Shawn Huckins: Check out this series by American artist Shawn Huckins, who, with acrylic paint, reproduces great pieces of American painting from the 19th century and superimposes oversized white lettering inspired by modern social media and text messaging jargon. For many more, pay a visit to Shawn’s website. Love it! 🙂
Alexey Kondakov: We love the beautiful creations of Ukrainian art director Alexey Kondakov, who inserts characters from the masterpieces of classical painting into the streets of modern-day Kiev, everything from Caravaggio to Nicolas Regnier through to Francesco Furini. For more, we suggest a visit to Alexey Kondakov’s Facebook page. Enjoy! 🙂
Tiffany Bozic: We love these surreal paintings from the portfolio of American artist Tiffany Bozic and have posted a selection of them for you below. It seems Tiffany Bozic has spent the majority of her life living with and observing the intricacies of nature. Her work has the traditional air of tightly rendered illustrations but with a highly emotional range of surreal metaphorical themes. In her paintings and sketches, she presents her vision of life’s struggles and triumphs that are largely autobiographical. Her wide array of subjects are inspired both from her extensive travels to wild places, and the research specimens at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California. Over the years, Tiffany Bozic has developed a complex process of masking and staining so the natural grain can collaborate with each composition using multiple layers of watered down acrylic paint on maple panels of wood. She has had several solo exhibitions featuring her large-scale paintings and installations. Her work has also been included in numerous group shows across the country and spoken about at international events. She was also the first ‘Artist in Residency’ whereby she collaborated with the California Academy of Sciences, to create the “From the Depths” exhibit on the public floor of the museum in November 2007. Tiffany Bozic is a self-taught artist currently living and working in her cottage in Marin, California. For more of Tiffany Bozic’s amazing work, we recommended a visit to her website. Enjoy!
Below are a selection of the latest creations by Natalie Shau, a photographer, artist and graphic designer who combines illustrations and photographs to lead us into a dark, strange and surreal world populated with beautiful creatures. Natalie Shau is a mixed media artist and photographer based in Vilnius, Lithuania who has an amazing talent in fashion and portrait photography as well as digital illustration and photo art. Coupled with her personal work, Natalie also creates artwork and photography for musicians, the theatre, fashion magazines, writers and advertisements. Her specialties include digital art, painting, CD artwork, photo manipulation, book covers, illustration, CD design, collage, digital painting, art direction, production design, advertising and fashion photography. Her digital masterpieces have graced the pages of French Vogue during a Lydia Courteille jewellery campaign and her extensive client list of music labels includes Island Def Jam, Sony Music Entertainment, Century Media, and Nuclear Blast. Gothic horror fiction, fairy tales and Russian classics (e.g. Dostoevsky and Gogol) are among the influences she lists for her surreal and strange creations. Natalie Shau uses a range of media, mixing photography, digital painting and 3D and the quality she seeks is “at once fragile and powerful”. “My works are digital mixed media. I mix photography, 3D elements, vector elements and digital drawing. I also enjoy creating surreal and fashion photography. My photography and digital works are often surreal portraits of women; however, I love portraying animals sometimes.” Natalie Shau regards her works as ‘pretty motionless and doll-like’, but they express the burden of waiting, and the inner conflict that boils within the characters. You can sense this in their expressions or in some contradictory elements or symbols hidden in the work. When questioned whether there is a reason that most of her illustrations and images are of women, Shau notes that she does not choose her characters, they choose her – she’s unable to explain how this happens. Her influences are many however Alexander McQueen, Eiko Ishioka, Trevor Brown are amongst them. Describing her creative process, Shau reveals “I have a flash of an idea or vision and, after exploring it in my mind, I try to sketch it and see if I can express it. I collect all the materials I need for that, take portraits, photograph elements, find any elements needed, and then I start working on a piece.” Take a look at Natalie Shau’s beautiful work below and be sure to visit her website:
