New watercolor http://anastasiaugorskaya.com

October 21, 2010

Handmade snowballs made from rubber and seeds by Everyday Design.

Above: Artist David Hammons selling real(100% snow)
snowballs on the streets of New York.

October 18, 2010

Oak Tree, Spring
2010, C-print, 24 x 36”, edition of 5

Oak Tree, Winter
2010, C-print, 24 x 36”, edition of 5

Sealed and Buried For All Time
2010, C-print, 30 x 40”, edition of 5

Striking photographs by Joshua Citarella. 

October 14, 2010

Nathaniel Lieb’s MFA performance piece Hatchling:

http://www.youtube.com/Lx4pbXTJ0J8

Nathaniel Lieb grew up in Lexington, MA, went to Syracuse University, Brooklyn College and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The forms in his sculptures/performances suggest natural structures like the mud daubers nests, however they were inspired by the conjoined impulses of measuring/mapping the extent of ones physical reach given a particular stance and the desire to make a sculptural form without having a pre-conceived idea of the finished form, rather responding to the situational relationship between myself the space and the materials. The similarity to nests lies in the similarity of method.  Both are built around the body from the inside out.
Nathaniel uses the cardboard because it is from the waste stream, is cheap (free) and available. “When I am finished with them they can be recycled, I love the way the material handles and looks. It has great tactile and manipulational advantages. I also like the color and textural variations within any given source, from smooth and hard to ribbed and gray. I like that I can tear it for an irregular edge” - Nathaniel.

Mud wasp nest above my door entrance:

October 08, 2010

Tree drawings and sculptures by Roxy Paine.

October 03, 2010

Sculpture on Governor’s Island, New York.

September 28, 2010

Unconventional artsy birdhouses made from odd objects and milk crates.  I saw them on Reference Library and fell in love with ever since!

- View more…......

Nature and art in the eyes of Arnar Asgeirsson.

http://www.arnarasgeirsson.com/

September 22, 2010

September 18, 2010

Detail from: A Still Life of Tulips and Other Flowers.
Jacob Marrel
1681, Oil on Canvas

Details from: A Glass of flowers and Orange Twig
Abraham Mignon
1660, Oil on canvas

September 16, 2010

Above: Shelving/vase system displaying thistles, dried plants and exotic flowers.

Daniel Goers is a local Brooklyn designer, architect and artist who has a show right now called Scrap Ecology at Brooklyn coffee shop K-Dog in Lefferts Gardens.  All pieces are made from reclaimed materials except some lighting components. Daniel has been collecting scrap materials and remaking them into beautiful designs and sculptures for some time now. His other great project is in collaboration with artist Jennifer Wong called Birdtown. Fifty birdhouses were built from recycled materials and installed in Fort Greene:

http://myrtleavenuebirdtown.com/

Above: Daniel Goers and Jennifer Wong.

Above: Birdhouse from Birdtown.

Scrap Ecology aims to rearrange the raw materials of our urban and natural environments into objects with new meaning and purpose. These materials include abandoned shipping pallets from Red Hook, wood cutoffs from carpentry projects, recycled packaging, discarded architectural samples, donated plant stems and foraged specimens from Prospect Park and the mountains of Harriman State Park.

http://dgoers.com

Why reclaimed materials?

New York is a great place to find raw materials to build with.  every day the streets are filled with “trash” that can be so much more. But maybe the best reason is that material is free. The reclaimed material also tends to have more character.

Do you enjoy living in New York? Would you if you had an opportunity move somewhere where there are more trees and less garbage?

Of course, New York is a great place to be a designer but my sculptures do hint at the desire to be closer to nature.  I would love to live in a barn in the mountains but in the meantime I will work to bring nature to people’s homes here.

Above: Lamp made from glass jar moss terrariums.

Why do you think using reclaimed materials is popular today? 

It’s just marketing for many people. I like to believe that myself and many other designers simply see some intrinsic value and potential in the waste around us. What was once a shipping pallet can become a hundred new things, so why cut down another tree?  More people come to this realization and the ‘green’ movement will become less about marketing & more a part of the collective conscience.

September 10, 2010

I love this painting by Vija Celmins.

September 09, 2010

Sun Boxes  are installations by Craig Colorusso powered by the sun via solar panels. There is a different loop set to play a guitar note in each box continuously. These guitar notes collectively make a Bb chord. Because the loops are different in length, once the piece begins they continually overlap and the piece slowly evolves over time.

The sounds of Sun Boxes have been described as both soothing and energizing. A unique combination of adjectives often used to describe yoga, or meditation. When experiencing the piece, Sun Boxes allows the participant to slow down, and notice the subtleties of the composition unfold. With the abundance of technology and hustle of this culture it is a much needed concept to not only be allowed, but also encouraged to slow down.

June 22, 2010

Forest Floor Still Life by Otto Marseus Van Schrieck. Otto was a Dutch painter best known for mysterious dark close-ups of the live undergrowth of forest floors that give detailed views of
wild flowers, weeds, thistles, and mushrooms, lives of insects.

Even though it is not really a still-life, I think this painting is particularly amazing because of how still it is.

June 04, 2010

Signe Parsegel land art.

Forest Art Wisconsin.

Michel de Broin “Superficial”

May 18, 2010

Irina paints on old wood boards, closet and wardrobe doors, metal pieces or simply on rocks she finds.  Irina’s paintings remind of Russian Orthodox icons, Avant-garde 1910-1920 and Russian folk art.  She paints portraits of Russian writers, happy couples, books, subjects and objects from villages and dacha life.  Irina says: The objects I paint on are just means of expression but their past affects my paintings. I find them in the garbage ...or they find me.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, portrait. 2004. Oil on reclaimed wood. From “Russian Writers” series.

Requiem. Series of portraits. 2000-2001. Oil on wood

Nikolai Semyonovish Leskov, portrait. 2004 from “Russian Writers” series.

Sugar. 2002. Oil on found metal.

Beloved vegetable garden. 1995. Oil on wood.

May 10, 2010

April 26, 2010

Sculpture by Michel de Broin made from discarded batteries.

April 19, 2010

“Biopsy” photograph series by Yedda Morrison

This work takes as its starting point the human desire for permanence, a desire made acute by the inevitability of our passing. If photography itself is a manifestation of this desire, our attempt to arrest or “still life,” plastic plants and flowers are a low-rent corollary. Suspended mid bloom and scattered throughout graveyards and empty parlors, they offer the promise of perennial youth, an eternal flowering, life ever after. Fake flowers both immortalize and render static the natural world. As such, they articulate a crisis between beauty and horror, desire and loss, artificiality and “the natural.” In our fall from the “pre” or “no” time of Eden, we have landed squarely in the artificial garden, the stilled remains of paradise. These sights of frozen or no time and the scale, duration and technology that make them possible, work to articulate a world where boundaries between the real and the artificial are increasingly blurred. If, in our contemporary moment, we are experiencing a gradual substitution of the machine for the body/mind, the image for the thing, and the simulation of the environment for the environment itself, then perhaps we are realizing Robert Smithson’s “frozen actuality,” the hallucinatory disjunction where “nothing is known but the impenetrable surfaces,” where “the artificial ingenuity of time allows no return to nature.”

April 13, 2010

“I have been trying to visually find a means to express the turbulence, sadness and strange beauty that comes with personal struggles, relationships and dealing with one’s own personal history in a more poetic way. Whenever something arises in my life that is profound, I find that nature always mimics it, and some of the shots I take grow into more rich personal symbols as time advances. I am interested in this use of image as a sort of personal time-capsule of my own struggles with anxiety, self-doubt and frustration”  - Allison

http:/allisonbeonde.com

February 23, 2010

November Meteors

Mare Humorum. From Study made in 1875.

Sun as Revealed by Telescope and Spectroscope

February 20, 2010

White Wolf in Mossland, chromogenic print

Canadian artist Adam Makarenko creates series of dioramas which are then photographed with altered perspective.  Influenced by science and nature, Adam creates photographs concerned with human manipulation of nature.

Pursuit, chromogenic print

Cessna, archival pigment print

HWY Drive, chromogenic print

There is a raven on our way down the northern highway

Adam grew up in Atikokan, Northern Ontario, where the caribou once roamed. “When Adam was growing up there, Atikokan was coated in red ore dust, and boasted two of the largest ore mines in the world. It was nestled in the heart of the Northern Ontario wilderness, isolated from the rest of the world. In 1980 the mines shut down, and it was at that point when Adam began to nurture his artistic ideas by exploring fields of endless moss, muddy swamps, thick boreal forests, and abandoned open pit mines” - from website.

February 18, 2010

Spring Beauty
1943

Found on EMPIRICISM, new blog aimed at keeping track of all things beautiful, innovative or interesting.

I actually do not remember where I found this post card or who made it but I really love it.

February 14, 2010

January 29, 2010

Ivan Shishkin. Winter. 1890.  Oil on canvas.

(Winter, detail with bird)

Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin born in 1832,  was a Russian painter who is known for his realistic forest landscapes, paintings of wildlife, grasses and especially pine trees. I like the tiny details in his paintings. Click on the images to see in full resolution.

Ivan Shishkin. The Rye Field, 1878. Oil on Canvas,

(The Rye Field, detail with grasses)

(The Rye Field, detail with birds)

January 19, 2010

Victorial from Tel Aviv, Israel and originally from Kiev, Ukraine makes these beautiful, delicate mesmerizing photographs of the natural world with different vintage film cameras.

“And he retraced his wanderings in those deep old lanes that began from the common road and went away towards the unknown, climbing steep hills, and piercing the woods of shadows, and dipping down into valleys that seemed virgin, unexplored, secret for the foot of man. He entered such a lane not knowing where it might bring him, hoping he had found the way to fairyland, to the woods beyond the world, to that vague territory that haunts all the dreams of a boy.”
Arthur Machen

-Inmost Light on Etsy

January 05, 2010

Flower illustrations from ” Plants - 2400 copyright-Free Illustrations of flowers, Fruits and Vegetables”

January 03, 2010

TREE
Graphite on panel, 2007
18” x 24”

WINTER TREE
Graphite on panel, 2007
18” x 24”

- By Anastasia Ugorskaya

December 30, 2009

Listen by Hanna Konola woodblock prints.

December 28, 2009