Peachy Keenum

Now this is Balloon Artistry I can get Behind...

Aren't these giant and odd balloon scultures awesome?!

From Daily Mail: The bizarre creations give an insight into the weird world of the New York artist who began using balloons for his art after becoming skilled with them as a street performer during his university years.

Jason Hackenwerth, 39, inflates them all before twisting them together to form the shapes. Some of his creepy creatures are so big that Jason said he has to 'wrestle' the balloons into place. The American goes through so many balloons that he has to buy them in bulk, ordering 5,000 at a time.

He said: "I wouldn't say I set out to make underwater creatures but that's what people seem to see in them most often. I spend lots of time sketching and planning the sculptures I make. The ideas come from all over. Actually building the sculptures is very difficult and labour intensive work. I sometimes use thousands of balloons."

Amazing Feats of Strength and Balance

Those crazy circus folk...

Nothing like amazing feats of strength and balance to get the blood flowing. Eskil Ronningsbakken performed this move on a Norwegian cliff about 40 times the other day. All in the name of art.

Eskil said, "The mission with the balancing was to create new images for an art collection, and hopefully being able to replace the traditional photos from this amazing spot."

Big Reward for Warhol Collection Stolen in Art Heist

So you've stolen the art, now what? You're gonna invite some friends over to show them the steal you found at a garage sale?

From Daily Mail: A unique series of Andy Warhol pieces - portraits of Muhammad Ali, Jack Nicklaus, Pele, Dorothy Hamill and other athletic superstars worth $10million - has been stolen from a collector's home.

The collection of 10 silk screen paintings of famous athletes of the 1970s was taken from the home of businessman Richard Weisman sometime between September 2 and 3, according to the Los Angeles police.

Weisman commissioned the iconic pop artist in 1977 to create the portraits, said Brenda Klippel, the director of Martin Lawrence Galleries in Los Angeles, which has a large collection of Warhols.

Fragments of Roman Emporers Horse Head Found

I have a friend who will certainly be over-the-moon about this.

From The Local: Hessian Science Minister Eva Kühne-Hörmann on Thursday presented fragments of a 2,000-year-old bronze equestrian statue of Roman Emperor Augustus found recently in a stream near Giessen.

"The find has meaning beyond Hesse and the north Alpine region due to its quality and provenance," Kühne-Hörmann said during the presentation with state archaeologist Dr. Egon Schallmayer and Director of the Roman-German Commission Dr. Friedrich Lüth.

"We've rediscovered the remnants of early European history. The unique horse head is a witness to the broken dream of the Romans to create a united Europe under their rule," she added.

On August 12, archaeologists pulled the gold-gilded, life-sized head of a horse and a shoe of the emperor – who ruled the Roman Empire between 23 BC and 14 AD – from a stream in what was once the Roman outpost Germania Magna. Experts there have uncovered several bits – including a horse hoof and a decorated chest strap – from the statue among some 20,000 artefacts uncovered at the site in recent years.

Scientists from the University of Jena believe it may have been destroyed by Roman soldiers retreating after the legendary Varusschlacht, or the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, when Germanic tribes ambushed and wiped out three Roman legions. As the remaining Roman troops retreated after the devastating defeat, they destroyed most of what they could not take with them. 

Latest Craze: iPhone Mini Masterpieces

As soon as my damn Sprint contract ends...

From Daily Mail: They may look like oil paintings on huge canvases but these breathtaking mini masterpieces were created on a 3.5-inch iPhone screen.

In a new craze sweeping the world, commuters are knocking out extraordinary 'paintings' on their mobile phones on the way to work. Amazingly, all the pictures, created with an application called Brushes, are painted freehand using forefingers and thumbs.

 

The application, which can be downloaded for £2.99, has become so popular some people are now planning to exhibit and even sell their digitally-created work. There is an active Brushes community on the photo-sharing website Flickr.

Created by Steve Sprang, Brushes can be used on both the iPhone and the iTouch. You can start with a a favourite photo of a blank canvas.

The tool features several realistic brushes to create smooth and bristly lines as well as extreme zooming to make minute alterations.  You can choose any colour (including transparency) using the hue/saturation colour wheel. And unlike canvas you can undo and redo strokes as often as you like. As each stroke is recorded you can also watch how your painting has built up over time.

Banksy Surprise Exhibition at Bristol Museum

Banksy has pulled off another fast one. His awesomeness continues...

About the top-secret exhibit, from DailyMailUK: Despite Banksy's international notoriety, the exhibition remained a closely-guarded secret with only two officials at the council-owned museum aware of the installation.

The reason the museum was closed was even kept secret from top council officials.

The elusive, iconic artist said he chose Bristol to stage it because he wanted to 'give something back' to the city.

In a rare statement Banksy said: "The people in Bristol have always been very good to me - I decided the best way to show my appreciation was by putting a bunch of old toilets and some live chicken nuggets in their museum. I could have taken the show to a lot of places, but they do have a very nice cup of tea in the museum."

The Obama Family by Micro-Sculpture Willard Wigan

Art in the eye of a needle.

Also Henry VIII and his sux wives.

You can see a few more of Wigan's works HERE.

Hockney's 'Beverly Hills Housewife' Sells for $8 Million

8 mil? Hell, I have some shit Anonymous can have for a couple hundred bucks!

Lisa Fung writes for LA Times: "Beverly Hills Housewife," David Hockney's 1966 painting of Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman, sold at auction for a record $7.9 million Wednesday night in New York.

The 12-foot double canvas shows the pink-sheathed collector on her patio, flanked by a zebra-print Corbusier lounge chair, and an abstract sculpture. It was featured in a 2006 exhibition of Hockney portraits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The previous auction record for a Hockney was $5.35 million for "The Splash," a 1966 swimming pool painting once owned by movie mogul David Geffen. It sold in London in 2006 at Sotheby's.

Freeman died in January of pancreatic cancer at the age of 87. "Beverly Hills Housewife" was among 20 artworks from Freeman's estate up for sale. Christie's said 18 of the 20 lots sold for a total of $31.6 million, with two works unsold because bidding failed to reach the reserve price. The sales prices include auction house commissions.

The name of the buyer was not disclosed. No Los Angeles museum owns a classic Hockney painting from 1960s, the decade the British artist first came to prominence while working in the city.

Iranian Art Goes BOOM!

Gay-Themed Artist Donated $1,000 to YES on Prop 8

She doesn't want us to get married but she'll gladly take our gay dollars...

Elizabeth Ganga writes for LoHum.com: Maureen Mullarkey is a painter who has done a series of works, well known in the gay community, depicting drag queens and inspired by gay pride parades. But she also donated $1,000 to the campaign for Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

That has raised calls of hypocrisy among gay rights groups and on blogs following the intense Proposition 8 debate.

"There's something very duplicitous in making money through depiction of the LGBT community through her art," and then donating the money to an anti-gay-marriage campaign, said David Juhren, the director of communication at The LOFT, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community center in White Plains, which sends delegations to the New York City pride parade.

Further: Mullarkey, 66, said she favored the measure, which passed in November overturning an earlier court ruling legalizing gay marriage in California, because she believes "marriage is the union of husband and wife - a premise so simple, so fundamental that nature and civilization itself both testify to the truth of it."

She likened the attacks to Nazi "brownshirt tactics" and expressed concern for people in the arts who had suffered reprisals for opposing gay marriage.

"Artists are not in the habit of imposing ideological conformity on one another or demanding it from others," Mullarkey said. "Moreover, regard for individual gay persons does not require assent to a politicized assault on bedrock social reality and the common good."

Photo of the Day: A Banksy on Beverly

I shot this photo ofa Banksy stencil on Beverly Blvd just west of La Brea Blvd.

Los Angeles, Sept. 2008

Andrew Wyeth - R.I.P.

Contemporary artist Andrew Wyeth has died at age 91.

From BBC News: Artist Andrew Wyeth, who captured the melancholy of the landscapes and people of Pennsylvania in his work, has died peacefully in his sleep aged 91. The popular realist painter captured images near his home in the state and his summer residence in Maine. His Helga paintings - full figure nude portraits of his neighbour - won him a wave of interest in 1986.

A sample of Andrew Wyeth's paintings:

3 more on the next page...