A former Tibetan Buddhist monk, Tashi Mannox is an incredibly talented artist and specialist in Tibetan calligraphy.
Here is a short film about his work made by the Planetary Collective.
I’m deeply impressed by his art, but also by his friendly presence and charisma.
Wonderful short film documenting the making of a flamenco guitar, created by Greek artist group DeepGreenSea. Portrayed are guitar maker Vassilis Lazarides and flamenco guitarist Edsart Udo De Haes.
Via Marco Köppel.
Wonderful paintings by Taipei-based illustrator JungShan. Combining Eastern style with Western techniques to produce her expressive images, JungShan works primarily with Chinese ink, accentuating certain aspects with digital pens and brushes in Photoshop. Her strong portraits often feature warriors and samurais in motion, while employing a style similar to calligraphy painting.
Visit JungShan’s Blog to discover more illustrations, learn about her creative process as well as download free ink textures.
Motion Plus Design is a non-profit project which aims to create the first exhibition center dedicated to Motion Design in Paris, France. The project’s introduction video intriguingly explains motion design and shows tons of historical and modern examples.
Via Daniel Lichtmeß
Arabesque 2 showcases contemporary work by young designers from the Arab world and Iran. Combining Arab type, calligraphy and modern graphic design, the presented artwork expresses the increasing cultural emancipation and modernization of the Middle East.
Supplemental texts and interviews by the editors Ben Wittner and Sascha Thoma from design studio Eps51 give background information and describe the environments in which the featured designers and artists work.
Via Page online.
Let The Arts Roam documents recent work of street artists El Mac and Retna for a school in Los Angeles. The video portrait is part of the I Am Los Angeles project by Joris Debeij.
Wherever they go, they try to make something that makes sense for the neighborhood, and the community. And they always make something positive, something the artists hope people can enjoy — regardless of whether life has greeted them with great fortune. Armed with a vision and their cans of spray paint, El Mac and Retna will transform a forgotten wall into a piece of art.
Generative Art, created by computer software and mathematical equations, and the traditional craft of printing (by hand) usually don’t come together very often. What happens, when you put a MacBook Pro and big buckets of color next to one another, is shown by artists Marius Watz and Jer Thorp for the Random Number Multiples series, an ongoing art publishing extension of Christina Vassallo’s curatorial platform Random Numbers.
Random Number Multiples provides an opportunity for artists to expand their repertoire through artwork editioning processes. It is a platform for artists to experiment with new techniques or engage with familiar ones in new ways.
As the current Data Artist-in-Residence at the New York Times, Jer Thorp took the newspaper as his reference point. With two separate works, or “timepiece graphs,” he tracked how often the Times printed the words ”red,” “green,” and “yellow” resp. “hope” and “crisis” from 1981 to 2010. Each piece is arranged so that the data can be read clockwise.
In a time where most typography is created digitally, designers, artists, and printmakers can draw a lot of inspiration from the handcrafted appearance of traditional letterpress printing. A real luminary in this field is Alan Kitching. Having worked as graphic designer, typographer, letterpress printmaker and teacher, Kitching is internationally renowned for his expressive use of letterpress type, process and materials in creating typographic designs for publishing, advertising and his own limited edition prints and ‘Broadside’ publications.
Photo: Celia Stothard
The data visualization “Conductor” by Alexander Chen turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. Each time a train crossed the line of another train, you hear a cello pizzicato sound pitched according to the length of the line. You can find the interactive version (where you can also pluck the strings at will) at www.mta.me or watch the video below.
Special Tip: Open www.mta.me in 2 or 3 tabs simultaneously to get a great sound experience.
If you are interested in the technical implementation of “Conductor”, read the project description at Chen’s Blog.
In this video, London-based architect in profession and calligrapher in passion Taha Al-Hiti explains some of the characteristics and difficulties of the art of Arabic calligraphy.
View the video on guardian.co.uk
Here are some of my favorite calligraphies by Taha (some of them are practice works, but I think they have a very nice artistic effect):
