Salustiano
Red. Red as blood, Red as passion, Red as the sunlight through your closed eyelids. I can forgive the pretension of the single name thing because the paintings are so great. That red makes my eyes feel like they’re shaking.
{ Monthly Archives }
June 2010
Yosuke Ueno
Not exactly my usual plate of fish, but for a lot of reasons this morning I am feeling the frantic pop sensibilities of Yosuke Ueno. Each painting is like a pastel paint fueled kamikaze plane piloted by The Disney Channel spiraling its way downward to explode in multicolored flames in your optic nerves. How can anyone not love that? I won’t sit here and analyze the 8 billion symbols and meanings in these paintings, because I’m lazy and you can do it for yourself. But if you want to break them down to their molecular structure, Ueno is having a show at Thinkspace Gallery opening July 9th, and you can press your face against each piece to try and unravel its mysteries. Try not to drool on the artworks.
Staci Janik
More than a few years ago, when I was still in college, I was home from school for the weekend and me and my friends, as usual, were taking extremely high doses of LSD and seeing how long we could survive. For some reason a consensus was reached that we should go to a house party where there were people we knew. I drove at night in the rain and only avoided crashing because the lines on the road reflected the light back so severely that I thought the road was on fire and I was trying not to melt the tires. We walked in to a breakdance battle where I believe someone mimed throwing a Street Fighter style fireball at their opponent. It cemented my understanding of the innate ridiculousness of being anything at all. One good thing to come out of that party was that we re-met Staci Janik. We knew her from high school, but she was there and she UNDERSTOOD us; not easily done by a many people at that point. We adopted her into our group (whether she wanted it or not) right then and there. She became The Girl. We already had The Little Girl, and Staci is too tall for that name anyway. We all loved her (did you know that, Staci?) in our individual ways, and she brought us new ideas in return. You would think that after all that, I would be biased, but luckily for me I’m too much of an asshole to ever be biased by love.
SO. It gives me nothing but joy to tell you about the design work of Staci Janik, a person who can never stop being a part of my family. Her work is simple, uncluttered, and beautiful. I can nerd out on her type choices, I can sit back and enjoy her layout, and more than that I can see her style in every stitch. It’s all classy yet playful and beguiling, like an Audrey Hepburn smile or that one little cloud sailing all by itself in miles of empty, bright blue sky. I don’t need to say much more than that. The Girl understands.
Cristiana Couceiro
I woke up this morning with a burning fever, and the only thing that could cure it was some great design. Cristiana Couceiro floated in like a wartime nurse and soothed my sweaty brow with the cool simplicity of her graphic design work. She’s captured a perfect vintage aesthetic and coupled it with modern lines and shapes in a way that is seamless and perfect, right down to her type choices. You want to see really great design, then look no further.
Emily Burns
Emily Burns, can I just say “yes” to you? If there’s one fetish that I have never understood it’s food fetish, but still “yes”. I would probably go as far as “hell yes”.
Jen Mussari
What I needed this morning was a few thousand cc’s of handrawn type delivered via opthalmic injection. Thankfully there was a steady supply in Jen Mussari’s portfolio, and my eyes got the essential vitamins and minerals they needed to keep functioning. Things were touch and go for a few minutes, but my retinas are just humming along fine now. Thanks, Jen, you’re a life saver.
Matt Taylor
The tattoo flavored art/illustration just keeps on coming, as today I present Matt Taylor. I came for the tattoos and stayed for the delightful combination of hand-drawn and vector work. Damn fine color palette, too. Get a taste of this magic.