Last weekend, I traveled to Boston to visit with friends & celebrate my cousin Bennett's 30th birthday. I'm pretty familiar with the city as I went to MASS ARTand spent my college years there.
I made a lot of good friends at Mass Art and since quite a lot of us relocated to NYC, those friends are still some of my closest almost a decade later. However, there are still a few I have to travel to see. 2 fellow illustration majors, Ben Pease & Kurt Brown stayed in Boston and are both fiercely championing the art of tattoo at very creative shop in
Cambridge, Pino Bros Ink. I usually pay the place a visit every time I'm in town.
This past month has been an overwhelming whirlwind of work & holiday obligations & merriment. It seems I've gotten a little behind on my posting, I do have a lot of fragments that I'm hoping to stitch together over the weekend. Meanwhile, I've asked one of my best friends to share a bit about her last trip to Brazil, a place I hope to visit soon.
Kim Beury: Last year I had the wonderful opportunity to spend some time in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. One of the aspects that I was most taken back with was the beautiful street art. Every corner turned revealed another piece, whether it be political or whimsical, figurative or abstract, sticker or paint, professional or crude. Unfortunately Rio is also know for their slums or favelas, characterized by violence, crime, drug trade, and poverty. City of God, anyone? One in five Rio residents live in a favela; there are over 500 favelas throughout the city. Two Dutch artists, Hass&Hahn (Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn) created the Favela Painting project in 2006 to merge street art and favela living, pervasive aspects of Rio. The murals serve many purposes. Beautifying the neighborhoods, instilling power to the community members, and creating jobs for the residents. Not to mentions it looks damn good, too.
This their first mural project in Rio, Boy with a Kite.
Mural along pathway in Vila Cruzeiro, designed together with Rob Admiraal.
Just got word that my work was posted this week on stylesight.com. I was paired with another NYC based Illustrator, Sara Blake a.k.a. ZSO. Beautiful stuff don't you agree? I had to repost.
A tour of some of the pieces I come home to. Love this Zach Johnsen mini
Stephen Holding/ Metalwing- Steve and I had a show together in Hong Kong a few years ago that was one of my favorites. In addition to our own works, we collaborated on 2 layered, shadow box inspired pieces which got an overwhelmingly good response. We're currently working on a new set, inspired by our last.
Another of Zach's works, he's a close friend and frequent collaborator, I'm lucky enough to have several of his paintings & I'm always hoping to collect more.
Ben Pease- this was his 1st oil painting. Do yourself a favor and check more recent works. Ben is one of the most talented painters I have ever come in contact with, also a good friend, I was lucky enough to share a studio with him in college- huge inspiration.
Stunning mirror, hand chiseled by my father. He threatens to steal this back every time he visits, that's not happening.
Adam Amengual- one of my best friends, I'm hoping to have some new works of his very soon!
Watercolor is my favorite medium. I learn something new every time I paint, find new tricks, different ways to pull it up, move it around, let it work with itself. It's versatile and challenging & even though I know I should try to play more with other mediums, I'm pretty sure it will stay my favorite until I put down the brush for good.
Because I'm such a fan of all things watercolor, I get particularly excited when I come across other artists who share my feeling for the medium.
I was browsing illustrationmundo.com today and came across Simon Shubert's quietly intense folded paper illustrations. What's going on here?? Really, how's this man doing this? I'm very curious.
After looking through Simon's work, I decided to check up on an old favorite, Peter Calleson, his work was amazing as always. If you give me a piece of paper I might fold it into an semi good looking origami frog but, I don't think I could even begin to process creating these incredible folded masterpieces.
I stumbled across Iain Macarthur's work today while doing some research. I'm so glad I did, my mind's running all over the place. I'm completely inspired and longing to figure out how to actualize an idea that's been buzzing around in my head for a while. I'll definitely have more to say about this later, but for now I'm going to stop typing because the work really speaks for itself.
