Tag: art

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Architecture & Design

Yarn artist Liisa Hietanen makes human embroidered figures

Knitting is a popular hobby in Finland. But 30-year-old artist Liisa Hietnanen takes the practice to a whole new level.

She uses wool to create life-size crocheted sculptures of the neighbors in her village.

“The slow handcraft techniques work as a counterforce to the accelerating pace in different areas of life,” says the
artist, who uses photographs and face-to-face meetings to help create these fiber people.

“To me the more important values in my works are not likeness or resemblance.

“The works are rather about encountering someone very concretely, seeing the other for real and getting to know them slowly. I see these as relevant values and balancing actions especially in contrast to quick stirs and thin encounters in social media.”

Check out more of Hietanen’s creative vision below.

Categories
Animals Culture & Society Nature

Neanderthals were great hunters but poor artists

Neanderthals were great hunters but poor artists
An early human painting of a lion from the Chauvet Cave in Southern France

Neanderthals were great hunters but poor artists.

According to a study done by UC Davis psychology professor Richard Coss, Neanderthals used basic spear hunting techniques to capture tame prey.

Meanwhile, Homo Sapiens developed the ability to throw spears as a result of chasing more elusive game in the open grasslands of Africa.

Homo Sapiens were also careful planners, sharpening their hand-eye coordination by drawing out hunting scenes on cave walls.

43,900-year-old hunting scene found on island cave of Sulawesi, Indonesia (Science News)

Such artistry not only made modern humans better visualizers and hunters, but it also helped them develop smarter brains.

Historian and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Noah Harari also argued that while Neanderthals might have had larger brains and finer tools than their fellow Homo Sapiens, they lacked the cognitive abilities for language.

Homo Sapiens developed rounder skulls and bigger parietal cortexes that allowed them not only to translate visual images but share stories through word of mouth.

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Architecture & Design Health Nature Travel

Beautiful apples from around the world

Beautiful apples from around the world

William Mullan is a photographer who specializes in taking pictures of rare apples from around the world.

The golden Knobbed Russet, the star-shaped api etoile, hard red Black Oxford apple — these are just a few of the varieties that appear in Mullan’s 200-page photo-book, Odd Apples.

Writes Atlas Obscura on how Mullan’s fascination with apples came to be:

Mullan was born in the United States, but grew up in the United Kingdom, where a teenage encounter with an Egremont Russet led to his love of apples. Its spicy, persimmon-like flavor “just blew my mind,” he says. But many of the apples he’s photographed were born in North America, including such romantic cultivars as the Black Oxford and Hidden Rose.

“There’s just this sense of infinity with [apples] that I love,” Mullan says. While he imagines he’ll move on to other subjects in the future, for now, he’s still entranced by apples.

Even better, during his exhibits, he slices the apples open and passes the edibles around for his audience to enjoy.

You can follow Mullan’s work on Instagram.

Beautiful apples from around the world
Beautiful apples from around the world
Beautiful apples from around the world
Beautiful apples from around the world
Beautiful apples from around the world
Beautiful apples from around the world
Categories
Architecture & Design Nature

Waves in progress

Waves in progress
Gif by 00.032

Here’s something you can look at for hours: looping waves in progress.

Created using visual effect software Houdini by Polish motion designer who goes by the name 00.032, according to her dribble page, the piece takes after Matthieu Lehanneur’s original physical work of the same vein.

The French designer Lehanneur constructed a furniture collection called Ocean Memories that depicts three-dimensional ocean currents frozen into stone and bronze sculptures.

Lehanneur and 00.032 demonstrate both static and motion-centric representations of the Earth’s ocean.

Waves, a symbol of natural energy, have been a fascination with artists such as Hokusai for centuries.

Categories
Architecture & Design Technology

Pablo Picasso’s “light drawings”

Pablo Picasso’s “light drawings”

“Everything you can imagine is real,” said the legendary painter Pablo Picasso.

In 1949, photographer Gjon Mili captured the painter using a small electric light in a dark room to paint the artist’s iconic centaurs, bulls and greek figurines.

The chaotic images vanished as soon as they were created but thanks to Mili’s two separate cameras, Picasso’s timeless “light drawing” live on.

Thanks to today’s advancements in virtual reality, one can replicate Picasso’s moves using Google’s Tilt Brush application on the Oculus Rift. The app lets your paint in 3D space with virtual reality.

Photos by Gjon Mili for TIME, 1949