I like the one on velvet.
April 15, 2012 1:24 AM   Subscribe

Let's add some monsters to thrift store paintings! Artists Chris McMahon and Thryza Segal decided to inject a little fun into these discarded works and give them a second life by adding monsters to the scenic landscapes.
posted by KevinSkomsvold (39 comments total) 42 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is precisely what I like to see when I turn on the internet at four in the morning!
posted by sendai sleep master at 1:28 AM on April 15, 2012 [8 favorites]


I like the white furry unicorn monster with baby.
posted by travelwithcats at 1:38 AM on April 15, 2012


Thryza Segal's G+ page has some really great pieces not shown in the original link. I really like these!
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 1:41 AM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Reminds me of Jake & Dinos Chapman's similar project with a set of Goya prints.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:52 AM on April 15, 2012


Heee I totally used to do this. I wish I still had some of them.
posted by louche mustachio at 1:53 AM on April 15, 2012


Better yet, let's add 40 external javascripts to our web pages!
posted by srboisvert at 2:04 AM on April 15, 2012 [9 favorites]


This set is really well done! I've tried my hand at this myself with oil pastels, though it didn't turn out that great.
posted by weewooweewoo at 2:11 AM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Reminds me of Jake & Dinos Chapman's similar project with a set of Goya prints.

Except that the Chapmans defaced works of indisputable artistic and historic merit (why did they have to use original prints rather than cheap reproductions?), whereas these are based on, and greatly improve upon, utterly crap paintings.
I wouldn't mind if the entire corpus of work of the recently deceased Mr. Kinkade was submitted to the same treatment. That, or fire...
posted by Skeptic at 3:06 AM on April 15, 2012 [2 favorites]


I wouldn't mind if the entire corpus of work of the recently deceased Mr. Kinkade was submitted to the same treatment.


I would so do that thing.
posted by louche mustachio at 3:07 AM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


One of my favorite pieces of art that I owned was a thrift store landscape painting that someone had pasted a magazine painting of a dinosaur cresting over the treeline into.
posted by jonbro at 3:08 AM on April 15, 2012


I do want to see monsters in Kincade's paintings, that is a perfect match! Someone needs to do it. Wouldn't it be easy if they are scanned in and "enhanced" with computer graphics? Then nobody would have to buy them.
posted by mermayd at 3:10 AM on April 15, 2012


I particularly like some of Thyrza Segal's efforts, because they appear to slyly cite some famous masterworks. For instance, this looks rather familiar.
posted by Skeptic at 3:16 AM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Better yet, let's add 40 external javascripts to our web pages! -- Yeah, what the hell is up with that?
posted by crunchland at 3:35 AM on April 15, 2012


Skeptic -- thank you for pointing that out. That is so cool!
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:39 AM on April 15, 2012


Except that the Chapmans defaced works of indisputable artistic and historic merit (why did they have to use original prints rather than cheap reproductions?), whereas these are based on, and greatly improve upon, utterly crap paintings.
I wouldn't mind if the entire corpus of work of the recently deceased Mr. Kinkade was submitted to the same treatment. That, or fire...
I believe you answered your own question there.
posted by fullerine at 4:07 AM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


louche mustachio: "Heee I totally used to do this. I wish I still had some of them."

I used to do this to schoolbooks. You know, Washington crossing the Delaware, menaced buy a giant octopus. The cityscape with Godzilla. The war scene with Godzilla. The picture of the Empire State building with King Kong being attacked by fighter planes.

Just the usual stuff.

I was a kid, okay? I wouldn't do it now.
posted by Splunge at 5:55 AM on April 15, 2012


Love this kind of thing. Here are some more!
posted by orme at 5:58 AM on April 15, 2012


I would be proud to hang any of these in my home.
posted by MexicanYenta at 5:58 AM on April 15, 2012


Chris McMahon and other involuntary collaborations previously: Modified Cabinet Cards, Involuntary Collaborations and Fat Cats in Art.
posted by filthy light thief at 6:46 AM on April 15, 2012 [2 favorites]


THIS is a GRAND idea. Why didn't I think of it? I'm shamelessly stealing it.

My only small critique is that it would be even grander if they could paint the monsters to better match the original paintings' styles. It's all mostly simple technique in these type works. This man gives happy advice for free on YouTube and could solve the problem easily.
posted by Shane at 7:16 AM on April 15, 2012


This reminds me of a piece I bought and love at the Eco Craftacular exhibition in Columbus, OH from Columbus artist E Schmidt--'Never Say Die.'. At the time, she had quite a few pieces where she worked in scale Sharpie illustrations over thrift store landscapes, thus transforming them into scenes from popular movies. Alas, she doesn't have a website.
posted by rumposinc at 7:34 AM on April 15, 2012


My friend used to have monsters fighting in thrift store pastoral paintings...my favorite was a T-Rex attacking a robot doing graffiti on the side of a barn. At one point he had about 15 pieces and they were shown at a local art gallery...I wish I'd bought one.
posted by schyler523 at 8:06 AM on April 15, 2012


The artist and childrens' book illustrator Matt Myers has been doing this for at least a decade as well (mostly with robots).
posted by Mchelly at 8:26 AM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Those are pretty cool - what a great idea. But damn, did you see the number of scripts running on that site? Talk about monsters in the landscape...
posted by Xoebe at 8:32 AM on April 15, 2012


I used to do this to schoolbooks. You know, Washington crossing the Delaware, menaced buy a giant octopus. The cityscape with Godzilla. The war scene with Godzilla. The picture of the Empire State building with King Kong being attacked by fighter planes.

Just the usual stuff.

I was a kid, okay? I wouldn't do it now.


You wouldn't? I would! I'm a teacher and I'm going to start doing this to my second graders. Help teach them a healthy skepticism regarding how things are presented to them (do you ACTUALLY think that giant octopus was there? But it's in the picture! How can you be SURE it wasn't?).

Also I'd be lying if I said we never did stuff like bar graphs comparing hypothetical populations of dinosaurs and monsters and stuff.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:45 AM on April 15, 2012 [5 favorites]




Aw, there's a purple people eater in there! But it doesn't fly :(
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:21 AM on April 15, 2012


I do want to see monsters in Kincade's paintings, that is a perfect match! Someone needs to do it.

Hey, look, Cthulumas! (scroll down) Searching for "thomas kinkade photoshop art" will get you a lot.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:25 AM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


If you decide to deface some random painting you found at a thrift store, take a look at this first.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:24 AM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Mrs. Pterodactyl, I wish I was in your class.
posted by seawallrunner at 11:45 AM on April 15, 2012


I'd find these funnier if I didn't have a knee-jerk reaction to people thinking it's ok to draw on things that I'd drawn / seeing me drawing things in my notebook translated to "collaborative venture". Maybe that's an overreaction.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 11:56 AM on April 15, 2012


There were some really good Kincade Photoshop Phridays on Something Awful way back when.
posted by kenko at 12:19 PM on April 15, 2012


A variant on this theme appears in Frederick Forsyth's short story The Art of the Matter (SPOILERS!), available in his collection The Veteran. Fun read.
posted by IndigoJones at 1:47 PM on April 15, 2012


Also see Wayne White's fantastic Word Paintings.
posted by troubles at 2:13 PM on April 15, 2012


I had a friend that did something similar to this with thrift store paintings. My favorite of his was one of a placid lake with a hidden lone sniper lurking in the woods. You look at the painting, know something is a bit off, and don't figure out what it is, exactly, until it's almost too late: he's got a gun, and it's pointed right at you!
posted by k8lin at 3:46 PM on April 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Word Painting
posted by holdkris99 at 7:23 PM on April 15, 2012


If you decide to deface some random painting you found at a thrift store, take a look at this first.

It really is possible to tell the difference between a good painting and an amateur daub. Making a bad painting better is no more defacing it than painting a wall is defacing the plaster.
posted by howfar at 3:25 PM on April 16, 2012


fucking plaster.
posted by Sailormom at 7:34 PM on April 16, 2012


The Slate piece is also worth looking at.
posted by fredludd at 1:04 PM on April 26, 2012


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