MetaFilter posts tagged with abstract

365 Wonder Animation Project

RobotHero — Thu, 02 May 2013 08:35:37 -0800

Just the way things are little guy

Potomac Avenue — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:33:07 -0800

It Will All Hurt [Part 2, Part 3] is "a weird, sad, silly, sketchy, fantasy adventure strip with magic and science-fiction and some fighting action." By Farel Dalrymple More short story comics from Study Group comics press (many NSFW): The Worm Troll -- by Sam Alden, author of 8th Grade and Haunter. (Sam Alden previously) The Mourning Star by Kazimir Strzepek Peepers by Patrick Keck Black Is the Color – by Julia Gfrörer Titan by François Vigneault Lone Wolf by Jennifer Parks Disappearing Town by Morgan Jeske The Yankee by Jason Leivian and Ian McEwan (no not that one) And many more!

Healing Kaleidoscope

shackpalace — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 12:16:15 -0800

Emma Kunz was a telepathic healer and researcher. Even though she didn't consider herself an artist, the hypnotic symmetry found in her hand-drawn healing charts is breathtaking.

Harold Lash

Rory Marinich — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 13:13:07 -0800

Harold Lash is an abstract painter whose works are wild and startlingly vivid. There are repeated themes of flowers and cities and ships and are often obsessively patriotic. I particularly enjoy his painting of Rittenhouse in Philadelphia, where he lives and works, and the colors of Girls Night Out strikes me as well. [WARNING: HUGE IMAGES]

"I have always been concerned with painting that simultaneously insists on a flat surface and then denies it."

zarq — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:18:31 -0800

"I had no desire to copy Pollock. I didn’t want to take a stick and dip it in a can of enamel. I needed something more liquid, watery, thinner. All my life, I have been drawn to water and translucency. I love the water; I love to swim, to watch changing seascapes. One of my favorite childhood games was to fill a sink with water and punt nail polish into to see what happened when the colors burst up the surface, merging into each other as floating, changing shapes." - Helen Frankenthaler
Her paintings looked like watercolors, but were created with oils. To achieve the effect, she heavily diluted her oil paints with turpentine, then dripped them onto an unprimed canvas on the floor, in a brushless technique reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's, called a "soak stain." But where Pollock's paint was often thick and sat on top of the canvas, hers drenched it in color, creating a unique, softer work. Ms. Frankenthaler passed away today, at the age of 83, after a long illness. Artnet has additional images of her work. Additional links can be found at Against the Grain. Her piece Nature Abhors a Vacuum is part of the permanent collection at the US National Gallery of Art. Biography / Profiles / Reviews at The Art Story, The Jewish Women's Archive, The Wall Street Journal. The quote at the top of this post is from Wikiquote. More on "Color Field" artwork, whose second generation she helped inspire. Additional Obituaries: The Gallerist, Associated Press,

The paintings of Don Van Vliet

Trurl — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:29:24 -0800

Don Van Vliet is self-taught. He neither expects allowances for the amateur’s lack of dexterity nor permits any technical deficiency on his own part to limit his scope. Nobody's understanding or forbearance sets limits to what he does - any more than does the fear of going wrong. The lacerations, transgressions, and awkward moments that he introduces are unpredictable, as is their duration; when he takes the figures that confront him and tugs them out of shape, he simultaneously tugs himself out of shape - and out of his own limitations. - Roberto Ohrt

a bit of a trickster

Potomac Avenue — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:27:06 -0800

Amalgamation, an animation by Micaël Reynaud based on an animated gif of photos by Michael Jang from his series "Summer Weather" with Music by Memory Tapes. Higher quality film on Youtube More films by Micaël Reynaud: Pizza Loop Milk and Cookies The Hulk Hands Theory Moonlacholia Nimes Google+ In Real Life Fast Focus on the Rails You Never Got Me Right Crushed Cat Small Fish, Big Pond Microscoped King of Legoland

WAN WAN

bonsai forest — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 09:30:59 -0800

Wanwanlink weaves together a sequence of motion in realtime, using fragments of archival footages that are being collected daily. When a human figure appears on the screen, the sound is deliberately distorted into a slow 'wan wan.' This project, with a theme linking to classification and dependency, shall continue to be developed for a very long time. (Footages featured on this website belong to the public domain. Clips were downloaded from http://www.archive.org/).

Sleepdrunk Vademecum

netbros — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:00:59 -0800

Tania Blanco is a modern artist who shares her time in France and Spain. She says of her collection Sleepdrunk Vademecum, "The body is made up of a large set of rounded painting formats. Medical instruments, high precision technology, scientific devices, anatomical models, clandestine laboratories and human representation become the object of study and thought. The bizarre represented objects reflect a mixture of past and future, and an ambiguous clinical atmosphere flows in them. On many of these painted surfaces, a soft cool-cold gradient isolates the represented elements and gives a non-gravitational character to the compositions." [via]

Low Res and High Concept

codacorolla — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:25:30 -0800

YouMakeMeSoHappy is the blog of net-artist Nicolas Sassoon. His work features a minimalist, abstract and low-fidelity aesthetic, combining simple shapes and patterns in animations to produce stunning results. _{Warning: some flashing lights contained in these links.} A brief interview with Nicholas O'Brien over at badatsports.com. Via the saltw.net forums.

Why did I do it? Because I could.

Wolfdog — Wed, 11 May 2011 06:48:46 -0800

How I invented games, and why not - an essay by game designer Christian Freeling. Between 1979 and 1986 I invented some fourty abstract games, most of which can be found in the ArenA and the Pit. Dameo, HanniBall, YvY and Symple(x) are exceptions. Dameo's invention in 2000, after an incubation period of fifteen years, took two minutes. The invention of HanniBall and YvY in 2009 and Symple and Lhexus in 2010 were 'live' occurences decribed in a late arrival and a final whisper respectively. Looking back now, from a safe distance, and with the benefit of hindsight, I'd like to clarify how and why I invented these games, and more specifically why not...

"It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed – after a while you may like it or you may not." Jackson Pollock

Fizz — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 05:31:35 -0800

“My monkey could have painted that.” 1 in 3 Art Students Can’t Tell Famous Paintings from Paintings by Monkeys. Take a look at the two images in this post. Can you tell? ANSWER: The painting on the left was by a 4-year-old named Jack Pezanosky. The one on the right is Laburnum Hans Hoffman.

Art IS a weapon

BZArcher — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 10:23:28 -0800

The CIA spent 20 years promoting modern art as a propaganda tool: "We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."

"Why is God making me paint her this way?"

grabbingsand — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:47:11 -0800

Re-introducing the work of George Condo. "George Condo is a man possessed by visions. A successful Soho artist, he paints what he sees: the "antipodal beings" that dominate his imagination ... They look like nothing so much as muppets or troll dolls as painted by Walter Keane." Featured recently at the Whitney Museum, Condo's work is finding a new audience as the cover art for Kanye West's latest single, "Power." More of Condo ... 2007 Interview in TimeOut: London. "New Works" at GALERIE BRUNO BISCHOFBERGER. "Portraits Lost In Space" at The Deitch Gallery (1999). Previously on MeFi ... Margaret Keane

The Wow of Now; Word Jazz with Pictures

louche mustachio — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:27:53 -0800

About Me: an octogenarian curiosity, the originator of word jazz back in the1950s, in love with the wow of now. Ken Nordine's Youtube channel, featuring mainly abstract visuals accompanying Word Jazz. Examples: Immunological Systems- Truth Mute- C'est La Vie- Fibonacci Numbers

Tut-Tutting

netbros — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:02:45 -0800

Tutting is the name given to a contemporary abstract interpretive dance style that exploits the body's ability to create geometric positions and movements, predominantly with the use of right angles. Finger tutting narrows the dance to just the hands. See: Monsieur Clay-Doh | JBeast | Moon vs. Pacman | Bugs Bunny 1947 and Learn: WonderHowTo | thaSMIZofESV | TheFreekachu [some nsfw]. Kids these days.

Break out the Crayons

Rinku — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 09:19:21 -0800

Today 10,000 Pages: A Colouring Book of Abstract Line Art reached the 10% mark. Click on an image for a hi-res version for printing. All drawings are released under a Creative Commons Licence. The artist, Pixo, has quite a few other art-related blogs.

Mother Nature is an abstract artist

CunningLinguist — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:48:50 -0800

30 Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth "From 400 miles away, the earth transforms into abstract art. The global landscape is impressionist, cubist and pointillist." Nice NASA images from 2000, downloadable as wallpaper.

JR Williams

Tube — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:45:17 -0800

J.R. Williams is a prolific comics artist with a distinctive visual style 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. He is fond of fanciful takes on pop culture icons like Quisp and Yogi Bear, as well as more ribald characterizations like Polly Purebred and Jane Jetson (NSFW) More recently he has branched out into abstraction, which might be characterized as psychedelic pictographs.

Koyaanisqatsi

phrontist — Sat, 10 May 2008 23:59:12 -0800

Koyaanisqatsi (wiki, previously)

Abstract concepts vs. concrete examples for teaching math

peacheater — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:24:19 -0800

A new study in Science claims that teaching math is better done by teaching the abstract concepts rather than using concrete examples. From an article by the study authors in Science Mag (requires subscription): If a goal of teaching mathematics is to produce knowledge that students can apply to multiple situations, then presenting mathematical concepts through generic instantiations, such as traditional symbolic notation, may be more effective than a series of "good examples." This is not to say that educational design should not incorporate contextualized examples. What we are suggesting is that grounding mathematics deeply in concrete contexts can potentially limit its applicability. Students might be better able to generalize mathematical concepts to various situations if the concepts have been introduced with the use of generic instantiations.

Don't Ask Me What It Means

maryh — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:36:54 -0800

"In" is a lovely, maddening, hypnotic 23-minute CG/live-action abstract short created by Philipp Hirsch and Heiko Tippelt. via

In the squares, not on the intersections, goddammit!

sonic meat machine — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:29:22 -0800

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, "International Chess" was the only widely known chess variant in the West. It had its problems. People tried to solve them. Of course, they could just play xiangqi instead. There's also janggi, Makruk, and the granddaddy of them all, chaturanga. Perhaps the most refined game in the family, however, is Japanese Chess--shogi. Shogi is a slower game than international chess, with few pieces able to range freely. Pieces remain in play throughout the game--captured enemy pieces can be "dropped" onto the board, using a move to do so; in practice, this thoroughly changes the strategy. Computer opponents aren't quite as good at shogi as they are at chess, probably due to the higher branching factor: even though pieces can't range as far, drops add a large number of possibilities to the game, particularly in the endgame. The game remains relatively unpopular internationally. "Western" Chess is played in most countries, including the Asian nations, and local variants (like xiangqi and Makruk) enjoy more popularity in their respective countries than shogi does. Even in Japan, shogi plays second fiddle to Go. Still, the game has its charms, and you might play a game or two to get a feel for it, though Kurnik lags significantly behind its go-specific brethren in terms of interface and features. Who knows, though? Soon there could be a boom in popularity. Shion no Oh is an anime with shogi as a central theme. Hell, it worked for Go, right?! Of course, Go never seemed to have an inferiority complex (or a board) quite this stupidly huge.

Vlad the Geometer

Burhanistan — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:17:13 -0800

Vladimir Bulatov enjoys making polyhedra and abstract geometric sculptures. Many sculptures available for sale on site. Not affiliated with this or any other geometer!

HOMOPHONI

hama7 — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 18:19:19 -0800

HOMOPHONI