Brothers Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez, aka The Date Farmers, are the shiznit of the art world at the moment, blowing up all over the place. The duo incorporates found objects, commercial ephemera and Mexican folk art that is a bit of a mash up of Basquiat and Barry McGee. There’s a cool video of the duo in action over at Current TV. They really are (or were) date farmers from Indio, a dusty farm town to the east of Los Angeles.On exhibit now at the ACE Gallery in LA through March.
Dave Imms takes pictures of people, places and things. The images are raw, gritty, uncompromising and honest. The subjects are captured in their most genuine of settings and laid bare for the viewer.
Vincent Pacheco who calls himself Mudchicken has updated with a lot of new work at his interesting website and portfolio. It’s more a spilling of ideas than anything and seems to function as a kind of archival assembly of sorts. The piece above definitely spoke to me.
Watercolor artist and illustrator Hannah Stouffer has been very busy lately and updated her site with a Grand Array of eye-popping colorful illustrations for numerous clients and publications.
Eleanor Davis must be an interesting character judging by her highly varied works ranging all over the map from what looks like vector, to drawing, to painting and even including comics and graphic novels for kids. Lots of talent.
There are some strangely divine things in the Flickrfolio of Brent Hildy including photography, collage and a screen print on wood that I’d be happy to hang on my wall.
Swedish illustrator Kilian Eng has mastered just the right amount of noise to give his images that soft-airbrushed throwback feeling but manages to keep a modern contemporary twist to his work. We are digging it big time, and he has quite an imagination too. Lovely.
Words are scarce when it comes to digging up information about photographer Platonov Pavel but what does exist are some fabulous (and I use that word oh-so-sparingly) images in his Flickrfolio. I can’t be sure how he is creating all of said images but one thing is for sure, they are fabulous indeed.
Markus is The Rainbowmonkey and he’s not afraid to experiment, have a little fun and make some puzzlingly interesting things that encompass both illustration and design.
London based photographer Felicia Honkasalo offer us a strange sideglance of the quiet moments in between that happen in Northern Europe. It’s an atmosphere that is noticed only by a contemplative resident but would go unnoticed by the passing tourist.
Travis Stearns has carved a special place out of my artistic center that sits somewhere between Hunter S. Thompson, Dave Carsen and Art Chantry. It’s a bit Gonzo but absorbing and after you’ve been absorbed you start to become engaged. You have to keep up on him because he is a shape shifter constantly putting himself on a limb whether it be in type, illustration, graphic design or photograph.
Kira Leigh looks like such a nice young lady but her “non-archival, spontaneous line work bleeds and flows on paper as thoughts are poured out in the form of surreal subject matter” will set your mind reeling back into a primal reflective childlike acid flashback. It’s hard to tell if your having fun looking at all of the bright colors and organic lines until you begin to fully take in the mass of strange disturbing mutated subject matter. But you know what? I really like it.
Dutch illustrator Merijn Hos has updated with some new work. I am a fan of his Yellow Submarine-esque characters and organic slightly psychedelic style. I have a few prints of his given to me by Mario Hugo and absolutely love them.
Matt & Julie aren’t just creative partners, they are also husband and wife and they run a creative studio called Tiger In A Jar. They recently completed a stop-motion animation music video set to Sufjan Steven’s song “All For Myself”. It’s a fun little romp about a dinosaur set to an excellent track. Time to pick up the new Sufjan album.
Nicole Cote is a very young photographer with some very mature imagery in her portfolio. Her black and white photos in particular are strikingly beautiful and leave a narrative opening for the view to create their own story around each image.
