21 September 2013

The City in the Middle of the Crystal Sea


A miniature world of water, oil, crystal and iron, created by Christoper Brooks. The sea is a mixture of water and vegetable oil, and the crystals are sodium thiosulphate pentahydrate, which crystallizes very quickly when melted then cooled.

The shiny black oil is ferrofluid - a suspension of tiny iron particles in oil with a surfactant to hold it together. Magnets are placed out of shot to make the spikes.

19 January 2011

Dafen - China's Oil Painting Village

By Guest Blogger Dan Lewis
Editor of Now I Know
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You may have noticed that hotels have the same oil painting in each room.  Or that you can get a replica Starry Night or Mona Lisa (like the one at the top of this post) for roughly the price of a high-end Kindle.   If you think that the oil painting reproduction game is a cottage industry, you're almost correct: it's a village industry.

In this case, it's the village of Dafen, China.  Founded in the mid-1990s by a businessman and about twenty artists, Dafen is now home to 5,000 artists -- who, collectively, churn out over 5 million paintings a year.  That's more than half of the oil paintings produced in the entire world each year.

Although you can order over the internet, the cheapest way to acquire Dafen art is to go there yourself - and there is always someone willing to talk to you.

Most of the artwork is entirely legal, at least under Chinese law.  Works fall out of copyright protection after fifty years, so the non-original work such as the two featured above are free and clear.   And while they can retail for hundreds of dollars in the United States, the artwork -- which quite literally on every street corner in Dafen -- goes for about $40 for even the most sought-after works in the area.

The quality of the work?  It's very good.  Not perfect, of course, but these are made by artists, not mere painters.  All of the (re-)creators are trained at art academies; to the extent that the if quality suffers, it is because they are expected to produce dozens of replicas weekly.

You can even have a painting done to order - in this case a reproduction of a very famous photograph.  However, sometimes the painters practice a form of censorship.  Now you see him.

Now you don't.

Of course, this would not be China unless there was some unintentional mangling of the English language.  Dafen not only produces paintings, it caters for woodcaring too.


Bonus fact: Reproducing three or more oil paintings a week means long, grueling hours.  Such hours would preclude these painters from taking up a very odd hobby demonstrated by a man in the UK -- wiggling one's way into the background of news telecasts.  Paul Yarrow spends an incredible amount of time doing exactly that, appearing in the backdrop of almost two dozen television broadcasts over the last year or so.

3 June 2010

Deepwater – German Art Duo Pour Water on Troubled Oil


Hot oil is hotter than steam. When the water hits oil, steam is created instantaneously at the oil-water interface. The steam expands violently, creating an explosion.  As a metaphor for human reaction, this is perhaps exactly what controversial German techno Avant-garde artists Ubermorgen planned with their new work.

It may not please an awful lot of people in the states of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, that's for sure.

The pair are back with, inevitably, their own take on the Deepwater oil crisis.  Called Deepwater, they have declared that the supreme discipline of art – oil painting is back.  As the oil reaches the coastlines of several US States they have declared that oil painting has now evolved in to a generative bio-art.  In other words they see the disaster as an opportunity to imagine the biggest piece of installation art in history - and take full digital advantage of it too.

The video above is made up exclusively of moving images of the oil spill.  Ubermorgen have used a digital enhancement technique to formulate their statement and to add to what they see as the plethora of oil paintings of the disaster already abundant on the internet (they mean NASA images and other aerial media).  By using video editing software the images of the slick become more liquid and form a visual assertion of the disconnection of color and form.

You may well have reservations about art that is based on and 80K square mile ocean slick containing over thirty million litres of oil but unquestionably from the perspective of Ubermorgen the spill in itself is a matchless piece of art. 

Certainly, the inspiration for great art has drawn from all kinds of painful human experience and the environmental catastrophe that is happening right now is not short of (sometimes dubious) media attention already.  What you must decide though, is whether Ubermorgen are taking advantage of a manmade disaster of a scale hitherto unprecedented or whether they are joining in the chorus of anger against BPs Gulf of Mexico shenanigans.  Or both.  Or neither.

Ubermorgen (which means the day after tomorrow or super tomorrow in German) is made up of a duo of artists, Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard.    Lizvlx has stated :"I saw the NASA earth observatory images and I was blown away.  Finally traditional painting made its comeback as a high-tech innovative art form and not as the starving grandparent of photography, video, digital art and performance. As a former painter I am thrilled and as a digital artist - I want to work this material until it bleeds".

This does seem particularly cold blooded in the light of what is happening but a strong, visceral reaction is exactly what the duo are looking for and this peculiarly Germanic detachment may not attract them many fans. Certainly it will get them a great deal of attention, however.

Yet how do you judge art such as this?  By its content or by its subject?  Do you judge or, like the duo themselves, stand back and coldly evaluate its merits as art?  If that is the case, they may be in some trouble.

10 May 2010

How big is the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill?

How big is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?  When you are on the floor of the ocean it may be hard to get a real idea.  Use the links here to find out just how big it is - it will astonish you.  You only have to look at the map above to get an idea.

As you no dount know, on April 20th, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon left kicked off what could become the greatest environmental catastrophe of our - and any - time.  There are to this date 17 workers injured and 11 missing, and presumed dead.

An immense human tragedy but overshadowed by the amount of oil that is coming out of the disaster area.  Oil surging from a well ober five thousand feet below sea level.  Imagine your hosepipe pinched at the end and you can imagine the discharge of over 200,000 gallons of crude oil a day coming from the site.

From these sites you can compare the area to other places in the world, in terms of land mass.

Of course, private estimates put the figure at closer to two million gallons a day. The spill covers at least almost three hundred thousand square miles of ocean surface.The old son The Earth Dies Screaming  may now be applicable to the oceans too.

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