the art life

Tired of MySpace? Fed up with FaceBook? Looking for something that will waste time until the coffee break? Just relax and enjoy...

We get sent a lot of links to artist sites and blogs and one of the most interesting to come our way lately is the site of Peter Callesen , an artist working in the medium of cut paper. There are a lot of artists using the old scissors-and-paper medium [cheap to buy, hard to master] but few are as quite as good as this.


A couple of blogs recently brought to our attention really stretch the limits of taste. The blog Illustration Art is a celebration of illustration for all manner of outlets, from pop culturally acceptable comics, illustrated novels and poster art through to the pop culturally unacceptable outlets such as greeting cards, car company ads and fantasy art. That the blog makes no value distinction is refreshing and challenging.



The blog Tomorrowland is an old fashioned blog that wanders around many subject areas for kicks, from pot addled cult leaders to a post about why some gut got tasered by the cops. On a more art related front, the blog does have the occasional architecture related story, such as futuristic architecture in Dubai and the speculative art of NASA that envisions what a 1970s space habitat would have looked like.



It was through Tomorrowland that we discovered the joys of Astrona: Space & Astronomical Art, a copyright busting blog dedicated to gathering together the work of artists such as Chris Foss, Chesley Bonestell and Shigemi Numawaza. If you're asking "who?" then clearly you didn't spend the better part of your teenage years reading crappy SF novels and wondering why the cover paintings weren't in "proper" art galleries. Well, the answer to that last question is fairly obvious, but we're way past caring and Astrona is a mixture of nostalgia and guilty pleasure.


Judith Van Heeren, Garnet red birds in grey landscape, 2007.
86 x 183 cm.
We're always looking for suggestions from artists for new additions to our list of artists sites and blogs. A blog we found through a gallery invitation is the work of Judith Van Heeren, an expat Dutch artist living in Melbourne who is currently having a show at MurrayWhiteRoom. Just the right side of kitsch, Van Heeren's work is moodily abstract with a lovely addition of birdyness.

Finally, a site you might want to visit before you've had your lunch is the work of New Zealand artist Angela Lasinger. It's creepy and frankly disturbing. You have been warned.

Labels: blogging, web sites

You've been wasting a lot of time browsing... which usually means you want to spend more time browsing. It's a vicious cycle. Happily we're here to help...



We've updated with some new artist's links. Incessant scribbler Gosia Wlodarczak has launched a new site that showcases her inter-disciplinary practice from drawing, installation and performance to some exquisitely produced DVDs. Another beautifully designed site is Stereopresence, the web site of Dr. Ross Rudesch Harley, another multi-disciplinary artist with archived audio, video and text and a blog featuring info on his collaborative projects with Elvis Richardson. Harley, a veteran of the on-line world, has another site he shares with his partner Maria Fernanda Cardoso and a site dedicated to his Aviopolis project. We've also linked to Jai McKenzie's website which has photos and info and some videos that are "comming". We're not quite sure what that means but we'll definitely be going back to find out.

It's not often that a brand new art magazine arrives and it's with unabashed excitement we note the debut issue of Artist Profile, launched last week at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The angle [we're told] is the magazine features interviews with artists by artists, or just with artists - no market bs, no gallery profiles - just artists, artists, artists all the way. The first issue features articles on young up and comers like Sidney Nolan, John Hoyland and that painter of exquisite big heads Alan Jones. The issue also excitedly proclaims the arrival of Reg Mombassa to the publication. Hoorah. Welcome to the world Artist Profile.

We receive a lot of emails. Most are welcome, but a lot of it is spam. For reasons unknown to us, Martina Hughes has been sending us information on Tantric Blossoming Workshops, where women may find not just the goddess inside but the sacred prostitute as well. Writes Martina:

"Why use the term sacred sexuality? Sacred sexuality is a path to increased awareness through becoming more responsive to your feeling body and using your energy to connect more deeply with your lover. Opening to greater pleasure, feeling and sensation provides the doorway to increased intimacy whereby lovers begin to call on the divine in each other, and can move towards ecstatic highs in the sexual relating. I have written an article in Inner Self magazine, due out this month, about Sexual Union for Transformation - if you are in NSW or QLD keep an eye out for it in the local health shops."

We're not certain if we're the right er... target audience for this steamy material but hey, keep it "comming".

If you'd like to have your web site included on our list, or alert us to any of your other activities, note that the address for all correspondence to The Art Life is via our Hotmail address theartlife[..]hotmail.com and not via the mailing list sign up address.

Labels: art magazines, site news, web sites

The December-January period is a great time for getting ready for the rest of the year. After lying on a beach for a few weeks you start to get a bit twitchy about all the things you meant to do over the break – get your office sorted out, launch a new artist run gallery or perhaps start a new web site. By the second week of January with the start of all those ‘Back to School’ specials you start to realise you’ve let things slide. Time for action and a few emails!

Miss Hannah Furmage wrote to us to let us know that she’s launched a web site that records her recent projects. It’s fine design job that cheekily includes quotes from a range of people including a not-the-most-flattering quote from this blog. We told Furmage we liked her site and that we’ve now included it on our list of artist sites. Furmage replied: “I am delighted to be considered for your list of links. Particularly because according to the visitor counter on my website - there have been only 2 hapless visitors to my site since its conception 2 weeks ago. Most depressing, especially as I know that 1 of them was my mum.” We encourage all our readers to visit to get those stats up.



The Baker-McMullan Art-Making Juggernaut is a juggernaut we hadn’t heard of before, the whole race track of the art world being crowded with similar sized vehicles jockeying for pole position. It turns out that this particular project is the collaborative work of Tom McMullan and Tillie Baker [BFA (Hons) 2004], two hard working individuals with many irons in many fires. Tillie wrote to us asking if we could mention their latest venture, an exhibition they are staging at Blanco Negro, a single image that is a gigantic picture of a telephone they did as a backdrop for a band called Red Riders to use in a but which they are now showing in its own right because it looks good and it is cool. The show opens on February 14 and is confusingly called November 18. For further explanation you can read about the show on Tillie’s rather lovely designed web site.

Labels: exhibitions, press releases, web sites