Posted in Arty sparks, Home sparks, WWWhat?

Help! My Lounge is Mutating!

I first saw these amazing pieces of furniturart (ok, so I just made that word up) on the fantastic My Modern Met website (and they had sourced them from the very cool peeps at Design Boom) under the heading Mutating Furniture Made of Bubbles. Yes please! You don’t get that at Ikea.

And I was not to be disappointed – like a Miss Teen USA contestant, these are at once beautiful and kinda creepy. I’m not sure how comfortable they would be, but as soon as you contemplate that thought, you know you’re not really worthy of the furniturart. Same goes for wondering how you’d keep them clean of dog fur and childrens’ handprints. Or how they’d look next to your teak coffee table. But we can still look, can’t we?

Belgian designer Maarten De Ceulaer’s Mutation Series will be presented this year during Milan Design Week. Each piece is unique, made from foam spheres covered in “a durable rubber or velvet-like finish”. According to My Modern Met, Maarten says “I want to use my work to tell stories, to stir people’s emotions, to tickle their imagination or to make them wonder.” The Willy Wonka of the furniture (furniturart) world, I guess.

And, like Mr Wonka before him, Maarten’s creativity knows no limits. Apparently he said, “Maybe one day we will be able to grow a piece of furniture like we breed or clone an animal, and manipulate it’s shape like a bonsai tree.” Yes, Maarten, maybe we will. I kinda like the idea of a naturally grown, fully furnished tree house. Add a glass elevator, chocolate river and an everlasting gobstopper and I’m sold!

More info in the My Modern Met post here.

Posted in Arty sparks, Sparky gifts

Brainiac

This Jumping Brain is one of a series designed by Emilio Garcia at the “secret Lapo laboratories”, wherever they are. And they might be secret, but presumably they’re paved with gold – an extra large Jumping Brain costs 1500 euros. But imagine how handy one could be…

When you’re in a meeting and Sucky Suckinson is trying to impress the boss with a jargon-filled speech, the brain jumps across the table as a very subtle sign that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is. Or when the 12 year old boy running the McDonald’s drive-thru gives you the wrong order, ol’ Brainy could jump up to the window as a reminder to stop chatting up the chick making the sundaes and actually serve the customer. Or at extended family gatherings, the brain could sit in the middle of the table as a warning to Great Uncle Charlie and Second Cousin Babs – no one wants to hear dumbhead rants about how much better things were in the olden days. Or if you see a Kardashian or a Snooki or pretty much any reality tv star…

Honestly, think of all the people you’ve met and discounted as idiots – and if you’ve worked in the corporate world in particular, I’m tipping you’ve met plenty – or the people that you suspect are either off their heads or heavily medicated when you speak with them. Maybe, just maybe – like a weird twist on old Pavlov’s dogs – when the Jumping Brain appears, everyone in the room gets a little bit smarter. If so, 1500 euros is looking like a great investment!

Check out Emilio Garcia’s brain(s) here.

Posted in Arty sparks, WWWhat?

Draw Something. Anything.

I think I’m very late getting on the bandwagon, so you’ve probably already seen the Draw Something app. Essentially, it’s online Pictionary with random strangers. Or, Words With Friends in picture format, if you like. And I’m hooked. I can’t really draw – a fact that is becoming more and more apparent with each game that I play – but there’s some satisfaction in your scribble being identified as your intended image. Basically, you choose from one of three options to draw (for your team mate to guess). And then you get awarded coins, depending on the alleged difficulty of what you chose to draw. An everyday plodder drawing equivalent – say, HAT – will get you one coin, while the nimble Russian gymnast drawing equivalent – say, PETSHOP – will get you three coins. (For the record, I have drawn both hat and petshop and they have been identified correctly by the person on the other side. How, I do not know, but that is beside the point.) You can use your virtual coins to buy additional virtual paint colours to brighten up your drawings, or to buy additional virtual bombs to blow up some of the letters that you choose from to name what the other person has drawn. People use bombs to help them decipher my drawings quite frequently – but I like to think that, like Picasso before me, the hidden depth of my work is not immediately obvious to everyone. I am also comforted by the fact that Picasso never had to try and produce a masterpiece using a canvas half the size of a phone screen, with an index finger as a paintbrush. The virtual artist’s life is not an easy one, I tell you.

However, there are some amazing people out there and I am regularly in awe of the quality of their drawings. Others, and I include most of my own drawings in this number, are either intentionally or unintentionally comical and I find myself shaking with laughter as I look at them on my way to work or waiting in line at the supermarket. For an app that is either free or upgraded to a 99c version, Draw Something definitely gives me my money’s worth in entertainment on a daily basis. Judge for yourself…

     (Ok, that last one is mine. CMM4. See what I mean?)

Posted in Arty sparks, Sparky gifts, WWWhat?

Too cool for school

These amazing fine art prints from Angela Rossi in LA make me laugh. Out loud. (See kids, we used to say it like that before you lazied it into LOL.) With the animal tops perfectly matched to the old American yearbook bodies, you can just imagine these dudes roaming the halls of the local high school back in the day. Not wishing to stereotype, but I reckon Andrea the Giraffe (all animals named by the artist, I have just interpreted the characteristics) would be the studious library-at-lunchtime geek; Hunter the Hound is either smoking in the bathroom or saying dopey things at the back of the classroom; Ryan the Raccoon is the cool jock (with a beard); Timmy the Alpaca would be all about music/drama/dahnce; Heather the Persian Cat would be the uptight teacher’s pet and Rachelle the Cockatoo would just be annoying (with a cute blonde ponytail).

Check out more cool prints, plates and postcards at Angela’s etsy shop Beat Up Creations.