|k| clippings: 2014-07-27 — Salmagundi Sunday

It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

Links

Time to clear a logjam of outstanding visual artists. We live in a time of riches.

• Laurin Döpfner shaved objects down, half-a-millimeter at a time, and photographed the results to create a mesmerizing video.

• Ren Ri works with bees to create beautiful beeswax sculptures.

• Cassandra Warner and Jeremy Floto use super high-speed cameras to capture “sculptures” of splashing, colored liquids. Meanwhile, Martin Klimas does the opposite, dropping porcelain sculptures and capturing the moment of impact in photos.

• “It’s about people, not victims,” says Ken Hermann of his SURVIVORS series of compelling portraits of acid attack survivors.

• Thomas Kellner’s contact sheet photo montages de/re-construct well-known landmarks.

• Shelly Mosman’s gifted portraits. Google Art Robot’s self-portraits…not so much.

• Intricate sand bottle art by Andrew Clemens. Consider alongside Loren Stump’s sliced glass portraits and “paintings”.

• What I Eat, a weird series by Marwane Pallas. Pairs well with Martín De Pasquale’s photo manipulations.

• Virtual beauty: Tom Beddard’s Fabergé Fractals. Virtual wooziness: David Whyte creates sometimes vertigo-inducing, math-based animated GIFs.

• Finally, voyeurism of three distinct kinds: Antoine Bruy’s Scrublands and Behind the Bushes looks at people who have gone off the grid in various ways; Florian Beaudanon’s Instant Life spies from above; Txema Salavans’ The Waiting Game discreetly captures photos of Spanish roadside prostitutes (safe for work, but not necessarily safe for the heart).

Commonplaces: Beauty

“Beauty limps.” (Jean Cocteau)

“Beauty and folly are old companions.” (Benjamin Franklin)

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being.” (Elaine Scarry)

“There is no exquisite beauty…without some strangeness in the proportion.” (Edgar Allan Poe)

“There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.” (Abraham Lincoln)

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” (John Keats)

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.” (Anne Frank)

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it.” (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus)

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.” (Miss Piggy)

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