Ville Savimaa
Wow, here’s some work that just made my Friday all the sweeter. Finnish artist Ville Savimaa creates the most clean, beautiful, and bizarre images, filled with chunky, abstract characters and creatures, as if viewed through an old fashioned grainy, black and white lens. It feels a lot like the trippiest noir film you never saw. Even when colour occasionally comes into the mix, Savimaa manages to gracefully maintain that sculptural sensibility, leaving the viewer feeling as suspended as the characters themselves.
Tagged: black and white illustrations, Finland, Finnish artists
- 0
- 0
RELATED
Finnish artist Marja Hakala makes site-specific environmental art out in nature — parks, reserves, mountainsides — as well as in gallery spaces and interiors using materials she finds in the environments she chooses. Her repetitive forms impose human order as a sort of meditation on human absence. Just as Thomas Cole and J. M. W. Turner emphasized the puniness of humanity before God and the natural world, Hakala draws out the futility of human endeavors in a 21st century context. Read more
It’s windy, cold, and raining out. On days like this, looking at the intricate work of artists like Kristopher Ho feels like re-reading an old book that you loved as a kid but forgot about in your more cynical adulthood. Read more
Berlin-based comic book artist/illustrator FuFu Frauenwahl has a classic style that really appeals to me. They remind me of the Tales from the Crypt and Heavy Metal comics I used to read late at night when I couldn’t sleep. His Mollusk Head character is pretty gnarly too. Read more
Also by ILANA KOHN
Sixth Pommery Exhibition Sons & Lumieres
How much better can it get than little dollops of contemporary art interspersed throughout the breathtaking setting of Champagne Pommery’s Domaine in Reims, France. The most interesting part here is that this is an ongoing tradition at Champagne Pommery, going all the way back to the 19th century ‘when Madame Pommery commissioned sculptor Gustav Navlet to carve four bas reliefs for the estate and later had the famous cabinet maker and glass artist Emile Gallé create a solid oak Pommery barrel that holds up to 19,816 gallons (100,000 bottles). This barrel was displayed at the 1904 Worlds’ Fair in St. Louis’. The upcoming Sixth Pommery Exhibition, Sons & Lumieres, will be curated by French artist Bertrand Lavier and will include ‘everyday objects often set in difficult spaces’. Read more
Color heaven! Perusing UK illustrator Ben O’Brien’s portfolio feels a lot like wandering the aisles of a giant candy store. I could buy one of everything in sight. Read more
I love it! With the CD now being eclipsed by the MP3, I find myself feeling even more nostalgic for the simple charm of the cassette. Australian artists Andrew Smart and Jared Schmidt create ‘large scale hand-made wooden cassette tapes, routed, sanded, bogged, primed, and painted with a high quality paint finish’. Aha! The perfect way to memorialize my old mix tapes. Read more
YOU'RE SAYING (0)
No comments yet.
HAVE YOUR SAY
New York photographer Sarah Wilmer creates dark, nightmare-inducing photographs that have a strange sense of innocence about them. They’re like movie stills, a cross between Lost Highway and Pan’s Labyrinth. We interviewed her recently to get the inside word on the inspirations behind her work. Read more
One of the largest contemporary construction projects in the world [it's the size of London's Hyde Park], the 220 suite Hydropolis, situated twenty metres below the surface of the Persian Gulf near Dubai, will be the first luxury underwater hotel. It’s expected to open to the public in late 2009. Read more
As if this season’s dresses weren’t delightful enough, here’s another reason to liquidate some stock and ruin your credit rating. First Prada and James Jean, now the top end retailer, Nordstrom: the exploration of art by fashion is long overdue, but well worth the wait. The Nordstrom campaign brings together three great things: the Cuban illustrator Ruben Toledo, the fashion photographer Ruven Afanador and the elvin Jenny Sweeny. Just looking at it makes me want to wrap myself in Cavalli and paint my walls bone shell white.
Oh man! I just want to curl up inside one of Will Cotton’s artworks and immerse myself in the sweetness of its surrounds. Read more
We spoke to Dopepope about his latest Metal Man Project: ‘In the fifth grade, I drew a comic called Metal Man about a humanoid robot that went crazy and pulled knives on people. It’s the most ridiculous thing ever. I was a kid! Anyway, I found the artwork and simply traced the head and the logo exactly as I had them and fell in love with the iconic shapes they’ve created’. Read more
Sufjan Stevens creates autistic music for introverts — soft, shy, naive, full of shadows, windows, and insecurities. Yet it all sounds slightly forced, his enigmatic songwriting as comforting as it is unsettling.
The Los Angeles musician, Ariana Delawari — aka Lion of Panjshir — is half Afghan and half Sicilian and makes wonderfully enlightened weirdo folk rock. I hope she takes that as a compliment! Her music is delicate and powerful and she is a pure artist. Everything she does has that magic light in it. She made her new album partially in Afghanistan, and many of the lyrics deal with the continued oppression of people’s liberties by the Taliban.
WE'RE RESPECTING
WE'RE POSTING / SOME OF THE BEST
Good thing Kris Kuksi channelled the trauma of growing up with an alcoholic stepfather, his disdain for ‘the typical American life and pop culture’, and his fascination with the macabre into obsessive, baroque assemblages, paintings, and drawings. Read more
Trip out with Sparrow Vs Sparrow’s retro illustrations, I love their aesthetic, color use and sense of humor. Read more
With the recession still biting, it may be time to whip out the glue and the cardboard and make your next pair of cool kicks. Don’t know how they’d manage in the rain though? Read more
There is not a medium that UK illustrator Lizzy Stewart cannot wrap around her little finger to make the most beautiful, whimsical images. Read more
Karen Caldicott’s clay head models
British born, New York-based model maker Karen Caldicott has been making clay heads for all major US publications over the last decade. Read more
Thanks to Sony Australia, four Lost At E Minor readers will win personal audio prizes, including the new 8GB Walkman S series video MP3 player and the MDRXB500 Extra Bass headphones. Read more
From this artist selection of t-shirts comes this Michael Gillette illustrated t-shirt, limited edition and distributed in a vinyl sleeve, with a biography of the artist on the back of the sleeve. Each tee is numbered and signed by the artist, and comes in organic cotton. Read more
FOLLOW US
DISCOVER MORE
SO...
SEARCH: Can't find what you're looking for? Do a search..
IS IT GOOD FOR YOU TOO?
We hope you're enjoying your time on Lost At E Minor, but it’s not over yet. Got something to share? Tell us about it and we'll look to publish it. If you want to have your work featured on the site, we'd love to hear from you. Pssst, we also have an online store stocking some of the goodies we feature on the site.
If you're a media agency and want to use this platform to connect with our readership, then drop us a line and tell us about it. Oh yeah, and we do digital consulting for cool brands that want to reach the sort of demographic that visits this site.
