The whimsical world of J. Otto Seibold

Candy pop installation art

Taking inspiration from Lewis Carroll, Dr Seuss, and Salvador Dali, Rose Skinner creates vibrant installation art from candy, plastic, and toys. Of her work, she says: ‘my intricate compositions of eclectic materials play tantalizing games on your senses; you are bombarded with colors and textures sounds and smells, metaphors and iconography that are used often in ironic ways’. Read more

Sarajo Frieden

The artwork of Los Angeles-based Sarajo Frieden literally explodes out of the canvas, this challenging, confronting, colourful burst of shapes and textures, at once disjointed yet somehow perfectly in place. She says of her work: ‘The cacophony of hand-painted signs in a variety of languages serves as both inspiration and daily reminder that the ordinary is often extraordinary and nothing is what it seems. A host of disparate vocabularies from the worlds of fine, folk and decorative art, including Persian miniatures, Shaker trance drawings, Japanese ukiyo-e, and my Hungarian great aunt’s embroidery, can be found wandering through my images. I try to give form to the human experience as I see it’. Read more

Laurie Hogin

Laurie Hogin takes a classical approach to painting mutant critters that snarl and menace through their cute, day-glo fur. If Victorian artists got in a time machine to the ’80s, watched Gremlins, bought some Hypercolor jam shorts, and went back to their home era, they might have generated images like these. Read more

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

Ben O’Brien

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

Art Decks

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