James Jean at New York’s Jonathan LeVine Gallery

Jeffrey Burdian

The great thing about knowing an artist for a long time is experiencing their development and progression. New York-based Jeffrey Burdian has really developed a strong and refined voice since I first saw the serious work he was beginning to make in 2005, allowing his compositions and choices to be elegantly simple and evocative without over-thinking his concepts. Read more

John Kleckner

Using the intricate and impossibly thin lines of a Micron pen along with sweeping watercolor washes, New York-based artist John Kleckner creates gorgeous pieces inspired by archival prints as well as more contemporary source imagery. The results have a unique mysticism about them, like a dark fairytale told by a latter-day hippie prophet. Read more

KAWS creme de corps

Random collaborations always come as a pleasant surprise. This time New York-based graffiti artist KAWS (aka Brian Donnelly) has joined forces with lavish beauty product manufacturer, Kiehl’s, in a bid to raise money for non-profit art initiative RxArt. KAWS’ design adorns an exclusive line of Kiehl’s skin moisturizers, with all proceeds benefiting RxArt’s mission to install art pieces in US hospitals.

Dear Japan art event in New York

Come out to a gallery in Soho, New York, on Saturday afternoon and purchase art for your home for a good cause. The one evening event Dear Japan has been organized by a group of Japanese artists who live in New York. It features 170 illustrators and fine artists, and all the works are $200 or under. It’s a small portion of what most of the participating artists would normally sell their work for. Of course, I am donating for this good cause, too. Read more

BLOW UP: featuring Hanuka, Shimizu, Weber

Three illustrators from vastly different backgrounds — Sam Weber (Canada), Yuko Shimizu (Japan), and Tomer Hanuka (Israel) — are meeting at the crossroads of a distinct American aesthetic to examine their new-found artistic voices through personal mythologies, broken narratives and remixed identities. Each of the illustrators featured as part of BLOW UP (running at New York’s Society of Illustrators until October 16) created new works to be shown for the first time in this exhibition. Read more

Harmonic Hairdoo

How could you not like these crazy hair prints by Shoplifter, the artistic genius behind Bjork’s Medulla cover art hair sculpture. Read more