FOR WEEKLY INSPIRATION Why

November 3, 2009 | New Art | by Nikki Savvides |

New Delhi-based digital artist Archan Nair (aka archanN) has worked for notable clients, including CNBC, Hugo Boss, Apple and Tiger Beer. But although his corporate works stand out in their glorious, hyper-real colour, his more intricate and personal works are my favourites. Read more

October 26, 2009 | New Eco | by Nikki Savvides |

The Miss Rockaway Armada is a group of about thirty artists, musicians and performers who hail from across the United States. In the summers of 2006 and 2007, the group floated down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans on a flotilla of handmade rafts. Crafted mainly from junk and recycled materials, the rafts ran on wind and solar power, were fuelled by bio-diesel, and their crew subsisted on rainwater and dumpstered meals for the entire journey.  Read more

October 21, 2009 | New Eco | by Nikki Savvides |

Eve and Eryn, two amazing Free Spirit Sphere tree houses, are located in Vancouver, Canada, high up in the canopy of the West Coast rainforest. They are, as their creators describe, ’suspended like pendants from a web of rope’ from the trees. This is a unique way of creating unobtrusive means of living amongst nature. Insulated and set up for one or two people to stay in, these spheres allow people to experience the ‘energy shift’ that occurs ‘once one breaks contact with the ground’. Read more

September 10, 2009 | New Art | by Nikki Savvides Highly recommended by the LAEM team. |

When I was a kid, I loved balloon animals and was always sad when the colourful, inflatable creatures I bought home from shows and circuses slowly deflated. I think Jason Hackenwerth may have had a similar passion, which he has transformed into a peculiar form of art-making: balloon sculpture. Drawing inspiration from nature, Hackenwerth brings strange animals and bizarre landscapes to life through the twisting and turning of hundreds and thousands of balloons. Reminiscent of millipedes, of crustaceans, of deep sea fishes and waterborne plants, his giant works make the microscopic macroscopic. Rendered larger-than-life but yet unnaturally airborne they are brilliantly surreal, capturing the transcendentalism of both air and of nature itself. Read more

September 4, 2009 | New Art | by Nikki Savvides |

Sardinian born Carolina Melis is an illustrator based in the UK. She’s obviously multi-talented, her bio listing her not only as an artist but as an animator, dancer and choreographer. Her illustrations are apparently ‘informed by her background in choreography’ and explore ‘ideas of delicacy, organic development, life-cycles and living relationships’. Read more

August 13, 2009 | New Trends | by Nikki Savvides |

A survey of two thousand Britons has revealed the country’s perfect pet. Max is a bizarre hybrid that is part cat, part dog, part rabbit and part horse. Insurance firm More Than, which conducted the research, suggests that Max ‘has high energy levels, loves daily walks and sleeps for an average of nine hours 27 minutes a day’. Read more

August 11, 2009 | New Events | by Nikki Savvides |

Cremations Solutions, ‘[y]our complete source for scattering urns and accessories’, offers personal urns which are created from the image of the deceased. The large containers, which feature lifelike features, but no hair, can hold an entire loved one’s ashes, and cost only US$2,600. Read more

August 11, 2009 | Cool Travel | by Nikki Savvides |

I’ve just returned from an amazing trip to Vanuatu, a small cluster of islands north east of Australia. There my friend and I spent time exploring the coral reefs of the Nguna-Pele Marine Protected Area, home to hundreds of thousands of brilliantly colored fish, sea turtles, reef sharks, sting rays and other fascinating underwater critters. Read more

July 9, 2009 | Cool Travel | by Nikki Savvides |

May’s is an outdoor gallery in Sydney’s St Peters that is devoted to promoting a legal space in which street artists can exhibit their work. The brainchild of Tuli Balog, who runs his own graphic art business behind the colourful façade, he set up the gallery to encourage and document the evolution of graffiti and stencil art in Sydney. Based on several removable and replaceable wall panels, May’s allows artists to work on an entire wall, and to keep the parts of their works on the panels before the next artist’s work takes up residency. While this system challenges the usually temporary nature of street art, it also provides an avenue for street artworks to be protected from removal or cover-up by the local council. For this reason, it is a unique space, protected from the rampant clean-up and gentrification which is sanitising so many areas of the city.

July 1, 2009 | New Events | by Nikki Savvides |

Rob and Christian Clayton hail from Pasadena, California, where, together, they create fascinating and somewhat nightmarish images portraying the ‘unique people, animals, and places that occupy the outskirts of the American psyche’. The sad-faced, tired-eyed characters that inhabit their bright, almost suffocatingly busy pieces seem bemused by, yet unarguably a part of, their hectic surroundings, while the rough honesty of their work reminds me of artists such as Frieda Kahlo and comic artist Lynda Barry. The Clayton Brothers have an exhibition called Jumbo Fruit coming up on July 18 and running until August 29, which will be held at the East and West Galleries in Santa Monica, California. If you’re in the area, I’d highly recommend dropping by and immersing yourself momentarily in their colourful chaos.

June 10, 2009 | New Photography | by Nikki Savvides Highly recommended by the LAEM team. |

Andrew Zuckerman’s beautiful photographs make me imagine how it would feel to be in close proximity to a menagerie of amazing creatures — orangutans, mountain lions, chameleons, and zebras. With a careful eye for what makes these animals unique, Zuckerman has, in his wonderful book Creature, shown the intimate side of animals that are usually considered ‘wild’. Up close and personal, these animals reveal what might be termed an innate humanness, or, perhaps, as I prefer, a pure and primal sense of emotion, a capacity that is too often denied to them by humans. Captured in this way, we see that it is not animals that are human-like, but humans that are animal-like: each of us share the same glimmer in our eyes, the same need for safety, food, companionship and belonging. Read more

May 28, 2009 | New Illustration | by Nikki Savvides |

I really like the work of Craig Phillips, an Australian illustrator whose notable achievements include creating the cover art for the new EP from Sydney band Lions At Your Door and being named as one of the 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide (Leurzers Archive). Read more

May 5, 2009 | New Art | by Nikki Savvides |

I’ve been keen on Mandy Ord’s work since we were both involved in the Australian underground comic scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s. She shared my love of the dark and the bizarre, and her cool little self-published comic, Wilnot, inspired me greatly in my own work. While I drifted away from the scene a few years ago, Ord continues to draw her darkly witty, autobiographical comics and has just had her first full-length graphic novel published by Finlay Lloyd. It’s entitled Rooftops, and it tells the tale of a night spent out and about in Melbourne with friends, discussing, amongst other topics, the existential nature of coincidences. Read more

April 29, 2009 | Cool Travel | by Nikki Savvides |

Several years ago I spent five weeks hanging out with friends who lived in the friendly environment of Copenhagen’s Freetown, Christiania. A former military base, Christiania is a self-governing borough set on 85 acres of mainly lush forested grounds, surrounding a lake. It is a beautiful and idyllic location where 850 residents have built their own idiosyncratic constructions in which to live and play. While I was there, I watched local bands play in the coffee-house, helped paint a psychedelic mural on the wall of one of the military bunkers, smoked some legal marijuana bought from street sellers, and jumped off a homemade tree-swing into the freezing cold lake. Sadly, in recent years the Danish government has cracked down on the pot sellers and attempted to ‘normalise’ the legal status of the community. I hope they leave the place as it was. Staying in Christiania for that brief amount of time was such an amazing experience, and it would be a shame if the unique nature of the Freetown was lost.

April 22, 2009 | Cool Travel | by Nikki Savvides Highly recommended by the LAEM team. |

Late last year, I spent a month volunteering at Northern Thailand’s Elephant Nature Park, located 45 minutes from Chiang Mai, in a lush valley by the Mae Taeng River. This was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life. Every day was spent working on projects like building fences and huts and collecting food for the 35 elephants who call the Park home. Almost all have been rescued from terrible situations. Read more

 

Rainbows shooting out of toilets. Trashcans everywhere. And what could possibly be a certain part of the female anatomy. Hmmm. My somewhat juvenile sense of humor is totally with New York-based illustrator and designer, Jesse Kuhn.


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There’s something quite attractively kitsch about the Lucky Dragons’ latest release, Dream Island Laughing Language. It’s undoubtedly unusual, and not too friendly on the ears, but something warm and fuzzy keeps creeping out of the broken drum rhythms and looped vocals. It’s a mish-mash of jangly folk licks, Squarepusher-style drum ‘n bass with a few Coco Rosie-esque experimental sound effects thrown in: intriguing, original, and fairly hard to describe!

Israeli computer scientists recently created a computer program that changes photographs of people’s faces into more attractive images based on an algorithm that determines ideal distances between lips and chins, foreheads and eyes, and distances between eyes.


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I’d never before seen a museum where the building itself is the attraction more so than what is exhibited inside. Built by Daniel Libeskind in 1999, the Jewish Museum in Berlin is worth a visit even if you are not an architecture fan. Read more

In my next life, I want to sing like Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison. Oh, and grow a lush beard, so I can play in their band. Better start cracking.

My friend, illustrator Ai Tatebayashi, is known for her lovely color schemes and she forwarded me the link to this beautiful handknit accessory store from Istanbul. With Etsy, we can now purchase talented designer’s work from all over the world. And I couldn’t resist, I bought a necklace-scarf and cannot wait until it comes to my door! Read more

Square America is a photo blog that’s sort of like Found magazine, but with more rhyme and reason. The eerie, antique photos are organized by theme, subject matter, and even the ways in which time or lens imperfections distort the images. Read more

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Lizzy Stewart

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

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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

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Cardboard shoes

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

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T-post: the world’s first wearable magazine

So here’s the scoop. Every six weeks, T-post subscribers get a new t shirt issue in the mail, with a news story on the inside and an artist interpretation of that story on the front. Yes, we agree. It’s clever, clever. Read more

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Timothy Karpinski

Illustrator Timothy Karpinski sews painted paper together to create his images, giving them a classic look. Read more


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Wolfmother. Rock n roll. Mystical lyrics. Heavy riffs. They have a new album out, Cosmic Egg, and we have five copies to giveaway, along with their debut album. To enter, tell us your favorite Wolfmother song and the city you live in. Yo! Two fingered salute. Read more

Printed on premium 100 percent combed cotton 150 gsm shirt, this Three Wise Robots graphic t shirt out of New Zealand label is damn soft and comfy. We have it for sale in the Lost At E Minor online store. Read more

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