Chunks of wood, and chunks of people. Ah, the collage work of Madrid based artist Jesús Perea. Love. And with that, I wish you a happy, creative, adventure-filled weekend! See you on Monday.

{via design milk}

Oh my word. American artist Janet Echelman makes huge, sculptural nets that are colorful and billowing during the day, and light up the skyline like beautifully bizarre jellyfish at night. Not that Amsterdam needs any help being beautiful, but yowza, that first piece in the top of the post creates an insanely stunning view of the city! Janet was originally a painter (USA), who studied calligraphy (China), and then dabbled in textiles (Bali), after which she was a teacher at Harvard (USA), and eventually ended up working in sculpture (India)… um, who’s inspired?! Yep, me too.

First, the multi-talented Faythe Levine {of Handmade Nation fame… among countless other things!} got together with photographer/film maker Sam Macon, and wrote this book. Can you guess what it’s about?

You guessed it! Sign Painters, and the lost art that is sign painting {um, with a foreword by Ed Ruscha!}. The book profiles, and celebrates, classic sign painters – the artists who actually use a brush, and paint, and old-school techniques to create some of the most beautiful typographic art in the world. But Faythe and Sam didn’t stop with a book … nope … they just made a documentary too!

So good! Here’s the overview:

There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade.

In 2010 filmmakers Faythe Levine and Sam Macon began documenting these dedicated practitioners, their time-honored methods, and their appreciation for quality and craftsmanship. Sign Painters, the first anecdotal history of the craft, features the stories of more than two dozen sign painters working in cities throughout the United States. The documentary and book profiles sign painters young and old, from the new vanguard working solo to collaborative shops such as San Francisco’s New Bohemia Signs and New York’s Colossal Media’s Sky High Murals.

Ooooh, it looks amazing! The first screening was just a couple of weeks ago in Washington DC. It’s starting it’s tour of indie theatres right now, so if you want to see if your city is on the list, click here. And for a preview of the film, you can watch the trailer right here.

I wrote about Canadian photographer Amy Friend just over a year ago. It was her gorgeous series, titled Dare alla Luce, that took my breath away. Amy has had a zillion people ask her to make prints from the series… and she listened! As of this very moment, the four images shown above are available in her brand new Etsy shop…  for $35 each {wait, what?!} Ok, that’s it, I’m going over there right now – I’ll meet ya there!

p.s I got “Waning Lights” – the two ladies on the beach! LOVE it!!!

Gasp! I’m a little bit lost for words {which is rare for me}. This is just so beautiful, and oh so meticulous. This work is from the paper-folding series, Between the Folds, by Chilean born, London based artist Francisca Prieto. These sweet little birds are from pages of “A History of British Birds, 1870″, but now they are catalogued in an entirely new way… a delicate origami, tiny hidden window kind of way! LOVE. And there’s so much more where those little birds came from! Francisca folds just about everything – ornamental designs from 1892, British botanicals, some very very old maps:

I already said , Gasp!, right? ♥

This is the lovely, and slightly disturbing, work of German artist Loretta Lux. Photographs? Paintings? Both? Well, Loretta is a photographer, but she studied painting at Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich… perhaps that’s why her photographs look like this! Some of these pieces take up to a year to complete, as she begins with a photograph but then digitally manipulates it by striping away the background and then dropping her subjects into these muted, dream-like environments. So pretty, and eery, and lovely, and strange… hey Wes Anderson, I think Loretta just cast your next five films!

ps. She photographs boys too, but there was just something about the girls… love love love!

{via The Lacquerie}

Yes. Yes. Yes!!! I love this simple letterpress project, by Portland based artist Alyson Provax, titled Time Wasting Experiment. There are sooo many good pieces in this series, I just pulled out a few that truly spoke to me and my crazy time wasting thoughts. I do not even want to imagine how many minutes I’ve used up doing all of the above. So, on that note, I have a little message to send out:

Hey, Worrying… you SUCK. I’m moving on, and getting my minutes back! There. We’ll see how that goes.

The first three words that pop into my mind – strange, childhood, dreamy/nightmarey. Ok, that was technically four words, but I couldn’t just leave it at dreamy… these scare me just a tiny bit. And I like it.  This is the beautifully bizarre work of Montreal based artist Dominique Fortin. Ok, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… a finished face, and an unfinished everything else is pure magic to me… and don’t even get me started on those fire breathing dogs on paint brush stilts. M.A.G.I.C.

{ps. I featured more of Dominique’s work in my ART GOES HERE post, that just went up today, over at sfgirlbybay}

Oooooh! New work by Vancouver artist Aaron Moran. I wrote about his salvaged-wood sculptures a couple of years ago {which I still love more than I can say!}, but when I saw this series, titled Section 1, I had to share it. Boy oh boy, it’s pretty amazing what he can do with bits of wood and a tiny amount of perfectly chosen house paint. Love.

Oh, Beth Hoeckel. Every time I visit her site there is something new. Something great. Something that makes me want to find images, cut them up, and glue them onto something else. These first three pieces are similar to the other pieces I’ve written about before, but these pieces have their own feel…

… and yep, I love these too! Oh, Beth Hoeckel.