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.

I couldn’t resist! A few bunnies for you, by Japanese artist/illustrator Aiko Fukawa, on Easter! Have a lovely long weekend … I’ll be back tomorrow … full of chocolate.

A leisurely breakfast, a trip to the circus, and then a little research on how to make my garden grow! Ah yes, that’s what my weekend would be like if I lived in the illustrations of Tokyo based artist Yuki Kitazumi. I spotted her Encyclopedia of Roses on Pinterest a few nights ago, and boy oh boy, I love where it lead me! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m suddenly in the mood for a little bread n’ honey. Happy weekend to you!

So, I just discovered Aesthetica, a gorgeous “Art & Culture Magazine” from the UK. It was this stunning story, in Issue 51, about American photographer Garry Winogrand {1928-1984} that got me! He spent the 1960’s capturing beautiful moments in everyday American life  – from the rich and famous, to the average stranger on the street {… if you’re as captivated by these images as I am, you can see this work in person at SFMOMA until June 2, 2013}. Now, as fantastic as these spreads are, Aesthetica is not just about black and white vintage retrospectives, oh no! It’s also full of glossy, contemporary pages as well…

Yes! Enter the work of Montreal based fashion/editorial photographers, MarquisMontes, aka Jose Enrique Montes Hernandez and Valérie Boulet, partners in work and in life. Quite a contrast to the work of Garry Winogrand, but it all finds a perfect home in this issue. Gor.Ge. Ous.