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Paintings of Divine, Apu, Amy Winehouse, Princess Leia and more, using old coins as a canvas
10.31.2014
10:46 am
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Divine, over an image of Generalissimo Francisco Franco
 
Andre Levy must be quite the draftsman, to paint such compelling and amusing images on the unforgiving terrain (copper, nickel) of a coin measuring no more than an inch square. But that’s what the artist, who was born in Sao Paulo but is currently based out of Frankfurt, has done. A cheeky sense of humor (he clearly loves the Simpsons) and a sharp eye have surely aided him in his quest to take over the Internet (which he seems to have done).

Benjamin Sutton of Hyperallergic got in touch with Levy per email: “I’m a graphic designer and split my time between an advertising job and my personal projects, which include street art and illustration. The most notorious of those projects, so far, is Tales You Lose, which became popular on Instagram and Tumblr,” Levy told Hyperallergic. “I never collected coins. What initially made me accumulate a few was the fact that I keep forgetting them in my pockets. I learned, though, that outside its territory of origin the coin leaves behind its illusional value as currency to carry a value defined by its carrier. I saw those coins as massively reproduced sculptures, and felt they could be turned into templates for something richer. Painting the coins was a way to give those metal pieces some room for interpretation. The pop characters were a way to bring in narratives as strong as the original ones and enable the new stories when people relate both characters.”
 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Leonardo, over Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man
 

The Flash, on a Greek Olympic coin
 

Princess Leia, over an image of British Queen Elizabeth II
 

René Magritte’s “The Son of Man,” on a Chinese coin
 

YouTube error icon, over Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
 

Amy Winehouse, on a French coin
 

Apu from The Simpsons, on a Thai coin
 

Asterix and Obelix, on a French coin
 

Swiftwind, on an Irish coin
 

Simpsons doughnut
 
via Hyperallergic

Posted by Martin Schneider
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10.31.2014
10:46 am
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Hilarious Jabba the Hutt and Princess Leia purse set
02.26.2013
11:03 am
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I adore this hand-painted Jabba the Hutt clutch purse with an accompanied attached-by-a-chain Princess Leia coin purse by Cat Penfold. Hilariously brilliant!

Via Neatorama

Posted by Tara McGinley
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02.26.2013
11:03 am
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Princess Leia’s ‘coke nail’ in ‘Return of the Jedi’

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So some smartypants on reddit believes they’ve spotted Carrie Fisher’s coke nail in Return of the Jedi. I have no comment, other than it’s normally the pinky finger, right?

Via Nerdcore

Posted by Tara McGinley
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09.28.2012
11:31 am
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Three Princess Leias in the TARDIS
05.30.2011
01:53 pm
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Photo by glittersweet
 
Must be some sort of weird space-time continuum leak? Or maybe they’re just lost?

Click here to see larger image.

(via Nerdcore)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.30.2011
01:53 pm
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21-87: How Arthur Lipsett Influenced George Lucas’s Career

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By the time Montreal-born filmmaker Arthur Lipsett made his nine-and-a-half-minute long dystopian short 21-87 in 1963, he was well-aware of the power of abstract collage film. His short from two years earlier, Very Nice, Very Nice was a dizzying flood of black & white images accompanied by bits of audio he’d collected from the trash cans of the National Film Board while he was working there. And wildly enough, it got nominated for a Best Short Subject Oscar in 1962.

But with 21-87, the then-27-year-old Lipsett was not only using moving images, he was also refining his use of sound. And it got the attention of the young USC film student George Lucas, who’d fallen in love with abstract film while going to Canyon Cinema events in the San Francisco Bay area. 21-87’s random and unsettling visions of humans in a mechanistic society accompanied by bits of strangely therapeutic or metaphysical dialogue, freaky old-time music, and weird sound effects, affected Lucas profoundly, according to Steve Silberman in Wired magazine:

’When George saw 21-87, a lightbulb went off,’ says Walter Murch, who created the densely layered soundscapes in [Lucas’s 1967 student short] THX 1138 and collaborated with Lucas on American Graffiti. ‘One of the things we clearly wanted to do in THX-1138 was to make a film where the sound and the pictures were free-floating. Occasionally, they would link up in a literal way, but there would also be long sections where the two of them would wander off, and it would stretch the audience’s mind to try to figure out the connection.’

Famously, Lucas would later use 21-87 as the number Princess Leia’s cell in Star Wars. But although his success allowed him freedom at the NFB, Lipsett’s psychological problems would lead him to commit suicide in 1986, two weeks before he turned 50.
 

 
After the jump, compare with Lucas’s equally bewildering short Electronic Labyrinth: THX-1138 4EB!
 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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07.24.2010
02:02 am
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