Artist William Geerts’ “(Sorry) Bible,” a work in progress. The artist says, “All letters in the bible were erased with white correction fluid except for the S, O, R, R, and Y in that order.”
 

 
(via Nerdcore)

 
Jason Mecier is truly a mixed media artist composing portraits using everything from food and yarn to pills and assorted junk. Here are a few of his pieces that turned my head.

Mary Hartman made from beans. Andy Warhol: bananas, film, soup cans. Tura Satana; rice. Michaels Jackson: pills. Patti Smith: yarn. Barbi Benton: rolls of film, cosmetics…

You really must visit Jason’s website to see all of his work in close-up. In many of the portraits, the materials used tell the tale - form truly being an extension of content.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
For a teenager, Mike Mitchell had a great eye and skill with a camera. His secret stash of stunning black and white photos of The Beatles hit the auction floor tonight at Christie’s and sold for $360,000, considerably more than what was expected.

On July 20, Christie’s is pleased to present The Beatles Illuminated: The Discovered Works of Mike Mitchell, a sale comprised of nearly 50 lots of unpublished and never-before-seen photographs of the Beatles’ first hysteria-inducing visits to America in 1964. Shot in black and white by photographer Mike Mitchell when he was just 18 years old, the images have been filed away for nearly fifty years. The complete rediscovered collection is expected to realize in the region of $100,000.’

More photos are on view at Christie’s website.
 

 

 
An inspiring interview with Mike Mitchell who is now 60 years old:

 
Great photo series from photographer Andrew Bush called “Drive” (also the title of a book you can purchase here). He’s posted 66 photos of Los Angelenos in their cars on his website. A lot of the snaps were captured in the late-80s through early-90s. I like how some of the drivers are completely oblivious that they’re being photographed. 

 

 
More photos after the jump…

 
Great Beast 666 Ouija board, handmade by James Woodford:

Litho print mounted onto hand stained and treated board with colour matched felt backing for that luxurious touch. Complete with planchette designed and fabricated by myself. In wood. Again hand finished to a high standard. Each board has a hand-made bag for safe keeping, covered in Crowleys unique interpretation of the Unicurcal hexagram.

This will be in a limited edition of 50 Ouija boards. £200.00. Order here.

Aleister Crowley and the Ouija Board by J. Edward Cornelius

 
Brazilian footballer, Carlos Alberto Torres, describes his arrival to NYC on July 13, 1977 during the citywide blackout in this animation for Umbro.
 

 
(via HYST)

Phil Spector before the fall.
 
Photographer Brad Elterman was smack dab in the middle of L.A.‘s rock and roll vortex at a pivotal time in the 1970s. His camera caught some of the energy of the moment in sharply etched fragments of time.

Elterman’s career started with a borrowed camera at the age of 16. His first photo, of Bob Dylan performing onstage, was published in 1974.

That lead to endless nights of covering the rock scene in Hollywood encompassing pop, punk and rock bands including Joan Jett and The Runaways, Rod Stewart, David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, Kiss, Queen, Blondie, the Ramones, the Bay City Rollers, Abba, Boney M, Kenny Rogers, The Who, Leif Garrett, Michael Jackson, etc.

“It was my education in life,” says Brad, who left school to travel with bands and visit European magazine editors at the age of 19. “I had a front row seat in life which took me everywhere from Munich to Tokyo to Rio.” Brad toured Japan with teen idol Leif Garret, traveled to South America with German pop stars Boney M, and did tour dates with The Eagles and Rod Stewart, just to name a few.

Elterman has an almost Zen gift of being in the right place at the right time, capturing unguarded moments that seep through the cracks of his subject’s facades. 

He’s published a collection of his extraordinary black and white photos in a limited edition of 500 copies. While “Like It Was Yesterday” seems to have gone out of print, Amazon has a few for sale here. You can also purchase prints of Elterman’s work at his website, which is worth visiting for more detailed views of these and many more photographs and his fascinating descriptions of how they came about. I’m waiting for his memoirs.
 

 

 

Cherie and Marie Currie.
 
A video interview with Brad Elterman and more photos after the jump…...

 
Take a look at the amazing stained glass portraiture by Neal Fox. Fox’s work reminds me of the work of many different artists, including Gilbert & George, Roy Lichtenstein, even Joe Coleman (composition, not details, obviously!). I’ll bet this exhibition is impressive “in the flesh.”

Daniel Blau Ltd. is pleased to present Neal Fox’s latest project Beware of the God. Fox’s drawings depict a phantasmagoric journey through the detritus and mythology of pop culture. From a life-long obsession with the tales of his dead grandfather, a World War II bomber pilot, writer and hell raiser, his large-scale drawings have developed into increasingly layered celebrations of the debauched and iconoclastic characters whose ideas have helped shape our collective consciousness.

Fox’s latest project takes many of the recurring subjects of his drawings and portrays them through the medium of the stained glass window. As traditional church windows show the iconography of saints, through representations of events in their lives, instruments of martyrdom and iconic motifs, Fox plays with the symbolism of each character’s cult of personality; Albert Hoffman takes a psychedelic bicycle ride above the LSD molecule, J G Ballard dissects the world, surrounded by 20th Century imagery and the eroticism of the car crash, and Johnny Cash holds his inner demon in chains after a religious experience in Nickerjack cave. One quality in particular binds these characters and the others together; a refusal to conform and conviction in their own ideology.

Working with traditional methods at the renowned Franz Mayer of Munich manufacturer, Fox is producing a set of twelve 2.5 metre high stained-glass windows; exhibited in a single room – an alternative church of alternative saints.

Neal Fox’s “Beware of the God” at Daniel Blau Ltd., 51 Hoxton Square, London until August 10th.

 
More after the jump…

Mike Saputo’s poster design for this year’s Fantastic Fest.
 
I’m convinced there’s no better city in the world to be a movie fan than Austin, Texas. Add this to our bragging rights:

Beverly Hills, CA – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library is partnering with the Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse theater chain to archive the company’s growing collection of original film posters designed by contemporary graphic artists. The first group of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Mondo posters arriving at the Herrick will include the latest print, a poster for the classic horror film “Frankenstein” (1931), created by Drew Struzan.

The Alamo Drafthouse began producing limited-edition silkscreen posters in 2003. Mondo, the company’s art boutique, now produces more than 120 posters annually, and through it prominent artists such as Martin Ansin, Shepard Fairey, Olly Moss, Tyler Stout and Ken Taylor are commissioned to create new art for classic films, as well as alternative posters for contemporary movies such as “Inglourious Basterds,” “True Grit” and “Thor.”

“We are always seeking out the unusual, and the Mondo collection certainly fits the bill,” said the Academy’s graphic arts librarian, Anne Coco. “We are looking forward to working with the Alamo Drafthouse to ensure that its contribution to the art of movie posters will be around for future generations to appreciate.”

This ongoing gift from the Alamo Drafthouse will be housed along with the Herrick’s existing collection of more than 38,000 movie posters. The posters in the library’s collection are stored in climate-controlled vaults, and are scanned and entered into the library’s online catalog, where they can be viewed by the public.

“We’re extremely grateful to the Academy for its interest in archiving Mondo’s poster collection,” said Mondo Creative Director Justin Ishmael. “We’re fans of movie art, first and foremost, and to have our artists’ work archived alongside some of the classics of movie poster art is an incredible honor.”

The Margaret Herrick Library poster collection includes a wide range of works created by noted graphic artists, such as the Stenberg brothers’ constructivist poster for “Man with a Movie Camera” and Wiktor Gorka’s arresting poster for the Polish release of “Cabaret.” The library also holds all of the film posters designed by Saul Bass, including his groundbreaking key art for “The Man with the Golden Arm.”

The Austin Film Festival and Fantastic Fest are coming up in the next few months and Dangerous Minds will be there.

Check out some of the stunning movie posters at Mondo’s website.

Here’s a taste:
 

Shepard Fairey
 

Jesse Philips

 
In the final moments of a documentary on Francis Bacon, made by a French TV channel, the great artist turned to camera and jovially announced, in his best Franglais, that he had lost all his teeth to his lovers. That is what he was like –dramatically revealing intimate scenes from his life at the most unexpected of moments. His paintings did the same, as they were images, which unnervingly presented the “brutality of fact,” within the most intimate and commonplace of locations – a bedroom, a living room, a toilet.

I once played Francis Bacon on his deathbed, tended by nuns. It was for a drama-documentary, which examined the Bacon’s work through his asthma. The idea was to find out how much this medical condition shaped the artist’s life. For as Bacon once said to critic John Russell: 

“If I hadn’t been an asthmatic, I might never have gone on painting at all.”

If this was true, then arguably, it was his asthma that made him a painter, and his asthma, which induced the heart attack that killed him.

Of course, there have been other suggestions as to why Bacon became an artist: the childhood trauma of being locked in a cupboard by the family nanny, or more luridly, as writer John Richardson has claimed, it was Bacon’s masochism that inspired his work. Yet, neither of these fully explain his drive or resilience, or the influence of his strange relationship with his father had on his work.

Bacon was 82-years-old when he died in Madrid, on the 28th April 1992. In many respects, it is a surprise he lived so long.  Bacon was a prodigious drinker, had a damaged and diseased heart, lost a kidney to cancer, and once, nearly lost an eye, after being “pissed as a fart” and falling down the stairs of his favored drinking den. But Bacon had resilience, rather than seek immediate medical attention he merely pushed the offending orb back into its socket, and continued with his afternoon debauch.

Bacon was a gambler. He saw himself as open to the opportunities of chance in both life and art. He made and lost small fortunes on the spin of the roulette wheel. He was an atheist who saw no hope of an afterlife, and gave credence to “the individual’s perceived reality.” He claimed he had been “made aware of what is called the possibility of danger at a very young age,” which led him to treat life as if it were always within the shadow of death:

“If you really love life, you’re walking in the shadow of death all the time…Death is the shadow of life, and the more one is obsessed with life the more one is obsessed with death.  I’m greedy for life and I’m greedy as an artist.”

In the late 1940s, Bacon was told by his doctor he had an enlarged heart. One of his friends, Lady Caroline Blackwood, then wife to artist Lucian Freud, later recounted a tale of a dinner when Francis had joined her and Lucian, at Wheeler’s Restaurant :

“His (Francis) doctor had told him that his heart was in such a bad state that not a ventricle was functioning; he had rarely seen such a diseased organ, and he warned Francis that if he had one more drink or even became excited it could kill him.

“Having told us the bad news he waved to the waiter and ordered a bottle of champagne, and once it was finished ordered several more.  He was ebullient throughout the evening but, Lucian and I went home feeling very depressed.  He seemed doomed.  We were convinced he was going to die, aged forty.”

 
More on Francis Bacon and part two of his interview with David Sylvester, after the jump…