8oinks

Félicien Rops (7 July 1833 - 23 August 1898) was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint.

I know very well that I would be better off living normally, better off keeping to the straight and narrow, not to be (at the age of 30 years) as futile as Cherubino di amore for Beaumarchais (…). I know that I do not have enough respect for the law, that I am as scatterbrained as a mayfly, and as unworried as a monk, I know that I do not contribute to the good of the State but that which you do not suspect and that which will cause all serious people to faint, right up until the fifth male generation, is that I am happy and almost proud of being like this and not otherwise…. I hope that this surpasses the boundaries of decent insanity… (read more)

The Four Stages of Cruelty is a series of four printed engravings published by English artist William Hogarth in 1751. Each print depicts a different stage in the life of the fictional Tom Nero. (Read More)

First stage of cruelty (Plate I)

Second stage of cruelty (Plate II)

Cruelty in perfection (Plate III)

The reward of cruelty (Plate IV)

Find more etchings by  William Hogarth on gutenberg.org

Let him laugh now, who never laugh’d before;
And he who always laugh’d, laugh now the more.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley 1872 – 1898, was an English illustrator and author. His drawings are characterized by an erotic nature, and his most erotic illustrations are those found in the Lysistrata; Beardsley drew these for a privately printed edition.

Beardsley later converted to Catholicism, and would subsequently beg his publisher to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings…by all that is holy all obscene drawings.

The Yellow Book, an illustrated quarterly 1894

The Yellow Book was the brain-child of Beardsley even down to its title. Novels by the French decadent writer were often issued in yellow wrappers; the most important of the novels was J.K. Huysmans’ A Rebours, 1883. Beardsley proposed a new illustrated quarterly dedicated to modern literature and art because many brilliant story painters and picture writers cannot get their best stuff accepted in the conventional magazines, either because they are not topical, or perhaps a little risquÇ. The Yellow Book published some of the best authors and artists of the Nineties, often causing scandals to the conservative public. (via)

Read all 13 volumes of the yellow book online or download via wikipedia

(via rapeshower)

dp picture (via cubeinthedesert)

robots vs armour

see also: New Friends by David Shrigley

Poster Boy NYC: pen or sword?

Ashley Reaks: it seemed a good idea when i started it…

see also: Reasons to Live, Rasons to Die by Ashley Reaks

Illustrations and paintings by Collin van der Sluijs more works on flickr

Don Hertzfeldt’s 2005 animated epic; this short took approximately four years to create.

Animated short film, traditional hand drawn, directed by Nico Di Mattia 2009 (via)

Brendan Danielsson: My work isn’t conceptual, personal, spiritual or political. And there’s no secret underlying message or point I’m trying to get across. I’m not trying to say much with it….at all. I simply create art that I would like to see if I were not the one making it. The process, as I develop a piece, is little more than a stream of consciousness without much forethought to what the end result will be. But I do try to incorporate a few elements of conflict to create a narrative for interest. These usually deal with man vs. beast, beauty vs. ugly, sensuality vs. violence, etc. Believe it or not, I don’t enjoy much of the actual process of creating art. It’s a contant struggle for me and I’m my harshest critic, but the end result is what keeps me going. When I create something that I actually like, I’m a happy man. (via)

Dina Goldstein: ‘…happily ever after’ (via)

Malice in Wonderland is the work of experimental animator Vince Collins, 1983. (via)

Juan Burgos expands the urban apocalyptic events of inattentive daily life. His inspiration is an innocent children’s storybook, out of which emerges a delirious collage. (read more) via we make money not art

Click on image to see it in high resolution

Done by Mr. Red: I’m average guy entering middle age. I am artistically schizophrenic and trying to make the best art I can. I am self taught. I hope you like it.

This Is Invisible

severed penis orgy - shit wank records

Gino Rubert born 1969 in Mexico; lives and works in Barcelona.

Edward Hyde on Flickr _ CIREDz

Eric Beltz (1975) The exquisitely rendered graphite drawings are sophisticated responses to American folkways and myths. As darkly funny as they are disarmingly earnest, the graphic works are both exhortations and critiques of our nation’s inborn exceptionalism and romanticism. The preservationists’ dualistic attitude (i.e., Humanity vs. Nature) provides only simple answers to our complex questions. By contrast, Beltz’s allegorical drawings shirk simplistic moralizing in favor of contradiction, ambivalence and multiplicity. His scenes speak to an active communion with Nature, albeit one that includes suffering, death and a melancholy nod to the essential absurdity of existence.

Appropriately, Beltz’s drawings incorporate Biblical texts and his subjects are recognizable as America’s founding fathers and God-fearing, anonymous farmers. But Beltz draws from a peculiarly American well, the proverbial melting pot. Each drawing is suffused with currents of Eastern philosophy and shamanism. His farmers and historical figures are also mystics.

Beltz’s meticulously rendered works don’t offer any answers, but neither do they shrug off the dilemma. With a richly ironic sensibility and a sensitivity to the complexities of our national character and (natural) history, Beltz embraces our clusterfuck approach even as he skewers it. “The Good Land” is sublimely ambivalent. (via myartspace)

Brendan Lott: “All the good ideas have already been thought about,” people say. They mean that this is a bad thing. But I love it. It is comforting. It really takes the pressure off of me. All these pre-thought ideas are useful, and they usually still have some good left in them, especially when applied in a different context.

Art is not special. Therefore neither are artists. An artist is simply someone who happens to professionalize an activity that everybody else does automatically. To choose the color and texture and size and style of your couch is an artistic gesture equal to one of Pollock’s drips or Judd’s shelves. The only difference is the couch chooser is simply doing it, whereas Pollock and Judd are making a big production of it. This doesn’t mean art isn‘t important. It clearly is. Like making the right choice for couch color is important. Many people express themselves beautifully by doing nothing other than selecting clothes that they will wear that day. Is this any less valid than Duchamp selecting a snow shovel? The difference is that Duchamp gets in the canon and everybody else just looks great at parties. I’m not sure which is more important.

If I could write a dictionary I’d want to make all the strong words so broadly defined that they would lose all practical meaning outside of a specific context. I’d like negatives like stupid and ugly to become more positive and words like brilliant and beautiful to become more negative so that they would meet somewhere in the middle. These words would then become simply descriptive without carrying any sense of judgment, like shiny or rectangular. I think then the language would become really free. People could say whatever they thought without worrying about hurting anybody’s feelings. People could really describe their own personal state of affairs clearly and without shame. (via)

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are two of China’s most controversial artists, renown for working with extreme materials such as human fat tissue, live animals, and baby cadavers to deal with issues of perception, death, and the human condition. In Old Person’s Home Sun & Peng present a shocking scene of an even more grotesque kind. Hilariously wicked, their satirical models of decrepit OAPS look suspiciously familiar to world leaders, long crippled and impotent, left to battle it out in true geriatric style. Placed in electric wheelchairs, the withered, toothless, senile, and drooling, are set on a collision course for harmless ‘skirmish’ as they roll about the gallery at snail’s pace, crashing into each other at random in a grizzly parody of the U.N.dead. (via)

I think that many of my works can be described as an advertising campaign coming from possible parallel realities. They’re conceived as actual advertisements, just without the claim of a product, slogans, and of course the pay I would receive upon completion. What they sell is rather the real value upon which our society is based, without any sort of lie or hypocrisy hidden within them. (Read more)

Julian Antonisz, (November 8, 1941 - January 31, 1987), was a Polish avant-garde filmmaker, artist, animator, scriptwriter, composer, and inventor. Best known as an inventor and promoter of his unique animation technique called non-camera.

Sun A Non-Camera Film 1977 was his first all non-camera movie, although the technique has been used also in Antonisz’s earlier productions. The idea after the tehnique was to paint or scratch the images directly onto the movie tape instead of using a camcorder.

His most awarded work is How a Sausage Dog Works 1971

also check out What Do We See After Closing Our Eyes? 1978

The system of belief or not; that is not the problem of yours ;
Jo Seub’s World of Disbelief

Jo Seub (1975, Born in South Korea), has developed a distinct system of disbelief, the centerpiece of which is a fluctuating of self-identity. By putting the symbolism of contemporary symptoms of scepticism into the artificially controlled images, he has taken disbelief as one main subject in his art. Irrationality and the distortion of one’s internal life have been common paradigm for postmodern system of reasoning and acting. This self-betrayal produced by the tension between the superficial belief and the internal disbelief are continuously knocking on our belief system of which we thought it could guide us to imagine and advance our own perspective of ’sensus communis’. From the perspective of a ‘pictorial ideology’, Jo Seub questions that why our living has to be determined in a trivial way. (via)

Who wants to live forever // Do not question

The romatic stories of Sauca Wilmer on Flickr

Creative support For the Love.

I got into art when I was really young. I have always been drawing and creating paintings ever since I can remember. As a child, you never really know what you want to do, I just knew it had to be something to do with art. I went through art college and studied Fine Art at university. While there, I met some people who had a real hunger for art and they had a really big influence on me. I fed off their desire to create and it made me realize that it was possible to make a living as an artist. (via)

Antony Micallef has exhibited throughout the world from L.A, Tokyo to Palestine. As well as exhibiting at the National Portrait Gallery recent group shows include the Royal Academy, Burlington Gardens and a print show at the Tate Britain.

Also make sure to check out Antony Micallef’s face studies and portraits

‘Scientists’ quizzed 2,000 animal lovers and asked them to list their ideal traits - before designing a computer profile of the creature. The freakish results included the ears of a rabbit, face of a cat, body of a golden retriever and tail of a horse. The monstrous mammal - named Max - has high energy levels, loves daily walks and sleeps for an average of nine hours 27 minutes a day. via theSun