Blackboard paintings from Vernon Fisher’s series The Long Road to Nowhere

About the project:

Fisher’s preoccupation with archive, information transmission, memory, and taxonomy stems from an early interest in how people make sense of the world. His hallmark blackboard paintings recall pedagogical lessons or speculative renderings, oftentimes replacing sequential logic with “disordered notations” analogous to excerpts from an unrepressed mindscape. Often weaving literary references, pop cultural imagery, and cartography with his own symbolic lexicon, Fisher renounces the convention of a singular, autonomous narrative in favor of a seemingly endless metonymic chain.

Flora & fauna by Lara Cobden

Biologically inspired work by Shoshanah Dubiner

Work by Mary Iverson

From the artist statement:

Mary’s prints and paintings resonate with so many other things that I am looking at online: data visualizations and information graphics, Modernist painting, and resurgences of photo-realistic and illustrative painting as well. I am particularly struck by the relationships in these images between the natural and the artificial, the figurative and the abstract, and the balance of thought and feeling. This balance is reminiscent of my own feelings about the Internet and the “wildness” of its networks. It seems perfectly appropriate that I would first see these images on the web instead of in the more controlled space of a gallery.

Iverson’s shipping containers can be seen as metonymic stand-ins for a whole system of distribution for objects that we deal with every day. These paintings, until recently, left us with little clue of what they might contain. They are like scientific conceptual “black-boxes” which are put into place to sidestep our actual material understanding. We might see these containers on a dock or train and have only a vague sense of what they may contain or how those materials might be used. This parallels directly with the distribution of data on the net. The analog and digital worlds of things echo each other.

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Work by Antoine Josse

Xchange by Nick Gentry 

About his work:

Much of his artistic output has been generated with the use of contributed artefacts and materials. He states that through this process “contributor, artist and viewer come closer together”. His art is influenced by the development of consumerism, technology, identity and cyberculture in society, with a distinctive focus on obsolete media.

Map art by Emily available in her Keep Creating Etsy store

Serenely beautiful paintings of waterfalls by Japanese artist Hiroshi Senju

From the book How To Disappear by Moki

Colorful underwater life by Nasty Natski

About the project:

Inspired by the art of diaphonization, hand painted paper and card are carefully sliced and layered to recreate just a few of my favorite aquatic creatures.

You can follow her here on Tumblr.

The wonderfully quirky work of Kevin Sloan

Sloan on his work:

My recent interest is in early natural history art from the era now referred to as the Age of Discovery. From Maria Sibylla Merian in the 17th century to John James Audubon in the 19th century, many artists painstakingly and accurately illustrated the newly discovered natural world, giving their audience a scientific and aesthetic understanding of these new, rare and exotic discoveries. Concurrent with the Age of Discovery was the idea of a Cabinet of Curiosities. In these rooms were housed a personal collection of things of wonder — many coming from the newly discovered natural world but also containing rare and extraordinary man-made objects.

With the addition of an allegorical and narrative element, my current work continues to explore natural history art as well as the sense of wonder and curiosity found in the old Cabinets of Curiosities. The natural world, now mostly understood and familiar is also increasingly threatened, making it once again rare and exotic. Freed from the need to describe for science, I can describe the natural world and our interaction with it through an allegorical, social and political lens.

Work by Scott Saw

Love the look of bookshelves but don’t have any? These lovely bookshelf paintings from Laura Sue’s Etsy store can help fill the void. 

Beautiful map art by Ed Fairburn

Everyday life interrupted by tornadoes painted in the style of Edward Hopper by John Brosio