Pinar's Blog (1,199)

London is known to be a rainy town, which isn't thought to be an ideal location for uplifting inspiration, but Londoner Gavin Hammond finds captivating beauty in his city's soaked streets. Hammond's series entitled London in Puddles depicts a somber yet intriguing view of the damp town, focusing on puddles that reflect its surrounding citizens and architecture.

We've…

LA-based mixed media artist Brooks Shane Salzwedel assembles beautiful natural landscapes, often featuring some form of majestic architecture like bridges and oil drilling towers. The artist primarily works with graphite, tape, and resin to produce these layered images, giving each one a three-dimensional feel. The separation that defines the difference between foreground and background…

Tokyo Hotaru Festival 2012 took place recently, releasing 100,000 blue LED lights to float in the Sumida River. The bulbs rolled along the waves of the river bank, mimicking hotaru (the Japanese word for "fireflies"), for the festival that celebrates the Japanese tradition of watching fireflies float along a watercourse. The spectacular event lit up the waterway with a sparkling sapphire…

Dutch artist Nicky Assmann has taken the core ingredients of soap bubbles and created a mesmerizing cinematic installation around the swirling visuals in her piece entitled Solace. Like a work of robotic performance art, an automated mechanism reaches into a vat of soapy water with a metal rod and expands upwards to reveal a fragile sheet of soap film, reflecting its surroundings in a…

Fashion department store Marks & Spencer launched its project called Shwopping, a portmanteau of shopping and swapping, in an effort to recycle clothing and decrease waste. The project, which they refer to as a revolution, seeks to draw attention to the amount of clothing that's discarded every day in the UK and make a…

New York-based artist Jacob Hashimoto is known to work with bamboo and paper, taking cues from his Japanese heritage. His sculptural installations repurpose the materials traditionally exhibited in Japanese screen paintings in a new and airy way. He also adds an interactive element to his works that elevate their appeal.



Armada is Hashimoto's installation of 700 to…

Would you stay in an hotel submerged below sea level? The architectural innovators over at Deep Ocean Technology have a conceptual design that is set to change the hotel industry and the vacationing experience in the Middle East. The Water Discus Underwater Hotel is designed as a modern and aquatic alternative to the mundane hotels found on land.

The…

French artist Julien Salaud created a luminescent ceiling installation titled Grotte Stellaire, which roughly translates as Stellar Cave, at Palais de Tokyo's Alice Guy Hall in Paris. The sculptural light installation involves interweaving strands of white string, held down with nails, illuminated by a projected…

There's a sense of accomplishment attained when one has completed a creative project like a painting or a sculpture. For video gamers, there's a similar sense of achievement in winning a game. Although there isn't necessarily a physical object to show for your efforts, it's hard to deny the victorious emotions felt. Just as a painter has a brush, a gamer…

Most of Guatemalan photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma's photography deals with his mixed Latin and Mayan heritage, focusing on portraits of the indigenous people of Guatemala. However, in this series entitled Ara Solis, he turns his lens on the beautiful imagery of ships sailing across a sea of crumpled bed sheets.

The photographer retains his center of attention on…

One of these houses is not like the others. This house in Tokyo by Sou Fukimoto Architects, known as House NA, stands out with its modern and transparent style. The building is unlike its neighboring houses in its appearance and structure. The interior of the residence has hardly any walls. The house boasts large glass windows for plenty of daylight, but the downside…

Brooklyn-based Italian photographer Andrea Galvani took to the frosty mountainous regions of Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, reaching altitudes of about 2800 meters, for his photo series entitled The Intelligence of Evil. The works depict a snowy, white expanse cut by a cloud of black smoke emitting from the figure of a man in a charcoal suit. The surreal imagery gives the…

We come across traffic signs everyday that dictate demands, "STOP" being the most aggressive. Instead of feeling antagonized, the STOP Project by Changing Lines seeks to embrace visual and typographic creativity, all while putting a smile on your face with their redesigns of stop signs. By adding a few words, they redefine the text in a humorous, lighthearted fashion with…

Based in Copenhagan, international architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group, aka BIG, has released its conceptual plans for an innovative residential complex in South Korea. The project known as Cross # Towers is set to be part of the Yongsan master plan in the developing Yongsan International Business District in Seoul.

The structure, whose design mimics the hashtag symbol (#), includes two…

Black and white is classic and can be quite beautiful, but there's something about a burst of color that has the ability to surge a wide range of emotions. Kansas City-based artist Anne Lindberg works with multicolored thread to create radiant installations that are a feast for the senses. Each site-specific installation uses several miles of thread, whose ends are stapled to the…

Japanese artist Mika Aoki embraces the dichotomous nature of glass's solidity yet fragility. She says of the translucent material: "Unless light shines on it, we can’t confirm the existence of it because it is transparent. But once the light shines on it, glass truly emanates a special presence." In her series of works titled Singing Glass, the artist presents glass morphed…

If you liked artist Federico Uribe's Pencilism sculptures and paintings, you'll get a kick out of his creative shoe lace art. The inspired artist simply loves to work with multihued ordinary objects, as evidenced in these series of works aptly titled Shoe Laces. The…

New York-based artist Michael Mapes takes documentation and preservation to another level. His series of works found in his virtual museum called Room 62 display tubes, glass vials, plastic bags, and gelatin capsules filled with "specimens" in an enclosed shelf. Each encased box has a unique subject whose physical identity is represented in a series of dissected photographs,…

Colombia-born, Miami-based conceptual artist Federico Uribe uses objects from daily life to construct life-size sculptural figures. His medium of choice? Pencils. Although most artists use pencils as a tool for sketching illustrations, Uribe utilizes multicolored pencils fastened together with plastic zip-ties to create a nuclear family—father, mother, son, and daughter—in…

A few years ago, Jelly Belly officially hired painter and illustrator Kristen Cumings to produce several works of art to add to their collection entitled Jelly Belly Masterpieces of Confectionary Art. The California-based painter takes about 50-60 hours to complete the life-size paintings made of approximately 9,000 to 12,000 jelly beans each. The enormous 4 x…