They visually lead into and out of themselves in a dizzying, mind-blowing way that makes me so excited to be living in this new digital age of art.
GIFs are my new favorite medium because they blend design, graphics, video and fine art together — four things I am learning to appreciate more and more in my everyday life, and four things that come alive in short looped spurts of color.
Plus, the amount of time it takes to create a looped GIF explains why it most definitely deserves its own classification as a new media artform. Welcome to the party, GIFs!
Jed Leiknes’ work is kind of frightening, but in a haunted house/horror movie kind of way. Flesh melts and skulls stare straight at you without eyes. Everything looks like it’s on fire but somehow isn’t burning. The paint looks so alive, like somehow it’s still moving even after it’s dry.
Which is what makes Leiknes’ time lapse video so consuming – you watch the paint in action before the show even starts. Because the colors don’t really get to work until the image is complete.
She’s a painter in London, working to interpret animals the way we were meant to see them: as sacred beings each granted with an important, specific purpose. In this amazing time-lapse video Louise McNaught documents the creation of an acrylic work that’s plated in a background of gold leaf and decorated in detail with pencil. The video was created in conjunction with her current residency at DegreeArt, and her inaugural show, titled Supernatural, will be on view at the London gallery until the end of this week!
On her Facebook page Louise writes,
“In my world the animals are God-like, sublime and ethereal in their luminescence. My soft style suggests a delicate relationship between nature and ourselves, making a clear point about man’s destruction of nature, which flutters jewel-like in the balance….
The animals that occur in my work predominantly have a connection to Celtic mythology, such as deer, bees, owls, rabbits and butterflies, with otherworldly creatures such as hummingbirds making an entrance from time to time…”
Louise with her piece, ‘Wild-Life’, Size (H x W x D): 91.5 x 183 x 5 cm Acrylic, spray paint and pencil on canvas (2013). From the artist’s Facebook.
Louise on this piece, ‘Wild-Life’:
“This piece is from my ‘wild’ series, which are about nature wearing the colours of man like war paint, trying to adapt to man’s intervention. The fluorescent paint also looks like energy radiating from the animal, as it is painted on the places I find most intense, usually around the eyes, radiating down the neck – wherever there is tension. I use a lot of hummingbirds in my work as I find them magical and otherworldly, they are so tiny and beautiful they almost seem as they are not part off this world, like they exist on another dimension. Here they are forming the figure 8 on its side, which is the symbol for life, eternity and reincarnation. The hummingbird also flys in this formation as it is the only bird that can fly backwards. The colours are moving through the formation to show they are all part of the same flow of energy…..”
