My eternal love for Breaking Bad has seeped into every part of my life. This is the final stage – blogging about Breaking Bad art.
I spend enough time on Reddit to know that there are some incredibly talented fans of the show. Each character depicted has so much emotion seeping out of them as we remember every tragic/insane event along the Walter White timeline to Heisenberg. And then whatever that guy from New Hampshire’s name is. Every work drawing from the power of the most intense show that’s ever existed, so that bright colors and sharp edges can get in your face, ASAC Schrader-style.
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…..”
Photographs from recent years are given a splash of past – a figure or middle-ground cast in a hauntingly transparent black and white, an image that comes from a photograph of what stood in the exact same spot decades before. Usually this image from the past comes from a time of war, so that the dramatic differences between countries fighting and not fighting can be witnessed in their entirety.
Below sits a photograph of Berlin’s Strasse des siebzehnten Juni taken in 2004. A man casually talks on his phone in the foreground and a car speeds past on the left, but in the center of the image stand two men from 1989, and behind them running through the middle of the scene sits the Berlin Wall, turned gray and translucent by time. A man walks along the wall in the older photograph, his form framed by a crane building in the future.
On the Strasse des siebzehnten Juni, Berlin, 1989/2004
A peaceful scene in New Jersey is interrupted by the giant flaming Hindenburg blimp as it crashes to the ground, its second half already turned to collapsed rubble on the ground. This historical event that happened in 1937 is brought forward in time and crashes over the ground in 2004, as a man in a red coat walks his red dog in the foreground, completely unaware of the past happening behind him.
Lakehurst, New Jersey USA, 1937/2004
The series was created in collaboration with the advertising agency, Ground Zero, as part of a marketing campaign for the History Channel. The campaign also included tv ads in which black and white videos of the Berlin Wall falling are superimposed upon modern, ordinary scenes of people commuting.
The History Channel said the aim of the campaign is to “Motivate people to understand the history of where they live by watching the History Channel.” It’s easy to forget the people who came before us, and probably sat where we sit now and walked where we walk.
The terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, 1940/2004
Seth Taras is a self-taught American artist, born into a family of artists. He’s been named one of Luerzer’s Archive’s 200 Best Photographers Worldwide. “Know Where You Stand” won Taras a Cannes Lion, and the campaign has now been translated into 30 languages and published in 130 countries.
His website gives more information into how his photographs come to be, reading, “Nearly all pictures are direct prints from original film negatives with no digital alteration and taken largely hand-held.”
Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, Normany, 1944/2004
For more of Seth Taras’ work, check out his website.
