The ancient Etruscans thrived for some 500 years in central Italy before the Roman Republic was established in 509 BCE. The Roman-Etruscan wars resulted in the overthrowing of the last Etruscan king of Rome and the assimilation of Etruscan culture into the new Roman Empire. The statues make it clear that the Romans and Etruscans were not only co-mingling, but worshipping together at this sacred site. The Italian Culture Ministry describes it as a “unique multicultural and multilingual haven of peace” during a time when the civilizations were mostly at war.

A team of Italian archaeologists unearthed the bronze statues of human figures in September and October from the mud and waters of an ancient pool in San Casciano dei Bagni’s hot springs. Over 2,000 years old and almost perfectly preserved by the unique site conditions, the statues represent the largest deposit of bronze statues of the Etruscan and Roman age ever discovered in Italy.

They date back to between the second century BCE and the first century CE, yet their features are still sharp, and the inscriptions (in both Etruscan and Latin) are still legible. Among the statues are representations of the gods Apollo, his son Asclepius, and Asclepius’ daughter Hygeia, from whose name we get the English word “hygiene.” Back in 2020, when the dig first began, archaeologists discovered a large marble pool of an ancient sanctuary decorated with fountains and altars to these same deities.

Other findings include about 5,000 coins, small votive offerings representing body parts in need of healing, and bronze depictions of internal organs that are shockingly accurate. The findings indicate that Etruscan and Roman families prayed together at the sacred sanctuary of the thermal baths.

“The pool was a sacred place, only the religious custodians could bathe there,” says Ludovico Salerno, a member of the local archaeological association that participated in the work. “Sick people came to the sanctuary in the hopes of being cured and would offer gifts to the gods. It was a place of suffering, and it was a place of hope.”

Researchers have determined that Romans dismantled the sanctuary piece by piece around the year 500 CE, about two centuries after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The statues were then laid at the bottom of the pool and covered with columns and slabs of marble in what archaeologists describe as a reverent and respectful burial.

Together, the findings provide an unusual amount of context for what life was like in that particular place at that particular time, potentially allowing scholars to rewrite the history of the transition from the Etruscan to Roman civilizations. “We can describe all the life, day by day here, through four or five centuries, so this is incredible,” says archaeologist Emanuele Mariotti.

Excavations will resume next spring, and the statues will be displayed in a new museum planned for the site.

The post Shockingly Well-Preserved Statues Unearthed in Italy Rewrite the History of Ancient Rome first appeared on Dornob.

Users simply upload 10 to 20 photos of their faces, and the app’s AI-powered image generating tool does the rest. It may seem like harmless fun, but some artists say the AI is stealing their work. Even worse, the app is generating sexualized images of minors, and users are unwittingly signing away the rights to their own images.

Fantasy Portraits Ignite Ethical Concerns

Artificial intelligence often learns by scraping the internet for content. The Lensa app’s Magic Avatar function draws from sites where real artists upload their work, like DeviantArt, Behance, and ArtStation. Lensa runs on Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image app trained to learn patterns through an online database of images called LAION-5B.

Some artists are recognizing their distinctive styles and even the remnants of their signatures in the AI portraits, like Kim Leutwyler, a Sydney-based artist who told The Guardian she saw almost every portrait she’s ever shared on the internet in the Lensa results.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Spanish illustrator Amy Stelladia says she learned her art was being used by AI apps after discovering a website called haveibeentrained.com, which allows artists to search the LAION dataset for their work. The tool also provides an easy way for artists to request that their art be removed from the AI-training network.

For artists, the problem is twofold. First, the AI is flooding the market with cheap art that exploits and devalues human creativity. “They are meant to compete with our own work, using pieces and conscious decisions made by artists but purged from all that context and meaning,” Stelladia says. “It just feels wrong to use people’s life work without consent, to build something that can take work opportunities away.”

Second, AI photo apps like Lensa are making bank while the human artists they draw from barely scrape by. By some estimates, Lensa is drawing in $1 million USD per day, and the artists seeing their work in its results aren’t even getting credited, let alone compensated.

Portrait Results are More Than a Little Problematic

Some users have found that even when they submit source images that are fully clothed and show no skin at all, the results are often semi-nude and sexually suggestive. At MIT Technology Review, Melissa Heikkilä writes that out of 100 avatars she generated, 16 were topless and another 14 were barely clad. Heikkilä notes that she and another colleague of Asian descent seemed to get more images like these than their white colleagues who tried the app.

Lensa’s Magic Avatar has also generated nude art based on photographs of children, lightened black skin, and made users significantly thinner than they appear in the source images they uploaded.

AI training data like LAION is full of racist stereotypes, pornography, and even explicit images of rape. Of course, AI training data reflects the biases and prejudices of human artists and other content producers, but there doesn’t appear to be any attempt on the app creators’ part to moderate that data. While Stable Diffusion offers a filter on its dataset to limit graphic results, Lensa doesn’t appear to use it.

Lensa also doesn’t seem to enforce its policies prohibiting nudity and minors, and it doesn’t prevent users from uploading source images of people other than themselves. That makes it easy for anyone to exploit Magic Avatar and produce sexualized images of anyone they want, including children.

Signing Away the Rights to Your Own Image

When users upload their own images to Magic Avatar and similar apps, they’re essentially selling their personal information for a very low price. Lensa’s privacy policy allows them to “collect and store your Face Data for online processing function.”

Though the images are supposedly automatically deleted within 24 hours after being processed by Lensa, they’re used to train the AI to produce more portraits. Users aren’t compensated when the company uses their images for that purpose. The app thus becomes just another way to give corporations more control over our identities — and that doesn’t seem worth the four bucks.

The post That Popular AI Photo App is Stealing from Human Artists — and Worse first appeared on Dornob.

Her passion for creating Black art stems from her childhood as a minority in Pomona, California. “Growing up, I was often the only Black kid in my class, and I found it hard to find things that represented my background,” Brown says on her website DomoINK.com. “My father and I would go out of our way to find greeting cards that had images of Black families on [them]. We’d buy them from individual sellers because many retailers didn’t carry them.”

As an adult looking to decorate her own home, the artist recognized there was still a severe lack of Black art at big-box stores. That’s when she decided to do something about it by starting her own brand of art prints, apparel, and home décor in her spare time.

“Our voices, idea, and stories still remain unspoken for in the art world,” Brown says. “I want my portraits to tell unknown stories. I want people of color to be represented.”

One of her most popular prints is her “Black Hair is Dope” portrait, which depicts a Black woman with a head cover and long twisted braids. Brown says of the piece: “I created this portrait to challenge stereotypes about Black people wearing durags. It serves to humanize and normalize that this headpiece is an essential aspect of our culture.”

At the start of the pandemic, Brown was working two full-time marketing jobs, putting in 80-hour weeks and making roughly $130,000 a year. She then quit one of those jobs and started designing in her evening hours. Although “there were a lot of sleepless nights” in the beginning, her artistic investment soon paid off. Brown’s after-hours work now amounts to less than two hours a day now and earns her $22,000 a month, thanks to sales on her website, Etsy shop, Society6 shop, and retail partnerships.

World-renowned companies including Disney, Samsung, and Lowe’s quickly took notice of Brown’s distinctive style and asked for collaborations. She’s even created art for the L.A. Lakers.

This year, Bath & Body Works commissioned Brown to craft a piece in honor of the Juneteenth. The result was an image of a Black family enjoying a picnic on the national holiday. She also recently completed a one-of-one artwork to decorate the walls of a Santa Monica Dr. Martens shop.

While her art career has officially taken off, Brown continues to work a traditional job as a marketing manager for an insurance company offering health care options to low-income Californians — but she loves making her mark with her side hustle.

“My ultimate goal is to make DomoINK a lifestyle retailer that can be a source of representation for those who are underrepresented,” Brown says. “The feedback I have gotten from people who feel seen by my work has been incredibly gratifying, and it inspires me to grow my business even more.”

The post Domonique Brown’s Art Brings Representation to People of Color — and Earns Her $22,000 a Month first appeared on Dornob.

The countercultural art movement began with a group of students at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kinshasa, who decided to make art from what they could find around them. Most of what they found was the waste of faraway strangers: tires, foam, bottles, paint cans, CDs, flip-flops, exhaust pipes, and more. In 2015, the artists founded the collective Ndaku Ya Life is Beautiful, led by Eddy Ekete, and began performing while wearing their startlingly creative costumes.

Each costume echoes the ancestral clothing arts of the Congolese, and each has its own story to tell. Jared Kalenga’s “Robot Annonce” is a suit made of broken radio parts in a warning against the spread of fake news. “Femme Électrique” is a costume made of electrical wiring by Falonne Mambu, symbolizing the Congo’s inconsistent electrical service and the kidnappings and sexual assaults that occur when the lights go out.

“Tin Can” by Mvunzi Muteba Jr. aims to raise awareness among Africans about how the presence of multinational companies (such as those mining for rare minerals) has affected the continent and kept its citizens poor despite its many riches. “Tire Man” by Savant Noir is a protest of those stolen resources, like the rubber used to manufacture tires. Other issues represented by the costumes and performances include gang violence, viruses, pollution, a lack of safe drinking water, and the Western-style consumerism that’s beginning to creep into the country.

Gladieu’s photos capture these costumes against relevant backdrops, including graffitied concrete walls, industrial sites, gutters full of trash, and public street markets with locals looking on. In publishing the book, he hopes the levity and creativity of the images will catch the attention of Westerners who don’t want to be guilted into caring about where their waste ends up. His approach celebrates the Congolese culture and the resilience of the community of Kinshasa, sharing the ways in which the artists have reclaimed their experiences and translated them into something beautiful.

“(In the photographs), we are talking about ecology, but we are talking about ecology through African masks,” says Gladieu. “As you can see, they’re completely covered up. You don’t see any part of the skin. The traditional masks were done with natural materials. They symbolized the spirit of the ancestors or the spirit of support of the natural world. These young artists reinvent these traditional masks in a way, but they do it today with trash because they find more trash and natural materials.”

Published by Actes Sud, Homo Détritus was released in hardcover in November 2022 and is now available for backorder from Bookshop.org. You can see more of these images at Gladieu’s website, and on Instagram.

The post Stephen Gladieu’s New Book Spotlights the Congo’s Protest Art Against Western Trash first appeared on Dornob.

Pantone calls Viva Magenta a nuanced crimson tone that offers a balance between warm and cool, drawing inspiration from a very organic source: the cochineal beetle. This insect produces carmine dye, one of the strongest and brightest natural dyes in the world. The psychology of this color is a rebellious softness that’s impossible to ignore, speaking to our desire to take on new challenges while meeting others with compassion.

“As we balance our digital and physical lives, we continue to grow our appreciation for the natural world,” says Pantone. “The Color of the Year 2023 acknowledges our gravitational pull towards natural colors as movements swell around climate change, sustainability, and land protection. Viva Magenta offers us the assurance and motivation we need to weather long-term disruptive events.”

“Three years deep into a pandemic, facing a war, an unstable economy, social unrest, supply chain breakdowns, and mounting climate change, we need to heal. And still, we need to find the motivation to continue. Here, Viva Magenta cloaks us in both power and grace, and sends us out into the world with the verve we’ve yearned for.”

Pantone unveiled Viva Magenta at ARTECHOUSE in Miami Beach alongside its exhibition Magentaverse. Presenting its Color of the Year as an immersive experience for the fourth year in a row, the company projected magenta-hued images captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and other outer space images into an animated LED tunnel. As visitors explored the exhibition, they activated a LIDAR sensor that triggered the visualization of data in real time.

Pantone also used the AI generative tool Midjourney to create a series of promotional images featuring Viva Magenta, and they’re every bit as surreal as you’d expect. That’s a fitting choice, given that Pantone sees Viva Magenta as a color “capable of driving design to create a more positive future.” Of course, the choice of the term “Magentaverse” is no accident, referring directly to the looming prospect of the metaverse in the near future.

If you want to incorporate Viva Magenta into your home this year, use it as a vibrant pop of color in a neutral setting or make it the focal point of the space in large-scale form using a painted accent wall. ArchDaily has a fantastic gallery of architectural projects that have already employed colors in a similar vein, using saturated magenta for furniture, built-in bookshelves, and even entire facades.

To get a sense of just how much Viva Magenta aims to change our collective mood for 2023, look back on the previous Colors of the Year. In 2022, Pantone chose the soothing warm bluish-purple shade Very Peri to help people get through difficult times. The company saw it as representing “courageous creativity.”

Back in early 2021, when the effects of the coronavirus pandemic were perhaps at their most dramatic (thus far, at least), Pantone announced two Colors of the Year: “Ultimate Gray” and “Illuminating” yellow, a contrast of neutral and bright shades meant to symbolize dependability and cheer.

The post Viva Magenta: Pantone Reveals Its 2023 Color of the Year first appeared on Dornob.

Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, tweeted “Ukraine today is the center of attention, center of resistance, freedom, true art. @banksy confirmed that he created seven murals in different parts of Ukraine, including Borodianka, Irpin, and Kyiv. It means a great deal to us. We are so grateful, Sir!”

In Horenka, on the ground floor of a devastated apartment block hit by Russian bombs in March, one mural shows a man lounging in a clawfoot tub, scrubbing his back with a brush. “For me, it means washing off all the dirt. The dirt of the Russian Federation,” local resident Tetiana Reznychenko told Reuters. “And this drawing makes me feel as if I have cleansed myself of the dirt that descended on us.”

Reznychenko told reporters that she served Banksy’s team a mug of instant coffee in her apartment when she saw them outside in the cold. Her damaged building currently has no electricity, heat, or running water, but she’s using a wood stove to get by for now. “Winter has begun, and we don’t know what will happen next,” she told Reuters. “Firemen brought us non-drinking water… but it will freeze unless we move it inside.”

Another mural in Borodyanka depicts a man resembling Russian president Vladimir Putin being thrown to the ground during a judo match with a young boy. Putin held an honorary black belt in judo until it was revoked earlier this year by World Taekwondo. The fourth mural shows children playing on a seesaw made from part of a tank. The fifth mural depicts a young gymnast holding a streamer aloft, and the sixth is a woman in a gas mask bearing a fire extinguisher. They all share a common theme of resilience in the face of horror and destruction.

Located about 35 miles northwest of Kyiv, Borodyanka was besieged by Russian forces early in the invasion and suffered extensive aerial bombardment, with many buildings reduced to rubble. Most of its 13,000 residents fled prior to its Russian occupation in late February. When the town came back into Ukrainian control in April, returning residents found that even those structures that had escaped bombs and shelling had been ransacked and burglarized.

Ukrainians like Alina Mazur, a 31-year-old from Kyiv, have traveled to the Borodyanka area to see the murals in person. “This is such a historic moment for our country, that people like Banksy and other famous figures are coming here and showing the world what Russia has done to us,” she told Smithsonian Magazine.

The post Banksy’s Presence in Ukraine Confirmed by a Series of New Murals first appeared on Dornob.

Christophe Guinet mainly works with natural materials to create his botanical sculptures. His latest project “highlights a series of sculptures representing tree trunks that come straight out of a fantastic and magical universe,” as he explains on his website. “This series of works consist of five tree trunks which connote through their shapes emotions that we can find in nature.”

The collection includes five large sculptures: a heart, an infinity loop, a spring coil reminiscent of barbed wire, a simple knot, and a more complex knot he calls “Wooden Lace.” Guinet stages the pieces in the forest and photographs them in their “natural environment,” adding to the illusion that someone has stumbled upon strange natural formations. The artist hopes the sculptures spur a sense of childlike wonder, awe, and appreciation for everything trees can do.

We’ve seen other works of art in which living trees are painstakingly guided into certain shapes over years or even decades, like the stick buildings of Patrick Dougherty and “Baubotanic” living architecture by students at the University of Stuttgart. Sometimes nature itself does the shaping, like when trees grow around objects, twisting themselves into surprising and unexpected forms. Monsieur Plant makes things happen a little faster than that with his own artistic methods, which involve plaster and real pine bark.

Guinet says forest walks inspired him to work with natural materials, raising questions about how nature adapts to its environment and its own innate creativity. His previous works often incorporated wood, bark, and moss, like an entire wearable Batman suit made of pink bark, a tree bark skateboard, arm-shaped moss sculptures wrapping around a real tree, and Nike sneakers made out of flowers.

“Contemplative and passionate aesthete of the plant world, he uses his findings related to places and seasons, to create works of art with care and a concentration close to the meditative state,” reads Guinet’s artist statement. “The artistic process is thus an integral part of the final work of art. As ephemeral and fragile as a bouquet of flowers, Christophe’s compositions show us the beauty of nature through everyday and cult objects. His care to minimize the harmful impact on the environment is in contrast to the escalation of consumerism and the race to keep producing objects which are ever newer, more technical, more ‘hype’.”

“His fields of reflection revolve around love, life, death, as well as the ambiguity of the cycle of life in a society where death has become extremely taboo. It is interesting to see a work fade, die, follow the cycle of the seasons. It reminds us of our own cycle: a flower blooms and fades to resume the same cycle the following year. We too follow certain cycles & states: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, then death. It is inevitable and every stage of life should be celebrated and magnified.”

The post Monsieur Plant Molds Tree Trunks into Shockingly Unnatural Sculptures first appeared on Dornob.

Members of the group Just Stop Oil (wearing t-shirts bearing the same slogan) splashed the soup onto the “Sunflowers” painting to protest the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and then glued their hands to the wall. The spectacle was so absurd, some wondered whether it was a psy-op to make climate activism look bad.

Perhaps you’ve added this recent protest to a mental list of other annoying activist actions: road blockages during the protests against racial injustice in the summer of 2020, for instance, and the vegans pouring out milk in British supermarkets. A group of activists has even started deflating tires on trucks and SUVs across the UK and United States this year to call attention to the climate crisis. These acts do not involve violence or direct harm, but they are disruptive. They’re inconvenient. They are, indeed, annoying, even for people who sympathize with the causes they champion.

But you know what’s really inconvenient? Getting killed on the streets by police because of the color of your skin. Suffering that goes unnoticed or ignored by the world at large. Altering the planet we live on enough to kill off our own species, along with thousands of other innocent species. The Earth will survive humans, but why are we so hell-bent on destroying ourselves?

Maybe it’s because collectively, we’re too distracted to see the reality of what’s happening. We’re focused on living our individual lives, consuming media, getting to work on time, receiving packages two days after we pressed a button to order them. We don’t believe it’s really true that such a terrible thing could occur — that our own children and grandchildren will suffer as a direct result of our inaction.

In this context, the actions of the Just Stop Oil activists suddenly appear gentle and tame. They chose that specific painting because it’s protected by glass, and thus easy to clean. No permanent harm occurred. The activists deflating tires aren’t slashing them, they’re temporarily immobilizing the vehicles. And nobody should be crying over a little spilt milk.

There’s no doubt that such actions will make some onlookers angry enough to turn them against the associated causes, but those people are likely a small minority. Others will (rightfully) be annoyed. But will you feel merely annoyed if your area is suddenly struck by extreme heat waves that kill vulnerable people, destroy crops, and dry up sources of drinking water? Will you be inconvenienced when climate change leads to food shortages and spurs mass migration to the few temperate areas that remain?

It’s very easy to bury our heads in the sand and ignore crises that are happening all around us. For activists and others who are vividly aware of the consequences, these are desperate acts attempting to break through that complacency.

The United Nations just announced that there’s no longer a credible pathway to the 1.5-degree Celsius goal needed to reduce carbon emissions to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis, and the world barely noticed. We’re frogs slowly boiling in a pot while watching Netflix and debating whether roughly half the human population should have the right to reproductive autonomy. At least the Just Stop Oil activists got us talking about climate change, even if was only for a minute.

The post The Soup-Throwing Climate Activists Succeeded in One Crucial Way first appeared on Dornob.

Cox and his wife Alena (aka Mrs. Doodle) started by recruiting friends and family to help them paint everything stark white, inside and out. When the pandemic restrictions and lockdowns started in spring 2020, Cox took advantage of his sudden downtime, devoting himself entirely to this project. He did all the doodling himself, working on one room at a time, starting with the upstairs bedrooms. Each one has a loose theme, like birds, sea creatures, food, clouds, robots, or “heaven and hell.” Cox doesn’t sketch anything out or even come up with a particular idea before he starts working, preferring to just draw whatever comes to mind in the moment.

Everything is monochromatic, and anytime Cox made a mistake, he left it in place. “The nature of a doodle is to let it be,” he told The Washington Post. By the time he was done, Cox had used 900 liters (238 gallons) of white paint, 401 cans of black spray paint, 286 bottles of black drawing paint, and 2,296 pen nibs. He also took 1,857 photographs of the process, later stitching them together to create a roughly two-minute-long stop-motion animation that reveals what the project looked like as it came to life.

Though Cox greatly enjoyed getting into the improvisational flow of constant doodling, it did have an effect on his psyche. In February 2020, he got the flu and started having doodle-related hallucinations, spending six weeks in a psychiatric ward. “It’s a scary feeling to think you are losing your mind and not know what’s real,” he told the Sunday Times. “I’m glad I have a grasp on reality again and now I want to make sure to go on walks and step outside of doodle world now and then.”

While he was working on it, Cox did his best to keep his doodled home under wraps. He limited visitors and was always afraid a delivery driver would snap a photo and put it on the internet. Luckily for him, that never happened. His neighbors have been supportive (and the fact that his house is hidden behind a dense layer of trees probably helps with that). However, the couple who sold him the house probably don’t love the results now that Cox has shared them with the world. “They told me whatever you do, please don’t doodle,” he told the Evening Standard. “I didn’t listen.”

Cox was able to buy the house in the first place after his career took off, the result not of agents or gallery representation, but social media and word-of-mouth. By 2021, the 28-year-old was selling nearly $4.7 million worth of doodles around the world over a period of just nine months. He now has over 2.7 million followers on Instagram and more than 95,000 YouTube subscribers, not to mention collaborations with major brands like MTV Europe and Puma.

The post Sam Cox Covered His Entire 13-Room Mansion in Black and White Doodles first appeared on Dornob.

“It is not the oldest of its kind, but it’s the most complete and the rarest,” said Hammam Saad, Associate Director at Syria’s General Directorate of Antiquities and Museums in an interview with the Associated Press, adding: “We have no similar mosaic.”

The artwork in question, made of half-inch square stone tiles, is remarkably well-preserved, having been hidden underneath the 1,600-year-old Roman building that stood above it until recently. The property was bought by businessmen with the Nabu Museum in Lebanon and donated to the Syrian government for excavation.

“There are other buildings, and it’s clear that the mosaic extends far wider,” Sulaf Fawakherji, Syrian actress and board member at the Nabu Museum, told the AP. “Rastan historically is an important city, and it could possibly be a very important heritage city for tourism.”

Having unearthed roughly 1,300 square feet so far, the grand floor covering depicts scenes from the Trojan War, featuring soldiers with swords and shields and the names of many Greek leaders who fought in the 1200 B.C. conflict. The Roman water god Neptune is also highlighted in one panel along with 40 of his mistresses. Another segment shows the Greek demi-god Hercules battling the queen of the Amazons and her ancient warriors in one of his 12 labors.

“What is in front of us is a discovery that is rare on a global scale,” says Saad. “We can’t identify the type of the building, whether it’s a public bathhouse or something else, because we have not finished excavating yet.” Syrian officials heralded the discovery of this mosaic as the most important archeological find since the civil war started 11 years ago.

Rastan was one of the first Syrian cities to rise up in rebellion against the totalitarian government of Bashar al-Assad, experiencing a tumultuous seven years until the Syrian government regained control in 2018. The city has had a rich historical past as an important locale during Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman rule.

Many of the country’s national treasures were vandalized or destroyed during the civil war. All six of Syria’s UNESCO sites have been damaged in some way amidst the fighting. The worst artifact offense was in 2015, when the Islamic State took over the ancient city of Palmrya and destroyed the first century A.D. Temple of Bel with explosives, as well as the third-century Roman Arch of Triumph and the second century B.C. Temple of Baalshamin. Since the Syrian government has reclaimed the city, it has been working on plans to restore all three sites.

Even this latest mosaic was under threat of removal from rebel armies in the recent past.

“Unfortunately, there were armed groups that tried to sell the mosaic at one point in 2017 and listed it on social media platforms,” Saad explains. Luckily, it’s once again protected by the government — even if that government is tyrannical and should not be allowed to continue ruling.

The post 1,600-Year-Old Roman Mosaic Unearthed in Syrian Town first appeared on Dornob.

For Mustardo, these fleshy ceramics offer a chance to play with ancient forms, infusing them with the characteristics of human bodies. The sculptor’s series “Anthropophorae,” “Toroid,” “Mug,” “Pitcher,” and “Flablet” make objects traditionally seen as hard and solid appear as soft and mutable as unbaked bread dough. Flablets and “Logoliths” are both puns on the clay tablet, “referencing the form and function of those great, antiquated, and often fragmented recording devices to examine certain mechanisms of visual language.” Their forms droop and dimple, looking like you could poke them with your finger and leave a mark.

The Toroid series starts with a torus (donut) shape, bulging and distorting it in a variety of hues and textures. Mustardo first began using toroids to test glazes in his studio, but soon became enamored with the simple form itself. During a residency in Rome, he closely observed Baroque architectural ornamentation of amphorae and krater with ribbed undersides known as “gadrooning.” Applying this technique to the entire shape, he stretches them into gourd-like sculptures, referencing the early days of humanity when actual hollowed-out gourds were used in place of the pottery that would soon be invented and mastered.

The Mug and Pitcher series take shapes we’re all familiar with and make them strange, abstracted, almost like objects that have been dropped deep into the sea to be encrusted with salt and barnacles. Anthropophorae is perhaps the most striking of all, inspired by the Ancient Greek and Roman amphora jar with two handles and a narrow neck. Exaggerating their roundedness and giving them human-like poses suddenly creates a sense of sensuality that didn’t really exist in these objects before.

Much of Mustardo’s work revolves around “broad, reverential notions of the vessel, the body, and language,” as he explains, animating the inanimate and perhaps making them more appealing to self-obsessed humans in the process. The objects are pushed and pulled, concave and convex, humorous and serious. When he covers them in a shimmering PVC coating for them a stippled, warty appearance, they become even more surreal. Some are finished with a contrasting coat of glaze for an eerie glow.

“Attempts are made to continually dissect processes, revisit forms, and reframe themes to agitate evolution and antagonize static thinking,” Mustardo says. “Objects are focused upon as vital witnesses and participants, reflections and poems, animate and imagined.”

The post Maxwell Mustardo’s Whimsical Ceramics Aren’t Afraid to Get Weird first appeared on Dornob.

The Eiffel Tower is currently illuminated by 20,000 exterior LED light bulbs that use approximately 7.8 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. Until September 23rd, the world-famous landmark glowed from dusk until 1 am, putting on a special flickering light show for five minutes every hour. Lightbulbs flash on and off in random patterns to mimic the effect of a fireworks display for visitors.

More recently, The Paris city council decided to turn the lights off every night at 11:45 pm, potentially saving up to four percent of the tower’s annual energy consumption. Originally constructed in 1887, the Eiffel tower was first illuminated by 10,000 gas lights and external spotlights projecting from the base. It was updated to more modern lightning in 1985, with the sparkle effect being added to ring in the millennial year 2000.

Gas and Oil Shortage

The Eiffel Tower’s light restriction comes in response to the growing energy crisis across Europe caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before the war, Russia had supplied roughly 40 percent of all of the European Union’s gas needs, but now only provides nine percent, causing skyrocketing prices and fuel shortages across the continent. Even those countries that were not heavily reliant on Russia for their energy needs are now feeling the pinch. For example, Germany depended on Russia for 55 percent of its gas needs in the past, but is currently buying more from Norway, reducing the amount available for other faithful customers like Great Britain.

What Else is Being Done?

In addition to dimming the tower lights a littler earlier, the City of Paris is also instituting several other energy-saving measures. For starters, all city-managed buildings will have their temperatures lowered from 19 to 18 degrees Celsius (roughly from 66 to 64 degrees Fahrenheit), except for in elderly care homes and baby day care facilities. Public pools will lower their water temperature from 27 to 26 degrees Celsius (from about 80 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit), and lighting on all public monuments will be turned off at 10 pm.

Around Europe, other countries are taking their own measures to cut energy usage. Germany is turning off spotlights on its over 200 public monuments and government buildings at night, shutting down fountains, requiring all state employees to wash their hands with cold water only, and even cancelling the traditional Christmas lighting along Berlin’s glitzy shopping district.

Spain has put limits on air conditioning and heating temperatures for all shops, offices, and other commercial venues. The Netherlands and Denmark are urging their citizens to take short showers to save on gas. And to ease the burden for their residents, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France have all set caps on electricity and gas prices. Since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, average household energy costs have jumped to nearly five times their previous level.

Even if the Eiffel Tower light reduction is largely symbolic in nature, it shows solidarity with people across Europe who are having to cut back on energy use. Despite the latest measures, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has assured the public that nation’s capital “will always be the City of Light.”

The post Paris Pulls the Plug on Eiffel Tower Lights to Ease Energy Crisis first appeared on Dornob.

Commissioned by a homeowner in the seaside town of Javea, Spain, Pantone and his team used over 130,000 one-inch ONIX tiles in just seven colors to create a stunning underwater prismatic pinwheel. Known for his work with light and color, the mosaic spectrum of blues, yellows, and reds showcases the artist’s brilliant way of melding individual pixels into a seamless rainbow of movement.

“Color only happens because of light, and light is the only reason why life happens,” Pantone writes on his website. “Light and color are the very essence of visual art. Thanks to television, computers, and modern lighting, our perception of light and color has changed completely.”

His process begins digitally as he works with various computer software to invent his designs. Then comes the manual manipulation of materials — in this case tiny colored glass tiles — to bring his kaleidoscopic vision to life. Radiating out from the very center of the pool, the colored squares flow over every inch of the floor and up and over the side walls, extending the optical illusion to its fullest degree.

The vibrant pool, which he calls the Felipe Pantone Residential project, is even more dramatic because of its juxtaposition with the starkly white modern home it’s attached to. From above, the tiled pattern appears to shift and gyrate beneath the water’s waves.

Born in Argentina, Pantone and his family moved to Spain when he was 10 years old. It was there he spent the remainder of his youth outside near the seaside stand his parents ran, finding artistic inspiration all around. “I was hanging out on the streets all day, immersing myself in the hip-hop culture, dancing breakdance, meeting graffiti artists,” he explains. Pantone eventually started making his own graffiti for fun before heading to the University of Valencia to get a degree in Fine Arts and unleashing his unique style on the world.

“I grew up as a painter, trained as a painter, and now my biggest goal is to get clear of all the academic training and to be able to make art freely, with the tools that work best,” he says.

Having grown up in a technological age when “kids unlocked life’s mysteries through the Internet,” his art is self-described as “a collision between an analog past and a digitized future, where human beings and machines will inevitably glitch alongside one another in a prism of neon gradients, geometric shapes, optical patterns, and jagged grids.”

Thanks to his bold use of color and geometry, Pantone’s aesthetic has been depicted by Forbes as “the intersection of Blade Runner and PhotoShop.”

Since his first gallery exhibition in 2006, Pantone’s bright optical illusion-like work has received global acclaim, with shows and installations in places like Paris, Mexico City, London, Italy, Palestine, Japan, and Australia. In 2017, he even painted what was at the time Portugal’s tallest mural. He’s since collaborated with international athletic brands like Reebok and Puma.

The post Felipe Pantone Dips His Signature Color Spectrum into a Residential Pool first appeared on Dornob.

Guy-Olivier Deveau, who lives in Quebec City, is a contestant on the second season of the Canadian reality show Race Against the Tide, where participants sprint to complete giant sand sculptures on the beach of the Bay of Fundy. The judges select the winner on each episode just moments before the tide washes all the art out to sea.

While some sculptors might be frustrated by the temporary nature of sand art, Deveau loves it.

“A lot of people wonder, ‘Oh, how does it feel knowing that your art will be destroyed soon?'” the artist said in an interview with Canada’s CBC network, adding: “…I really don’t mind it because when I’m starting it, I know what I’m in for.”

He finds sand art freeing for several reasons. “I like ephemeral art. One of the things is that they’re very quick mediums to work with,” he explains. “A two-meter sand sculpture will take me like, two or three days. If I were making the same thing out of wood or out of stone, it would take me weeks, if not months.”

Deveau also enjoys the ability to make and fix mistakes easily. With sand, he says “you can scratch it off and start again or try something new. The commitment is not so high. If you’re going to be working on a piece for four months, you know, if suddenly you don’t feel like doing it anymore or if you’re not into it, well, you’re stuck with it. But with sand, you just iterate a lot and then you’re always working on something new.”

His particular brand of sand art has a harder edge than most of the competition. Skulls, disintegrating heads, and skeletal creatures are prominent motifs in Deveau’s work.

“I like to jokingly say that my inspiration is philosophy, death metal, and video games,” Deveau says. His influences include H.R. Giger, the artist who created the creature from the Alien movies. Deveau also incorporates themes from Japanese fantasy role-playing games, adding: “Also, I like anything that has a death metal or black metal aesthetic — that is dark and sometimes a little bit disturbing.”

“I know there’s a lot of other artists that are doing that style in different mediums, but when it comes to sand, this has become my signature style, so maybe that’s what makes me unique,” he says. “Sand sculpture is often a bit more family-oriented, so my style may kind of clash with what’s expected.”

The artist’s horror-laced creations have at times been too much for the judges, but his vision eventually grew on them. “All the stumbling blocks that I came across just became fuel for the energy to do it better,” he confesses.

The second season of Race Against the Tide aired on July 10th, 2022. The winner will be named in the last episode, set to run on Sunday, September 11th.

Fans can check out Deveau’s amazing sand art, as well as his ice, snow, and wood sculptures on his Facebook and Instagram pages.

The post Guy-Olivier Deveau’s Sand Castle Art is a Temporary Terror first appeared on Dornob.

“This is how this little collaboration came about, exactly at the time when I just started a new fiery paper artwork — the Phoenix,” the UK-based artist said in an Instagram post alongside Rohulskyi’s video. “It seems symbolic because Bogdan’s life in Ukraine has been burned to ashes, but from the ashes a new chapter of his life is rising and beginning to take flight here in the UK.”

However, Brodskaya admits that the poignant comparison only came to her after the fact. “In truth, there was no mental concept or idea that inspired me to create this artwork in the first place.”

“If I really have to attach any words to this artwork,” she continues, “I would say that this portrait is about coming into your personal power and burning down…old patterns and beliefs in order to give rise to your Higher Self — the part of you that is pure light.”

“Yet every time you take courage to follow your heart and your true self, the fire of the Phoenix gets stronger… until it is no longer possible to suppress it,” Brodskaya adds. “…Phoenix comes out in its full glory to purify and burn down everything that no longer serves the real you.”

The details on the face and bird are exquisite, with intricate tiny folds, cuts, and curls. Bright yellows, oranges, and reds explode across the black background of the three-dimensional art. The entire portrait is composed of only paper and glue. And as an extra delight, Brodskaya included a hidden message written in pen on a few of the feathers: “Watch me rise like a Phoenix, from the ashes, to become a heroine, of my own legend.”

Brodskaya got her start as an artist in 2006 when she got her first job as a graphic designer and illustrator. However, she soon gave up digital design to embrace her passion for hands-on art in the form of paper quilling.

“Paper always held a special fascination for me,” she says on her website. “I’ve tried many different methods and techniques of working with it, until I found the way that has turned out to be ‘the one’ for me: now I draw with paper instead of on it.”

Brodskaya’s unique and dramatic style has quickly made a name for her among art-enthusiasts and celebrities. Among her 200 projects and commissions over the past several years, she has made paper paintings for Oprah Winfrey, Nieman Marcus, Paramount Pictures, Hermés, the Country Music Association, Starbucks, and Target, to name a few. She has also authored a book entitled Painting with Paper: Paper on the Edge that sheds light on her creative process. The artist posts all her latest pieces on her Instagram and Facebook accounts.

The post Yulia Brodskaya’s Phoenix Portrait Mirrors the Life of Her Ukrainian Collaborator first appeared on Dornob.

Known as Vanitas, the genre focused on the futility of seeking wealth, power, and earthly pleasures, as it ends the same way for everyone: death. Carrington found the idea intriguing when she visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years ago.

“I’ve always been attracted to the tradition of ‘memento mori,’ art that reminds us of the passing of time,” Carrington said in a recent interview. “In looking at those pictures of half-consumed food and fading flowers, I realized that one of the only things that could have survived to today was the silverware, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to try to make something out of that?’”

Her brainstorming led her to collect cast-off tableware to create arrestingly beautiful metal floral arrangements. Soup spoons became peonies, and silver teaspoons changed into rose petals. She incorporated berry spoons and fork tines to imitate tulips, protea, and hydrangea blossoms. One piece features a suspended silver pitcher pouring out a flood of feathers and flora.

Carrington taught herself how to weld just for this project, as well as how to solder and braze. Each piece takes her roughly three months to complete. “They’re quite difficult to make,” she said, referring to the process of collecting, sorting, composing, and finally welding every item into place. “Each flower requires a different kind of spoon and each metal requires a different heating technique.”

In the same vein, she has also constructed a 17th-century-style ship from the strands of discarded pearls. In a nod to Vanitas sensibilities, its splendor is tempered with the heaviness of the precious orbs.

Carrington has a long history of assembling everyday objects in completely new configurations. She’s turned gold jewelry into spider webs, metamorphosed soda cans into classical busts of famous kings and philosophers, transformed old blue jeans into a map of the United States, and even transfigured buttons into a giant postage stamp with the profile of Queen Elizabeth II.

“Mundane objects such as knives and forks, barbed wire, pins, and paintbrushes come with their own readymade histories and associations which can be unraveled and analyzed if rearranged, distorted, or realigned to give them new meaning as sculpture,” Carrington adds.

Her artistic career began with studies at the Bourneville College of Art, after which she earned a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1985 from Trent Polytechnic. She finished her formal training at The Royal College of Art graduating with a Masters in Sculpture in 1987. Since then, her art has attracted global attention, even being used to help raise awareness about human trafficking at the 2010 United Nations conference in Luxor, Egypt. Her list of personal commissions from celebrity clientele is impressive, including Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles, Elton John, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Tyra Banks.

Her works can be explored on her website and her Instagram page.

The post Ann Carrington’s Upcycled Sculptures Pay Tribute to the 17th-Century Art of Vanitas first appeared on Dornob.