Lifted shamelessly from a Fecal Face interview with Brooklyn based artist Maya Hayuk. Call it the conservation of energy for other challenging Sunday tasks and duties.

“Gallery 16 is pleased to welcome Brooklyn based artist Maya Hayuk to her first solo show with the gallery. Hayuk is a prolific muralist, photographer, printmaker, painter, illustrator, and documentarian. Her fearless attraction to wild color, a genre-bending mix of graphic design, graffiti, illustration, and abstraction has earned her a wide international audience. Hayuk’s work overflows with a uniquely cultivated handmade aesthetic . Part punk, part psychedelic explosion, her paintings, prints and murals display unbridled enthusiasm. Her monograph “Just Good Vibes” describes the work “Multicolored diamonds morph into rainbows on public walls, day glow birds and flowers sprout extra appendages appearing both beautiful and menacing, and everything eschews logic while making perfect aesthetic sense. Hayuk’s bold images of colorful beauty are at once visceral, ethereal, humorous and political.”

All kudos to changethethought for picking up the website of Kristian Hammerstad. He has a beautiful comic influenced style harking back to the 80’s skate designs from the powell/bones era of zombie/metal/horror inspired graphics. All the images on his website are unique and bold and couple perfectly with his particularly dry sense of humour. Worth a good long look.

Cause it’s just monkey genius, and it makes me shiver (in awe and with a equal amount of jealousy). Check out AJ Fosik’s flickr (and his rad collection of beer sweaters).

Maybe it’s a little too early in the morning for artists statements and overviews, but non-the-less, the sculptural work of Brooklyn based artist Faile was just what I needed to see at 8:42am. I can’t say a hell of a lot about it, cause it’s just so damn remarkable, but it’s safe to say it has scale,  guts, and it’s made an impact. Now for coffee.

If you ever played the FF series of Nintendo games back in the era of NES, you probably saw some of Yoshitaka Amano’s beautiful work on the box, cartridge or inside the instruction booklet. In my case I was a little young at the time and didn’t have the patience for anything more challenging than Duck Hunt…even Zelda was a stretch. If you are interested in delving into some video game history and a brief personal history, head west to his wiki entry, if you want to look at some more examples of his work, head south to the BOOOM entry.

Laura Barnard has a really strong inky thing going on in her portfolio of landscapes and railway lines. I especially like the image above of Bristol. It rightly won an award, and you can learn a bit more about her work and her other experimental stuff on her blog.

It is kind of shocking, and deflating in the same degree, to find someone else has been down the same path you thought you were beating furiously at alone. But on the other-hand, it can be comforting to know that there are other people out there, totally insane,  and obsessed with the minute (and for the most part totally overlooked) little details that bring some kind of satisfaction when they blur into one spasm inducing image at a distance. It’s awesome and so is John Borowicz’s work. Check out the rest of his ‘SPRAWLING CONGLOMERATES’ on his blog or butdoesitfloat?

Reading through the Japan Times newspaper the other day, I came across an article reviewing a show called “Trouble in Paradise / Medi(t)ation of Survival”. (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) The show aims to bring art and science a little closer through installations, sculptures and interactive media; but despite being a a fairly interesting idea, the show didn’t quite come off successfully for the paper’s art writer, only emphasizing “the fissure between art and science” as something comparative to a great chasm. Sadly.
Anyway, newspapers and fluff aside…I found someone who mixes art and science in a different way, and perhaps with more success. Former-biochemist-come-artist Kelsey Brookes could be a good candidate for drawing these two worlds a little closer. His paintings are constellations that kind of explode off the canvas like little chemical reactions (did you like that?) Anyway, check it out for yourself. I think it’s pretty rad.

Los Angeles based artist Marrissa Textor has some wonderful graphite drawings of trees with a  strong environmental message. You can check them out here. Her attention to detail is striking and it would be a real treat to see them in person.

I woke up with a headache today, but there was something soothing about Betsy Walton’s images that made it go away.