0 WOODEN SCULPTORS BY TOM ECKERT

Tom Eckert creates everything out of wood and we mean EVERYTHING.  His sculptures are formed entirely of wood and then painted.  He uses traditional processes to carve, construct, laminate and paint his pieces.  The woods he prefers working with are basswood, linden and limewood (all very similar) chosen because they carve and paint well and are very stable.

Transcendence

Coming from a painting and drawing background, he applys some of these techniques to his sculptures.   His choice of paint is mostly waterborne lacquer applied using both spray guns and brushes.

Forms carved to suggest cloth recur in many of his pieces.  As he explains on his site: By tradition, cloth has been widely used to conceal and shroud objects in practices ranging from advertising to church rituals.  Covered forms are often more evocative - with a sense of mystery absent from the uncovered object by itself.  As he recalls: "I remember in church one Lent, as a child, being mystified while gazing at the statues shrouded with purple cloth."

He further goes on to say: “Cloth” carved of wood has much different structural qualities than real cloth. When this idea is applied to my compositions (floating book, floating cards, floating rock) a sense of the impossible happens - for me, magic.

0 FEATURED ARTIST: TRINA MERRY

Trina Merry is a fine art and avante garde fashion bodypainter based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the owner of the bodypaint installation and performance troupe the ART ALIVE GALLERY. She has been a bodypainter since 2006 when introduced to it by Australian band the Red Paintings on a Dresden Dolls Tour.

Trina is very passionate about this most ancient and simultaneously contemporary artform. “Bodypaint creates a special connection to a person that other visual art forms have trouble accomplishing; it’s a distinctly human experience”.

After graduating with a B.A. in film, she worked on many major films & TV shows in the art department. She decided to move back to the Bay Area to focus on her own art and was exhibiting in up to 9 gallery shows a month, selling ¾ of her work.


The Human Motorcycle Project

Trina Merry and her ART ALIVE Gallery team created three bodypainted human motorcycles to promote the International Motorcycle Roadshow tour starting November 2nd.   Through teamwork, they pushed through impossibility together to create a cutting-edge work of art.  It is one of the most ambitious and highly inventive bodypaintings ever created.  This creative team invented living human Transformers-  Cruiser, Sport Bike and a Dirt Bike - that can breathe, move & even be tickled.

0 FEATURED ARTIST: MIRU KIM

Miru Kim is a New-York-based artist, photographer and filmmaker with a love of the new and unknown. In her best-known body of work, she investigates left-behind industrial spaces, infiltrates them with her camera, and then photographs herself in the space, nude.

Miru was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts in 1981 and was raised in Seoul, Korea. She returned to Massachusetts in 1995 to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, and moved to New York in 1999 to attend Columbia University.





Williamsburg Bridge, New York, NY, USA

Until the 1920s, the Williamsburg Bridge had the record for the longest suspension bridge span on Earth. New Yorkers celebrated its opening in December 1903 with fireworks over the East River. Sitting on the bridge, I imagined a full procession of men in top hats and coats, carriages drawn by horses, and press photographers with large wooden box cameras.  From the top of the bridge, the emotions that emanate from the spectacle of the city cannot be more unique. Perched on a narrow beam, I felt the wind, and the tower gently swaying. 

0 FEATURED ARTIST: MICHELLE WIBOWO

Meet Michelle Wibowo (born 1978, Indonesia), a British sugar craft artist whose specialty is making sculpted cakes and sugar sculpture. Michelle creates award winning sugar arts and cake sculptures with an incredible attention to details and realism.

She runs a small business called Michelle Sugar Art Ltd.

She graduated from the National Bakery School and begin career in cake decorating in London. Her first international success was in October 2008 when she was awarded a gold and silver medal for her creations in International Exhibition of Culinary Art in Germany. She created a lifesize hound dog shape sugar sculpture which won her gold and picked up silver for a cake of Elizabeth I of England.

Yes, these are all edible cakes! 

It took Ms Wibowo 2 weeks to prepare and both creations have consumed more than 25 kg sugar paste (fondant).