Posts Tagged ‘art’

Recently I received an e-mail with some cool logos in it. The whole thrust of the e-mail was the things that graphic artists hide in company logos. I thought you might find some of these as interesting as I did.

I'll start off with one that many people have either noticed on their own or have had pointed out to them. What is the hidden message in the following logo?

Did you see the white arrow between the "E" and "x"? I thought it was really cool that the artist was also able to make that happen in the Arabic version of the FedEx logo below. The arrow points in the opposite direction, but then I believe that in Arabic they write from right to left.

The arrow in the next logo is much more visible and signifies that Amazon has everything from A to Z.
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Earlier this week my wife Becka made some delicious wraps. I told her that her wraps were so good that she could consider herself a "wrap artist."

As I contemplated what to post this week, I thought about a picture a reader e-mailed me last week. The picture was of a van from Golden Corral that had been creatively wrapped.

Those two events — eating the wraps and receiving the picture — came together in my mind and resulted in this blog post. In my files I had some creative wraps of trucks and buses that I thought my readers would enjoy.

We have had some house guests from Germany recently, and we've all enjoyed our time together very much. Becka did a blog post about their visit, so I'll just share a link to it.

Quite a while back someone sent me pictures of some creative wrapping of trucks in Germany. Here they are will little comment. It would be distracting to be driving down the road and see some of these!
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Being a person who likes to leave things better than I found them, I have never understood the mentality that does graffiti or other forms of vandalism. Some "graffiti artists" might argue that they are trying to improve things by leaving something eye catching behind, but many of them do not leave something good behind. Much of graffiti is vulgar and unsightly, seeking to show disrespect or to draw attention to the vandals themselves, and most people do not appreciate having their property defaced or having to clean up graffiti. In this post I am in no way trying to encourage or excuse vandalism, but since graffiti happens, I will try to look at some of the effects that are actually interesting or even beautiful. Some graffiti is quite creative ... if only that creativity could be directed into more acceptable activity....

I'll start off with some that are really pretty cool.

Here's a staircase illusion.

Here is some modern art done by someone named Banksy, a British street artist with an international reputation.
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Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa? I'm not asking if you've seen a picture of the painting — I'm talking about the painting itself. I saw it for the first time the summer of 1972 with my French cousin Annie. Her family lives in the suburbs of Paris, and I was visiting them and other relatives on my first trip to France. (My paternal grandmother was French.) In my mind's eye I pictured what this most famous portrait in the world would be like. Since it attracted millions of visitors each year, I assumed the painting would be "larger than life." I was surprised that it is only 30 inches × 21 inches (77 cm × 53 cm). Below is a picture of the Mona Lisa, known in France as La Joconde and in her native Italy as La Gioconda.

It's a good thing this world famous "mug shot" is in that protective case — earlier this month (August 2) a Russian woman pulled a ceramic mug out of her purse and threw it at the Mona Lisa in anger and frustration. The deranged woman was sent to a psychiatric ward afterwards. Because of the protective case, this woman's attack was an unsuccessful, literal "mug shot."

The painting has a long history of attacks. It was stolen in 1911 by an Italian nationalist, a Louvre employee named Vincenzo Peruggia. My French grandmother was a 12 year old girl at the time of the theft — I wonder if she even heard about the theft.... The painting was finally returned in 1913. In 1956 it was doused with acid. Later that same year a man damaged the painting by throwing a rock at it. Sometime in the 16 intervening years between those attacks and my 1972 visit, Mona Lisa was put in that climate-controlled, protective case.

I know it seems a bit irreverent to call this celebrated portrait a mug shot. But that term took on a new meaning last month at the 12th annual Rocks Aroma Festival in Sydney, Australia. The festival featured the huge picture of Mona Lisa made of 3604 coffee cups. 564 pints of milk were used to lighten some of the cups of coffee cups to achieve the required shades for the design. Here are two pictures of the picture.

Now that is a mug shot!

Many other items have been used to recreate versions of the Mona Lisa. This one was done by 300 employees at a department store in Osaka, Japan. They built their rendition with nothing more than old train tickets — several hundred thousand of them.

A mystery artist used about 800 Rubik's cubes to create the image below. He twisted each cube to get the colors he wanted on the top face before placing them next to each other on a board.

Lego has its own Mona Lisa.

That wasn't enough for Eric Harshbarger who used Legos to create "Mona Lego," composed of over 30,000 Lego blocks. It measures six by eight feet and weighs over 45 pounds.

Chinese artist Ju Duoqi did a version of Mona Lisa with vegetables. Her veggie Mona Lisa ("Mona Tofu") is made out of rice, sea kelp, and tofu.

In addition to various versions of the Mona Lisa, there are plenty of perversions. Here she is with bubble gum.

Here's Goth Mona Lisa.

Here she is in a burqa.

Here are some animated "gif" images of Mona Lisa.

I'll end this part of the post with a Mona Lisa comic strip.

Some of my regular readers may have noticed that I didn't do my usual Thursday blog post last week. I had to make a quick trip up to Ohio to help deal with some issues that my mother is having. If you are one who prays, please pray that Mom's thinking will clear up soon. She is having some exceedingly dark thoughts right now, and it's hard to know why this started happening all of a sudden.

What are your thoughts about the Mona Lisa? Do you think it deserves the status it enjoys?

quotation...

"God calls dead rebels to life." - Joshua Pegram

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Rob

If you look like your passport picture, you probably need the trip.

How do you know whether to believe what you see? With today's technology it's possible to alter images so that the changes are almost imperceptible. In addition to that, some people have great fun posing to create certain illusions. And sometimes people and objects are aligned quite accidentally to produce amusing effects. I wish I could find and scan in a hilarious picture taken in our living room where one the people standing in front of our fireplace ended up with what looked like antlers when the pictures were developed.

Here are some pictures that have been accumulating in my files. Some are undoubtedly contrived, but I think that some are purely serendipitous.

In this final week before the elections, be careful. Reality is often distorted, and not everything may be as it appears. It's truly hard to know what and whom to believe. I'm glad to know One who is always to be trusted and believed!

If you have a funny picture similar to those above, please send it my way. I'll do another post in the future with the best ones I receive.

quotation...

"Many brave men have died for countries that don't exist any more." - Dr. Drew Conley

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Rob

"I believe in my cosmetics line. There are plenty of charities for the homeless. Isn't it time somebody helped the homely?" - singer Dolly Parton