Unstructured Picture of the Interval

It is best to mock that which we abhor.

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Attribution unknown

Unstructured Microart

Willard Wigan specializes in amazingly tiny sculptures.

I wasn't able to find a good gallery of his work so, instead, here's a Google Image Search link that returns quite a few samples.

Enjoy.

Unstructured Food Sculpture

I've long been fascinated with ephemeral art. I'm also fascinated by the thin but blurry line that divides mere kitsch from true art.

I think that amusing food sculptures provide a neat intersection between these two interests of mine.

Yet More Unstructured Photons

Another gallery of light drawings. This set was created by Eric Staller.

Unstructured Jack O' Lanterns

We're approaching Halloween here in the United States which, in the traditions of our culture, is the time of year when we sell our souls to Satan and ritually sacrifice our least wanted children.

One part of the pagan festivities involves the carving of pumpkins (known as Jack O' Lanterns by way of a vaguely menacing threat to the Irish that we'll carve them, too, if they get uppity).

Here's a gallery of some especially cool carvings that are well beyond your ability to manage. Pumpkins carved by real people generally look like they've been hacked at by some sort of savant weasel. If you suffer delusions of competence, here's a site that promises to turn you into an actual pumpkin artist.

Unstructured Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was one of the pioneers of the Dada movement, which was an artistic movement that strove to transcend conventional notions of art, via absurdist rejections of the norm, which pushed the boundaries of what was and was not art.

Duchamp is perhaps best remembered for the abstract Nude Descending a Staircase but my personal favorite is Bicycle Wheel (pictured to the right).

(I'm also amused by the title of his mustachioed Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q., which, in French, basically sounds like "She is hot in the ass").

Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp is an excellent interactive timeline of his work.

Unstructured Surrealism

A common complaint about representational art is that it lacks creativity whereas a common complaint about abstract art is that it's so abstract that it can mask a simple lack of technical skill.

My own position is that Surrealism neatly straddles the divide. A surrealist must demonstrate the technical proficiency of representationalism while transcending the bounds of mere photographic duplication. A good surrealist must be creative as well as expressive.

Here is a lovely collection of some very beautiful surrealist art.

Unstructured Gorey

My first exposure to the art of Edward Gorey was in the old animated introduction to the P.B.S. series Mystery. He's got a very distinctive, and macabre, style of line art that's impossible to mistake for anyone else's.

I especially like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which is a sort of grim alphabet featuring various tykes dying alphabetically of various situations and conditions.

Unstructured Street Art

I am a big fan of street installations, which are a kind of guerrilla art where the artists place sculptures in an environment with the goal of amusing, confusing and or provoking onlookers.

Here's a collection of some particularly good ones.

Geek Alphabet

From "A is for alignment" to "Z is for Zombie", here's a very clever geek-themed alphabet.

Unstructured Dazzle

Light art, created by long exposures and a bright, moving "pen", is cool enough but animating it increases the magnitude of the cool by a factor of "wow".

Unstructured Drawings

Here is an absolutely fascinating experiment where artists took kid drawings and then reworked them while adhering to the basic design.

Unstructured Meeeeeow

For you viewing pleasure, here are some hot, fantasy babes.

Unstructured Mural

What you see here is a small segment of a much larger digital mural entitled Universe. It is well worth your while to see the entire picture.

Unstructured Fractals

There is never a wrong time for fractals, and Fractal World Gallery is your go to place for best fractals on the market.

They make great anniversary gifts, you know.

Photonic Graffiti

Making art with a source of light and a long exposure has a respectable lineage. Even Pablo Picasso was known to partake of the format.

Here is a stunning collection of "graffiti" that uses this technique.

Unsolicited Musings

I swear that it is not my goal to turn this into the Honor Harrington Cover Art blog, but my friend Rob, who was much inspired, created a mock up (in more than one sense of the word) of his own Harrington art using City of Heroes and Photoshop. I particularly like the shoulder kitty. (Click the pic for a larger image)




Rob is also the owner of an excellent site that's part blog, part web page. Among other things he has quite a lot of essays as well as some top notch game reviews. Be sure to check it out.

The Evolution of Honor

The feedback of my critique of the cover art for Honor at War has inspired me to do a brief retrospective of the covers for the entire Honor Harrington series. Click the pix for larger images.

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Honor stars in a gender-bending version of HMS Pinafore. It's also clear that, when she gets old and grey, she's going to be the absolutely scariest cat-lady in the whole damned universe.

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I'm not sure if Honor is going through a Goth phase, here, or if she's just really tired because she stayed up way too late listening to emo rock.

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It was big, floppy beret day down at the local minor league ball park.

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Uh oh, Michael Jackson's got a gun! We'd better beat it!

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Honor as some kind of pirate/samurai (if only she were a pirate/ninja). She'd better be careful or that amulet around her neck is going to put her eye out.

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"Don't bother me with war talk, I'm on a conference call."

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Honor as an ascended being with a very bad case of stellar acne.

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Honor takes some time out from battle to sit in the world's most uncomfortable optometrist's chair. Notice that the video thingy in front of her is displaying the image on the side facing away from her eye?

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What did I tell you? She put her eye out.

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Oh, no! Honor's disembodied head has been grafted to the Death Star and they're assaulting it with techno-dildos!

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Either she's dropping LSD or she fell into the Matrix.*

*It's been noted that this last one isn't part of the Honorverse, and that's correct (note my clever use of "she" instead of Honor), but I wanted to include it anyway, not least because it looks so much like a Harrington cover that it really ought to be one.

Unstructured Commentary

If you read science fiction, you've probably heard about Baen. And if you're familiar with Baen, you're probably familiar with David Weber. In case you aren't, imagine that Tom Clancy was a science fiction writer (and that he had the prolificacy of Stephen King) and you've got the general idea of what he's about.

Weber most famous series is the Honor Harrington series, which is loosely based on the Horatio Hornblower novels. The eponymous heroine of the story is one of those hypercompetent individuals that one only ever finds in military fiction (and spy novels, to be fair). She, and her sentient "tree-cat" companion go from humble beginnings, through victory after victory, until she's very nearly a demi-god among mortals.

But I'm not here to talk about that. Rather than judging the books, I thought that I'd judge a cover. Baen has a non-enviable reputation for producing the ugliest dust jackets in the genre. This is even taking into account the lamentable 70s when every cover looked like something out of a geeky acid trip. The cover for the latest Harrington novel, At All Costs, however, sets a new record for sheer god-awfulness.

The covers for most of the novels depict Honor with some sort of resolute and determined expression. She's usually in uniform and her hair is generally pulled back. Typically, there's some sort of space battle going on in the background (see the example in the upper-right). In the new book, however, the illustrator decided to go in a different direction. Instead of the standard-issue military pose, we have a sort of Madonna and Child (and book) thing going on. Honor has let her hair down, ditched the uniform, and picked up a kid (you can probably guess the relationship, but I don't want to be accused of spoilers).

The first thing that makes it a bit creepy is the look on her face. I think that they were trying to go for something maternal but what we actually get is a vague, slightly cross-eyed expression that makes her look like she's been lobotomized. But what really pushes it over the edge is her tree-cat. Understand that the tree-cat is supposed to be a good character. The picture, however, makes it look like some sort of Satanic imp. The fact that it's dangling a dangerously pointy bauble within arm's reach of an innocent (indeed, archetypical) baby only adds to the air of malevolence. Clearly this hell-spawned beast has bewitched our beloved Honor and is now preparing to claim the soul of the child as well!

I've included a picture just so you can see for yourself that I'm not exaggerating. Try not to have any nightmares.

Unstructured Fun: Egg Scupltures

I think that there is something very cool about ephimeral art. One of the most unsuall I've encountered are these pictures of some sculptures (or, perhaps, horizonal murals) made out of eggs.

Check it out.