Artists have been known to stretch the limits of artmaking to limits unimaginable by most of us. Whether it’s punching paint onto the canvas with boxing gloves, preserving animals in formaldehyde and suspending them in glass tanks, using humble needlecraft to represent birth in all its glory, or making elaborate collages out of drugs and […]
Author: Ilene Roizman
Ivana Besevic Captures Raw Emotion in Vulnerable Portraits
Embracing the complexity of being human, Ivana Besevic creates digital portraits that don’t glamorize or glorify. She doesn’t shy away from sadness or pain, and she doesn’t smooth over the red splotches and tear streaks on her subjects’ faces. These are real people with real feelings—many of them directly engaging the viewer with an open, […]
Shai Langen Redefines the Human Form
Combining material design and photography with human models, Shai Langan creates otherworldly images that shift our visual perspective. He experiments with such materials as wallpaper paste mixed with acrylic paint, liquid latex with calcium nitrate, and fermented dough. “By using photography or film,” he says, “I animate material, which interacts with the human body to […]
Photography Inspired by the Great Surrealist Rene Magritte
The Surrealist works of the Belgian artist Rene Magritte have become some of the most familiar and copied images in the world. Posing existential questions and challenging ideas of personal identity, Magritte’s stark, almost spare paintings have lent themselves over and over to replication, reinterpretation, and reenvisioning. Whether constructed from Lego pieces or made from […]
Fine Art Nude Photography and Painting on Ello
Note: Contains nudity. Social media sharing opens up endless opportunities for modern artists to get their work seen, to feel and give support, and to be part of a community of likewise creative souls. It’s nothing new—artists have been forming leagues for centuries, sharing and criticizing, supporting and learning from one another. What’s different now […]
Diane Arbus’s Photography: Freaks, Transvestites, and Nudists
Note: Contains nudity. From the very start of her photography career, Diane Arbus was drawn to the seamy side of humanity. It became her mission to capture unsavory characters, social outcasts, the kind of people the rest of us turn away from—yet at the same time can’t help but stare at. People with strange physical […]
Reimagining Biology: Freaky Anatomical Sculptures by 10 International Artists
We humans really like to explore our own biology. And the biology of animals. And even the biology of beings that don’t actually exist, but somehow always manages to be very similar to ours. When the exploration is done in the name of science, knowledge emerges. When biological exploration is done as an expression of […]
Hyperrealist Tattoos with an Italian Flair: Interview with Silvano Fiato
Inspired by classical Italian art and music, Silvano Fiato channels centuries of history into his hyperrealistic tattoos. His Eternal Tattoo Studio in Genoa evokes a Renaissance salon, combining a lofty cultural air with the raw mechanical inking of skin. An artist from a young age, Fiato attended an art institute to hone his skills. Early […]
10 Strange and Provocative Visions in Nude Photography
Making images of the human body has kept artists busy forever. Photographers who compose images by manipulating bodies—alone, paired, grouped, with props—carry the practice a step beyond traditional posed oil portraits. These modern nude photos can be just as formal, indeed inspired by centuries of tradition, or they can break free of old conventions and […]
Stark Nude Tableaux Inhabit Olivier Valsecchi’s Newest Photos
Note: Contains nudity. “Drifting,” the title of Olivier Valsecchi’s most recent series of nude photographs, refers to gradual change, bodies in motion, a shift from one state of being to another. These photos are meticulously composed still lifes reminiscent of 16th- and 17th-century Flemish paintings, with starkly naked human bodies in place of luscious flowers […]