Coulsdon Artist of the week

Check out this great interview with Chris Stain on Vandalog  

Chris Stain is a Baltimore bred New Yorker street artist, who transitioned from graffiti writing to stencil portraits and paste-ups.

  

Winter in America

Photo by Luna Park 

Vandalog is a street art blog that as the place for people to keep up to date on what’s going on with street art. If something matters in the world of street art, you can read about it on Vandalog.

Inspiration: Francesco Vezzoli

Francesco Vezzoli, Portrait of Lady Gaga

Artist Francesco Vezzoli combines the art of film and the art of embroidery to create his work. His best know pieces are these serigraphs in which details of the images are hand-stitched using petit-point embroidery techniques in shocking colours. There's an interesting interview with him over on FlashArt Online, here.

Petit-Point is a needlepoint stitch similar cross-stitch but it's worked on canvas and is even smaller in scale. If your thinking about embroidering onto images it's important to think about what you will stitch into - photographs? fabric? etc and what embroidery techniques you might use; there's lots of them! This post on Craftster is a great starting point to explore different techniques and Mr X Stitch is a great resource for inspiration! 

Inspiration: Caroline Mak

How incredible is this installation that artist Caroline Mak created entitled 'Root Architecture'. The tubing itself spans an incredible 4000ft and I think it looks fantastic! Her installations often involve slow repetitive processes and unique uses of materials, you can read more about her work here and see the rest of her portfolio here. 

inspiration: Klash Erbert

Swedish designer Klas Ernflo has the most exciting portfolio - from drawings of knitwear, quilts and fabric footballs. 

Sarah Applebaum

image source

I am completely head over heels in love with the work of Sarah Applebaum! 

Inspiration: A Collection a Day

Day 314 vintage wound thread/yarn, image source

From January 1st  2010 to December 31st 2010 artist and illustrator Lisa Congdon posted a entry on her blog everyday with a photograph, drawing or painting of one of her collections. The project was spurred by her childhood obsession with collecting and then arranging and displaying the collections the results of the project are amazing and they've recently been published in a book! How inspiring! If you're inspired by collections or groups of objects perhaps you could use this idea as a starting point for your next project.