Art
Art and the stories hiding behind it.
Videos
- The art forger who tricked the Nazis (Video) — TED-Ed on Han van Meegeren, who forged “lost” Vermeers well enough to sell one to Göring, then had to prove his own paintings were fakes to beat a collaboration charge.
- Abstract: The Art of Design — Paula Scher (Video) — a full Netflix episode, free on YouTube: the Pentagram partner behind the Public Theater and Citi identities on hand-drawn type, her painted maps, and working “in serious play.”
Artists
- Lisa Ericson (Website) — hyperreal, surreal wildlife paintings: foxes trailing swarms of butterflies, owls perched on turtles, small animals staged in quietly impossible little worlds.
- Ernst Haeckel (Website) — a tribute site to the 19th-century biologist-artist whose intricate drawings of radiolaria, jellyfish, and diatoms turned the microscopic world into ornament and helped shape Art Nouveau.
- Liam Cobb (Website) — the British illustrator’s Tumblr gallery: flat two- and three-tone interiors drawn in a soft, slightly wobbling line — a man eating a doughnut at his laptop, an old woman alone with a slice of watermelon in a green diner booth, a dig site in pink and orange. Quietly uncanny domestic scenes. His commercial work runs to The New Yorker, Rimowa, and album art.
Resources
- Public Domain Image Archive (Website) — The Public Domain Review’s free image archive, browsable by artist, century, style, theme, or tag; the Ernst Haeckel gallery alone holds 70 plates of radiolarians, medusae, and echinoids, all downloadable.
- Art History Resources on the Web (Website) — Prof. Christopher Witcombe’s sprawling directory of art-history links, online since 1995 and organised by period and region, from Prehistoric and Ancient through Baroque, the modern centuries, and Contemporary, plus research resources.
- Floor796 (Interactive) — Pavel Sannikau’s ever-expanding animation of life on the 796th floor of a huge space station, drawn frame by frame in an editor he built himself: a 60-frame loop repeating every five seconds, spread across themed blocks and packed with references to films, games, anime, music, and memes.