Building Head - Chameleon Print 24″ x 29″

Chiho Aoshima

Click the link above to visit a gallery collection of her paintings

Chiho Aoshima is a digital artist from Tokyo, Japan. She creates unique and extraordinary fantasyscapes through the use use of computer softwares, such as illustrator. Her digitized paintings are then printed in a variety of forms including large-scale murals. These are often exhibited in different environments such as advertising spaces, gallery walls to complete rooms.

Chiho’s work can best be described as a fusion of nature and culture; it’s the substantial elements in Aoshima’s work which often reflects her concerns about global patterns of abnormal weather. The artist is influenced and associated with the superflat movement too, this is a contemporary Japanese art movement reflecting the two-dimensionality in contemporary Japanese pop culture. Ultimately, this has influenced her style of painting in the process, be it with manga pop of contemporary Japan or a traditional Japanese scroll painting flatness. At the same time, she draws upon the evolution of youth culture in a surreal, colorful, and sometimes violent universe.

More samples of Chiho’s unique manga-pop fantasyscapes are viewable after the jump. more…

Client: Benderson Development Company, Fashion Outlets of Niagara Falls USA
Size & Medium: 28’ x 141’, acrylic on prepared masonry

Central Piece - Close-up

• Eric Grohe

Ever wondered how plain facades can be transformed into three dimensional Trompe-L’oeil paintings ? The answer can be found in viewing Eric Grohe’s paintings. Working much like the street artists reviewed in my previous entries, Eric transforms the drab urban landscape by creating exceptional wall paintings on the sides of buildings - inside and out. The thing that sets Eric’s murals apart from “most” other street artists is their subjects and execution - they make a flat wall look like it has three dimensional space and form. Therefore, in most cases, can be considered realistic illusions, much like the work of street artist Julian Beevers.

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This Caravan was painted during the preparations of the “Graffiti Stories”-Exhibition in Sète

“Whole Car” painting

These fantastic paintings are from the Graffiti Stories events happening right now in two locations in France. The Show runs till the 13th of January, 2008, in the MIAM in Séte (Musée des arts Modestes) and the Abbaye d’Auberives near Dijon. The exhibition there will run June 30th, 2007 to September 19th, 2007.

Artists include Alëxone—Paris; Esmaeil Bahrani—Téhéran; Dzus—Kaohsiung; David Ellis—New York; Maya Hayuk—New York; Jonone—Paris; Nunca—Sao Paulo; Reach—Taipei; Zonenkinder—Mainz. All walls in the museum have been painted by the artists.

The Caravan piece (top) painted during the preparations of the “Graffiti Stories” is amongst my favorites from the showing so far. There is, however, plenty of talent to be seen throughout the Zonenkinder collective, see here: www.zonenkindercollective.de.vu.

We are entering into an incredibly productive phase of urban street art, where talented artists like Brazilian Claudio Ethos are creating stunning and dramatic artworks. Ethos’ artworks contain sharp social commentary obviously inspired from the “sprawling metropolis” of Sao Paulo - the new “shrine to graffiti”. While many street artists today prefer the stencil method, Ethos prefers to paint using freehand style to create these unique figurative paintings. They would indeed enrich the surrounding of any living space.

You can find most of Claudio’s work at ekosystem.org. Unfortunately, street art is usually short lived, gone within days or certainly weeks after it is completed. The only permanent record of these works are photographs. Here are [28] more photos for the record, capturing ethos’ spectacular ephemeral pieces… more…

Ever since 1993, Japanese farmers in the town of Inakadate, Japan create trompe l’eoil crop art, using just three different strains of rice - a purple and yellow-leafed variety of rice along with their local green leafed tsugaru-roman variety. This year, residents of Inakadate decided to reproduce the famous woodblock prints from Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji — see above. Full (trompe l’eoil) visibility of these rather intricate Hokusai representations are assured after harvesting in September. Here are more Inakadate crop art examples from the recent past.. more…

From the miniature to the enormous, pictured above is Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s giant size “Rubber Duck” entry for the Loire Estuary 2007. This is an outdoor, contemporary-art exhibition now taking place in France that features the works by 30 artists from around the world. All of the work is being installed along a 40-mile stretch at the mouth of the Loire River, from Saint-Nazaire to Nantes. Since “Loire Estuary 2007″ opened, on June 1, some 240,000 visitors have trekked through the Nantes-Saint-Nazaire corridor in search of the artworks on view.

The project will also be repeated in 2009 and 2011. More info From the artists’ website:

Title: Rubber duck
Year: 2007
Location: river the Loire, France
Dimensions: 26 x 20 x 32 meters
Materials: inflatable, rubber coated PVC, pontoon and generator
Assigned by: le Lieu Unique and the Biennial Estuaire

A yellow spot on the horizon slowly approaches the coast. People have gathered and watch in amazement as a giant yellow Rubber Duck approaches. The spectators are greeted by the duck, which slowly nods its head. The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn’t discriminate people and doesn’t have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relief mondial tensions as well as define them. The rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages!