Australian sculptor Ron Mueck started out as a model maker and puppeteer. Soon thereafter he began his own company in London where he started making photo realistic props for the advertising industry. Muecks mother-in-law introduced him to Charles Saatchi who started collecting and commissioning his work.

Mueck’s sculptors are incredibly realistic. The key difference is the scale to which the sculptors are built. Often they are larger than life or much smaller. I had the opportunity to see his sculpture “Boy” in 2000 at the Millennium Dome in London. Truly remarkable and painstaking work.

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Banksy is a anonymous graffiti artist from the UK. His work is quite extraordinary and has a social commentary angle. According to Wikipedia:

He is believed to be a native of Yate, South Gloucestershire, near Bristol^[2] and to have been born in 1974,^[5] but there is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and personal and biographical details.^[6] According to Tristan Manco, Banksy “was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier technician, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s.”^[7] His artworks are often satirical pieces of art on topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His street art, which combines graffiti writing with a distinctive stencilling technique, is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris and members of the anarcho-punk band Crass who maintained a graffiti stencil campaign on the London Tube System in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His art has appeared in cities around the world.^[8] Banksy’s work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians.

One of the most impressive things about Banksy is that he doesn’t sell photos or merchandising of his work. Instead, he posts high resolution images on his Web site and encourages people to make their own stuff. He only asks that it is for non-commercial use. Very generous and true to the intention of the art work.

Jonathan Feinberg is the mastermind behind Wordle.net – a fun way to weave word clouds. The cloud creation is quite simple. You can either add words via an online editor or you can add an RSS feed to automatically generate a word cloud. Just like any word cloud, prominance is given to the frequency the word appears.

The fun part is tweaking the clouds. At your disposal are different fonts as well as a myriad of layouts and color schemes. The final images can be printed out and placed in a frame.  Bam! instant artwork for typographically challenged.  The clouds can also be saved to a public gallery so others can enjoy your handwork.

The word cloud above was generated via Mashable.com’s RSS feed

Create your own word clouds at wordle.net.

Sometimes even the best intentions fall short. Such is the case with the art featured on this site called “Bad Paintings of Barack Obama.” And they’re not kidding either … they’re beyond bad!

Obama goes green! He’s glowing like a nuclear reactor…

This is from his short lived stint with the Blue Man Group.

Obama and his bestest pal in the world … honest Abe.

YIKES! The only way I could tell it was Obama was because of the logo in the background.

Here’s what Obama would look like if Piccaso painted him … YEAH, RIGHT!

Several years ago, we created an ad series to promote Foreclosure.com’s new agent listing center. The ad was to run in the leading default real estate trade publications. Thumbing through any of these default real estate pubs was like watching Scooby-Doo run past the same five houses over and over again. Nearly every ad featured a photo of a house and way too much copy. Some ads were copy driven, but not like you would expect … the whole ad WAS copy!

Our goal was to swim upstream on this one. We thought “What if we created a campaign with NO houses, NO photos, and NO long copy?” The result was the lean green vector series. With a right-read placement and the brand’s pulsating neon green background, this ad definitely stood out. Way out!

Copywriter: Tom Myers
Creative Director: Me
Illustration: Simon Oxley | Bortonia