Sherlock, Hope, & Selfie's

RESTING TIGER

Three special promotions, including one on my Resting Tiger Fine Art Print, this week. Resting Tiger has been one of my most viewed and favourited works for the last few weeks. Created entirely on the iPad, using a mixture of Procreate, Sketch Club, and my beta test version of Lightricks latest iPad app, Enlight, the work took around 30-hours to complete in total. Resting Tiger is also one of my favourite works, and I am currently working on a follow up piece which will be ready soon. I hope to create a series of wildlife based digital art, so if you're a keen collector of big cat's, there's a great reason to own one of my latest works.

Resting Tiger by M.A

FOREST FIRE

Forest Fire by M.A

WATER LILIES

Water Lilies is an essential piece created using the iPad and Photoshop on the PC. Completed using a Wacom Bamboo Fineline Stylus, this piece took in excess of 20 hours. It's one of my nature favourites and I even have a 40 x 30 print hanging in one of my offices!

SHERLOCK

one man has become a behind-the-scenes force to be reckoned with in tracking down lost and stolen art, most recently securing the return of art looted by the Nazis to the descendants of its original Jewish owners. The piece in question was "Seated Woman" by Henri Matisse which was returned to the Rosenberg family. Another artwork returned was the restoration of "A Portrait of a Gentleman", by 16th-century artist El Greco, to the descendents of Jewish banker and art collector Julius Priester.

Just two years after founding the Art Recovery Group, a specialist private company who find and recover stolen, missing or looted art, Christopher Marinello, a 53-year-old with piercing blue eyes and a Brooklyn accent, has been dubbed "Sherlock" for his outstanding work.

Marinello became a lawyer after abandoning his own art studies due to lack of talent, or so he puts it. He made a name for himself during the seven years he worked at the Art Loss Register, a private database of lost or stolen artworks and antiques. He has now become a competitor of his former employer. More details about the group can be found here.

HOPE

Image from Beechhouse Media

Shepard Fairey who I wrote about recently, and the talent behind the famous Obama HOPE poster was taken into custody earlier this week by customs agents at Los Angeles International Airport. Fairey was returning from a European trip.

Fairey, 45, was charged by Wayne County prosecutors last month with malicious destruction of property over $1,000 and less than $20,000, after he allegedly vandalised 14 different buildings and walls, including two city-owned properties.

SOTHEBY'S

On July 14, Sotheby’s in London will auction a Nobel Prize medal awarded to Hans Krebs in 1953 for the discovery of the Citric Acid Cycle, otherwise known as the Krebs Cycle, or the Bane of AP Chemistry Students everywhere. The medal is estimated at £250,000-350,000 (about $385,000-539,000).

The sale will benefit the Sir Hans Krebs Trust, which provides grants to refugee scientists and supports the training of young scientists in biomedical sciences. Krebs himself was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany for the UK.

MEANWHILE IN IRAQ

The Iranian artist Atena Farghadani, sentenced last month to 12 years and nine months in prison for drawing a satirical cartoon, is now facing "indecency" charges.

According to Amnesty International, Farghadani and her lawyer Mohammad Moghimi have been charged with having an "illegitimate sexual relationship short of adultery" and "indecent conduct" because they shook hands in prison, the Daily Mail reports.

Moghimi was arrested on June 13 and released three days later, after paying a bail set at approximately £40,000 ($60,000). Both Farghadani and Moghimi will be tried for those charges in due course.

SELFIE'S

The Selfy Stick - Genius or Dangerous?

Back in May, a 21-year old woman in Moscow accidentally shot herself in the head while taking a selfie. Clearly this was an upsetting and dreadful accident, but one that wouldn't have occurred had the woman not been holding a loaded gun to her head.

Two young men posing with a hand grenade back in January, in the Urals, killed themselves in the process, leaving their selfie as evidence of the failed Kodak moment.

There are hundreds of reported "selfy" incidents each year. Not always from the act itself I would imagine, but possibly even a poke in the eye from someone who has been poked in the eye with a selfy stick.

The Russian Interior Ministry has taken charge by starting a campaign cautioning Russia's Kodak moment happy youth, against taking extreme selfies. Just looking at some of the Russian teens stunts on YouTube, climbing thousands of feet in the air, up to the very top of spires on tall buildings, and then extending a Go Pro on the end of a selfy stick, makes one question their sanity. They use no ropes, no helmets, although I doubt a fall from the top of a crane would be safer with a skateboard helmet, but importantly, they appear to have very little fear, or sense. Of course, it's not just the Russian's, other nationalities can be just as dumb.

The campaign has been launched via leaflet, web, and video offering tips like, don't take selfies with a gun or while standing in front of a lion. "When a person is trying to photograph themselves, their attention is scattered, they lose their balance, they don't look look around and feel no danger," said the interior ministry in a statement translated by the Global Post.

Russia's selfie safety tips. Photo: Russia's Interior Ministry.

The selfie-safety campaign is illustrated with red-white-and-black road sign-type drawings featuring a large red line drawn over stick figures engaging in such dangerous photo-ops as climbing an electrical tower, standing in a speed-boat, and jumping in front of a moving train.

As unbelievable as it might seem, these crazy warnings depict real incidents, including one in which a teenager was electrocuted climbing onto a railroad bridge to take a picture in May.

The 21-year-old woman who shot herself in the head taking a selfie survived to tell the tale, luckily, but not everyone does.

Not helping the matter are those intrepid Russian selfie daredevils like Kirill Oreshkin, who has made a name for himself breaking into buildings to perch atop the roof and take a death-defying image of himself. He has become known, unsurprisingly, as the "Russian Spider-Man." (There is a similar, albeit less-widespread, trend in New York.) over here in the UK, I have personally seen two shop assistants climb on top of a chair to reach items off a shelf.

Selfies are getting more and more dramatic all over the world, nudity-loving artist Milo Moiré was just arrested at the Eiffel Tower for her naked selfies, but Russians are really taking things to the next level of allegedly stupid.

If anything, Russia's extreme selfies make the increasingly-common selfie stick museum ban seem like an overreaction. Is a slightly over-crowded museum really worth worrying about when people are crashing cars in the name of the selfie? Or maybe it's better to stave off the selfie before it gets too extreme? Considering the number of paintings and sculptures that have fallen victim to the scourge of the selfie, maybe an art-specific version of the selfie safety infographics could be more useful than you'd think.

TWITTER TOLD OFF

That sometimes frustrating, sometimes troll encouraging social network, Twitter has come under fire, after posting two video adverts featuring bright flashing colours, potentially putting epilepsy sufferers at risk of a seizure.

The videos were posted to Vine and it wasn't long before Twitter users began realising the potential risk. UK charity Epilepsy Action brought the issue to the attention of Twitter in a tweet: "Your #DiscoveryMusic Vines are massively dangerous to people with photosensitive epilepsy. Please take them offline now."

The videos were later removed, as confirmed in a response from Twitter's internal comms director Rachel Bremer. "Hello, we appreciate your feedback, thank you," she said. "We have deleted them."

EMAIL A TREE

Trees are generally beautiful organisms which provide shade, the air to breathe, and an undeniably beautiful seen as their leaf colour starts to change in the fall. The question is, would you ever, or have you thought of emailing a tree?

I must admit I did a double take when I first heard the news from officials in Melbourne, that you can now indeed email a tree. I also wondered what kind of person would do this, and I decided that it might make life so much simpler if we just took the warning labels off bottles, and let it all sort itself out.

The Guardian’s Oliver Milman reported that when they rolled out a program that assigned email addresses to trees in a bid to help identify damage and issues, they discovered that city residents preferred to write them love letters instead. See, the bottle idea clearly has some merit.

The city is calling it "an unintended but positive consequence" of their attempt to help citizens track tree damage. On their urban forest data site, Melbourne assigned ID numbers and email addresses to each of the city’s trees so it would be easier to catch and rehabilitate damaged trees.

Then the emails began to arrive. Instead of damage reports, people began to write fan mail to trees, complimenting their looks and leaves and telling tales of how they’d helped them survive during inclement weather. Some trees even write back.

So that's today's roundup of art and technology news, and there will be more tomorrow. I'm still going through my chemo, I'm currently on day five, so just another nine days to go. I'm actually feeling ok, apart from feeling a little sick the morning after. Hopefully this will get me back into remission of my colitis. In the meantime, I've managed to continue working, and I realise just how lucky I am. Not too long now before I go on my cruise for a few weeks, so whatever the Dr suggests, he'll have to take a pause while I'm away!

Do you think the Selfy stick should be banned? I would really like to hear your views. Feel free to leave a comment below!

 

 

Copyright M.A - Beechhouse Media