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Just the good stuff
Futuristic cities have always fascinated me, as a fan of SciFi TV shows, movies, and digital art, futuristic city designs always bring me inspiration. Everyone can find quite a lot of stunning illustrations on sites like deviantArt.
Many artists have become so skilled at Photoshop and 3D software that they create almost photographic illustrations of whole cities with incredible detail and precision.
I have been inspired by these illustrations and it makes me work harder at everything I do; I hope you will feel the same. If you find other amazing art, please send it to us, we will use them in our upcoming articles.
This one is really realistic, I expect someone to build this within a few decades.
I've always wanted to live in a city like that.
This one has an eerie feel to it, makes me think of a futuristic civilization that Steven Hawkins described in his documentary show.
This one was created for the Star Wars The Old Republic cinematic. Quite impressive artwork.
Looks like this planet revolves around a star that's really far away. Must get cold.
Who says cities can't simply be in space in the future?
This one has nice delicate brushing.
This one is packed with detail.
This artist made 4 different version of this futuristic city.
Amazing detail in this inspirational city.
Artist says he speed painted it within 2 hours.
The lighting on this one is great.
I wonder if the balls here are futuristic SAM sites. The artist has really worked hard on this one.
This is just beautiful, reminds me of a Star Wars city.
Apparently, building gundam giant robots is cheaper than SAM sites in this future.
Reminds me of Chronicles of Riddick with the Furion lady.
I wonder if the owners had a permit to run a portal to hell in this city.
Ah, so that's how they solved the problem of meteorites and asteroids in the future.
Reminds me of Starship Troopers, where are the giant spiders?
I guess poverty won't be solved even a thousand years from now.
Looks like cruise ships in the future will fly.
Wow, how many buildings do you count?
Reminds me of the cruise ship in that planet on The Fifth Element for some reason.
If we can solve the health problem of bone density and living in space (or create artificial gravity), I think this might be possible.
On Friday, May 21, the day after five paintings worth roughly $125 million, including works by Braque, , and , were discovered stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, an ebullient scandalmonger known as Turbo Paul, who runs two art-theft blogs, sent me an e-mail message: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Cheers, Turbo Paul. You scare me.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by Turbo Paul’s giddiness. I have read his faintly evil blogs, Art Hostage and Stolen , almost since they started in September 2006. Where Art Hostage is a general-interest chronicle of art heists, Stolen Vermeer is about the nefarious heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. “I read Paul’s stuff,” Robert K. Wittman, the former senior investigator of the ’s art-crime team, told me by telephone. “But I never read it for ideas or tips. I always read it because it is entertaining.”
The minute I saw the Paris heist in the news, I knew Turbo Paul would be psyched: traffic to Art Hostage would spike, his brain would rev high and he would get to peddle innuendo and what he presents as underworld intelligence. When news of big heists break, “I am at my toxic best,” he told me. A self-described former dealer in stolen antiques, he says he now actively works “to recover the art.”
This lifted-eyebrow, if-you-know-what-I’m-saying voice makes his blogs irresistible, as does the fact that Turbo Paul knows everything about cops and robbers — or seems to. Sure enough, by May 22, he was proposing what the Paris heist meant; who was sending signals to whom; who was humiliated by the heist and who had the last laugh. He said his blog was besieged by visitors with prestigious IP addresses, and when I asked, he passed on the routing information of his readers: Justice Department, State Department and F.B.I.
After the Paris heist, Turbo Paul had also, evidently, conversed with all kinds of unusual suspects, giving intelligence, getting it, pretending he knew more or less than he did.
On his blog, he dispensed some unsolicited advice to the French authorities at the Banditry Repression Brigade of Paris (B.R.B.-P.P.), warning them that their covert strategies to recover the art had been compromised: “Undercover B.R.B. have been made, so your presence is hindering the quick return. Stand down and don’t make the arrest as this will not guarantee the safe return of the art. They won’t fall for the same sting used to get back the two Picassos stolen in 2007 from Picasso’s granddaughter.”
Undercover B.R.B. have been made! They won’t fall for that 2007 nonsense. This sounded more like a ransom note than a blog post. That effect is vintage Turbo Paul, who told me by e-mail: “I regard myself as a firewall between the underworld and law enforcement.” I admire the way Art Hostage sends half-coded signals to disparate populations. I further appreciate how, like a good airport thriller, the blog hints to those of us who know nothing about $100 million heists that we’re missing something — potentially everything — about this great big world of good and evil.
Were you really a crook? I asked Turbo Paul, emboldened by the speedy and anonymous chat, his favored means of communication. “Of course,” he wrote back quickly. “I was good as an organizer, tried to be a burglar but was too noisy, so better to sit at a hotel waiting for the stolen art to arrive.” Turbo Paul sees himself as Fagin, the “receiver of stolen goods” in “Oliver Twist” ; he even named his son Oliver.
For his authority and his notoriety, Turbo Paul says he is grateful above all to Google, which, as he sees it, has given a onetime truant a place at the front of the class. For his blogs themselves, he uses Blogspot, which is Google’s blogging platform. He said he trusts Google’s secure servers and privacy policies to protect him from snooping, censorship and interference. “I will always stick with Google blogs,” he wrote, “because I come under the Goggle security, and it stops hackers, govt ones mainly, trying to disrupt my blogs.”
Dickensian Web characters have every reason to love Google. It stokes and protects the intricate ecosystem that is their habitat. (I doubt there will ever be a Turbo Paul app.) By supporting his blog and clocking its page views, Google inserts Turbo Paul into history — the history of art-theft investigation, that is, which is the only history he cares about.
And sometimes Turbo Paul really does seem to be at the center of the action. Consider one of Turbo Paul’s recent stories. In April, he told me by Skype chat, Art Hostage received a number of visitors who came to the site after conducting Google searches about a valuable clock that was stolen in September 2009 (a theft that Turbo Paul blogged about). Among the visitors, to judge from the IP addresses, was the police in Yorkshire, England. Turbo Paul realized that an investigation was heating up. When a blog reader came to him with questions about the clock and whether there were any efforts to recover it, he didn’t respond. A short while later, the clock was recovered and a man was arrested.
What happened, exactly? Turbo Paul directed me to an April news story: a man named Graham Harkin had indeed been arrested and charged for the theft of a 17th-century Thomas Tompion ebony clock, valued at $292,000, from a historic home in the northwest of England. Turbo Paul connected some dots: the reader who asked about the investigation, he claimed, was Harkin himself. “Now transpires, Harkin was trying to get advice from Art Hostage before he was caught with the clock,” he wrote. Turbo Paul could have scuppered the undercover operations by replying to Harkin, he stressed, but he hadn’t.
Maybe I’m just a sucker for Dickens and silver-tongued nutters, but it’s people like Turbo Paul who, to me, exemplify the possibilities of the open Web. Turbo Paul’s blogs have opened my eyes and mind to new ways of seeing the world and new vocabularies for discussing it. Do these blogs solve crimes? I don’t know, just as I don’t know whether the Web has been “good for democracy,” as some assert or deny. I tend to believe Turbo Paul, however, when he says that the “Web has been a wonderful tool for as both sides talk in a back-channel manner and issues can be resolved that otherwise would fester in an Internet-free world.”
But I especially believe Turbo Paul when he describes the sensory-emotional experience of his work, which is like the sensory-emotional experience of fantasy and fiction and novels. After talking me through his work, Turbo Paul wanted to make sure I understood his napalm excitement, which I originally balked at. “Virginia, now can you understand the napalm quote and what context I make it in? I so love this Web weaving, its gives such a rush when things are fluid, let alone if a result is obtained!”
Turbo Paul, I get it. I so love this Web weaving, too.
Renoir in 1885, after his turn away from Impressionism
Some artists go out in a blaze of glory. Titian is an obvious example: his dark, sketchy late work would be influential for centuries. Van Gogh is another: The Starry Night was produced by a man who would take his own life the following year. Pierre-Auguste Renoir went out in a blaze of kitsch. At least, that's the received opinion about the work of his final decades: all those pillowy nudes, sunning their abundant selves in dappled glades; all those peachy girls, strumming guitars and idling in bourgeois parlors; all that pink. In the long twilight of his career, the old man found his way to a kissable classicism that modern eyes can find awfully hard to take.
The determined-to-change-your-mind new show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is called "Renoir in the 20th Century." It could just as well have been called "Renoir: The Problem Years." Take one look at a painting like Bather Sitting on a Rock, and the problem is obvious: cupcakes don't get much more scrumptious than this. Which is another way of saying that a whole line of mildly lubricious babes, from the phosphorescent nymphs in Maxfield Parrish to Tinkerbell and the Playboy bunny, owe something to the old man's influential wet dream of classical form. All the same, the Renoir of this period — three very productive decades before his death in 1919 at the age of 78 — fascinated some of the chief figures of modernism. Picasso was on board; his thick-limbed "neoclassical" women from the 1920s are indebted to Renoir. So was Matisse, who had one eye on Renoir's Orientalist dress-up fantasies like The Concert, with its flattened space and overall patterning, when he produced his odalisques. Given that so much of late Renoir seems saccharine and semicomical to us, is it still possible to see what made it modern to them?
The Concert, 1919
Yes and no. To understand the Renoir of "Renoir in the 20th Century," which runs in Los Angeles through May 9 then moves to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you have to remember that before he became a semiclassicist, he was a consummate Impressionist. You need to picture him in 1874, 33 years old, painting side by side with Monet in Argenteuil, teasing out the new possibilities of sketchy brushwork to capture fleeting light as it fell across people and things in an indisputably modern world.
But in the decade that followed, Renoir became one of the movement's first apostates. Impressionism affected many people in the 19th century in much the way the Internet does now. It both charmed and unnerved them. It brought to painting a novel immediacy, but it also gave back a world that felt weightless and unstable. What we now call post-Impressionism was the inevitable by-product of that anxiety. Artists like Seurat and Gauguin searched for an art that owed nothing to the stale models of academicism but possessed the substance and authority that Impressionism had let fall away.
For Renoir, a turning point came during his honeymoon to Rome and Naples in 1881. Face to face with the firm outlines of Raphael and the musculature of Michelangelo, he lost faith in his flickering sunbeams. He returned to France determined to find his way to lucid, distinct forms in an art that reached for the eternal, not the momentary. By the later years of that decade, Renoir had lost his taste for the modern world anyway. As for modern women, in 1888 he could write, "I consider that women who are authors, lawyers and politicians are monsters." ("The woman who is an artist," he added graciously, "is merely ridiculous.")
Ah, but the woman who is a goddess — or at least harks back to one — that's a different matter. It would be Renoir's aim to reconfigure the female nude in a way that would convey the spirit of the classical world without classical trappings. Set in "timeless" outdoor settings, these women by their weight and scale and serenity alone — along with their often recognizably classical poses — would point back to antiquity.
For a time, Renoir worked with figures so strongly outlined that they could have been put down by Ingres with a jackhammer. By 1892, the year with which the LACMA show starts, he had drifted back toward a fluctuating Impressionist brushstroke. Firmly contoured or flickering, his softly sculpted women are as full-bodied as Doric columns. This was one of the qualities that caught Picasso's eye, especially after his first trip to Italy, in 1917. He would assimilate Renoir alongside his own sources in Iberian sculpture and elsewhere to come up with a frankly more powerful, even haunting, amalgam of the antique and the modern in paintings like Woman in a White Hat.
That picture is in the LACMA show, along with works by Matisse, Bonnard and Maillol, to demonstrate Renoir's influence. What's apparent from these, however, is that Renoir was most valuable as a stepping-stone for artists making more potent use of the ideas he was developing. The heart of the problem is the challenge Renoir set for himself: to reconcile classical and Renaissance models with the 18th century French painters he loved. To synthesize the force and clarity of classicism with the intimacy and charm of the Rococo is a nearly impossible trick. How do you cross the power of Phidias with the delicacy of Fragonard? The answer: at your own risk — especially the risk of admitting into your work the weaknesses of the Rococo. It's a fine line between charming and insipid, and 18th century French painters crossed it all the time. So did Renoir.
Jean as a Huntsman, 1910
The Artist in Winter
In the late 1890s, renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. It progressed until his fingers were bent into claws, the tips pressed against the palms of his hands. On the recommendation of his doctors, he moved from Paris to the dry climate of Provence, where, like so many other artists, he found a personal paradise, a garden tended by ghosts of the ancient Mediterranean. His was a farmstead in Cagnes-sur-Mer, not far from Nice. Though in constant pain, Renoir entered the most productive period of his career, producing hundreds of canvases, many of them painted while he could barely grip a brush.
In Cagnes, friends, family and servants were his models, dressed and undressed. That's the second of his three sons in the life-size portrait Jean as a Huntsman, striking an aristocratic pose borrowed from Velázquez. At age 16, he looks as if he knows he'll grow up to be one of the greatest of all filmmakers, the director of classics like The Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game. During the run of this show, LACMA has scheduled a Jean Renoir film festival. You can schedule one at home to decide for yourself who was the greater genius in this family. If it weren't for Dad's Impressionist years, my money would be on Junior.
Bather Sitting on a Rock, 1892
This drawing of an Alpine landscape was until recently attributed to the Renaissance-era artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder of the Netherlands, who lived from 1525 until 1569. In 1991, art historians began to suspect the work was not authentic because its watermark has been associated with papers not documented before the mid-1580s.
Determining what is real and what is fake has long been a problem for art curators. It is estimated that 20 percent of the worldwide art market is made up of forgeries. But art lover and Dartmouth College mathematics department Chairman Daniel Rockmore has developed a technique that is helping to determine the difference between excellent copy and the real McCoy.
"I joke a lot that I am a mathematician by mistake," says Rockmore. "It was something that I had an aptitude at, but I've always had lots of interests."
One thing Rockmore is particularly interested in is art. And a few years ago, his professional skills and personal interest collided.
The Juncture Of Math And Art
In 2001, through a friend, Rockmore met Nadine Orenstein, a curator of prints and drawings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At the time, Orenstein was working on an exhibition of the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Flemish painter from the 16th century. She invited Rockmore to the museum to see the show.
The exhibition featured both drawings by Bruegel and several that had long been attributed to him, but that historians later suspected were drawn by others. "Our exhibition was really the first time we were getting together in one place all of the drawings by Bruegel and the ones that were no longer considered to be by him," says Orenstein.
Rockmore says it was at this exhibit that he realized how his mathematical training could intersect with his love of art. "Nadine was explaining to me the various pen strokes that seem to be characteristic of the way Bruegel works, the way he creates a scene," says Rockmore.
He realized that if he had digital images of the drawings, he could use his math skills to design a computer program that would analyze the pen strokes and characterize which were Bruegel-like and which weren't. So he and some colleagues got hold of the digital images, and wrote the program.
An Art Historian's Tool
By 2004 they had a program that was pretty good at identifying real Bruegels. And now, as Rockmore reports in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the program has been further improved through the use of a different kind of statistical sampling technique.
The program determines whether a particular drawing is consistent with an artist's style. Until now, Rockmore has only tested his program on Bruegel drawings, but he says there is no reason it could not be used for other artists.
While it can identify suspicious works, it cannot definitively prove that they are fake.
But, says Orenstein, it "might kind of put a little light bulb in the head of the scholar and say, 'Oh, here's something we need to further investigate.' "
A Way To Better Understand Art
In the end, Rockmore doesn't see his work as leading to a way to track down forgers but rather as a tool to deconstruct art — a way of describing what it means to be Picasso-like or Bruegel-like.
"You get deeper questions about the creation of art, and our experience of art," he says. "But it's probably more fun to report on whether or not that's a fake Bruegel."
Although reporting on the science of how we experience art is fun too.
Americans became familiar with the art of Ernie Barnes via the television show "Good Times," and his appointment as the Official Artist of the XXIII Olympiad at Los Angeles. But his work gained critical acclaim and collector strength through Manhattan's prestigious Grand Central Art Galleries. Today, Ernie Barnes continues to be one of the most collected artists in America. (1938 - 2009)
Everyday Grandeur: Remembering Artist Ernie Barnes
Though his name was rarely uttered in conversations of fine art and few in academic circles had more than a passing interest in his body of work, when Ernie Barnes died this past Monday, his art was arguably some of the most recognizable among African-Americans. Most known for his 1971 painting “Sugar Shack” and for his striking treatments of African-American athleticism, Barnes will be most remembered for bringing grandeur to the everyday lives of African-Americans.
Born in Durham, NC in 1938, Barnes first began to paint as a refuge from childhood peers who teased him about his boyish heft. Ironically by his teenage years Barnes became interested in fitness, so much so, that he received more than twenty scholarship offers to play college football. He chose to play for North Carolina Central, an HBCU, and though he didn’t graduate, he went on to play professionally in the now defunct American Football League (AFL). It was Barnes’s connections with professional football that led to his career as a full-time painter, initially as the “official” artist for the AFL before the merger with the National Football League (NFL). Later Barnes found support from then New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin, who paid Barnes a $15,000 salary to develop his skills and helped organize Barnes’s first major gallery show in New York City.
Barnes’s biggest break occurred, when television producer Norman Lear decided to feature the artist’s work in his series Good Times (ghosting the art of eldest son JJ, who was a painter on the series). “Sugar Shack” was featured in the series’ closing credits, a painting that highlights blacks in a local dance hall. The same painting was used as the cover art for Marvin Gaye’s 1976 recording I Want You, the album in some ways serving as a logical soundtrack for “Sugar Shack.” The painting not only reflected the beauty of African Vernacular culture, it was accessible enough to be enjoyed by the very folk who derived the most pleasure from that culture.
According to Duke University Art Historian Richard J. Powell, “Ernie was arguably a pioneer in the mass-marketing of his highly stylized paintings of African American life and leisure. As early as the early 1970s (when many artists turned up their noses at the idea of transforming their art works into posters or notecards), he sold beautiful, high-quality reproductions of his paintings that ordinary folks could afford.” By the end of the 1970s Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte, Ethel Kennedy, Sammy Davis, Jr., Flip Wilson and Bert Reynolds were among those with Barnes originals in their collection while there was nary a black student dorm room that didn’t have a copy of Gaye’s I Want You cover adorning their walls.
Barnes’s signature pieces featured African-American subjects with elongated limbs—a metaphor perhaps for reaching beyond the limits of possibility. For Powell, author of the new book Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (University of Chicago Press), Barnes’s figures were “so intentionally sensuous and impossibly elongated, very much like Marvin Gaye's vocals on the classic album.” Barnes gained more recognition in 1984, when he was chosen as the official artist of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, despite being originally overlooked until former teammate and then New York congressman Jack Kemp brought Barnes’s work to the attention of Olympic officials. It was a fitting apex to Barnes career, as the artist told People Weekly at the time that, “without athletics…I don’t think my work would have the guts and fluidity that it does.”
Art historian Powell notes that Barnes “took the idea of being a ‘popular artist’ to an aesthetic apogee,” adding that “folks never grow weary of his beautiful and outrageous athletes, dancers, and other African American men, women, and children.” Indeed Barnes art resonated even for the hip-hop generation; When Camp Lo released their nostalgia laced 1997 recording Uptown Saturday Night (which features the classic “Luchini aka This is It”), the cover art paid homage to Barnes’s “Sugar Shack.
To Know Defeat
Solid Rock Congregation
Sugar Shack
The Olympic Experience
The Advocate
Main Street Pool Hall
His Effort
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