"i was insecure about being fat until i stopped long enough to ask what i thought. When i did, i consistently saw beauty, i saw sensuality, i saw warmth, i saw pride and i saw strength. i saw the audacity to live a life outside the bounds of cultural acceptance without closing my heart. In those moments, i stopped listening to the world, to the culture, long enough to see I owned these things- i owned them whether society chose to validate them or not. i decided to trust my opinion and now- i’ve found the love i thought i always had to change for. It was there all along."
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(Source: v-west)
LARRY CARLSON, The Sky is Blue - California Dream, collage and paint on wooden board, 24x16in., 2011.
Great and Mighty Artist of the Day:David Butler
Born Good Hope, Louisiana, 1898; died Moran City, Louisiana, 1997David Butler began making art after a series of life-changing events. His various manual labor jobs—in sawmills and road construction—ended in 1962 with a work-related injury, and his wife died in 1968. In the early 1970s, when Butler was in his mid-seventies, he began adorning his yard in Patterson, Louisiana, with colorful, cut-metal painted sculptures, mostly of fanciful subjects such as whirligigs and critters, and with decorated objects like bird feeders, mailboxes, and bicycles. Butler also made cut-metal window screens for the outside of his house, both to control the light inside and as “spirit shields” against evil forces. Butler’s work was included in the important 1982 exhibition Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C . The works in his fanciful yard environment were eventually dispersed into galleries, museums, and private collections.
See his work in Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, opening March 3!
(via blackcontemporaryart)
8 Genetically Modified Foods I Wish Existed [Click for more]
If you’re gonna screw with the food, at least make it awesome.
Japanese artist Marefumi Komura creates textured, expressive portraits with an arresting presence. With their faces obscured and mouths agape, the subjects appear in states of agony — Komura’s loose, generous brushstrokes make them appear disfigured or swathed in gauze or fabric. This style stems from Komura’s reaction to the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster in Japan, when the artist visited the devasted areas and saw the destruction firsthand. Take a look at some of the paintings below, images courtesy of Marefumi Komura.
