hilary faye's gifs.

Hilary Faye is an immensely talented artist whose saturated-postcard aesthetic translates across a variety of mediums with such sincerity, it’s hard not to admire her. Witty collages that play with perspectives and Italian grannies, whimsical GIFs that make you giggle, surreal stop-motion animations, photographs of roadkill… it all falls under her creative umbrella, and I’m in awe.

 “Let’s share weird ideas,” she says. If by that she means more desert nights spent on garish sofas and weeping riverside in an over-sized armchair, then I’m with you, girl. 

Hilary’s website here.

christopher green.

This year’s 7^th Annual Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize for Representational Painting was won by the worthy portraitier AntonyWilliams, but I have to say my top pick was certainly Christopher Green. His watery-realism style of sketching pockets of London activity is mesmerizing enough on computer screen, let alone when he spreads it six meters wide across a gallery wall. (A feat he completed for an exhibition of megalith Thames panoramas, catch them at the Prince’s Drawing School.)

His drawings are a love affair with the city, glorifying everything from the Walthamstow Marshes to a high-rise in Archway, Liverpool Street station at rush hour to Bermondsey at dusk.  Taking the busy and making of it beautiful, languid images which hang together in their darkness and seem to span great stretches of time. 

What I love most are the imperfections of his pen, the warped perspectives and evident creases where the paper has been folded. It’s reality as it often feels it should be captured - not with the hyper-pixilated perfection of a camera lens, but with interpretive sweeps of graphite that follow a pattern of truth, but leave room to dally. 

And a quick nod to runner-up Rachel Ross as well, whose still-life acrylics of "worn", "found", and "significant" objects are more than a little bit lovable. Enjoy them too. 

Christopher Green's website here. 

wearable planter.

The Atlanta, Georgia-based Wearable Planter crew use 3-D printing to make these obscenely likeable portable perennials for your lapel, decolletage or bicycle frame. So you'll never be caught out without a herbal nibble!

So stupid-cute, I can't even handle it. Enjoy their website here.

just a thought. [the space]

I highly recommend you take a look at The Space. Launched today, it's a joint venture from the British Art Council and the BBC. And while this six-month trial project may reek ever so slightly of Olympiad era "we support of the arts!" overkill, it's entirely fair to overlook this and appreciate the effort that is being made to close the gap between artist and audience, widening our exposure and access to a beautiful bundle of things we'd probably never make the time to go see.

So far featuring original interviews with artist like Gilbert and George, full length recordings of theater and dance performances, archival films from the British Film Institute and, oh wait, John Peel's entire record collection... The Space is definitely looking like the place.

Enjoy a good little BBC report here.

www.thespace.org

silo.

I recently made a trip to the brilliant So Far the Future gallery to see their current (and excellent) All About Hats exhibition - catching up with the work of these fab milliners.

But my visit also acquainted me with the work of the previous space holders: Silo design studio, whose Plastic Alchemy show I seem to have just missed.

"Hand made high tech" is how they describe themselves, and while their lofty design process intimidates (often involving intricate moulds and "growing" polystyrene building materials), the resultant bookshelves, tables, chairs and miscellany retain a playful un-pretension not often found in Designs of the Year nominated furniture. Joy of joys, I'd eat my ice cream Sundays off of these bad boys any day!

Silo's website here.

susanna majuri.

Looking at the work of Sussana Majuri is like recalling childhood trips to a natural history museum, a place where falsified realities told marvelous tales. 

You walk into the grand museum hall. Transfixed as you are by the spectacle in front of you, you mustn’t believe it’s real. Elephants loom large amongst spindle legged African storks that do not fly, surrounded by tall grass that does not grow. In another corner a frosty bear tears shreds from a salmon by a mute woodland stream, and in yet another corner a big bald eagle spreads his haughty wings while stuffed sparrows look on. All these tableaus, frozen in time, set scenes for our pleasure behind a pane of glass. So much more than a parody of the natural world - better to call it a half told truth, a version of life whose soul is made up of imaginary actions. 

Majuri’s photos perform a similar trick on two-dimensional surfaces, making fantasy worlds from real images, placing the emphasis on narrative and fiction. 

What a strange and beautiful use of water and bodies, no? Taking my mind in all sorts of funny directions right now, that’s for sure.

Enjoy more of this Helsinki-born babe’s work here.