Art Picks: Wind

The Wind by kamui (I have no other info on this artist)


What makes this picture work
Great bold composition and smart use of the medium.
The diagonal composition always looks dynamic, but here it is enhanced by the arrogant frame cropping and making the top half of the canvas the focus. The leaping sphinx is almost (the key point is, almost) too big for the frame, which reminds the viewer of a lucky snapshot photograph, further enhancing the dynamic effect. The two parrots help fill the space, as well as create and enhance secondary lines of action, "pulling" the sphinx along.
The lower half is filled with silhouetted trees, which underscore the height of the sphinx's leap and balance the composition without distracting the viewer's attention. Skillful use of texture and brushstroke is remarkable; they enhance the points of interest but never become a point to show off. The hair is lushly textured, but the spots are sketchy and don't distract from the feline body form. The front parrot is detailed, but the back one is subdued and sketchy. The trees are actually a posterized photo, but the collage technique is used so subtly and altered by hand, you would never realize that. Everything is used in moderation. Even the color is subdued and neutral to bring out the gold in the sphinx.

Incidentally, the sphinx is clearly a close relative to the one in Khnopff's Caress. It's good to see cultural allusions like this.

What could be improved
Cohesion could be better in some places. The artist clearly used photographs here, and used them well, but if you look at the way the head is attached to the neck, you could see that the forms and anatomical structures do not quite mesh believably. A part of it is the angle of the head, turned towards the viewer rather than forward. That might have been an artistic decision or limited by available photograph. But in either case the artist should have thought of where the muscles attach, rather than follow the reference to the letter.

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Art Picks: Big Bad Bunny Eater

"Big Bad Bunny Eater" by Bobby Chiu (imaginism)

What makes this picture work
This picture is a great example of intelligent humor.

Mimicry like this actually occurs in nature. The sort where the whole creature imitates another whole creature is more frequent, but creatures with "drawings" or "sculptures" made of a part of their body do exist. So we have believability; but the picture's real impact is hilarity. The realistic handling of textures and lighting gets combined with extremely stylized bunnies. Whimsical but entirely plausible details like the monster's fur mimicking a patch of grass or its ears getting co-opted into representing the fake "bunny"'s ones are next to the comically evil expression on its face. And then there is the whole premise of a huge monster pretending to be something tiny.

If the bunnies were realistic, we wouldn't believe that they could be fooled by the Eater's disguise. But if the whole picture were stylized, we wouldn't really see how bad the disguise really is. It's a perfect case of the realistic finish and well-grounded tidbits adding a lot of credibility to a very unrealistic and far-fetched situation, but it also makes the combination a major source of the humor, and that is rare.

What could be improved
The fur texture on the Eater's tail is a bit mechanical, and the regular clumping on it is out of place; I'd expect such clumping to happen under the throat or some other place where skin gets a lot of stretching.The greens could use more variety. The leaves on the forest floor are so bright that they suggest autumn, but all leaves still on the trees are green, and the vegetation seems tropical. All these things are technicalities and do not really detract anything big from the picture, though.



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