The graffiti knitting epidemic

A bunch of ‘graffiti knitters’ are on the loose in the UK – hellbent on liberating us from the forces of drabness. Maddy Costa hits the streets with a woman called Deadly Knitshade

Purls allowed … Knit the City take the Thames. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for the Guardian

It’s a blustery Sunday afternoon on London Bridge and I’m exercising my right – or at least, the right of freemen in 11th-century London – to herd sheep across the Thames. They’re not real sheep, thankfully. They’re tiny knitted creatures, with spindly legs and multicoloured bodies, and snapping at their heels is a gnarly-looking wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Confused? Welcome to the world of graffiti knitting, or yarn bombing as it’s generally known. If you haven’t encountered it before, you might just over the next few days, as knitters across Britain celebrate wool week by “tagging” lamp-posts with knitted doilies, wrapping public statues in scarves and sending knitted animals scurrying about city streets. I can’t say exactly where, though, as it’s all hush hush.

My introduction to yarn bombing came courtesy of Knit the City, a tight-knit (sorry) London-based crew with fanciful names: my accomplices today are Deadly Knitshade, the Fastener and Shorn-a the Dead. For their Knitmare Before Christmas project, they attacked the statue of a ballerina outside the Royal Opera House with figures inspired by The Nutcracker, while Web of Woe found them installing a 13ft spider’s web, replete with trapped insects and fairies, in the “graffiti tunnel” beneath Waterloo station.

Brueghel painting saved by £1m grant

An Old Master by painter Pieter Brueghel the Younger will remain on public display after a government fund paid £1m to save it for the nation.

 The painting would have been put up for auction if the target was not met

The Procession to Calvary, completed in 1602, will remain on show at Nostell Priory in West Yorkshire.

The painting had been put up for sale for £2.7m. A campaign by The Art Fund and National Trust raised £1.7m.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund, which aims to save key historic items, has now stepped in with the final £1m.

The painting depicts Christ carrying the cross on his way to crucifixion and has hung at Nostell Priory, a stately home near Wakefield, for 200 years.

Beautiful Photoshop Illustrations By Artists Around The World

Photoshop is a magical tool for digital artists and photographers, and it rules the digital imaging world. It is not just a tool, though; Photoshop is a blank canvas that invites you to perform magic with your creativity. It gives you room to creatively manipulate photos and explore the artist in yourself.

To celebrate the upcoming holidays, in today’s post we decided to step away from technical design/coding-related topics and showcase some beautiful digital illustrations and their creators. Hopefully, the artwork will inspire you and stir your imagination.

As you know, so many more brilliant illustrations have been done by digital artists doing great work, but we cannot cover them all in a single post, so we will try to showcase them in our future posts (if you want to). If we forgot to mention the work of your favorite artist, please do share it with the other readers and let us know their name.

Painter Lucian Freud dies aged 88

David Sillito looks back at artist Lucian Freud’s famous
works

Sourced from the BBC – all links go to BBC pages

Realist painter Lucian Freud, one of
Britain’s most distinguished and highly regarded artists, has died aged 88.

New York dealer William Acquavella said Freud had died at his London home on
Wednesday after an unspecified illness.

Freud, a grandson of the psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud, was born in Berlin in
1922 and fled to Britain with his Jewish family in 1933, when he was 10.

Freud – particularly known for his paintings of nudes – became a British
citizen in 1939.

Boy on a Sofa fetched £1.49m
last year, a record price for a work on paper by Freud

His works have been increasingly sought after at recent auctions and his
portrayal of an overweight nude woman sleeping on a couch sold in 2008 for
$33.6m (£20.6m) – a world record for a work by a living artist.

‘Lived to paint’

Mr Acquavella described Freud “as one of the great painters of the 20th
Century”.

“In company he was exciting, humble, warm and witty. He lived to paint and
painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world.”

Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate gallery, said: “The vitality of
[Freud’s] nudes, the intensity of the still life paintings and the presence of
his portraits of family and friends guarantee Lucian Freud a unique place in the
pantheon of late 20th Century art.

“His early paintings redefined British art and his later works stand
comparison with the great figurative painters of any period.”

Featured artists . . . . . . so far

Featured artists . . . . . . so far

Banksy

Patrick Hughes

Chuck Close

Image of the decade

What artwork springs to mind as the image of the decade? Was it Martin Creed’s 2001 Turner Prize-winning exhibit of an empty gallery with the lights going on and off? Or perhaps you would nominate the 2008 installation of one of Jeff Koons’ kitsch-rather-than-cute giant puppies that dominated a stateroom in Versailles, epitomising a period when contemporary art dethroned more traditional art as the people’s favourite?

Andy Warhol art thief sought by police

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The World according to facebook

The world according to facebook

Read article (link to BBC)