More Blasting from the Pasting! ... wait what?

These are excepts from my Oxford's visual dictionary of nearly everything. It is lacking in some aspects when it comes to living up to it's title, but it makes it up in unintended humor and gorgeous illustrations. It's great fun to see what the norms of clothing, hair and technology were back in the day.

But it's much better fun to find all the strange compositions they came up with when trying to describe ordinary tasks.

Such as above, where one scuba diver is just about to assault the other. In this underwater attack surprise is everything, which is probably why he has decided to beat his fellow diver to a watery grave with an appropriately themed conch shell instead of using the handy knife he is wielding.

See fig. 8

Blast from the Past

While going through my stack of 'inspirationals', which amounts to a giant pile of photocopies, clippings and things I pick off the street, I stumbled across these wonderful educational children's magazines. They follow the alphabet in a general encyclopedia method and are littered with old school photographs and illustrations. How did this little gem of the 1970s find its way into my possession?

Well a few years ago one of my friend's decided to clear up her room and redecorate. In the usual high school girl fashion we all got very excited and came over sleep over style to help out. Some point during this little event, the magazines changed hands. I'm pretty sure the original owner was Jess Whiting, who's up in Brisbane now working in the management and curation side of the Arts. She had brought them over collage materials, but in the end they were spared the scissors and I convinced her to give them to me.

There are several other excerpts and delightful covers but instead of making an annoying giant post I just decided to put the rest in my flickr account. You can find them, and other scavenged, stolen and found images, here

Found

Old photographs have a certain quality about them, colours don't go pixel crazy in a horrible fluro of grey noise the same way they do in digital photographs. It might have been that before I moved to digital my photograph taking abilities were much higher. But what's more likely is = Film just turned out better.

So what if digital was much cheaper and more distribution friendly? I miss the old days of tearing open my packet of developed film in rabid excitement and sorting through my ill-lit and unfocussed crap to find a few good photographs. Those good photographs were amazing.

But really the whole process was much too expensive.

So now I opt for digging through other people's photographs. I found this set in an Antique and second hand store. These are just a few of my favourites. I'll add more when I finish scanning them in.

Found Art

I found these photo's discarded and scattered about in an outdoor parking lot.  As an artist, a cheapskate, and an obsessive hoarder I find great joy in picking things off the floor.  Images, metal objects and bits of wood are high on my list right now.  

I always justify my collection by telling myself about all the amazing art I will eventually make with it.  In reality it just sits under my bed gathering dust.  Until now!  In an attempt to clean my room I stumbled over these photos.  

Originally they weren't that interesting.  And after finding them in the carpark I washed them off, stacked them together tightly and stored them away.  Photographs and water do not mix.  Years later when I unearthed them they had glued themselves together into a little brick of stiffened card. 

I peeled them apart and the resulting mess is what I've posted.  I will be attempting to paint them later down the track but right now I'm just loving them as photographs.