Pop Art Gallery, PopArt Machine Catalog

Welcome to PopArtMachine.com

Pop Art Machine is a CGI library that collects, curates and creates works of art. Our focus is the study of digital printmaking using public image sources as inspiration. Here you will find over 1,000,000 source images and countless finished prints side by side with the methodologies used to create.

Alejandro Cardenas Dogs Illustration Posters

Here are a couple of fun ones for today… illustrations of dogs and their owners by Alejando Cardenas — believe to be primarily a commercial and fashion artist. Not even sure which Pop Art Machine technique was used to build these posters from the small source files but the output is if nothing else, fun.

There is very little information about Alejandro Cardenas online. There is a video about the “business of death” which is believed to be of the same person. If you have more biographical info on this artist please post it.

Andy Warhol As Fashion Photographer Illustration

Trying a new production technique that overlays a semi transparent layer of the original image on top of the traced and simplified layer in order to bring texture and gap filling color into the composition. In this example illustration of Andy Warhol taking a photo at what might be a fashion show the effect is not lost but is subdued. Mixed media and photographs featuring this technique show great promise in the quest for the holy grail of pop art print production — enlarging small source images without compromising the integrity of the original artist’s intent.

The example shown here is taken from Art Dept’s staff illustrator Kim Demarco.

Fashion Art Rebecca Antoniou’s “Water Air Earth Fire”

Image based on Rebecca Antoniou’s “Water Air Earth Fire” … click image to download 5000×4850 pixel image suitable for large format printing.

Wish there was more to be said about Rebecca’s work — there’s precious little to be found about the artist online. The original image used for the art started life at art-dept.com at little more than 300 pixel wide.

Here is a recap of the technique used to enlarge and “pop-ify” the original. The two tools used are ImageMagick’s convert and Autotrace, a free raster to vector line tracer:



convert -verbose -monitor 1.jpg -strip -quality 100  +dither -quantize YUV -adaptive-resize 300  -quality 100 2.png

autotrace -report-progress -output-file=8.eps -output-format=eps -despeckle-tightness 2 -despeckle-level 10 2.png

convert -verbose -monitor -density 1200  8.eps -density 300 -quality 100 -quality 100 pre1.png

convert -verbose -monitor pre1.png -fuzz 10% -transparent white -quality 100 pre3.png

convert -verbose -monitor 2.png -adaptive-resize 5000 -quality 100 2r.png

convert -verbose -monitor 2r.png pre3.png -quality 100 -quantize RGB -colorspace RGB -flatten -density 150 -fuzz 10% -fill white -transparent white -quality 100 pre4.png

convert -verbose -monitor -background white pre4.png -flatten -quality 100 preview.jpg

Fashion Illustration David Downton Inspired Art

Works based on David Downton’s fashion illustrations. Click on the thumbnail to download large format print ready images.

Note — these images should be viewed at the equivalent of 150 DPI or better for smooth edges. Generally speaking when printing or photo finishing these images, the output device will take that into account. Viewing these images in a web browser may not show them in their best light.

David Downton has attended Paris Haute Couture shows for more than a decade. His illustrations chart both the back stage and front of house of the couture world. His portfolio includes portraits of models Erin O’Connor, Lily Cole, Linda Evangelista and Carmen.

His reports have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Saturday Telegraph, Harpers Bazaar (Australia) and The Independent as well as Visionaire and Vogue and he was commissioned to create an illustrated couture portfolio for Vogue China.

Commercial clients include Tiffany’s New York, SAKS 5th Avenue, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, Burberry, and the British Fashion Council. His work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Conningsby Gallery, London (1998 and 1999) and at the Couture Voyeur show at London College of Fashions Fashion Space Gallery (2006). Downton has also collaborated with supermodel Erin O’Connor on a number of occasions including shows at the Rootstein Gallery, New York (2002) and at the Joyce Ma Gallery, Palais Royal, Paris (2003).

In 2006 he was commissioned by Brown’s to design the Christmas window display and invitation for their South Moulton Street store. His work has featured on the front cover of a special edition of Jane Austen’s Emma, produced by the Daily Telegraph†and on the cover of Cally Blackman’s 100 Years of Fashion Illustration (2007).

convert -verbose -monitor 1.jpg -strip -quality 100 +dither -quantize YUV -adaptive-resize 300 2.png

convert -verbose -monitor -background white pre4.png -flatten -density 150 preview.jpg

HAIR … Screen Print Inspired by Gregory Corso Poem

Click images of interest to download high resolution image files suitable for printing.

My beautiful hair is dead
Now I am the rawhead
O when I look in the mirror
the bald I see is balder still

When I sleep the sleep I sleep
is not at will
And when I dream I dream children waving goodbye—
It was lovely hair once
it was
Hours before shop windows gum-machine mirrors with great
combs

pockets filled with jars of lanolin
Washed hair I hated
With dirt the waves came easier and stayed
Yet nothing would rid me of dandruff

Vitalis Lucky-Tiget Wildroot Brilliantine nothing–
To lie in bed and be hairless is a blunder on God could allow–
The bumps on my head–I wouldn’t mind being bald
if the bumps on my head made people sorry–
Careless God! Now how can old ladies cookie me?

How to stand thunderous on an English cliff
a hectic Heathcliff?
O my lovely stained-glass hair is dry dark invisible
not there!
Sun! it is you who are to blame!
And to think I once held my hair to you
like a rich proud silk merchant–
Bald! I’m bald!

Best now to get a pipe
and forget girls.

Subways take me one of your own
seat me anybody
let me off any station anyman
What use my walking up Fifth Ave.
or going to theatre for intermission
or standing in front of girls schools
when there is nothing left for me to show–

Wrestlers are bald
And though I’m thin O God give me the chance to wrestle
or even be a Greek wrestler with a bad heart
and make that heart make me sweat
–my head swathed in towels in an old locker room
that I speak good English before I die–
Barbers are murdered in the night!
Razors and scissors are left in rain!
No hairdresser dare scheme a new shampoo!
No premature hair on the babe’s pubis!
Wigmaker! help me! my fingernails are knived in your door!

I want a wig of winter’s vast network!
A bear of hogs snouting acorns!
Samson bear with me! Just a moustache
and I’d surmount governance over Borneo!
O even a nose hair, and ingrown hair,
and I’d tread beauty a wicked foot, ah victory!
Useless useless
I must move away from sun
Live elsewhere
–a bald body dressed in old lady cloth.
O the fuzzy wuzzy grief!
Mercy, wreathed this coldly lonely head a crowning glory!
I stand in darkness

weeping to angels washing their oceans of hair.
There goes my hair! shackled to a clumping wind!

Come back, hair, come back!
I want to grow sideburns!
I want to wash you, comb you, sun you, love you!
as I ran from you wild before–
I thought surely this nineteen hundred and fifty nine of now

that I need no longer bite my fingernails
but have handsome gray hair
to show how profoundly nervous I am.

Damned be hair!
Hair that must be plucked from soup!
Hair that clogs the bathtub!
Hair that costs a dollar fifty to be murdered!
Disgusting hair! eater of peroxide! dye! sand!
Monks and their bagel heads!
Ancient Egypt and their mops!

Negroes and their stocking caps!
Armies! Universities! Industries! and their branded crews!
Antoinette Du Barry Pompadour and their platinum cakes!
Veronica Lake Truman Capote Ishka Bibble Messiahs Paganinis
Bohemians Hawaiians poodles

————————————————————————————————————

Gregory Nunzio Corso was born in New York’s Greenwich Village on March 26, 1930, to teenage Italian parents. A year later, his mother moved back to Italy. After living in orphanages and foster homes, at age eleven Corso moved back in with his father, who had just remarried. After two years, however, he ran away; upon being caught he was placed in a boys’ home for two years. He also spent several months in the New York City jail while being held as a material witness in a theft trial. He was returned to his father, but after running away again was sent to Bellevue Hospital for three months “for observation.” At age sixteen, he began a three-year sentence at Clinton State Prison for another theft. While in prison, he read widely in the classics, including Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, and Christopher Marlowe, as well as the dictionary; it was there that he also began writing poems.

In a Greenwich Village bar in 1950, the year of his release from prison, he met Allen Ginsberg, who introduced him to experimental poetry. In 1954 he moved to Boston, where again he devoted himself to the library—this time at Harvard University. His first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1954, and the publication of his first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems (1955), was underwritten by Harvard and Radcliffe students. Corso worked at times as a laborer, a newspaper reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner, and a merchant seaman.

The following year he went to San Francisco, where he performed readings and interviews with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and became known as one of the major figures of the Beat movement. From 1957 to 1958 Corso lived in Paris, where he wrote many of the poems that became his book Gasoline, which Lawrence Ferlinghetti/City Lights Books published in 1958. From 1970 to 1974 Corso worked on a manuscript that was to be titled Who Am I—Who I Am, but the manuscript was stolen. He did not issue another major work until 1981’s Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. Among other notable books are Bomb (1958), The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), Long Live Man (1962), Elegaic Feelings American (1970), and Mindfield: New and Selected Poems (Thunder’s Mouth, 1989).

Corso traveled extensively, and taught briefly at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and for several summers at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. (He was dismissed from the SUNY teaching position in 1965 for refusing to sign an affadavit certifying that he was not a member of the Communist Party.) He was married three times and had five children. Gregory Corso died on January 17, 2001, at the age of seventy.

The source images for “Hair Lament #1″ are from a soon to be released collection of over 500,000 vector pop art objects. Hair Lament #1 series represents group one of five in the series all of which will be published at Pop Art Machine.

Starting with low resolution (300 pixels or less) photo objects found on public web sites, an advanced algorithm was applied to each object resulting in Pop Art style vector images. These vectors were subsequently quantized and flattened with coordinated color backgrounds.

A physical installation featuring these works is under way for a commercial client.

Andy Warhol Prints : Jean Cocteau 1983

Andy Warhol. (American, 1928-1987). Jean Cocteau. (1983). Oil stick on paper and colored paper, 31 1/2 x 24″ (80 x 61 cm). Original source stolen without remorse from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Click on image to download 4167×5500 JPEG suitable for large format printing.

“Cocteau and Warhol’s work share an…ironic detachment,” observes Phil Watts, Associate Professor of the French Department at the University of Pittsburgh. “There’s also a common sensibility in their works, a common aestheticization of the body, of the male body…. I know that Jean Marais was one of Cocteau’s favorite stars, and he may have had the same function in Cocteau’s films as some of the Factory stars had for Andy Warhol’s films.

“Cocteau was a galvanizer of talent, a catalyst in the art world” continues Watts, confirming further uncanny similarities between the French surrealist and pop’s largest icon. “He’s someone who discovered new talent, who encouraged new talent. He’s one of the people who discovered the writer Raymond Radiguet , and who helped to publish Jean Genet, who had started writing his novels in prison. Cocteau was sort of a prominent figure in a the gay world,” notes Watts, “and he brought a lot of underground gay writers to the attention of the public.

Andy Warhol Prints : Camouflage Paintings Portfolio

Andy Warhol Edition Prints -> Camouflage : Portfolio of eight screenprints with flourescent colors, i.e. a series of eight large format prints based on the works of Andy Warhol available for free download and subsequent printing.

Did you know you can print a Warhol with an online photo processor just by downloading these images and ordering up a print? Now that is pop art.

Click image of choice to download. Suggestion: image is very large — print ready 38″x38″ approximately or 11,400 pixels square approximately at 300 DPI. You should save to disk and view image with a proper image management software.

Original Edition Edition of 80, 3 PP, 1 EP, 84 individual TP not in portfolios, signed and numbered in pencil on verso by the executor of The Estate of Andy Warhol on a stamped certificate of authenticity.

Pop Art Machine’s adaptations of Andy Warhol’s Camouflage series is an interpretation of the artist’s original artwork using computer generated image techniques.

Pop Art Machine does not represent these images as actual Andy Warhol prints but mere representations of them based on thumbnail source images found in public archives.

Load image: 100%
1.jpg JPEG 295×300 295×300+0+0 DirectClass 8-bit 14.2422kb
Normalize image: 100%

Resize image: 100%
writing raw profile: type=APP12, length=15
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autotrace -report-progress -output-file=8.eps -output-format=eps -color-count 256 -despeckle-tightness .7 -despeckle-level 20 2.png
“gs” -q -dQUIET -dPARANOIDSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOPROMPT -dMaxBitmap=500000000 -dAlignToPixels=0 -dGridFitTT=0 “-sDEVICE=pngalpha” -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 “-r820.8×820.8″ -g11400×11594 “-sOutputFile=/var/tmp/magick-k82Kxreb” “-f/var/tmp/magick-O9FjsmqG” “-f/var/tmp/magick-vYf1Qaqn”

One of the last serial groups of paintings Warhol completed before his death in 1987, these paintings are inspired by the military motif of camouflage.

The Camouflage Paintings confront issues of pattern and design within the context of the New York School of Abstraction. Using an image which is itself a simplification of nature, Warhol addresses the history of landscape painting. As Thomas Kellein puts this irony in historical perspective for the introduction to his seminal exhibition “Warhol Abstracts”:

With the Camouflages, a military pattern that helped hide weapons of war in the landscape was brought into play for an abstract, informal flood of paintings. Warhol expanded the vegetable like effect of leaf-shaped sprigs and islands, first onto square, then onto rectangular formats, until the “all over” ideal of the Abstract Expressionists had been brought back to its familiar origin: the water lily paintings of Claude Monet. This historically burdened design was

brightened and lightened by colors to such an extent that we stand in front of some spiritually emphatic testimony to abstract painting, ready to lose ourselves in the Camouflages as in a landscape.

There is a very terrible drama in these paintings, or a lighthearted one. Nothing in them which is not Government Issue, except the colors chosen. They don’t mean anything, nothing is expressed (what is ever expressed, anyway?) beyond certain formal relationships of color and form, line and plane. These often have reference to other artists, Gauguin, Dubuffet, Albers, and of course Matisse, among many others.

The middle range has the iconographic isolation of a Creecy or a Kandinsky. The largest are a tapestry mode, or a Vuillard wallpainting. But what is looked after by the artist is the unexciting relationship, at first, between plane and perspective, and then the two-color perspective indicating an active principle, finally the overwhelming primacy of the descriptive mode as a variable of contiguity, the sort of thing that is an aspect of visual illusion.

A giraffe’s head and shadow over a fried egg, an udder or glove under a branch, such images suggest themselves at first, then there is the Mediterranean Sea, various landscapes, etc. Impossible to know where you are, and that is where the irreducible poetry, unascertainable, but not indeterminate, comes into play.

Warhol is reported to have asked his studio assistants, “What can I do that would be abstract but not really abstract?” Camouflage gave him the opportunity to work with both an abstract pattern and an immediately recognizable image, rich in associations. Unlike military motifs, Warhol’s camouflage paintings reflect bright synthetic and inorganic colors, which would not provide a veil or disguise in any landscape. Created by artists at the

military’s request, camouflage dates from the early 20th century. It was first used for concealment of equipment, and then for uniforms. As Warhol invented more camouflage works he incorporated the pattern into his self-portraits. In these works, the juxtaposition of identity and disguise mirrors the artist’s lifelong struggle to gain notoriety while keeping his own private life hidden.

Warhol also collaborated with the fashion designer Stephen Sprouse to create a line of camouflage clothing. This apparel brought the association of war into high fashion, although women dressed in camouflage gowns did not blend in, but instead attracted attention in urban settings. Over the past few decades the military has struggled to create an effective urban camouflage uniform, but hasn’t succeeded because the environment is constantly changing. Unfettered by such concerns, the main interest of contemporary urban clothing designers is to make a bold statement.

If you’d like to get your grubby little hands on the EPS vectors please email info@popartmachine.com and they’ll be sent right over.

Convert Photo to Pop Art For Free

This is a first attempt at offering the Pop Art Machine’s filter process to the public. If you like this let us know and we’ll add features like image control knobs that go to eleven, making it possible to adjust a number of settings to fine tune the image output.

Other options, down the road, may include multiple image output formats (including vector formats), mixing images, transparencies, collage techniques, centerlining and a number of techniques often used here for our exhibits.

NOTES: this test is limited to JPEG files under 350k only. Images are removed periodically, so if you like the output, be sure to save it.

Are the results really pop? Generally speaking output taken directly from the filter is not ready to hang on a wall. But sometimes you get lucky. And with some effort many low resolution photos can be made into entertaining if not genuinely good art.

Just Loomis Saint Tropez Fashion Color Poster

Just Loomis has lived and worked in Europe and the U.S. A well known fashion photographer in the 1980s for Harper’s Bazaar and The New York Times Magazine, his photographs have been nominated for a Grammy Award and chosen as Photo of the Year by American Photographer. Loomis and his family eventually went west to pursue filmmaking and documentary photography. His photographs of children were recently shown at the Patricia Correia Gallery in Santa Monica, Ca. His recent projects include a book as well as work for clients Dreamworks and Warner Brothers Records.

In the late 1980s, Just Loomis was an art school graduate with his eye on the fashion world. With a group of friends, he moved to Milan, where he photographed runway shows and followed his favorite Italian models about town as they lived their lives to the hilt. The exuberant young women, with their open laughter and graceful gesticulations, were so intriguing to Loomis that he stayed in Milan for four years.

“I was reacting against a lot of studio photography going on at the time,” he says. “I gravitated towards the fresh and joyful rather than the constructed and artificial.” Loomis also had an eye for classic beauty, for moments that seem to have sprung—along with the models’ pearl chokers, up-dos, strapless gowns and brick-red lips—from Fellini’s influential film, La Dolce Vita. With a nod to this filmic inspiration, Loomis chose to portray an anachronistically openhearted fashion community, where young people rejoiced in their beauty and the sweet life it afforded them.

After recording the works of Just Loomis from a variety of online sources, a bit of color was splashed on the St Tropez image using Photoshop’s magnetic selector and colorize functions. It was then processed through the standardized Pop Art Machine filter at as-found resolution:

1) convert -verbose -monitor 1.jpg -quality 100  2.png

2) autotrace -report-progress -output-file=8.eps -output-format=eps -color-count 256 -despeckle-tightness .7 -despeckle-level 20  2.png

3) convert -monitor -verbose -density 300 8.eps -quality 100 preview.png

Vector EPS, used to create higher resolution output, is available upon request. For vectors or any additional information please email info@popartmachine.com or use the comments forms.

William S. Burroughs: Cities of the Red Night

Three new free pop art posters featuring variations on William S. Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night cover art are now available at the Pop Art Machine.

Cities of the Red Night based on The Triumph of Death: an oil on panel, approximately 117 by 162 centimeters (46 x 63.8 in), painted c. 1562 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It currently hangs in the Museo del Prado, Madrid. In this adaptation, the portrait of a young howling boy is featured, much in line with the subject matter of the book.

The painting is a panoramic landscape of death: the sky in the distance is blackened by smoke from burning cities and the sea is littered with shipwrecks. Armies of skeletons advance on the hapless living, who either flee in terror or try vainly to fight back. Skeletons kill people in a variety of ways - slitting throats, hanging, drowning, and even hunting with skeletal dogs. In the foreground, skeletons haul a wagon full of skulls, and ring the bell that signifies the death knell of the world. A fool plays the lute while a skeleton behind him plays along; a starving dog nibbles at the face of a child; a cross sits lonely and impotent in the center of the painting. People flee into a tunnel decorated with crosses whilst a skeleton on horseback slaughters people with a scythe. The painting clearly depicts people of different social backgrounds - from peasants and soldiers to nobles and even a king and a cardinal - being taken by death indiscriminately.

Based on the 2003 Russian Cities of the Red Night publication, this poster presents a somewhat Magna style picture of the original book cover featuring a young muscular man complete with angel wings and an oversized weapon of cartoon proportions.

In the background note the ship which represents the book’s point of view which follows a group of pirate boys, lead by Noah Blake, who land in South America to liberate it with The Articles, i.e. Captain James Mission’s Libertatia or foundation of life based on personal freedoms.

The book’s plot sees a group of boys become pirates and create a colony based on freedom. Surrounding the main plot are many sub-plots which link into the novel, following these can be tricky for some who has not read Burroughs before as time and space seem to change quite frequently and without warning or explanation. The sub-plots follow Clem Snide searching for a missing boy and Dr Benway and the disease which is plaguing humanity.

It is well known that William S. Burroughs often enjoyed hand guns. In this poster an outlined image of Burroughs in multiple shooting poses is balanced with a twister and a couple of sunflowers both evoking hints of rural Kansas

The sunflowers heads also give the vague appearance of bullet holes which reflect Burroughs’ own mixture of guns paint, canvas, doors and other objects for the creation of art.

Pop Art Shows: art for the people, pop by the people

Pop Art is a vision of democratized art within society. It is, in fact, the true future of art: art for the people, by the people.

In the recent past, art production and ownership was naturally hindered by the physical limitations of the amount of art one could personally produce. This inspired artists like as Warhol to set up his Art Factory — a studio production team mainly producing screen prints of Andy’s original designs in the earlier years and a fully autonomous art machine in later years.

Pop emancipates art from the notion of the artist working in his studio and returns instead to an earlier model of the art studio collective producing art to order. That’s one reason why you see a strong Japanese presence of Ukiyo-e, Hanga and Manga in our archives.

Once was the time that every home was adorned with original art — from the first daubs on cave walls to the highly decorated homes of the Egyptians through to the intensely decorated artefacts of the Celts. Pop art in one sense has reduced art to the mundane (Warhol’s Campbell Soup can being an obvious example) and yet, simultaneously, elevated popular culture, media and celebrity itself to the lofty heights of art.

The most encouraging thing about pop art is the way it offers, at last, real art back to the people at a price every working man or woman can afford - a price dictated by the materials involved in its production only and free from the price hikes that galleries would make in order to preserve it for the elite.

1) consecrate the pop aesthetic

2) destroy what you worship

3) abhor the copyright

4) abide the obliger

Through the millions of pages available at Pop Art Machine, we encourage you to download and produce works for your use, for sale, for rip off, for drab office walls, your dog, etc..

And as we press forward to bigger and better machine processes and interactive pop design tools, we ask that you help us only by spreading the word about our ideas and our web site. Link to http://popartmachine.com/ and download often!

Manga Godzilla with F18; a Tom Kristensen Pop Art Conversion

Tom Kristensen, born 1962, is a passionate ukiyo-e collector and printmaker from Australia who works in typical Japanese ‘moku hanga’ style: self-carved and self-printed with natural Japanese pigments on hand-made washi paper. Tom was first discovered by Eric van den Ing from Saru Gallery, where Paul Binnie was first introduced. In 2004 Tom Kristensen has begun to work on a series ‘36 Views of Green Island’.

Merritt, Helen and Yamada, Nanako, “Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints 1900-1975″, University of Hawaii Press, 1995, ISBN 0-8248-1732-X

Lane, Richard, “Images from the Floating World: The Japanese Print”, Fribourg, 1978, ISBN 0-914427-54-7

Laurance, P.Roberts, “A Dictionary of Japanese Artists”, John Weatherhill Inc., New York, 1976

Frances Blakemore “Who is Who in Modern Japanese Prints”, John Weatherhill, New York and Tokyo, 1975. ISBN 0-8348-0101-9

From artlineo.com
Date Sold Thursday, April 12, 2007
Title Godzilla with F18
limited edition
Artist Tom Kristensen born 1962 Biography Short Biography
Signature Signed and numbered by artist.
Dated 2006
Medium/Technique Woodblock print.
Impression Printed on a thick Japanese kozo washi.
Colors Printed with Japanese powdered pigments, gum and rice paste.
Description “Godzilla with F18″. For a description of this design, please click on the link “related article”.
Note Self-carved and self-printed by the artist.
Original Width Item 8.7 inches = 22.0 cm
Original Height Item 9.6 inches = 24.5 cm
Original Width Image 7.1 inches = 18.0 cm
Original Height Image 7.3 inches = 18.5 cm
Related Article Kaiju Manga

convert -verbose -monitor -quality 100 -normalize  1.jpg 2.png

autotrace -report-progress -output-file=8.eps -output-format=eps -despeckle-tightness .7 -despeckle-level 20 -color-count=256 2.png

convert -monitor -verbose -density 600 8.eps -normalize -density 600 -fuzz 10%  -transparent white  -quality 100 preview.png

Muhammad Ali standing over a fallen Sonny Liston in a boxing ring

TITLE: Muhammad Ali standing over a fallen Sonny Liston in a boxing ring
CALL NUMBER:NYWTS - BIOG–Clay, Cassius–vs. Liston, Sonny–1965 [P&P]

REPRODUCTION NUMBER:LC-USZ62-120902 (b&w film copy neg.)
No information on creator or on reproduction rights found with the image, 1998.

New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

REPOSITORY:Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Raiju Japanese Folk Thunder Demon Print

See links at the end of this post to download 4171 x 5876 print ready images. EPS and larger formats available upon request. Don’t be shy.

A demon from common Japanese mythology whose name means “thunder animal”. It is often presented as a demon of lightning in the shape of a small cat. During thunderstorms it becomes extremely agitated and leaps from tree to tree. If a tree shows the marks of lightning, people say that Raiju’s claws have scratched it open.

The demon likes hiding in human navels, so, if afraid, a person should sleep on his or her belly during thunderstorms. However Raiju’s are mostly benign.

A raiju’s small size and timid nature makes it a neutral creature. Ancient Raiju were great tigers which fought against the angels, however now, Raijus are small cats which wander looking mostly for food.

Item 25636; from artelino.com
Date Sold Sunday, February 18, 2007
Title Action - 2
Artist Tadashige Nishida born 1942
Signature “T.Nishida” in pencil on the lower margin.
Seal Artist’s seal on the lower margin.
Dated 2005
Edition Size 150
Description “Action - 2″ A black cat with golden eyes on solid red background.
Width Item 11.4 inches = 29.0 cm
Height Item 16.3 inches = 41.5 cm
Width Image 8.5 inches = 21.5 cm
Height Image 13.2 inches = 33.5 cm

Contrast stretched Datacraft Sozaijiten Vol.036 Fabric & Traditional Japanese Patterns number SzV036-010

Background:
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2) autotrace -report-progress -output-file=8.eps -output-format=eps -despeckle-tightness .7 -despeckle-level 20 -color-count=256 2.png
3) convert -monitor -verbose -density 300 8.eps -normalize -transparent white -fill green -colorize 80% -quality 100 preview.png **

** Modify green fill with color choice — in these examples you see primary colors plus orange and a gradient fill for the metallic which is not shown in the ImageMagick example at the moment. Inquire for details. No PhotoShop!

Foreground:
1) convert -verbose -monitor -quality 100 -normalize 1.jpg 2.png
2) autotrace -report-progress -output-file=8.eps -output-format=eps -despeckle-tightness .7 -despeckle-level 20 -color-count=256 2.png
3) convert -monitor -verbose -density 300 8.eps -normalize -fuzz 10% -transparent white -quality 100 preview.png

Note the eyes are a bright yellow which is actually quite nice — in the original version, through the color reduction and fuzzed transparency application, the eyes revealed the background layer which in its own right is interesting and does some tie together between the disparate sources. This final(?) round of work features the original eye color.

Hanga Cat with Japanese Pattern Poster

Top layer “cat” by Tadashige Nishida, born 1942 . . . a Pop Art work in progress.

Two common embodiments of the cat in Japanese mythology are at two extremes. There is the cat god of lightning, a frenzied creature called Raiju, who leaps frantically from tree to tree in a thunderstorm, scratching the trees with its razor-sharp claws and creating the sound of thunder.

Then, there is the cat god of good luck—Maneki Neko, who sits beneficently with its paw raised, and has become absolutely ubiquitous in countless shops and homes. In the complex history of this myth, the gesture of the raised paw may be based on images of cats washing their face—an action they sometimes perform in the company of strangers. At some point, a link was made between a cat washing its face and the presence of visitors; as time went on, it became causal—the sight of a cat washing its face could actually mean visitors were coming. From there came the next step: that a cat washing its face would invite visitors, much like an inviting hand.

Tadashige Nishida was born on Amami Oshima Island in Kagoshima Prefecture. He studied at Chiba University. In the 1960s he went to Spain and the U.S.A. to extend his art studies. Tadashige Nishida works in woodblock technique. His favorite subjects are cats. The artist is internationally known.
Literature sources used for artist biographies:

Merritt, Helen and Yamada, Nanako, “Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints 1900-1975″, University of Hawaii Press, 1995, ISBN 0-8248-1732-X

Lane, Richard, “Images from the Floating World: The Japanese Print”, Fribourg, 1978, ISBN 0-914427-54-7

Laurance, P.Roberts, “A Dictionary of Japanese Artists”, John Weatherhill Inc., New York, 1976

Frances Blakemore “Who is Who in Modern Japanese Prints”, John Weatherhill, New York and Tokyo, 1975. ISBN 0-8348-0101-9

Original Image Data
Item 25636; from artelino.com
Date Sold Sunday, February 18, 2007
Title Action - 2
Artist Tadashige Nishida born 1942
Signature “T.Nishida” in pencil on the lower margin.
Seal Artist’s seal on the lower margin.
Dated 2005
Edition Size 150
Description “Action - 2″ A black cat with golden eyes on solid red background.
Width Item 11.4 inches = 29.0 cm
Height Item 16.3 inches = 41.5 cm
Width Image 8.5 inches = 21.5 cm
Height Image 13.2 inches = 33.5 cm

Contrast stretched Datacraft Sozaijiten Vol.036 Fabric & Traditional Japanese Patterns number SzV036-010

Pending publication! If interested, please inquire. First version — additional versions pending.

Fashion Tie-Waist Dress in Black Head Chopped

“We can’t get enough of this versatile style. Dress it up with heels, go casual with flats. Sleeveless and sexy in warm weather, sophisticated with a cardigan when it’s cooler.”

Details
- High-quality woven cotton.
- Elasticized, drawstring-styled v-neckline ties at top, raw-edged ruffle trim.
- Sleeveless, elasticized empire waist, self-tie.
- Shirring throughout, hits at knee.

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Black Mask was a pulp magazine launched in April 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to support the loss-making but prestigious literary magazine Smart Set. Mencken was a well-known literary journalist and sometime poet; Nathan a drama critic. They had been financially successful with another pulp money spinner of theirs called Parisienne, which itself had been followed by an erotic stablemate called Saucy Stories. Keeping Smart Set solvent was always their priority, and there had initially been plans to follow up Saucy Stories with an all-Negro pulp.

These plans were scrapped in favor of Black Mask. It was a purely commercial venture, in direct contrast to Smart Set, and its first issue was not even devoted exclusively to crime. In an open attempt to cater to as wide a readership as possible, Black Mask initially offered “Five magazines in one: the best stories available of adventure, the best mystery and detective stories, the best romances, the best love stories, and the best stories of the occult.” The few pages devoted to detective stories offered little that was special. It was all standard, English-influenced mystery.

Noriyuki Haga Crash Yamaha Motor Italia WSB Team

Japanese rider Noriyuki Haga of Yamaha Motor Italia WSB team loses control of his motorbike during the the race 1 of the 2008 Spanish Round of the SKB World Superbike Championship at Ricardo Tormo racetrack in Cheste, near Valencia, Spain, Sunday, April 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Fernando Bustamante)

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Cyclists crossing Mirabeau Bridge over Durance River Gap, France Tour de France bicycle race

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REPRODUCTION NUMBER:LC-USZ62-120835 (b&w film copy neg.)
Publication may be restricted. For information see “New York World-Telegram …,” (

New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

Tour de France (Bicycle race)–1950-1960.
Bicycle racing–France–Gap–1950-1960.

REPOSITORY:Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Race Flag Checkered Finish Checker Flags

The exact origins of the use of a checkered flag to end races are lost in history, although there are many theories. A possible though unlikely theory is that horse races during the early days of the settlement of the American Midwest were followed by large public meals and that to signal that the meals were ready and racing should come to an end, a checkered tablecloth was waved.

Another origin theory claim is that the checkered flag’s earliest known use was for 19th century bicycle races in France.

A more likely explanation is that a single-colored flag would be less conspicuous against the background of a crowd, especially when early races were run on dirt tracks (and therefore dust reduced the driver’s visibility).
The earliest known photographic record of a checkered flag being used to end a race was from Long Island, New York in 1904 at the inaugural Vanderbilt Cup race. Some historians dispute the dating of this photograph, and attribute it to the Vanderbilt races of 1906 or 1908.

A 2006 publication “The Origin of the Checker Flag - A Search for Racing’s Holy Grail”, written by historian Fred Egloff and published by the International Motor Racing Research Center at Watkins Glen, traces the flag’s origin to one Sidney Waldon, an employee of the Packard Motor Car Company, who in 1906 devised the flag to mark “checking stations” (now called “checkpoints”) along the rally-style events of the Glidden Tour.

In 1980, USAC flagman Duane Sweeney started a tradition at the Indianapolis 500 by waving twin checkered flags at the end of the race. Previous flagmen had only used a single flag. Sweeney also marked the first use of twin green flags at the start of the race.

Water Curtain Umbrella Rain Singapore

Office workers take shelter under their umbrellas as they walk past a building’s exterior landscaped with a water curtain on Thursday March 13, 2008, in Singapore.

The city-state is experiencing unusually wet weather this March due to moisture-laden winds from the Pacific Ocean, which are forming massive rain clouds over the region according to weather reports.

Moist winds are due to a ‘moderately strong La Nina’ in the Pacific Ocean. La Nina is a phenomenon causing cooler, wetter weather.

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Pensacola Panoramic Photos

Good news I fit all three panoramics on a single 20×30 sheet. The quality should be pretty good — a guy could spend some time touching them up if you wanted to get museum quality output but these are not bad.

You should try to save the image to your computer rather than displaying it in a web browser due to the size of the file. Take that image and either upload it to a photo finisher or put on a CD or memory stick for local processing. If you go local you can get some help but will pay more. What you want either way is a 20 inch by 30 inch poster print.

After printed, you can razor cut each image out and dry mount on foam core or get them framed. A 20×30 sheet of foam core is just a few bucks and would make for a great inexpensive display.

> Thanks for your assistance, where can I send you what I owe or
> what-ever,for your help?
>
> Frank

> Thanks for the quick reply.
> Is there anyway that those 3 photo’s can be copied, or bought as
> individual photos?
> Last year I copied the individual copies of the two port scenes and taped
> them together, but there has to be a better way. The individual photos of
> the port scene are on the first page of the 143 photo’s. I have an
> original panoramic photo taken of another part of the water front, and
> it’s roughly 22-24 inches long and about I’d say 5 inches wide.(It’s at my
> fathers house). I am from Pensacola, that’s why I’m interested in the
> photo’s. I know that the Detroit Publishing Company were the original
> makers of the photo’s, as that was were I had seen them originally?
> Do you have any suggestions about how to go about making, or buying a long
> photo? I’m new on the computer as I have recently let the 19th century to
> join everyone else in the 21st century!

Urban Outfitters Rip Off Fashion

Click thumb to see 5000 pixel wide poster proofs. Images are deliverable via EPS or large format JPEG, TIFF, etc. Contact us for access.

1) Truly Madly Deeply Say Cheese Crew Tee
$28.00
Lightweight cotton t-shirt cut long and loose with a scoopneck. Finished with a photo-worthy graphic at the front. Exclusive to Urban Outfitters. Made in the USA. Machine wash.
*Medium/Regular fit
*27″l from shoulder to hem
*Fits true to size
*Cotton

2) Japanese Tiger V Neck
$28.00
Washed-soft tee cut with a deep-v neckline and printed with a bright graphic at the front. Exclusive to Urban Outfitters. Made in the USA. Machine wash.
*Medium/Regular fit
*26″l from shoulder to hem
*Fits true to size
*Cotton

3) Sublimination Kaleidoscope Tee
$38.00
Sheer sublimated t-shirt cut long with a v-neck and elastic waist. Finished with a large buttoned keyhole opening at the back. Exclusive to Urban Outfitters. Made in the USA. Hand wash.
*Medium/Regular fit
*28″l from shoulder to hem*Cotton, polyester`

4) Truly Madly Deeply V Neck Tee
$28.00
Soft cotton t-shirt cut long with a deep-v neckline and topped with bright graphics. Exclusive to Urban Outfitters. Made in the USA. Machine wash.
*Medium/Regular fit
*27″l from shoulder to hem
*Fits true to size
*Cotton

5) Alyssa Zukas Heart Tee
$28.00
Soft cotton t-shirt cut long with a deep-v neck and finished with a heart graphic at the front. Exclusive to Urban Outfitters. Made in the USA. Machine wash.
*Medium/Regular fit
*26.5″l from shoulder to hem
*Fits true to size
*Cotton

6) Bizarre Love Triangle Skull Stars Tee
$28.00
Soft cotton t-shirt cut long with a scoopneck and topped with a star skull at the front. Exclusive to Urban Outfitters. Made in the USA. Machine wash.
*Medium/Regular fit
*27″l from shoulder to hem
*Cotton

Alix Malka Fashion Photography

ALIX MALKA is a talented fashion photographer. Born in Paris, Alix Malka is today one of the most asked for photographers by the international magazines. His inspiration comes from the likes of Pedro Almodovar and John Waters, as well as designers like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. Malka’s images suggest tastes for rich, exuberant and sophisticated style. Alix entered the world of the fashion in 1985 when he began work with director Tierry Mugler.

Pop Art works based on Alix Malka’s photography. Click images for larger size. Large scale vector EPS or finished rasters in JPEG or TIFF are available upon request.

The linked images are quick scan proofs at 2500 pixels wide. Consider these draft quality. If you like any of them leave comments and we’ll publish production quality output.

Ring-tailed Lemur Poster Download

In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, a ring-tailed lemur nuzzles a cub at a zoo in Hefei, capital of east China’s Anhui Province, on Thursday, March 27, 2008. The cub was born on March 24. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Liu Bingsheng)

The Ring-tailed Lemur (Lemur catta) is a large prosimian, a lemur belonging to the family Lemuridae. The Ring-tailed Lemur is the only species within the monotypic genus Lemur and, like all other lemurs, is found only on the island of Madagascar.
Although threatened by habitat destruction and therefore listed as vulnerable by the IUCN Red List, the Ring-tailed Lemur is the most populous lemur in zoos worldwide; they reproduce readily in captivity.

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Monotype Printing Technique

Monotype is a one-off technique in which a flat surface on copper, zinc or glass is painted with oil colors or ink and then passed through the etching press. The process permits only one copy; thus “monotype.” Modern monotypes take advantage of a wide variety of materials including perspex, cardboard, etc., with artists creating veritable collages on the surface, then printing them for surprising results. The term monoprint is often used interchangeably, but in actual fact a monoprint is a unique image where part of the image is repeatable on a fixed matrix and part is not. Digital prints onto film transferred to a receptor paper are monoprints.

What is Pop Art; What is Pop Culture?

Popular culture can be defined as the sum of arts designed for simultaneous consumption by a numerically large audience. Thus, there is a similarity in distribution and consumption between prints and magazines, movies, records, radio, TV, and industrial and interior design. Popular culture originates in urban centres and is distributed on the basis of mass production. It is not like folk art which, in theory at least, is hand-crafted by the same group by which it will be consumed. The consumption of popular culture is basically a social experience, providing information derived from and contributing to our statistically normal roles in society. It is a network of messages and objects that we share with others.

Oyvind Fahlstrom, writing about another artist, Robert Rauschenberg, described the artist as “part of the density of an uncensored continuum that neither begins nor ends with any action of his.” Instead of the notion of painting as technically pure, organized as a nest of internal correspondences, Fahlstrom proposed the work of art as a partial sample of the world’s continuous relationships. It follows that works demonstrating such principles would involve a change in our concept of artistic unity; art as a rendezvous of objects and images from disparate sources, rather than as an inevitably aligned set-up. The work of art can be considered as a conglomerate, no one part of which need be causally related to other parts; the cluster is enough.

A unifying thread in Pop Art can be described as process abbreviation. An ambitious painting requires a series of steps by the artist, from a conceptual stage, though preliminary sketches to drawing, to underpainting, to glazing and, maybe, to varnishing. These discrete steps were not experienced in isolation by the artist, of course, but such basically was the sequence of his operations. In one way and another, modern art has abbreviated this process. For instance, Pop artists have used physical objects as part of their work or rendered familiar articles with a high degree of literalness. Silk screen paintings achieve a hand-done look from the haste and roughness with which the identical images are printed. Photographs, printed or stencilled in the work of art give the most literal definition available in flat signs to the artist.

Pop Art Machine exhibits process abbreviation by replacing the traditional graphical interface used in digital art production with a purely mathematical approach. The computer generated imaging (CGI) process completely automates source sampling, assembly and publication — so much so in fact that most of the work exists in digital form and is rarely printed.

Neither Art Painting nor Art Photograph But a Nameless Mixture

Art is something which must be destroyed - a proposition common to many experiments of Modernity.

Pop art reverses values. “What characterizes pop is mainly its use of what is despised” (Lichtenstein). Images from mass culture, regarded as vulgar, unworthy of an aesthetic consecration, return virtually unaltered as materials of the artist’s activity. I should like to call this reversal the “Clovis Complex”: like Saint Remi addressing the Frankish king, the god of pop art says to the artist: “Burn what you have worshipped, worship what you have burned.” For instance: photography has long been fascinated by painting, of which it still passes as a poor relation; pop art overturns this prejudice: the photograph often becomes the origin of the images pop art presents: neither “art painting” nor “art photograph,” but a nameless mixture. Another example of reversal: nothing more contrary to art than the notion of being the mere reflection of the things represented, even photography does not support this destiny; pop art, on the contrary. accepts being an imagery, a collection of reflections, constituted by the banal reverberation of the American environment: reviled by high art, the copy returns. This reversal is not capricious, it does not proceed from a simple denial of value, from a simple rejection of the past; it obeys a regular historical impulse; as Paul Valéry noted (in Pieces sur l’Art), the appearance of new technical means (here, photography, serigraphy) modifies not only art’s forms but its very concept.

1) Source image http://www.journalstar.com/content/gallery/gallery_49/album_881/midsize_photo475074f836cde721239091.jpg -- note 600x386

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Planographics Lithography Intaglio Techniques

Lithography
This is the printmaking technique invented by Senefelder in Germany in 1796 that takes advantage of the repulsion between oil and water to transfer an image from a smooth limestone surface to a sheet of paper. It is considered one of the most authentic means of artistic reproduction as it prints directly the touch of the artist’s hand. On the other hand, sheer production numbers detract somewhat from its appeal to collectors, as the method permits practically unlimited editions. The first artists who left their mark on the lithographic tradition were mainly French and go from the early Delacroix and Géricualt to Daumier, Degas, Manet, and especially Odilon Redon.

Intaglio
One of the four major types of printmaking techniques (the others being relief printing, stencilling, and planographic printing) whose distinguishing feature is the fact that the ink forming the design is printed only from the recessed areas of the plate. Among intaglio techniques are engraving, etching, drypoint, aquatint, soft-ground etching and crayon-manner etching.

Stencil, Silk Screen or Serigraphy Techniques

Stencil: Silk Screen or Serigraphy
Silk screen, or “serigraphy” as it prefers to be known in fine-art circles, originated in China and found its way to the West in the 15th century. It’s a stencil process based on the porosity of silk (nylon or other fabric) that allows ink to pass through the areas which are not “stopped” with glue or varnish. One or more layers of ink are applied with a squeegee, each one covering the open areas of succeeding screens until the final composite image is achieved. Photographic transfers, both in line and halftone, can also be fixed to the screen with a light-sensitive emulsion. Serigraphy took on the status of art in the late 1930s in the United States when a group of artists working with the Federal Art Project experimented with the technique and subsequently formed the National Serigraphic Society to promote its use.

Traditional Printmaking Techniques - INTAGLIO

Etching
Etching is a method of making prints from a metal plate, usually copper or zinc, which has been bitten with acid. The plate is first coated with an acid-resistant substance (etching ground or varnish) through which the design is drawn with a sharp tool (burin or other). The acid eats the plate through the exposed lines; the more time the plate is left in the acid, the coarser the lines. When the plate is inked and its surface rubbed clean, and it is covered with paper and passed (between the cylinders of an etching press under high pressure) under a cylindrical press, the ink captured in the lines is transferred to the paper.

The first etching on record was that of the Swiss artist, Urs Graf, who printed from iron plates. Albrecht Dürer, though a consummate engraver, made only five etchings, and n