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We love this stunning collection of prints by Still Life Stylist Sonia Rentsch with photography by Scott Newett entitled ‘Dinner Etiquette’. If these characters walked off the page, I can imagine exactly what their personalities would be. Do you think they would want to be friends with me? I hope so.
Lucy, Style Assistant x
Beautiful collages by the brilliant designer, Sophie Duran. And we’ve always loved those vegetables-styled-up-as-creatures images.
Mo, acting news ed.
You may remember we blogged about Melbourne based artist Liesl Pfeffer last year and her beautiful mountain range art works collaged from photographs. Her latest works are just as covetable; giant semi precious stones and gems in all their faceted glory, collaged together from bits of sky, water and surfaces. We love her delicate, feminine colour palettes (utterly on trend) and graphic touch. What girl wouldn’t want a rock like this?
Kate, Editorial Assistant
Like brilliant Expressionist paintings, these prints strip back the Olympic games to mere geometry. Life.Style.etc really loves.
Mo, acting news editor.
Pont Max Juvenal, Aix en Provence (Patrick Blanc)
Quai Branly museum, Paris (Patrick Blanc)
We’ve been inspired recently by the ultimate urban gardening – living walls. More like artworks than the grassy roofs we’ve seen on libraries and the like, they add colour, pattern and movement to buildings, and don’t take up any floor space – a bonus in a busy city. Leading the way in ambitious designs is French botanist-artist Patrick Blanc, some of whose beautiful work is posted here. Layers of PVC and felt on a metal frame with an integrated, automated watering system, create an easy-care support for the plants, which is a boon, as we wouldn’t fancy the weeding much…
Pershing Hall hotel, Paris (Patrick Blanc)
Rue d’Alsace, Paris (Patrick Blanc)
Although we enjoy shouting at the TV as much as anyone when The Apprentice contestants make bumbling business decisions, we feel less qualified to pass judgement on Facebook’s recent acquisition of photo sharing app Instagram. The app allows iPhone users to apply retro and Polaroid camera effects onto their digital phone photos, and share them with their friends. The Facebook deal has been witheringly referred to as ‘paying $1 billion for a set of photo filters’.
For us it’s just a reminder of how great real Polaroid photography is. For a distinctly smaller sum of money, Facebook could have picked up a secondhand SX-70 camera on eBay and stocked up on instant film from The Impossible Project. $1 billion could buy you an awful lot of Polaroids.
The authentic analog snaps – with their unmistakable lo-fi, low-tech washed out colours and imperfect focus – are so much more beautiful than any digital simulation. Professionals, amateurs and enthusiasts alike help keep Polaroid photography alive, sharing their work on Polanoid (such as those gems above), a sort of Flickr for Polaroids.
David Hockney is also a fan – creating collage artworks by combining Polaroids together, showing multiple views of the same scene (such as in the below work titled ‘San Diego Wild Animal Park’ from 1982).
Like all things analogue facing obsolescence in the digital age, there’s a small amount of magic that gets lost from their modern successors – the warm crackle from a vinyl record, the comforting feel of a favourite book in your hands, and the suspense of watching a Polaroid photo develop right before your eyes not knowing exactly how it’s going to turn out. Let’s hope they stick around for a little while longer.
We love our feathered friends here at Livingetc – but even more so when they’re photographed in all their avian glory against the most stylish of backgrounds. With their bright blues, radiant yellows and gorgeous greens, these brilliant photographs caught our interiors eye in that they bring to mind a classy paint colour card – only more fun. This is the work of talented photographer Luke Stephenson, whose aim is to document the eccentricity of the British psyche, which this, his Incomplete Dictionary Of Show Birds series, does with aplomb. As well as these beautiful birds, his portfolio includes a study of painted faces, ice cream vans and moustaches. A word of warning, though: coulrophobics should steer well clear of Luke’s Clown Egg Register pictures.
Kathy, Acting Deputy Chief Sub Editor
The Livingetc team has been marvelling at this magical artwork by Holland based artist Berndnault Smilde, titled ‘Nimbus II’. Created at the Hotel KMK in Amsterdam earlier this month, the installation lasted a mere minutes before it disappeared forever. Is it an illusion, is it a trick, has it been created or captured? The artist has kept an air of mystery surrounding the process he uses to create his indoor clouds (because that would be telling), but we think it’s all the more beautiful for it’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it existence!
Kate, Editorial Assistant
With its sensuously curved roof and gorgeous larch-clad exterior, we already knew the outside of the Olympic Velodrome was a thing of beauty – and now that they’ve opened the doors with the Track Cycling World Cup, an Olympics test event, we can safely say it’s just as lovely on the inside. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Chic blue from our fabulous My Interior Life in March, Georgia Hardinge, (catwalk shot by Kris Atomic, speaking of which – wow).
2 Phoebe English is pretty in pink. click through for more fashionteriors delights…
