This isn’t even the most like birds a plant can look! This green birdbush grows in Australia and appears to make hummingbirds except, wait, there’s no hummingbirds in Australia. So what is this plant doing.
An engraving from Fischer von Erlach and Johann Bernhard’s Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (1725) illustrating the ancient Greek architect Dinocrates’s proposal for a city on Mount Athos, complete with a massive depiction of Alexander the Great carved into the side of the mountain that would appear to hold the city in his hand. According to Wikipedia, the planned city was rejected as unlivable.
This reminded me of Vincenzo del Vecchio’s anthropomorphic cities in the book Terraneo. Below, the artworks that inspired their impossible -yet fascinating- architectures.
Olaf Hajek is a traditional media painter and illustrator.
His style is influenced by the aesthetic of folk painting (for example the choice of using wood instead of canvas, so that veining emerges and gives a kind of textured, worn out look, or the frontal and flat representation of people). He has a preference oversized, overlapping flowers and flora, a feature that he shares with many collage artists of the last decade.
Julie Heffernan — Self Portrait as Big World (oil on canvas, 2008)
This post is about Julie Heffernan’s method of representing herself as giant globes of carefully displayed vegetals and small artifacts, almost like she is a sort of giant bombonnière.
But then I discovered her own gallery site, and I realized she is much more than this, she is a whole explorer of her own world, which looks like the background of a Rococo painting under hallucinations, or a very rare 18th century fantasy landscape (below).
