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Paper Bones
a group of artists built a giant Styrofoam ship
that measured 45 ft (13.6 m) high, 60 ft (18.4 m)
long and 15 ft (4.5 m) wide.
â Canadian artist Maskull Lasserre intricately carved
a human spine and ribcage into a compressed stack of
ordinary daily newspapers. To maintain the required
level of concentration, he worked in short bursts of
no longer than an hour at a time. He says: “Paper is
a very difficult medium to carve because of its
grain and the fact the pages are not connected
to each other laterally.” Aside from newspapers,
Maskull also works with different media such as
books, tree branches and coat hangers.
Vickerd from Toronto, Ontario, created a series
of taxidermy statues—human bodies dressed
in hooded tops but with stuffed animal heads
in place of their faces. He put his sculptures,
which featured the heads of raccoons, skunks,
squirrels and a bunch of ducklings, in busy
areas of major cities to observe public reaction.
Museum of Wonder at Seale, Alabama,
includes such oddities as a chandelier made
from cow bones and a range of bowls woven
from sticks chewed by beavers. Even the
bathroom windows in his house are made
from gnawed beaver sticks.
CLIP ART Every year for the past decade,
brushes, artist Princess Tarinan von Anhalt
from Aventura, Florida, paints with $10-million
airplane jet engines. She creates abstract
artworks by hurling paints into the airflow of a
Learjet engine, which splatters the colors onto a
large 8 x 8 ft (2.4 x 2.4 m) canvas about 30 ft
(9 m) away with a force many times stronger
than a hurricane. The technique was pioneered
by her late husband, Prinz Jurgen von Anhalt,
30 years ago and became so popular that her
clients will pay $50,000 just to watch her work!
MEDICAL JARS Artist Tamsin van Essen
of London, England, has created a series of
ceramic jars containing deliberate faults and
blemishes to represent different illnesses and
diseases. Inspired by apothecary jars of the
17th and 18th centuries, her “Medical Heirlooms”
range includes acne, osteoporosis, psoriasis
and scars, and, as family heirlooms, her jars
can be passed down through generations like
hereditary medical conditions.
MINIATURE WORLD Nichola Battilana
from Brighton, Ontario, makes miniature
landscapes in thimbles. She sculpts tiny
houses with paper clay, uses tufts of moss to
represent a garden and then carefully positions
them in the thimble.
PAPER WINDOWS
Eric Standley, an
associate professor of art at Virginia Tech,
creates 3-D images of beautiful Gothic
stained-glass windows from hundreds of
pieces of colored paper. With mathematical
precision, he spends up to 80 hours lasercutting the paper and he then stacks the cut
pieces together into layers, often more than
100 deep, before binding the sheets together.
â Body-painter Johannes Stoetter from South Tyrol,
Italy, produced this amazing image of a tropical tree
frog resting on a leaf by using five cunningly
camouflaged painted women to re-create the
creature’s torso, legs, arms and head.
He takes up to five months to plan each project, working
out the coloring and the precise positioning of his
human models. He then spends eight hours applying
special breathable paint to their bodies to turn
them into animals, fruit and landscapes that play
unbelievable tricks on the viewer’s eye.
He started body-painting in 2000 and has become so
successful that in 2012 he became the world champion.
He says: “Body-painting is special because the artwork is alive and
can move. While a canvas painting lasts forever, a body-painting
exists only for a few hours.”
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smooth sculptures Artist Vipular
Athukorale from Leicester, England, makes
highly detailed sculptures—including a vintage
Rolls-Royce and a scene from Little Red Riding
Hood—out of margarine. First, he creates a wire
frame and then he covers it in margarine, which
he molds with tiny scalpels. His sculptures
are up to 2 ft (60 cm) long and each one takes
months but, as long as they
are kept cold, they can
last for years.
BEAVER BOWLS Artist Butch Anthony’s
PAINTING BY JET Instead of traditional
photograph on his passport, Swedish artist
Fredrik Säker has a painted self-portrait. As
government regulations stipulated that he had
to submit a photo, he decided to photograph
the brilliantly lifelike self-portrait that he had
taken 100 hours to paint—and it was accepted
without question.
HEAVY PAINTING The Rose, a 1966 painting
by San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo, used so much
oil paint that it took eight years to complete and
weighs more than 2,000 lb (908 kg).
SPOOKY SCULPTURES Sculptor Brandon
Mike Drake from New York has collected
hundreds of nail clippings and made a
paperweight from them.
PASSPORT PICTURE Instead of a
Human Frog
art
STYROFOAM SHIP In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,
www.ripleybooks.com
MINI MARXES To celebrate the 195th
anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, artist Ottmar
Hörl placed 500 miniature statues of him
throughout the philosopher’s hometown of
Trier, Germany. The little Marx men were all the
same size and shape, but were cast in different
shades of red.
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