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Category / Art & Design Awesomeness

Rediscover the Fine Arts Retro Aesthetic of the Babysitters Club

Remember The Baby-Sitters Club? If you grew up in the nineties, had a perm or a crush on Jonathan Taylor Thomas, you definitely swapped copies with your friends. The series, which details the lives of a group of pre-teens living and babysitting in suburban Connecticut was created by Ann M. Martin, although the majority of…

All Aboard the Doomed Art Deco Floating Palace

Seventy-five years after she lay burning and capsized in the New York harbour, the French SS Normandie still holds the record as the most powerful steam turbo-electric-propelled passenger ship ever built. She is considered one of the greatest of ocean liners in history, a floating palace of Art Deco majesty so dazzling, they nicknamed her the “Ship of Light” similar…

Who’s Afraid of Adolf Wölfli?

Some artists leave us tangled legacies– reputations tied up in creative theft, family feuds and unresolved estates. Others, like Adolf Wölfli, leave us a veritable Pandora’s Box for consideration. At a glance, Wölfli’s work oozes the sentiments of Psychedelic art; its kaleidoscopic swirls of colour look fresh off the Haight Ashbury, circa 1967. In truth,…

The Hunt for the Missing Orient Express Trains

Nothing says old-world luxury quite like the Orient Express. The train of kings, courtesans, spies, storytellers and murderers alike, all elegantly dressed and sipping on Champagne from cut-glass crystal flutes as European landscapes rolled by. The Orient Express, which linked Paris to Istanbul, connecting Europe to Asia on an 81-hour ride operating between 1883 and…

Wish You Were Here: Saugatuck Art Colony, 1949

I‘m currently yearning for the itching of grass on my bare legs, for that awful predicament of having nothing to do but lounge around in the sun all day until I think to myself: “maybe I could take up painting for the summer”. This photostory I found buried in the LIFE Archives, labelled “Saugatuck Art…

Being Henri Matisse’s Assistant: The Story of Madame Lydia

The saying is that behind every great man there is a woman. In the case of Henri Matisse, that woman was not considered to be his wife of 40 years, but a penniless refugee who was barely surviving in 1932, when she found temporary work with the French modern master. Her name was Lydia Delectorskaya,…

It’s about Time we Reinvented the Autochrome

Show me an Instagram filter that can do this and I’ll personally take you out to dinner so that we can become lifelong friends. Autochrome is a dead art – a secret recipe – if you will, that has been long lost to the modern world, left uncharted by 21st century technology and yet to be…

Marge Simpson, the Style Icon

With that towering head of blue hair, we tend to forget that Marge Simpson has a killer body – for a bright yellow cartoon character, that is. So what better way to show off those famous Simpson curves than have her recreate some of the most memorable moments in fashion history? Italian illustrator, AleXsandro Palombo,…

Famous Movie Scenes you probably didn’t realise were Borrowed from Paintings

I do love a good side by side comparison. It must go back to those “spot the difference” puzzles we used to do as kids. Filmmaker and photographer, Vugar Efendi, makes a much more grown-up version of those puzzles in his series Film Meets Art, using his trained eye to spot some iconic movie scenes that…

The Adorable, Squishable Soho Sex Shop

Do you remember the girl who revived an abandoned corner shop last year in East London and filled it with hand-sewn “products” made of felt– over 4,000 fuzzy creations to be precise, from Mars bars to newspapers and even the shop’s till? Well the hugely talented artist Lucy Sparrow has struck again, this time, transforming a…

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