René Magritte, Accidental Hipster?

Creative inspiration lives on a carrousel. Meaning, bygone trends and inventions always rear their heads at another point in history, finding relevancy for a new generation — and, yes, usually the generation in question is millennials, who’ve successfully resurrected a love for handlebar moustaches, Bukowski and bespoke taxidermy. Today, we’re making a case for the…

Is MacPaint the Most Underrated form of Outsider Art?

Readers of a certain age may remember MacPaint’s arrival well: developed by Apple and released in 1984 with the OG Macintosh Computer, it was our planet’s first taste of fancy graphics editing, and it was available to absolutely everyone. For a price, of course (the first Mac cost the 2019 equivalent of $5,000 USD). As…

These are the Real-Life Gardens of Earthly Delights

These are also the places that will confuse the heck out of aliens if they ever do land on this planet. From the forests of Finland to the subtropical mountains of Mexico, we’ve come across some many magical gardens over the years and thought it was about time to put them in one place… The…

Get to Know the Woman behind these Real-Life Wes Anderson Interiors

Like it or not, we’re living in a Wes Anderson world; from fashion trends to instagram fads to interiors, the director’s aesthetic has well and truly taken over. And if you want to make it your business to know the names of the movers & shakers behind our current generation’s design movement, you should probably…

That Time a Wheat Field Grew in Downtown New York

The 1980s was a weird time to be in New York. Punk was flourishing, but so was crime. There was Basquiat and Keith Haring. The creative energy was non-stop, but tumultuous, and living conditions were gritty and hard for many. But in 1982, one artist’s knee-jerk reaction to that reality was breathtakingly simple: in the face of…

One Artist, 146 Faces

She’s the woman of a 146 faces (our ballpark guess), as well as the stylist, makeup artist, art director, model, and, above all, photographer behind their creation. For today’s art students, Cindy Sherman is a postmodern prophet of the über meta in photography, a woman who toyed with the concept of selfies and identity long before…

An Artist’s Beautiful Obsession with Cabinets of Curiosity

Steffen Dam doesn’t quite live in the same world as everyone else. For decades, the Danish artist has been creating a veritable Wunderkrammer, or “Cabinet of Curiosities” out of his studio (a former 1930s school house) dedicated to the creation of a whole new genus of sea creatures — all made of glass. Every beaker, jar, and…

The Mountain Wizard of Woodstock

What happens when you put Rip Van Winkle, Robin Hood and Paul Bunyan in a blender? You get Clarence Schmidt, the iconic outsider artist who spent a lifetime building an eccentric folk art kingdom on a mountaintop in Woodstock… Schmidt was originally from Queens, but he split for the country when he inherited five acres of…

Legend of the Button King

The secret life of Dalton Stevens was born in the quiet of 2:00 am, in the even quieter town of Bishopville, South Carolina. (Population = more or less 3,000.) Stevens, then 53, had recently developed insomnia. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do,” he said. Then he picked up a button. He started bedazzling an old jumpsuit…