You can make art out of anything. Even out of Rubix’s cubes: http://koikoikoi.com/2011/11/dream-big-by-peter-fecteau/. This is a pretty clever use of Rubix’s cubes besides its common use, but the amount they spent on the cubes surely does seem counterintuitive if you’re an artist (according to the stereotype that artists are poor). The Rubix’s cubes were rented and costed approximately a whopping $8,000. I wonder how one can make much profit out of this, but regardless of the price this is an inspirational piece of art and is extremely ingenious.

I remember when we went to a Korean art gallery at Chelsea many people found the pieces strange or plain boring, but I found some really beautiful and innovative pieces by a Korean Artist: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/04/ephemeral-portraits-cut-from-layers-of-wire-mesh-by-seung-mo-park/.

Each piece looks very real, some almost like an old photograph, but it is actually made out of wire upon wire upon wire that is either cut or manipulated a certain way. Kudos to the artist for such amazing work, as it probably takes a lot of time and tedious work to create these pieces.

The artist’s website: http://www.seungmopark.com/

I found a really funky website where you can make your own abstract art: http://weavesilk.com/. If you’re in a creative mood I’d suggest trying it out. Or just try it out for the sake of trying new things :).

This was my attempt: http://r.weavesilk.com/?v=4&id=dabfmeynwx

It looks like an angry pug, or maybe a clown. I’m not sure.

Inspiration can happen at any moment! For Visual Artist Ruslan Khasanov, inspiration came to him while cooking with soy sauce.

http://www.behance.net/gallery/Pacific-Light/10037541

I love how the colors swirl, mix and bead together, yet they don’t entirely mix as expected. This creates so many possibilities of images and practically paints itself! Unlike Tauba Auerbach’s book (“The Book of Souls”) with just color, the colors are fluid and moving. I feel like this is could be a representation of souls and how they move through life and interactions with other souls. Live Souls?

The artists page: http://ruskhasanov.com/

I have to say, a lot of this artist’s work is awesome, but very trippy.

So I came across this awesome book/cube/atlas by Tauba Auerbach. It has nearly every color you could think of. All mixtures of different colors and all shades and tints possible. And I’m sure you may be thinking: “Wow, what a completely useless block of paper.” But I feel that it may be useful to many artists and editors. This would be perfect while learning how to mix colors when it comes to painting as it would provide a great comparison tool. It also has a great range of colors, but I really doubt anyone would use it for practice as it is worth $200-500. It’s a cool piece of art though! What do you guys think?

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/09/tauba-auerbachs-rgb-colorspace-atlas-depicts-every-color-imaginable/

The artist’s website: http://taubaauerbach.com/

http://talentsearch.ted.com/video/Phil-Hansen-The-art-of-the-impe;TEDNew-York/

This clever artist’s story is quiet an inspirational tale of getting past all restrictions to do what you love. Regardless of Phil Hansen’s progressively shaky hands and the destruction of his nerves, he never stopped making art. Or rather he embraced his defect and created a unique style of his own. And from that stemmed the idea to limit his art to induce new forms of creativity.

This idea eventually results in Hansen’s wacky, humorous ways of expression, like using solely karate chops to paint a giant image of Jet Li (which is a pretty amazing feat considering that the side of ones hand is a strange shape). These random and somewhat crazy ideas eventually culminated in his thought evoking project, Goodbye Art, in which the medium the art was created is consumed by some external force, rots or is just destroyed.

It can be quite appalling to many that an artist would go to great lengths to create something only to ruin it. A vast majority of people have this idea that art and literature leaves a person’s mark on the world and is what makes him/her memorable, but I feel that Hansen expresses that art does not have to be physically there, everlasting or perfect to be inspiring or memorable. Hansen’s story just goes to show you that one can change the winds of life by taking a problem and manipulating it to do something you love or create something inventive.

This TED Talent Search video reminded me of a random page by Alden Tan that I came across a while ago (this is actually a commercial website but his posts are quiet interesting). This man strongly believes that life shouldn’t stop you from doing what makes you happy and literally makes a post saying that there is no excuse to let life’s problems hinder you because others seem to find a way out (so why shouldn’t you!): http://alden-tan.com/no-excuses/.

For those of you that have your own personal “shakes” in life, there are always new possibilities and a way out of just about any obstacle with hard work and a bit of creativity. Just some hopeful words before the craziness of finals next week :).