create something beautiful

I’ve been a big fan of Banksy’s work for years now. If you don’t know who he is, good. That’s the point. He’s tried to remain anonymous for a long time, perpetrating what many consider vandalism, what other - like myself - consider street art. I’m not going to get entirely into his history right now, but some of his work has become entirely iconic and his the act of posting them incredibly buzzworthy. For example, you may have heard of the guy who was hanging his own paintings in several museums when no one was looking. Some remained up for hours, others days before anyone noticed that they didn’t belong with the other classics.

Today on NYmag.com I read an article about his latest major statement. Apparently England has been installing a large number of closed circuit surveilance cameras and many people are getting the “big brother” feel from always having a watchful lens pointed their way. Over the weekend, Banksy put up three stories worth of scaffolding, under which he painted a massive message and two figures onto the wall, all under the eye of one of these cameras. When he removed the scaffolding, the work was revealed - on the side of a post office. It’s his biggest work of “vandalism” to date and I think it’s pretty brilliant.

What do you think?

I wrote another article for NYLON, this one about the Heroes & Villains exhibit that is about to open for two days only at the Corey Helford Gallery in California. It’s a photography exhibit entirely made up of portraits of graffiti, pop surrealist, and alt-comic book artists and it’s pretty darn cool. The initial exhibit only lasted two days but will now go on to San Francisco and several other cities throughout the country. The photos are all by Tatiana Wills and Roman Cho, two amazing artists who took on the three-year-long project in order to showcase some of the amazing artistic talents that are shaping our cultural vernacular as we speak. Please click the image (which I made) to read the entire article and see some of the photos that make up this awesome one-of-a-kind exhibit.

So remember when I wrote that post a week or so ago about the CO2 Stats Counter? If not, check out the post here to refresh your memory.

So I was looking at my Google Analytics account to see how my web traffic is doing on the site and noticed that I was getting quite a few links through the site. I checked it out and this is what the website looks like:

And if you look at the list of sites on the righthand side of the page, you’ll notice MY SITE listed second!

-xo-
one happy merb

Here are the latest batch of images I made for NYLON. There aren’t too many of them this time around because I was also busy writing a couple of articles that day. C’est la vie.

(Oh yeah, and I wrote the article for the one above too.)

I just wrote another article for NYLON that is up on the website now. It’s all about Alex Prager and her upcoming (second ever) solo photography exhibition, her first exhibition in the UK. In researching her stuff I’ve come to admire her a lot. She’s entirely self-taught and stopped even going to school after the 8th grade. And yet her photos are all amazing.

Every image is incredibly saturated with color and has a eerie look to it, kind of a voyeurism feel, and as though you’ve only been given a glimpse into a scene that makes up an entire elaborate story.

Click on the image below - which I made - to see the whole article (please!):