Women of Kibera

One of my more favorite street artists, JR, just completely blew me away with his latest project. From Wooster Collective:

"Today, after more than a year of planning, 2000 square meters of rooftops have been covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera. The material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season. The train that passes on this line through Kibera at least twice a day has also been covered with eyes from the women that live below it. With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces have be pasted on corrugated sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. The idea being that for the split second the train passes, their eyes will match their smiles and their faces will be complete."

Kibera is one of the largest slums in the world, and it's filled with marginalized, forgotten people. I love JR's idea, and his execution is profound:




Some unrelated notes:

• I've been working on the Wordpress layout for the 'blog' section of ianhenrysmith.com, but it still needs much love.


• School and life in general have sidetracked my discretionary projects, but I think that's okay.


• I replaced my default icons with ones from Wall-E, and they are very fun.

Rainbow Tree

I just wish it were real. Then I would sell it.

5 Better Things

5. 'Skine Art. A great site where people upload images from their Moleskine journals, some of these scans blow me away.

4. Christopher Lee's illustrations are fun to a point that they make me giddy.

3. Huun Huur Tu. Tuvan throat singing at its best (and most bizarre?). I heard the one in the front left made a deal with the devil for that moustache. They have some albums for download (legally) here.

2.Gareth Neal's furniture. I want a desk from him.

1.Yo Gabba Gabba toys. If you haven't seen the frenetic surreal kids show that is 'Yo Gabba Gabba', follow the link.

5 More Good Things

5. Ikea decorated a public train in Kobe, Japan. I want one.


4. Get Lost, by Douglas Wilson. I love the print and the idea.


3. Hairy Futura. I have seen many fonts, but none have made me smile like this.

2. The fashion of Henrik Vibskov: it is ridiculous and unsettling at the same time. Expect me to rip him off in the near future.



1. "Copia", a series by Brian Ulrich. His non-judgmental visual exploration of American consumer culture is profound.

Andy Kehoe

So I recently have gotten into Andy Kehoe's work. It's great stuff, I love the texture he uses in his pieces:

Analog Triumph

Look at these great pictures from Fax-O-Rama. I love their distortion and abstraction:


Update: It looks like Fax-o-Rama is gone! Oh No!

Basquiat Smirked

So now one of my all-time favorite artists is Dave Kinsey. I've always liked his visual style and his gritty bold lines, but his latest stuff made my mind smile and my eyes bleed (well, something like that). His new works burst with objective social commentary and they very much make me jealous. The textures of his backgrounds are so rich they unify all of his pieces. And he now reminds me of my favorite artist Jean-Michel Basquiat with every stroke. A couple of Kinsey's latest:

Abandon All Hope (Reprise)

Letter Flourish

Sparrow is Not Sorrow

The Interview

Sebastien of the (chronically) awesome Chronically Sick, But Still Thinking I Think was kind enough to send me these great interview questions. I tried to answer them, and the aftermath follows the period at the end of this sentence.

1. How do you come up with ideas for your artwork? or is it spontaneous? or hard to explain?

Well, I think my ideas come from things I see. Any creativity in my drawings is the result of some horrendous mistake that I tried to clean up. For example: I’ll start drawing a guy in a suit and then not really want to draw his face, so I’ll put a gigantic beard that turns into a flowery bush thing instead of a face (I’m going to put that image up sometime soon hopefully). That technique works really well with all sorts of images. If I have a line that doesn’t look right, I’ll just turn it into some sort of plant. The only exception is when I draw birds, because I love birds so much I can’t mess with them. When I draw, things that I have been thinking about always work their way onto the page. It’s very therapeutic. So I would say above anything, my work is spontaneous.

2. You are supposed to run zigzags if a crocodile is chasing you. Do you think that's true? If not, what's your method for escaping a crocodile that's chasing you?

I saw an episode of Mythbusters about that, and I think they busted the myth that you’re supposed to run in zigzags. I know if I were running in a zigzag pattern, I would more likely fall down than successfully run away. At least is seems that way. But crocodiles really don’t seem that smart (I’m probably wrong about that though), so I would just act like a tree or something. I’m tall and skinny, so I think I could pull that off. If the crocodile didn’t fall for my tree act, I would try to make noises like a poacher (I hear they grunt a lot) and talk about how I wanted some new Sunday shoes.

3. Who are some artists that inspire you? Why?

There are so many artists who inspire me, too many to name them all. I took an art class in high school for which we had to basically write about an artist every day for two years, so I went through a whole slew of great artists. I started with one of my childhood favorites, William Heath Robinson who was an illustrator (he worked from WW1 to WW2). From him I moved onto Norman Rockwell onto American printmakers. Then I found the book “Stencil Graffiti” by Tristan Manco at the same time I found Wooster Collective. Of the many street artists that I found who still inspire me, a few of them are: Arofish, 108, Akay, Swoon, Blek, Borf, Tano, Dave Kinsey, Sam Flores, Evol, Pisa73, and Revs. Street art got me into silkscreen, seeing as I really don’t have the passion to go around doing real graffiti. A lot of my work now is influenced by graphic designers like Ben Cronin. I love simplicity, so many of the artists I admire have that quality to their work (like Rolf).

4. What celebrity do you find most attractive? Why?

Sufjan Stevens. Hands down. I mean, I have a great girlfriend but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s such a cutie. He can wear a set of butterfly wings while still maintaining his rugged good looks. If that doesn’t declare his attractiveness, something with the world is dreadfully wrong (but that leads me to your next question).

5. Do you think there is a duckbill platypus conspiracy to take over the world? Or is it just an elaborate hoax?

I only hear bits and pieces, but I think one is the mayor of Sarajevo. If you don’t know much about history: Sarajevo is the place where stuff went down, which resulted in World War One. If those platypuses control the powder keg of Europe, I don’t know what we should do. We could go wage war in Bosnia, but that’s kinda cliché. Even if we did try to stop platypuses, did you know the males have giant poisonous barbs on their underbellies? I don’t even want to mess with that.

If you would like to be an interviewee:

* Leave a comment at my blog saying, “Interview me.” Include your blog URL.

* I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.

* You will update your weblog with the answers to the questions.

* You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

* When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

My Finger is Growing, or Something?

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My Parents Gave Me Life, But Bill Watterson Gave Me Trees

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