Athenia Design

According to this article people are increasingly choosing inexpensive pursuits such as painting and drawing during the recession. It seems people are moving away from more expensive hobbies as paint brush sales tripled and sales of A4 sketch books doubled at Tesco last year. They have put the increase down to their customers looking for cheaper ways to spend their free time and expect a further increase this year.

At first glance this might seem like quite a good buy for £3,000, but the bungalow is actually a condemned property. The bungalow at Knipe Point near Scarborough is situated dangerously close to the edge of a cliff and is likely to fall into the sea within 6 months. Artist, Mr Cunningham has brought the property so that he can spend his time painting its descent into the sea. He also intends to set up cameras inside the house in order to film its destruction. Many of the neighbouring houses have already gone over the edge and the property has recently developed cracks in the past few weeks so it seems the artist may need to paint rather quickly to get his moneys worth.

Artist Eugenie Scrase has won BBC Two’s School of Saatchi show with this tree trunk artwork. The piece beat five finalists to win a place in Charles Saatchi’s current show. The artist found the fallen tree whilst out walking in East London and asked the owner if she could remove the section of fence it was impaled on. The work entitles Trunkated Trunk has been on show at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, Russia since October. It’s certainly interesting but its not really my idea of art.

These gargoyles are made
out of toilet roll tubes.
French artist Junior Fritz Jacquet
makes the faces by moulding the
toilet roll tube to create the sculpture.
He starts off by constructing the
eyes and then creates the nose,
mouth and the rest of the face.
When finished the face is
coated in different coloured
pigments and fitted to a
metal stalk so it can be displayed.

These interesting looking sandwiches were created by Mark Northeast in an attempt to get his son Oscar to eat his vegetables. Fed up of his son not eating his meals Mark started to make them a little more interesting. His creation include a caterpillar and a crocodile as well as Spongebob Squarepants and a piano. They are certainly more exciting than most sandwiches I have seen.

This is unusual, its 3D sculptures carved out of old phone books. They are made by Alex Queral an artist from Philadelphia. He produces two new pieces a month and has been working in this way for 14  years. He starts off by sketching a picture and then places it over the phonebook to use as template before using a scalpel to cut away at the pages to create the finished sculpture. You can see a work in progress above and a finished image of Obama to the right.

This is unusual, its artwork created on dirty cars. The work is done by artist Scott Wade who creates these impressive pictures simply out of the dirt on car windows. They range from more traditional pieces based on famous works of art like this Mona Lisa he created in the back of a mini to more unusual works like the one below of a family inside a car.