A Turner painting depicting the city of Rome has recently sold for £29.7 million, a record amount for eh British artist. The painting Turner’s Modern Rome has been brought by a London dealer on behalf of the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. It was painted in 1839 and has been described by experts as Turner’s finest view of a Italian city. It has only been sold once before on the open market back in the last 172 years. It was previously owned by a descendant of the 5th Earl of Rosebery,who bought it in 1878 whilst on his honeymoon and before that by Scottish landowner and collector Hugh Munro of Novar who brought it directly from the artists exhibition.

Floppy disks are not really good for much these days but one artist has been putting them to good use.  Nick Gentry uses old floppy disks to create his pictures incorporating them into the artwork itself by using them as a canvas. Anything from 6 to more than 100 disks are used to create each picture depending upon the size. You can see one example to the left here but for others take a look at this article.

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 pictures have been created using various light sources shone directly into a camera lens. The pictures have been created using things like flash lights, bike lights and LED and are shot with long exposure cameras using a slow shutter  speed in the dark. They are quite amazing, especially as they are created from a single photo that has not undergone any computer enhancement. The camera used is a 21.1 megapixel Canon EOS 5D Mark II .

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.