Large drawings, some over one kilometer in length take shape under Sam’s rake.They can take the form of geometrical patterns, figurative work, or sentences.

“I try to integrate my work in the nature as well as the nature in my work. It’s all natural and disappears in a few hours.”

“I take photos of my drawings before the tide erases them.”

“Then I try to tell another story.”

He has brought his rake and his camera with him to beaches in France, Spain, Morocco, England, the Bailiwick of Jersey, and Bermuda. The best photos are printed in a limited series on brushed aluminum for the grain and light.

But this is just the beginning for him, there are more beaches in distant lands to rake.

Basically every sandy coastline on Earth has the potential for being one of Sam’s canvases, it’s brilliant really.  It’s like an impermanent series of Nazca lines…Now that I’m writing about this I am already dreading the thought of hipsters getting inspired by these pictures, and wanting  to co-opt this concept and invade Rockaway Beach with rakes this Summer.  Please, please, please, if you are reading this and had that thought yourself.  NO…We are on to you.  Be a fucking original.

Learn More on Sam’s Website www.sam-dougados.com and like him on Facebook

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post French Artist Creates Mile Wide Beach Graffiti in The Sand appeared first on Artiholics.

New York, NY – Friday, June 14, 2013

There is a point where a topic reaches critical mass.  Yesterday three different articles about “overdoing it” with photo-retouching or “airbrushing” of models in magazines, film posters, and advertising popped up in my feed.  So let me once again talk about this, because it is always funny to me when people (especially women) obsess over trying to look like the models they see in magazines, when the models they see in magazines probably wish they look the way “they themselves” appear in magazines, but will never actually look that “good” in real life.

The reason is my friends, what you see in magazines is not reality.  I’ve mentioned this before on ArtSucks.com, back in the late 90s when I was retouching movie posters for Indika I recall working on one poster featuring Patricia Arquette where I literally Frankensteined the finished pose out of 14 different photos.  You wouldn’t know it to look at it, and it is quite the magic trick.  Making a “perfect” image out of over a dozen not perfects, but that’s the brilliance of a good retouching.  Ever since Cindy Crawford lost her belly button, the secret has been out there, and as any good photo retoucher will tell you, it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors.

It’s actually rare to see a celebrity un-retouched.  Even the supposedly “candid” pictures of celebrities being “just like us” in the weekly rags are retouched.  It’s so few and far between that you see an un-retouched printed image, that when a celebrity does it, it is considered news.  You might remember back in September, 2002 when Jamie Lee Curtis (pre-Activia) decided to do a photoshoot with MORE Magazine without make-up and retouching and then with make-up and retouching . (Photos by Andrew Eccles)

“I don’t have great thighs,” she tells More. “I have very big breasts and a soft, fatty little tummy. And I’ve got back fat. People assume I’m walking around in little spaghetti-strap dresses. It’s the insidious Glam Jamie Jamie, the Perfect Jamie, the great figure, blah, blah, blah. And I don’t want the unsuspecting 40-year-old women of the world to think that I’ve got it going on. It’s such a fraud. And I’m the one perpetuating it.” – Jamie Lee Curtis

The first article I got shared to me wasn’t really an article, just an imgur page by greatnessoverload featuring a series of animated gifs, of before and after pictures.

These are some examples of really good retouching. Here are some bad ones.

The second article I noticed today was from a dailymail article about how a store called Debenhams has declared they will no longer be retouching lingerie photos.   According to the article:

The high-street department store puts and end to such images as they ‘want to help customers feel confident about their figures without bombarding them with unattainable body images. Recent research shows that half of schoolgirls as young as 12 are unhappy with their weight and some are skipping meals in an effort to slim, ‘due to exposure to airbrushed images’.

‘We want other retailers to follow suit and encourage positive body-image through minimal retouching rather than bombarding them with unattainable body images,’ said a spokesperson.

Good luck with that.  Maybe in England, but in America there is never a photo in a magazine that hasn’t been tweaked or touched up in some way, even if it’s a really small thing like bumping up the contrast, photos get retouched.  The technology exists, and there is rarely any turning back on technology.

I remember for a few movie posters the main image we wanted to depict just simply didn’t exist.  Getting the Actor to pose in the costume and hair of the film after they have moved on to other projects is sometimes impossible, so we had to shoot a body double.  And is how you end up with shit like this...

Bruce Willis has different body syndrome, Matthew Perry has tiny head syndrome, and who is that weird guy they shoehorned in between them?  Scorsese?

The post Has Photoshopping The Sexy For Print Gone Too Far? appeared first on Artiholics.

Big brother is watching you, in the mirror.  Just a day before these pictures were taken I was writing about how the future tech is going to be a lot more clear, and now here I am, at 566 Johnson Ave., in Bushwick, Brooklyn during the Bushwick Open Studios trying on a pair of Google Glass myself, and taking the technology for a test drive.

The first thing people say is “they look like shit!” I agree, they do, but this is the short sighted view of them.  The stylish designer sunglasses you currently wear, picture them as Google glasses, now you get the idea.  This is a scary near-future we are about to be embracing friends.  A future where the time is in the upper right corner of your screen VISION at all times.  Where the things you are seeing can be recorded on command, and tweeted to the web on command.

When I first tried them on and they took a minute to get used to.

Like firing a gun I felt compelled to close one eye to focus on what I was seeing in the other, obviously a Google Glass n00b..  A tiny translucent screen hovers above and to the right of your right eye.  You can swipe down on the plastic on the side of your face to scroll through the images (like swiping your finger on an iPhone screen) to see what pictures you have taken thus far.  It was displaying 4 images at a time stacked in two rows of two.

Artist Ashley Zelenski (One of only about 500 of these prototypes) takes these pictures of me with my camera as I command the glasses to take a picture of her.

It’s as simple as saying “OK Glass, take a picture.”

Here is the first picture I have ever shot by voice command and without holding a camera.  A little blurry I know, I had no idea what I was doing.  Here’s how it LOOKS ON TWITTER.

My camera back in my own hand, of course Ashley wears it better, I took pictures of her while she took pictures of me with the glasses.  Very surreal, and scary.

As you can see in this close-up there is no actual glass to the Google Glass, except for the rectangular chunk that obscures most of your right eye.  The rest of it is just frame, camera, and computer.  In this shot you can see that she has taken a picture and it’s holding still framed in the screen until she tweets it or scrolls out.

This is the standby screen.  If you think girls are distracted when they are talking to you now, imagine when they have the internet buzzing in front of their eye at all times.  Good luck with that.

Ashley Zelenski is an amazing 3D sculptor who is one of the pioneers of 3D sculptural printing.

Here is some of her work on display in her open studio.

She’s also the gallery/ studio director of Active Space. You can follow Ashley on Twitter to see all the photos she uploads from her Google Glass each day  They will most definitely not be all blurry like my shitty attempt.

Photos of Cojo by Ashley Zelinskie
Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post The Future Revolution Will Not Be Televised…It Will Be Live Streamed appeared first on Artiholics.

A group of fine art students from the senior class at Parsons The New School For Design have decided to shoot their senior portraits wearing their nothing but their art.  Luckily for us, they are all in pretty decent shape.  Living in New York City as an art student has it’s advantages, one of which is *not being able to afford food (*some may not see this as an advantage).  I remember when I was in art school at SVA I had a friend who was dating a girl from Parsons who Moonlighted as a stripper.  Since then I have always associated Parsons with attractive female artists, an unfair bias, but a good one.

The calendar project is the brainchild of artist Robert Hickerson and Tara Long (pictured above).

Hickerson encouraged other students to pose for this project holding works of art in front of them, covering the naughty bits.  The works they were holding were pieces from their senior thesis projects.  As momentum for the calendar, grew 30 of the 48 students in the BFA Fine Arts Department showed up to pose for portraits.  This leads me to believe the other 18 are either self conscious or hideous.  30 to 18 is an overwhelming majority ratio, the percentage of extroverted / beautiful people in this bunch is hugely skewed towards attractiveness, which does not correlate with the American standard,  Again backing up my totally unscientific hypothesis that  “Parsons is full of hot chicks.”

Dominique Suberville poses with her painting, “Cigarettes”and Ariela Kader poses with her piece, “Patterns of Consumption: Coffee.”

Jeesu Kim (l.) and Zoe Alexandra Ciupitu

Monica Pages poses with her piece, “Insidious” while Julia Galeano poses with her painting, “Honduras.”

Kathryn Chadason (l.) (AKA August 2014 in the calendar) volunteered to make the website for the “Nudie Calendar” (which I have yet to find) with her painting “Grandma.” Classmate Leila Ehtesham with “sand and a tire.”

Considering only 1% of art students actually make a living in the art world, there is a good chance most of these people won’t be brand names in few years, but thanks to this project they will at least have left behind their impressive “bodies of work.”

The Parsons BFA Senior Thesis Show is May 21 from 6-8pm at

25 East 13th St. in New York City.

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

Read more: https://www.nydailynews.com

The post Parsons Seniors Sell Their Thesis Art Projects With Bare Flesh appeared first on Artiholics.

Of all the weird photo trends, memes, or whatever you want to call them, this one I actually like.  Fuck Planking, owling, and all the others it’s time to see some live-action Dragon Ball Z-ing.  Japanese School girls started this by taking pictures with their friends, which try to capture in real life, still frame ATTACKS from the Anime style cartoons like Dragon Ball Z.

It’s photo art imitating animated art.

Even YouTube’s Deadpool is getting in on the act:

Iron man punches the ground when nobody is around.

Roller Derby Players (Photo by Rudi Holt)

There was also that weird fight scene in one of the Matrix movies.

I remember we used to do this as kids with poses from the game Street Fighter, but never thought to take a picture.

Only effective if you yell “HADOUKEN!!

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

See a whole bunch more photos on Kotaku and on MTV Geek!.

The post New Photo Trend: Dragon Ball Z-ing appeared first on Artiholics.

“We’ll always have Paris”, is part of one of the most famous lines in Cinema history, and it’s funny after looking at photos from streets in Paris from today and 100 years ago from the same vantage point.  The Paris of 1940’s Casablanca was pretty much the same Paris then as it is now, as it was in 1900.

The signage might have been a bit updated, there are cars on the streets rather than horses and buggies, and now there are few trees where formerly there weren’t.  I have seen great before and afters with NYC streets, and when a city isn’t already thousands of years old like Paris, a lot of construction and renovation happens in a century, hell in a decade.

Porte Saint-Denis (2013 – 1914)

Passage du Caire (2013-1914)

Rue d’Aboukir (2013-1914)

Rue Basfroi (2013-1918)

Rue Puget – Rue Lepic (2013-1914)

These photos were from the French News Site Rue89 with an interactive slider function, so you can pull them from one century to the next, but that takes precious seconds, and as Americans, Sweet Brown said it best, Ain’t Nobody Got Time For Dat. The good people at 22words already did the heavy lifting (screen grabbing & cropping them).

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post Photographs of Paris Taken 100 Years Apart From The Same Location appeared first on Artiholics.