Abandoned Detroit House Gets Adorned with 4000 Flowers

What does it look like when you give florists 48 hours to fill an old, abandoned house with flowers? These photos, taken by photographer Heather Saunders, are from the trail run of Flower House, an exhibition planned in October that will fill 15 rooms of a dilapidated Detroit home with between 60,000 and 100,000 flowers. For the preview event, it took florists 48 hours and 4,000 flowers to transform a neighboring house into a wildly beautiful wonderland.
Lisa Waud, the creator of Flower House, has had a floral design business called Pot & Box for five years. After seeing images of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapped Pont Neuf bridge in Paris and Christian Dior's 2012 couture show, Waud had an epiphany. "I knew I had to create my own house of flowers and invite as many people as possible to experience it with me," she stated. She found it surprisingly easy to get florists on board with her vision. "The Flower House October installation will be an unprecedented one," she wrote. "We will experience something that has never been done before—for one weekend, the walls, ceilings, floors, and fixtures will be bursting with luscious blooms and textural foliage harvested from American farms coast to coast, and featuring our own Great Lakes state. There is a real and strong momentum gaining for consciousness in growing, sourcing, and buying flowers grown in our own soil. Much like the Slow Food movement, the Slow Flowers Movement is changing the way people think about where their cut flowers come from in America."
The house will be open to the public from Friday, October 16, to Sunday, October 18. Visitors will be able to witness the unique setting before the house gets torn down and replaced with a living, growing flower farm. "The goal is to dismantle the structures and divert as much 75% of the reusable materials out of the landfill," she states. "The hope is that this deconstruction and land repurposing will inspire others to see abandoned structures as platforms for art and business, and to use them in an environmentally responsible way." Waud also sees the project as a way to give the house "one last hurrah" before it gets torn down.
 

Calligraphy Brushes to Create Breathtaking Watercolor Paintings of Birds

"In painting and calligraphy, the first stroke is the most important. It comes from nothing and manifests something." San Francisco-born artist Karl Martens creates beautiful paintings of birds using materials not often paired together - Japanese and Chinese calligraphy brushes with watercolor. What's most fascinating is that he paints all of his works by memory, without reference to any guide. What you'll notice first are the sweeping brushstrokes and then you'll see all the fine details. While he uses large Japanese and Chinese calligraphy brushes to create the general shape and posture of the birds, the intricate markings of them are done using charcoal pencil and smaller calligraphy brushes. Martens studied birds for so long that he knows how to paint both the large and subtle differences including the birds' beaks.
Martens is inspired by Shih-t’ao (1642-1707), one of the most famous Chinese painters in the early Qing dynasty. He was considered revolutionary during that time because he didn't believe in imitating old masters, while he respected them, he forged his own path. He valued innovation, and as such, he used bold, impressionistic brushstrokes and he left white space to suggest distance. Above all, Shih-t’ao believed that the artist must trust his or her own ability. He coined the term Holistic Brushstroke, which means that one could create something out of nothing. As Martens describes it, "Optimally, it contains no planned thought. It emanates from 'emptiness.'"
Here's how the artist describes his own work. "Just as the union of calligraphy ink and paper always provides unexpected results, so does the watercolor on this rough hand made paper. Especially when calligraphy brushes are used. Each paper reacts differently to the medium. Sometimes it absorbs immediately, and other times it doesn’t absorb at all. A simple brush provides less control than fine one, and sometimes the opposite is true. This uncertainty is what inspires me. What will happen this time? In order to give life to some areas I sometimes use salt on the paper, which creates unexpected patterns as the paint dries. All in order to confront the unexpected."
Below, you can watch Martens at work in a fascinating video he produced with Cricket Fine Art back in 2012.

  

Luxury Spa Blends in Perfectly with Gorgeous Desert Background

Nestled in the desert of southern Utah sits the Amangiri Resort and Spa, a luxury accommodation that celebrates the beauty of the nearby mountainous landscape. The relaxing locale occupies a 600-acre site in Canyon Point and is close to the border of Arizona. It’s tucked into a protected valley with views overlooking the colorful, stratified rock towards the Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument.
The resort is built around a central Pavilion that embraces a main swimming pool punctuated by a large, sloping rock. It also features a communal living room, gallery, library, and dining room, as well as a private dining room and cellar. From the Pavilion, there are two building wings that house 17 suites a piece. Each room is accessible via a private courtyard and includes a combined living and bedroom space, in addition to an expansive wardrobe and deep soaking tub in the bathroom.
Three architects collaborated to build the Amangiri: Marwan Al-Sayed, Wendell Burnette and Rick Joy. They designed it to blend into the scenery, not stand out. So, the colors, textures, materials, and proportion of the structures are all in keeping with the natural surroundings. It allows the visitor to enjoy the desolate beauty without any other visual distraction.
        

Frieze's New "Fun-House" Maze is Filled with Puzzles and Obstacles

The contemporary art fair Freize New York opened to VIPs and collectors today, May 13, at Randall's Island and it's the first day people have been experiencing an intriguing installation. Tribute to Flux-Labyrinth 1976/2015 is a 200-foot-long one-way maze of narrow corridors and rooms where visitors have to overcome crazy obstacles and mind boggling challenges until they can reach the end. The participatory project was originally conceived 40 years ago by an experimental group called Fluxus artists. The enclosed maze, which consisted of various artist-designed challenges, was going to be staged at René Block gallery in New York in 1975, but the plans fell through so it went up the following year in Berlin instead.
Those brave enough to enter must first sign a waiver because it can be "very tight and claustrophobic" as well as a "little wobbly," according to a facilitator of the installation. So what can you expect?ArtNews has the scoop: "Upside down forests, balloon pits, and pianos that control portals. The maze is full of puzzles and physical challenges. Doorknobs are rarely what they seem...Tip-toeing on tilting catwalks and plunging bare feet into pools of beans, it was hard not to go through the whole delightful thing grinning. At least until the last rooms, designed by John Bock. A tangle of wires and medical tubes hung from the ceiling in the penultimate stretch. A small monitor embedded in the snarl showed a bearded man who seemed to be sleeping. Menacing, but manageable. Pushing past that, Bock served up one final challenge: squeezing through a tunnel lined by large, mostly naked hirsute men, a birth canal of bears."
For this resurrection, three stretches of the labyrinth are exact replicas of the original and new parts have been commissioned by artists Amalia Pica, John Bock, and Gelatin. The newcomers were advised to devise, “obstacles that can be both physical and psychological, keeping in mind the spirit of Fluxus, which was very do-it-yourself.”
Above: Installation view of ‘Flux Labyrinth’ at the Walker Art Center in 1993. (Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis)

 Fluxus-Labyinth Sketch
Forbes calls it one of 7 events and exhibitions you don't want to miss, stating, "Creating new environments in the existing concept, attendees will be utterly confused trying to escape, and they will love it." Now, here are some first Instagram photos of the installation.
Artforum

 margotnorton
 kiptoncronkite

Flocks of Sheep Roam Across the Tuscan Countryside in Breathtaking Aerial Photos

During his summer and springtime trips to Italy, Polish photographer Marcin Sobas has captured captivating aerial views of Tuscany's sheep-filled scenery. In the undulating valleys of Siena and Val d'orcia, Sobas trekked across the hills to photograph a shepherd herding his flock of around 300 sheep. In taking snapshots of this moment, we can see the sheep wandering across the vivid green grass as dust appears in their wake.  
Using a telescopic lens, the 34-year-old artist shot the pictures from an opposite hill, so that he would not startle the sheep. Even so, this task was not always easy. "It was quite hard sometimes because they moved not where I wanted and it’s not a good idea to come closer to negotiate with them. All of them are guarded by Tuscan dogs that are not always friendly with photographers," wrote Sobas onBoredPanda. 

Woman Quit Her Job in New York to Build Sustainable Bamboo Homes in Bali

In 2010, Elora Hardy left her successful fashion career in New York and returned to her childhood home in Bali, which is where she decided to build bamboo houses for a living. Over the course of the last five years, Elora and her team at Ibuku have revolutionized bamboo construction, believing that this plant is both underused and an ideal renewable resource. After treating this material with boron to make it indigestible to insects, the group of talented artists have created several remarkable bamboo homes in Indonesia. "When I first saw these structures at Green School under construction six years ago, I just thought, this makes perfect sense. It is growing all around us. It's strong. It's elegant. It's earthquake-resistant. Why hasn't this happened sooner, and what can we do with it next?" questioned the bamboo enthusiast during her TED Talk.
Elora was inspired to utilize bamboo by her father John Hardy, who developed the Green School, which features majestic bamboo structures that reflect the sustainable principles the school is based on. With this in mind, Elora went on to create the Green Village, a sustainably built village that redefines what it means to use bamboo as a tool for construction. "The key for me was opening up the possibilities of bamboo, architecture, and design at a high-end level. I wanted to the make the Green Village change the perceptions of bamboo to a cooler material and use it in innovative ways. I love making creative, beautiful things using craftsmanship that can open up and preserve a new skill set," stated Elora to The Eco Gypsy.