Artwork So Awesome It will Melt Your Face Off [WonderBros via Walyou — Thanks, jorel845]

[Alexis Rockman via {feuilleton}]

Disney World I
Disney World II
Capitol Hill
Church and White
East 82nd St.
Gateway Arch
Hollywood
Hollywood at Night
Hotelscape
Manifest Destiny
Mount Rushmore
Miami
Vie en Rose
Washington Square

Chueh's Inferno series, as well as some of his other paintings, are currently on display at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles, where he's also selling a limited edition sketchbook explaining the concepts behind each painting.

[Luke Chueh's Inferno via mashKULTURE]

Ring 1: Judgment
Ring 2: The Fornicators
Ring 3: The Gluttonous
Ring 4: The Hoarders
Ring 5: The Wrathful
Ring 6: The Heretics
Ring 7, Inner: The River of Blood
Ring 7, Middle: The Forest of Suicides
Ring 7, Inner: The Desert of Fire
Ring Eight, Bolgia Nine: The Sowers of Discord
Ring 9: The Traitorous

In the early 1980s, video cassettes enabled entrepreneurs in Ghana to set up traveling open-air cinemas to bring movies — often Western science fiction, horror, and action films — to remote Ghana audiences. To promote the films, cinema owners would ask artists to paint promotional posters (generally on sliced-up canvas flour sacks) to accompany each cassette and stir up interest in the movies. The artists were encouraged to take considerable liberties with the artwork, and many artists never even viewed the films at all before creating the posters, only hearing them described by the people running the cinemas. Thus, while some paintings are simply copies of the images from the cassette boxes, others are wild interpretations of the movies, paintings that are more inspired by the films than attempts to accurately represent their content.

[ephemera assemblyman, Affiche Museum, Poster Page via Nerdcore]

Jovanovic was inspired to create her current series Pareidolia, when she spilled ink across a piece of paper and began tracing human organs, glassware, and tubes across the pattern of the ink. The series, she says is meant to evoke "the curiosity and fear that are often associated with scientific research." Her other work tends to be science focused as well, such as the first two images below, her "Hybrids," which meld human bodies with parts from other animals and machines.

Pareidolia is currently on display at the International Museum of Surgical Science.

[Vesna Jovanovic]
Interview with Jovanovic on Pareidolia [Seed Magazine]

Reattachment
Timekeeper
Ventricles Apart from Pareidolia
Cordiform from Pareidolia
Radiating Duodenum from Pareidolia
Metalhead Photophore from Pareidolia
Temporal Nexus from Pareidolia
Vital Choice from Pareidolia
Femur Strife from Pareidolia
New Mitosis from Pareidolia

The airship paintings are part of Amend's "Airships and Tentacles" series, in which he combines Jules Verne-inspired technology with Lovecraftian monsters. They're all available as prints at Amend's store, which also features Amend's other steampunk-inspired paintings and engravings, such as "Nautilus 20,000 Leagues," also below.

[Myke Amend via Dark Roasted Blend]

Behold the Machine
Antarctic Experiment
Sabicu
Engraving from "Sabicu"
The Rescue
Nautilus 20,000 Leagues

The Ancient Book of Sex and Science is the second book in a planned four-book series (the first was The Ancient Book of Myth and War and explores the relationship between sex and science in Pixar's familiar, Mary Blair-inspired style. Said editor and Pixar animator Scott Morse:

Well, we're usually pretty introverted, so maybe that makes us a little kinkier. And there's a tradition of us loving Playboy cartoons and naughtier things in general. We all remember drawing in the margins of our textbooks when we were younger.

And he feels the connection between physicality and the exploration of the physical world was a natural one:

They're similar in that they both have correlating patterns, like the rhythm of math and sex, or like music with peaks and valleys, highs and lows. They can both be very calculated.

Below are samples from the book. Somehow, I'll never look at the characters from Monsters Inc. the same way again. Warning: One picture is NSFW, as you can probably tell from the thumbnail.

[Amazon via Nerve]

In 1994, Ellison, inspired by Yerka’s work collaborated with the painter on Mind Fields. Yerka created 34 paintings for the book, and Ellison wrote a short piece of fiction for each painting, latching onto images or themes he saw in them. The piece above, entitled “Fever,” inspired a story which begins:

Icarus did not die in the fall.

What his father, Daedalus, never saw was this:

Icarus fell toward the Aegean Sea; fell through clouds; through billos and canopies and flotillas of clouds; and was lost to the sight of his father. The wings melted and fell away. They were carried on the stratospheric currents, miles away from the drop point at which Icarus had vanished through the cloud foam. When Daedalus banked and swooped and did his air-search, he found the pinions floating in the Sea. But he did not find his son, because Icarus had come down miles away.

[Yerka Land via Zuzu Fan]

The dreamlike images of “Patriot” (at the top) and “Rousseau” (above) suggest a world where most humans and industry have disappeared, leaving just a few human beings to press on. But the monochromatic “Buttonmaker,” “Chocolate Donut,” and “Hungry” suggest additional losses – loss of clean air, loss of limbs – that present a more extreme vision of the new normal.

A few of his paintings depict the things we would leave behind. “Necropolis” shows a snowy boneyard not of our bodies, but of our vehicles, while “Extinction (Study)” reminds us that when we’re gone, our Darwinian betters will move impassively about the last monuments of our existence.

[Fred Einaudi via Coilhouse]

Buick's inspiration for the exhibition stemmed from our tendency to romanticize both the future and the past:

Why Science Fiction and Westerns? It is our own interpretation, personal myth and pure fantasy about our past and future. Each opened a world of possibilities, we imagined Time machines that would help us undo our errors and we imagined Space machines that would solve all the world’s problems. Who lives in the present? No one. We’re always holding on to an illusion of our glory days or residing in a dreamland of future utopias. The uncharted territory of the mind can be as lonely as the desert or space, chained to mistakes of yesterday or terrified of the shadowy nightmare of tomorrow. We struggle to make sense of the two. In searching our hopes and fears we uncover treasures in memories and the lessons learned. With this knowledge we create the future through our dreams and imagination.

Buick has made the show's catalogue available on Etsy.

Sci Fi Western Art Exhibition [SpaceWesterns.com]