Arie van’t Riet – The radiant beauty of nature

Arie van’t Riet‘s beautiful x-ray photographs gracefully combine the outer visible surface and the inner invisible structure of the natural world in images that give new life to the definition of ‘radiant beauty’.

A medical physicist, Arie van’t Riet has turned into an artist almost by chance, when a friend asked him to take an x-ray picture of a painting. On that occasion he became interested in the creative possibilities that x-ray technology opened up by means of exploiting the different densities and degrees of light absorption of the materials it touches. Made of thin petals and leaves, a bouquet of flowers became Arie van’t Riet‘s first ‘artistic’ experiment. After taking the x-ray picture of a bunch of tulips, he digitalized the silver-bromate analog film, then inverted the gray scale and eventually selected some areas to be coloured. The resulting image perfectly restitutes the impalpable lightness but also the vivid strength that flowers have. With this new and exciting possibility to explore nature at hand, Arie van’t Riet started including insects and animals, elegantly composing flora and fauna while playing around with the different x-ray intensities required in order to capture thin and thick tissues in one image. The Dutch scientist/artist only uses dead animals (which he gathers when the sad event has already taken place) for his x-ray photographs, as he does not want to expose living creatures to the danger of x-ray exposure. Van’t Riet defines his pictures as bioramas where the natural elements variously assembled literally radiate the sheer splendor contained even in the tiniest natural element.    The artistic path embraced by Arie van’t Riet bears witness of the fact that to be an artist is first and foremost a matter of creative disposition, enabling one to look at the world in an open, curious and actively responsive way, no matter what expressive tools are chosen. Playing around with the technology he better knew, Arie van’t Riet discovered that he could fix in a single image both the outer surface (that we see in colour when touched with visible light) and the inner structure (only showed in grey scale by invisible x-rays) of nature.  Looking at Arie van’t Riet photographs is like ideally wearing a pair of x-ray glasses that make us participate to the wholesomeness of the natural world.

Invited by TEDx in 2013 to hold a lecture, in this video Arie van’t Riet explains how he discovered the expressive potentialities of x-ray technology:

To explore more of Arie van’t Riet‘s bioramas, please visit his website here.

Images courtesy of Arie van’t Riet.

(via e MORFES)

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Colors of The Wind by René & Radka – The unbearable lightness of being

(…after a two weeks rest in my homeland, Sardinia)

Soundtrack for this image: If I Were A Fish by Múm (you can listen to it here)

If I were a fish and you were a seashell
Would you marry me anyway?
Would you have my babies?

If I were a fish
If I were a fish

If I were a bumblebee and you were a puddle
Would I drown in you anyway?
In your soggy eyeballs?

If I were a fish
If I were a fish

If I were a fish
And you were a puddle
If I were a fish

The series Colors Of The Wind by photographic duo René & Radka is my visual remedy for re-entering the hustle and bustle of my London life while keeping with me the healing effect that sea, sun and a lighter way of living have on me.

Although set on a beach, Colors of The Wind is inspired by air and wind rather than by water. The colourful creatures inhabiting these pictures are flying kites. Jellyfishes, octopuses, teddy bears, alligators, mushrooms etc. resemble little playful and free spirits floating in the sky with gentle movements, as if underwater.

 René and Radka are professional fashion photographers, but in this personal project they have created a delicate and poetic universe, where the playful is all but childish (just like Múm’s lullaby), where the sky and the sea offer the open space to become wiser…if it’s true that “people do not get ‘heavy’ with wisdom. They get light. The wiser you become, the lighter you become” (Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas). 

For more images visit René and Radka website.

(via Collater.al)

Flora Metamorphicae – harmony between art and nature

The collaborative project Flora Metamorphicae reinterprets the traditional use of decorative ceramics and flower motives, creating incredibly beautiful installations that harmonically integrate within both nature and exhibiting spaces. The original idea for Flora Metamorphicae dates back to 2003, when a group of professional ceramists based in Bergen (Norway) were looking together at a catalogue of historical ceramic’s pieces. Inspired by their elegant and elaborate beauty, they decided to give new artistic life and an original ethos to the creation and use of ceramics. Since 2006, Flora Metamorphicae is a group of six women (Kari Aasen, Lippa Dalèn, Siri Haaskjold, Bjørg Hougen, Audhild Rypdal and Eli Veim). Each of them keeps working individually, but in this project they join forces and creative imagination in the name of a commune sense of beauty. There is just one imperative for the creation of the flowers: they must be handmade and no more than two hands big. In the years the variety of flowers – naturalistic or imaginative ones – has increased, mirroring the surprisingly incessant offer of colours and shapes of nature.These amazing installations appeal for their immediate vibrant beauty. But their meaning goes beyond being decorative and it is revealed through their ever changing aspect, when they are installed within the open environment. In the tradition of land art, they assume a deeper power in their co-existence with nature, in their response to it. When installed in water locations (like lakes, ponds but also dams) they astonishingly react to lights, reflections and the ebb and flows, offering a show that is never the same. Submerged and shining with reflections at times, blossoming out of water when the tides retire, these pieces of art harmonically enter into dialogue with the environment,  blurring the separation line between nature and artifact.But the work by Flora Metamorphicae has a joyful life also in the close of gallery spaces, where it re-asserts its status as art. The flowers are thickly assembled on floors, drawing elegant patterns or simply invading the space. In this second life, they bring with them the traces (grains of sand and similar) that they inherited from their life in the open.

With their collaborative production, Flora Metamorphicae seem to bring alive the idea that individuality and collective cohesion are not opposite forces, just like natural and manufactured can enter into harmonic conversation. All images courtesy of Flora Metamorphicae.

Flora Metamorphicae website.

Danmala – Mandala Art by Kathy Klein

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Rune Guneriussen’s Dreamscapes

Norwegian artist Rune Guneriussen creates graciously incongruous dream-like universes, where lifeless everyday objects inhabit natural and apparently unaltered-by-man landscapes.

[  Italian version]

Jim Denevan’s mind blowing Sand Art

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[ Italian version]