Banksy Creates Bob Ross-Dubbed Process Video of New Work Depicting Oscar Wilde Escaping Prison

   19 hours ago  |  ThisIsColossal

What begins as a soft-spoken clip of America’s most iconic TV painting instructor, Bob Ross from his Joy of Painting show, suddenly shifts into a frenetic and extremely rare behind-the-scenes video of Banksy creating his latest work in Reading, Berkshire. Titled “Create Escape,” the clip was just posted to the artist’s social media channels and depicts the real-time creation of a stenciled artwork of a prisoner escaping the high, red brick walls of HM Prison Reading (formerly known as Reading Gaol). More

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Archaeologists Uncover a Lavish Marble Floor from Ancient Rome in Southern France

   04 Mar 00:00:19  |  ThisIsColossal

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We?re Back! The Colossal Shop Is Restocked

   04 Mar 00:00:19  |  ThisIsColossal

We just added a few fun goods to the newly reopened Colossal Shop, including these (reversible!) face masks featuring some of art history’s most iconic works. Head to the shop for pins, magnets, and pop-up greeting cards that’ll find a permanent spot on your fridge. Each purchase directly supports Colossal and independent arts publishing, and remember, Colossal Members get 10 percent off nearly everything: just log in to your account and grab the discount code before check out. More

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A Dazzling Series of Photos Captures the Soft Glow of Firefly Mating Season in Japan

   03 Mar 00:00:29  |  ThisIsColossal

An enchanting series by Russian photographer Daniel Kordan (previously) frames a sea of flickering fireflies as they populate a dense bamboo forest. Captured in pockets and trails of light, the insects radiate across the thick vegetation on Japan’s Kyushu Island, which Kordan visited back in 2019 during their mating season.
The beetles search for partners from about May to July, with the males first producing the flashes of light and the females generating responses. More

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Plants Embedded in Wax Sprout from Fragile Hands in Memory-Infused Works by Valerie Hammond

   03 Mar 00:00:28  |  ThisIsColossal

In Valerie Hammond?s series of wax drawings, protection is two-fold: the artist (previously) encases dried flowers and ferns in a thin layer of wax, preserving their fragile tissues long after they’ve been plucked from the ground. In outlining a pair of hands, she also secures a memory, or rather, “the essence of a gesture and the fleeting moment in which it was made.”
Centered on limbs lying flat on Japanese paper, the ongoing series dates back to the 1990s, when Hammond made the first tracing “partly in response to the death of a dear friend, whose beautiful hands I often found myself remembering.” She continued by working with family and friends, mainly women and children, to delineate their wrists, palms, and fingers. More

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Architecture and Bold Geometry Fragment Cubist Portraits by Patrick Oberhi Akpojotor

   02 Mar 00:00:22  |  ThisIsColossal

In his architectural portraits, Patrick Oberhi Akpojotor visualizes the exchange between humans and their built environments, whether real or imagined. The artist’s spatial body of work, which explicitly contemplates the relationship between interiority and exteriority, is founded in his childhood in Lagos, a city checkered with traditional, colonial, and contemporary structures where he still lives today. “I saw how a former residential area became a commercial one changing how people interacted with that community,” he says. More

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   02 Mar 00:00:21  |  ThisIsColossal

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A Serendipitous Shot Frames a Meteor Soaring Over Russia?s Klyuchevskaya Sopka as It Erupts

   28 Feb 00:00:20  |  ThisIsColossal

In a single, fortuitous photograph, Daniel Kordan proves his astute eye as he documents two of nature’s rarely seen phenomena: the brilliant trail of a meteor streaking through the sky and Klyuchevskaya Sopka as it spews a mass of glowing lava. Striking and similarly explosive, the pair even reflect in the small body of water in the foreground.
Raised near Moscow, the now-itinerant photographer took the unexpected shot while leading a 2016 workshop at the Kamchatka Peninsula, which sits at the northeast corner of Russia facing the Pacific Ocean. More

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Sheets of Frosted Glass Obscure Floral Bouquets in a Photographic Series About Ambiguity

   27 Feb 00:00:04  |  ThisIsColossal

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