Search results (tags) for: "barry london"

There's No Place Like Here: Dustin Yellin

2009-05-15T14:22:00-05:00

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(music by Butthole Surfers, Barry London, Enemy Heroes, The Give, animation by JuliaPott)

Artist, filmmaker, surfer, and world traveler Dustin Yellin is a maker as well as a hunter. Yellin creates intricate volumetric tomographic paintings and hunts for salvaged treasures during his extensive travels. The Red Hook Labs is a collaborative artist space headed by Yellin and photographer Charlotte Kidd. This 15000 square foot warehouse houses studios for sculpture, photography, painting, a video editing facility, a gallery and an artists' residency space. The move to Red Hook happened once Manhattan became too expensive for artists.

Yellin has filled the space with an eclectic collection of street finds and friends' artwork. From paintings and drawing by Gavin Anderson and Gibby Haynes to animal skulls, snake skins and giant wooden sculptures, this artistic hub is filled with natural history wonders and contemporary art.

P.S. We found Dustin through a fantastic photography blog The Selby. Thank you Todd Selby!

Check out Dustin's latest show Dust in the Brain Attic at Robert Miller Gallery.

Open your door to Etsy's There's No Place Like Here series! Add photos of your beautiful space (studio, home, or boutique) or suggest photos to us through our There's No Place Like Here flickr pool. If you would like to share your crafting space, add your photos to the Etsy Open Studio flickr pool. You never know, you might need to bust out the welcome wagon for the Etsy video crew!

Watch other Etsy videos | Decorating Posts | Get the Look series

Search Etsy for "Natural History" | Browse Etsy's Art Category

There's No Place Like Here: Made with Love by Hannah

2009-04-22T15:24:00-05:00

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(music by Lineland, Barry London, animation by JuliaPott)

What's it like to live in a fantastical German chalet in the heart of downtown Los Angeles? Hannah Kopacz of Made With Love By Hannah has customized her colorful abode with twenty years' worth of knick knack and ric rac treasure hunting. Take a tour of her packed home, overflowing with vintage and handmade gnomes, figurines, mushrooms and veggie people.

For more on Hannah's projects, tchotchkes and gettin' shack wacky, check out her blog and Flickr stream. She even made her studio (which is a shed in her backyard) look like a huge cuckoo clock!

Open your door to Etsy's There's No Place Like Here series! If you have a beautiful space (studio, home, or boutique — not craft spaces), let us know. Add photos of your space or suggest photos to us through our new flickr pool. You never know, you might need to bust out the welcome wagon for the Etsy video crew!

Watch other Etsy videos | Decorating Posts | Get the Look series

Handmade Weddings: LoucheLab's Love Story

2008-09-05T14:00:00-05:00

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[music by Barry London]

This article was originally published on March 28, 2008. We are reviving it as part of the Best of the Storque series. Enjoy!

If you're following the Handmade Wedding Series, then you probably appreciate a good love story. LoucheLab and her husband Ned have a particularly handmade story of falling in love (well, it's high tech, too). Blogging, artwork, photography, web cams, artist books and international romance all converged to get these two souls together. Below, you'll find LoucheLab's account and photographs, as well as a special video portrait we produced with them (which does have some spicy mature artwork by the artists, so be forewarned if you are watching this with your child — this is an adult love story, after all!).

Ned and I met by accident. (Which is a pretty big accident, considering that we lived about 7,000 miles from one another.) I was living in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Ned was living in the Meat Packing District in New York while packing up his studio to move to Brooklyn. We had both started blogging 9 months before — after painful break-ups. So Ned was surfing random blogs and got into mine, went to my Flickr page and looked at my art and then wrote me an email.

It was basically my art and his words that brought us together.

We spent almost a year apart; then I flew to New York at Christmas to meet him for the first time. Before I came he said, "I want us to make art together while you are here." My art was always very solitary, so I asked, "What do you mean?" and, he said, "I don't know, but we'll figure it out."

And we have: we made graffiti and paintings, and we took a lot of pictures of one another. After I went back to Israel, we kept on talking on webcam all the time; it was on 24 hours a day. He would wait 'til his midnight, which was my 7:00 AM, and we would talk before I would go to work, and I would rush home from the office to see him. It was like living in one apartment with a window into the other room where he was, without being able to touch one another — besides with words and art.

In the course of the months apart, we both created a lot, we expressed our love, the sexual frustration and the emotional roller coaster state with photography and paintings and street art and t-shirt making and computer art and so on. The whole relationship, between his blog and my blog and our Flickr accounts, was very public, and we had people all over the world encouraging us through the difficult times and happy for us, when finally, we made the choice of me moving to New York so we could start a life together offline.

[Me signing our Ktuba (illustrated wedding contract in the Jewish tradition). We wrote the text together and I illustrated it.]

We first decided to get married so I could stay in the United States, but as the preparation started, it became a very small part of it all. Because art was such a big part of our relationship, and because as a part of our relationship we beat all odds and made the rules as we went along, it was really obvious to us that our wedding would also be like that — intimate and important and very art inspired.

[This is me working on the Hupa. It's a big blanket like thing that in Jewish tradition serves as a roof the couple need to get married under. I spray painted about a 100 ravens on it, and my hand was sore for about a week after. The stars in the middle are tattoos we got together when I came to visit New York and met Ned for the first time.]

The theme of the wedding was ravens, because of — well, a lot of things, but also because they mate for life after having a relatively long period of just playing the field. (Below, you'll see me getting my wedding tattoo. I illustrated it.)

It was basically a Rabbi who is a friend and about 20 friends and family members in our studio in Williamsburg. A lot of what we made was a spur of a moment idea that took shape. Ned edited a cool music mix and we thought "this would be a nice give-away," which lead to me spray painting 40 CDs with a cool pattern, and us burning copies 'til 5:00 in the morning.

Our Rabbi told us that although we didn't want rings, we needed to exchange something of value. So we decided to get rings after all, and on the train on the way to the store, we tried to figure out what they would symbolize for us — and what being married means to us. We talked about learning and making mistakes and this being a beginning rather then a happy ending: we got both rings engraved with "Human" on the inside.

The idea of writing and illustrating our own Ktuba actually came from Josh the Rabbi, which I was really grateful about. I wouldn't have thought about it myself. Also, he suggested making some art or writing something to express how we feel about weddings and marriage, which is how the wedding book I made came to be.

We didn't have a DJ or a band or 300 people in fancy dresses or flowers or a white dresses: we had only people that we wanted there (including my sister on webcam from Israel). We had to deal with a lot of feelings and fears beforehand, rather than having too many arrangements to take care of. While the wedding was going I realized I forgot one of the decoration projects I wanted to do, but it didn't matter. After the ceremony, Ned's parents took everyone out to Union Picnic for dinner, which was at the time our favorite restaurant. Even still, we hear from people who were there about how significant and intense the whole event was, and how it's one of the most memorable events they can think of.

[Ned getting his wedding tattoo. He designed it.]

The handmade wedding theme caught on, and we got artwork from three or four artist friends as gifts, and Ned's dad designed and printed a book of the wedding pictures for us which we show off to anyone who wants to know what the wedding was like.

I always hated weddings before. I used to work for a catering service and the way so many wedding are about food or about showing off was really repulsive to me. With the way things went with our wedding, I can say that this was the best wedding ever, which is cool because it was mine!

[Married!]

What an inspiring love story. Leave your thoughts in the comments!

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Wedding Gift Guide | Wedding Category | Wedding Showcase | Handmade Wedding Series

Handmade Portraits: Maya Hayuk

2008-08-15T11:50:00-05:00

(MATURE content in the video: if you're watching this with your child, be prepared to answer some questions about female body parts.)

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(music by Barry London, The And Group, Hold Me)

Muralist, photographer, painter, music video creator... Maya Hayuk prefers to simply call herself an artist, because under that moniker she has the freedom to work in whatever medium she wants at any given time.

Growing up in Baltimore, Maya learned the art of traditional Ukrainian handicrafts from her family. Her parents, both professors—one geography, one psychology—traveled extensively with the family during her childhood and bought Maya a camera at an early age to document their adventures. In high school she started shooting bands and getting attention for her work. After attending Massachusetts College of Art's SIM (Studio for Interrelated Media) program, Maya became interested in environmental art, wherein murals work in collaboration with the surrounding architecture, as well as the community who lives with the art long afterward. Maya also studied comparative religion, which has infused all of her work with a spiritual aspect ever since.

Maya has painted murals around the world, and her work has been featured in magazines, album covers and ads campaigns. Her improvised style and bright colors seem to be part of a new resurgence in psych-folk art that is pinned to a higher consciousness: one that inspires good vibes. Maya says that with her murals, "the narrative can be as simple as 'I like those colors'" and it doesn't have to go deeper than that with her audience. Maya's work has become something more than a precise painting on a wall. It's a part of people's lives, and a living thing that people interact with and tell stories about.

Last spring Maya headed to Braddock, PA to work with Braddock Active Arts organization to help revitalize a once thriving steel mill town, now part of the forgotten post-industrial landscape of America. Sixteen different artists from all over the world gathered to contribute environmental art that ranged from the functional to the inspirational. With the help of the teens from the Braddock Youth Project, these artists added a little life and hope to this depressed town.

Although Maya makes part of her income from licensing her imagery and painting murals, her bread and butter comes from selling rock posters, t-shirts and books of her designs. Maya's work will be featured at the upcoming Democratic National Convention (Bright Future, pictured below) and at the Mahan Gallery in Columbus, Ohio this fall.

Watch our other Handmade Video Portraits and subscribe to our Youtube Channel!

See Maya's website for more of her work: www.mayahayuk.com

Handmade Portraits: MV Knits featured on YouTube!

2008-08-03T20:25:00-05:00

Today, August 3rd, 2008 YouTube has featured one of our Handmade Video Portraits on their front page! Please watch our portrait of shepherd Susan Gibbs and then subscribe to the Etsy channel on YouTube and Itunes to keep up-to-date on the latest Etsy videos.

Check out the Martha's Vineyard Fiber Farm's blog and flickr site. You can also check out the Etsy Labs flickr site for Calder Martin's photos from the shoot.

Watch the rest of the Handmade Video Portraits series and leave a comment! Let us know if you find the stories inspiring and enlightening.

Handmade Portraits: MV Knits

2008-07-11T11:00:00-05:00

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(music by Barry London, Charlie Parr)

After quitting her day job in Los Angeles and moving to Martha's Vineyard, a quiet island off the Massachusetts coast, Susan Gibbs aka MVKnits had a great idea. She started Martha's Vineyard Fiber Farm and figured out how to make a living making yarn. Why not use the local food movement's model of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and apply it to a yarn harvest? Shareholders pay for a share in the yarn harvest as a way to support a local farm (or in this case, a local farm supported through the internet) and in return they get weekly updates, photos from the farm, an invitation to the shearing and ultimately a share of the yarn.

Check out the Martha's Vineyard Fiber Farm's blog and flickr site. And check out the Etsy Labs flickr site for Calder Martin's photos from the shoot.You can watch more of our Handmade Video Portraits and we'd be so thrilled if you'd subscribe to our free Etsy iTunes podcast.

Handmade Portraits: Elizaveta

2008-05-19T17:17:00-05:00

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[music by Barry London]

Canadian artist Elizaveta makes giant, playful, handmade necklaces using an odd assortment of items. From My Little Pony to hair rollers to Bubblicious bubble gum, her outrageous designs take people by surprise. Combining influences of haute couture designers like Alexander McQueen, Comme Des Garcons and rapper Flava Flav, Elizaveta makes one of a kind jewelry like no other.

Watch our other Handmade Video Portraits and subscribe to our Youtube Channel! Also, you can check out other international stories in our Etsy World Tour series.

Etsy How-to: Make a Miniature Moustache

2008-04-18T16:43:00-05:00

This week, Christine (aka iheartmoustaches) breaks it on down and shows us how to use #6 plastic to create miniature moustaches! (Christine has made a bunch of these in the past, as she is a lover of the moustache in all its various forms.) #6 plastic is not recycleable in New York and so this is a great way to upcycle those strawberry containers and Chinese take out containers and keep them out of the landfill. This project is awesome for people who need a moustache on the go.

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She's also open sourcing two of her moustache designs. You can download "The Professor" and "The Lady's Man" in this pdf!

We did some measuring and the moustaches started out 6 inches wide and ended up 2 1/4 inches wide. That means it shrunk to almost 1/3 its original size!

(music by Barry London )

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For more how-tos and instructional good stuff, check out Howcast.com! We post videos there, and there's much more to discover!

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Handmade Portraits: Junkprints

2008-04-04T21:30:00-05:00

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(music by Tough Dumplin Productions, Barry London & Jukeboxer)

This is the first in a series called Handmade Portraits. These mini-documentaries are intended to tell stories of handmade ingenuity and feature artists who are an inspiration to the Etsy community and beyond.

Meet Chanel Kennebrew, aka Junkprints. Chanel is a photographer, graphic designer and occasional art director who got sick of having her designs watered down, so she became an independent garment producer as Junkprints. And avid illustrator since childhood, Chanel combined her skills ito create unique designs that have social commentary, or as she calls it, "Chanelovision," about the world around her. She tells it like it is, but has a playful style and spirit that inspires you to get out there and make things!

Let us know what innovative artists and makers that you'd like to see profiled in a Handmade Portrait. Also, make your own video and tag it with "Handmade Stories" on Youtube — we'd love to share your stories with the world!

Making Eco Friendly Bags with Burda Style

2008-03-21T15:00:00-05:00

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(Music by Barry London )

The next time you're asked if you want a paper or plastic bag at the grocery store, you will be able to politely decline and then put your goodies in this handmade shopping bag. Strut out of the store with DIY pride!

Our friends at BurdaStyle gave us a run through of how to make the fabulous open source Charlie grocery bag pattern. This bag folds up into its own pouch so you can carry it wherever you go. You can help keep our planet green by reusing your own handmade grocery bag. It's easy to make, so you have no excuse! Go make one and put a link to a photo of it in the comments so we can see the fabulous creations you've made!