Tag: Art

Someone on the train is using a phone with a cracked screen. I ask the person to pull up a photo on flickr or instagram. Then I take a photo of the person’s cracked screen showing the photo. People using…

Yeah! Take more photos! Taking photos makes you more observant of your surroundings. Pausing and considering things around you gives you perspective. Often I can get too wrapped up inside my head about life and worrying. To get outside of…

The bright orange pumpkins have arrived just in time for October. Rows and rows of fresh pumpkins sit happily behind a glossy black fence. Soft morning sunlight illuminates the contrast of orange against green. While photographing this scene, I wanted…

Every day Flickr ranks the top 500 photos posted to popular photo sharing service. 1.4 million photos are posted to the service every day, so to be ranked in the top 500 is quite an achievement. In 2014 alone, I…

You encounter what appears to be a wall of notes written by a crazy person. 23 sticky notes arranged on a grid by a seat on the train. Many reflective questions that question our perspective of life. Questions of self-awareness…

My Uncle Bill posted a few photos of a beach stone that looks like a heart. I ran his three images in Google Image search and came up with three other things his stone looks like: This beach stone looks…

“art” is at the core of “earth” so is: carte carts darts farts garth harts karts marts parts party tarts tarty warts warty Fun that art would be the core of farts, party, and warty. Then for 7-letter words, art…

The opportunity: The Art Institute of Chicago was asking for “surrealist objects” last week as a promotion for the current Magritte exhibit. The objects will be selected by the curator of the Magritte show and will be displayed in the…

One part finger monster. One part white-out. Inspired by Magritte’s surrealism exhibit at the Art Institute. Take all these together and what do you have? The “White-out Monster” who likes to paint things white. Yesterday I wrote up an interview…

Many of Chicago’s iconic buildings are white today, because of an unknown artist working today. This artist has managed to keep his identity relatively unknown for the past hundreds of years. He’s also managed to stay alive for the past…

If you had to make a surrealist sculpture only with office supplies and a finger monster, what would you make? Walking around the 14th floor of the Tribune Tower with a finger monster wedged onto my finger, I weighed my…

Bring a “Surrealist-inspired object” to gain free admission to the Art Institute’s Magritte show on July 24, 2014. In the fine print the Art Institute outlines the rules for what cannot be accepted. One of things they do not accept…

Art museum bathrooms. Clean, sharply designed, austere. Much like the white walls of a museum, most bathrooms within art museums have a modern, contemporary yet neutral feel. Among the granite tiles and light gray walls of the bathroom in this…

Boredpanda.com reports: October Jones (real name Joe Butcher), the prolific writer and illustrator… is at it again with a fun series of sticky notes featuring a grimly determined cat named Peppy posing next to motivational messages. He draws them and…

The spudart name came from a problem most college graduates faced in the mid-1990s: losing your school email address after graduation. Email had just gained widespread use during the 90s, so for most college students at the time, it was…

A dog sits in a kitchen and smells unseen fresh bread. He patiently waits for this delicious treat. For the past couple of hours here at Panera, I’ve been looking up at the painting, appreciating how the yellow in the…

Stack many objects together, the final result transforms into a whole that is different than the parts. Take a brick building. At the start, bricks are individual units. Rectangles of hardened clay. Stack them together in a planned fashion and…

A fog crawls over Chicago, photographers slide their cameras out to capture the gray beast. Chicagoist selected 14 photos of today’s fog in Chicago. The second featured image is my photo of the Water Tower pumping station. While riding the…

The Art Institute of Chicago recently “restored” Gustave Caillebotte’s painting, “Paris Street; Rainy Day” (1877) Wow, the umbrellas are really blue now. They almost feel like alien hovercrafts. Perhaps Gustave Caillebotte was predicting an alien invasion on the streets of…

The Art Institute released an app that explores nine artworks on display in the modern wing. Each artwork has several mini factoids and videos uncovering specific details about the background behind the work. The free app, “A Closer Look in…

Ever look at items on a website and then have ads for that website follow you around other places online? Christie’s the high-end auction house is stalking me on the internet. “Click on Calder” a Christie’s banner ad asking me…

Make a photo available via a Creative Commons license allows it to run wild free on the internet. You’ll never know what will happen. In 2007 I shot this HDR image of a tugboat on the Chicago River. Accidentally using…

Vertical lines. Horizontal lines. The difference between the two means the difference between the World Series trophy and a weber grill. These are works of art for sale by my brother, Erik Maldre. Venturing into the never-ending snow with his…

An image search for my name, Matt Maldre, brings up four photos of me–and a photo of the great artist Joseph Beuys. Google is implying that I am the late Joseph Beuys. While I would love to have this honor,…

I’m extremely honored that the Yahoo Creative Team asked that one of my photos be included in the 10-year Flickr anniversary video! Here’s their request: I immediately thought they would want to use one of my most popular photos, like…

Four hours and 33 minutes of a realistic drawing is condensed down to 3 minutes 42 seconds in this youtube video: The artist Marcello Barenghi does have some mad skills. But you can also make a drawing like this with…

The clothespin artist stands at the front steps of the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer of 1994. My fellow college freshman friends and I approach this man selling clothespin necklaces and tshirts with simple clothespin silhouettes. While signing…

In the past week the Spudart Facebook Page had 28 posts. Here are the top three that got the most clicks. Seriously? There’s a Kickapoo State Park in Texas? 29 clicks. This also got 418 views! The other posts on…

Looking for some creative sources? Here are 60 (formerly 45) websites that bring interesting posts. You could subscribe to them using an RSS reader like feedly.com. 3quarksdaily: 2,000 readers A Creative Universe: 664 readers Art in America: 232 readers Art…

There are many variations done on Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” but how many people captured a photo or created an illustration that looks like this famous painting, but never realized the likeness? This would be like creating a masterpiece…

Sherlock Holmes is free! Run wild Holmes! Sherlock Holmes is now in the public domain in America–but wait–only the pre-1923 Holmes. Any characteristics of Holmes developed after 1923 are off-grounds. Fascinating how copyright law works. People can now do anything…