GelaSkins | What's the Skinny?

Nice Cans!

The Cans festival is set to kick off this weekend in London and promises to be a whole metric ass-tonne of awesome. This is being marketed as a street party of stencil art and has a cast of 'partyers' that are pretty impressive. Everyone from Blek le Rat to 3D and Banksy will be taking part in the festivities, but there are a few rules of engagement...

1. It's a stencil only event - no freehand lettering or characters
2. No going over other artists
3. Apparently the have a lot of security, and they will direct you to your painting area


We'll have the pics up for you early next week, so check back!

Canned goodness *UPDATED*

So much great stuff going on in the world today, where to begin...

Steven Daily, the southern Californian  artist, dropped a line this week saying thanks to all those that supported Gag Me With A Toon and he was so inspired by all the love you folks threw out their way, that he just waltzed right out and threw down some wicked graf. He was kind enough to send a few shots along to show all of you.

 

The Bay area's MARS-1 has a great new print being offered  up by the Jonathan LeVine Gallery called Aerodynamics for Psychonauts. This baby is limited to 50 and can be purchased for $350 directly from the gallery.

Shepard Fairey has released a new poster in support of the new movie BOMB IT featuring the GIANT himself along with a slew of others on the history of global graffiti and street art. Pretty sweet if you ask me, but I'm a little pissed they haven't announced a Toronto screening date.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

* UPDATE -  Stay tuned in the coming weeks for an announcement for the Toronto screening of BOMB IT :) 

In the meantime, check out the trailer...

 

Annnnd our man behind the Bookshelf, Colin Thompson, is up for an award Down Under. The Children's Book Council of Australia  has put Colin's book Dust on a short list for Best Picture Book Of the Year. Well done Colin and good luck!

Free skin Feeevaah!

Alright kiddiewinkles, it's Friday (Hoooray!) and on Friday's 'round these parts we're going to get things jumping a little bit by giving you what you want. That's right, we're giving away some skins on this here blog and it's veeeeeerrrrry easy to win. Here's what you gotta do - email the correct answers to the questions below to this address(contact at gelaskins dot com) and the first 3 people to email in win their choice of skin. Please include your name, address (no P.O. Boxes please!) AND Telephone number (very important!)

Alright, here we go...

1. Which company makes amazing wallpaper whose patterns warps around your fixtures and frames?

2. Which kind of mammal did the worlds tallest man save?

3. Which table is the coolest table in your house?

*Hint- The answers to all these questions can be found in posts on the blog - you jus' gotta dig a little.

In artist news, Juxtapoz, low brow art mag extrordinaire has a great little interview with Amy Sol. Greg 'Craola' Simkins has designed a great new figure for street stylistas Upper Playground  based on their mascot/logo.  This little guy is called the Orange Argyle Walrus - makes me want to trick some little oysters... Speaking of Alice in Wonderland, I came across some awesome illustrations by Ralph Steadman of Lewis Carroll's magnum opus.

Well, hope you have a good weekend - see you next week!

It's another day to get a little bit of feel good.

Jamie Lidell IS the man (and also known as JIM according to his impeding release) and has released the second video from his sophomore release next week. Well, maybe sophomore isn't the most correct term in this case. For someone that's been releasing minimal techno albums for the better part of a decade, definitely not, but in his current incarnation as a funk machine churning out sexy tunes to get down to, fo' sho!

As we've come to expect from mr. Lidell at this point, his melodies are saccharine, his beats tight and funkay, and his "No way I'm this white or English" soul vocal stylings are just f***ing killer - no two ways about it.

Peep these two awesome cuts: Another Day and A Little Bit of Feel Good. What I love about these videos  is that he's decided to go a very Stanley Kubrick-esque route with video content, which has very little correlation with the lyrics or even sytle of music - awesome!  Who knew a horse could give him a little bit of feel good?

Ketner Does the 'Springs...

Our main man from the Chicagoland area, Jeremiah Ketner, had a solo show open this past weekend in the delightful dessert oasis known as Palm Springs, California. The M Modern gallery is playing host to "Another Tomorrow" over the next few weeks so please be sure to head on over if you're in the Palm Springs area.  In the meantime, Jeremiah was kind enough to send over some great pics of the work he's exhibiting - stunning as always!

In other news, both Alex Noriega and Jaime Zollars among others are taking part in a show called Menace and Charm: the Nostagia of Childhood starting this Saturday the 26th at Black Maria Gallery.

Make sure you check to see What the Skinny is on Friday as I'll be giving away some of our new PSP and DS Lite skins!

Let the Gaming Begin!

It's a big day around ol'  GSHQ as we've just unleashed the latest skins on the masses. I know what you're thinking, "WHY GelaSkins, WHY? Aren't you satisfied with just being super awesome already? Why can't you just leave well enough alone?"

Well I suppose we could, but we do have a yearly awesome quota to fill and well, releasing bunk skins would leave us a little short.

But seriously folks, all kidding aside, we do appreciate all the feedback, comments and requests we've received to date that have helped us develop this product and we just want to let you know that we know that you know we're awesome.

Kapish?

Bill's idea?

Good lord.

I thought I'd seen enough ridiculous for one day...and then there was this.

This was supposed to be an internal video for Microsoft Vista's SP1 and boy howdy, is it awesome. It's really straddling that hairy line between being "so bad, it's goddamn incredible!" and "Jesus, this is shittiest thing I've ever witnessed, someone carve out my eyes....PLEASE!"

I'll let you decide.

Body Technology Interface is more annoying than anything. Ever.

I'm not sure, but this might be the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. It screams, "HIT ME HARD AND OFTEN"

I'm completely flummoxed on how anybody thought this was a good idea, but I really want to know how the brainstorming session went down. I can only imagine it went something like this...

"Hmmm, you know what Gertrude, I really wish I had a garment that would make people want to strike me."

"Good thinking Penelope! Maybe we could knit something that you could use with your computer to pass it off as functional, but at the same time instill loathing in all those around us. Everyone loves a hand knitted garment!

"YEAH! KNITTED! We'll be the toast of the town!"

"Hey...this can of aerosol is empty..."

"I know, we've been huffing it all afternoon, duh."

Here Is What Is

You would be hard pressed to escape the far reaching influence of Daniel Lanois. The man has been producing peerless records for the biggest artists in music for over 20 years, writing and recording his own critically acclaimed work all the while keeping his artistic ego in check. The man is responsible for five U2 albums (and not all the shitty ones either, I'm talking Unforgettable Fire, Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby.... yeah that's right!), Peter Gabriel So and Us, a couple Bob Dylan albums, Luscious Jackson, Emmylou Harris, etc.

Yeah.   

Here Is What Is comes as a companion album to his recent foray into the world of cinema with a film by the same name about the making of an album, a subject Daniel is intimate with to say the least.  The record swings to and fro from Lanois'  weeping lap steel guitar (his personal favorite instrument), to the weaving piano lines of Garth Hudson (formerly of The Band) to the impossible touch and feel of Brian Blade's drums, with surprising ease.

This record doesn't quite capture a time and place like Belladonna did, nor does it have all the flowing soul and energy of Shine but what it does exude is raw (albeit well produced) emotion and more than any other of his records allows you to experience what it's like (or what I can only imagine) in Dan's world. I was very lucky to have witnessed two shows Dan staged at The Great Hall (Queen and Ossington) back in September in conjunction with the release of his film at the Toronto International Film Festival and looking back on them, it was a  perfect representation of what this album brings to the table now, an amalgamation of his intimacy as artist and producer shown in emotion and honest, down-to-earth soulfulness.

I'd highly recommend this album to anyone that likes music.

MP3:  Where Will I Be?

MP3: Duo Glide

Gag Me With a Toon!

This past week Gag Me With a Toon opened up at Meltdown Gallery in Los Angeles and by all accounts went off splendidly. The show, curated by GelaSkins artist Steven Daily, is an homage to saturday mornings in the 1980's. That is to say its 20 artists representations and interpretations of some of their favorite 7am heroes like Thundercats, He-Man, Transformers, the Smurfs, etc. Man, those were the days eh? A time where your biggest concern was how big of a bowl do you thought Mom would let you eat your puffed wheat Sugar Crisp out of.

Steven was kind enough to send me some pictures of the show which I'm now going to share with all of you -  aren't I nice? There's a NSFW pic in here so be careful...

Above are just some of the works from Jon Schnepp, Roman Dirge, Nathan Cabrera, Greg 'Craola' Simkins, Chris Devious Gliebe, Matt Danner, Alex Pardee, Tomi Monstre, Kyle Ng, Jeff McMillian, Reginio Gonzales, Matt Bone, Gea*, Adam Hathorn, Jim Koch, Joe Benitez, Jonathan Wayshak, Steven Daily , Rygar, Gill, Jim Mahfood [Food One], Mike Kelley, Les Schettkoe and SPRFKR. Check it out now at the Meltdown Gallery...