Wolfgang Kals Michael Jackson Paintings

I discovered these fantastic paintings by Austrian-born fellow Ontarian artist Wolfgang Kals.

Wolfgang Kals

 

wolfgang kals

 

Please drop by and visit at www.wolfgangkals.com.

He also paints, Elvis, The Joker, Marilyn Monroe, and many other artists he admires.

 

Cartoonist tribute, Michael Jackson Bad

The creativity Michael has inspired in millions of people never ceases to astonish me.

Amazing Collages by Nina Fonoroff

I got some lovely letters from  Nina Fonoroff saying how much she enjoyed the Michael Jackson anthologies I put together. Nina is a filmmaker and artist and I asked to see her collages. They are amazing! Read what she says about Michael below:

“Before Michael Jackson died, I knew little about him and cared less. Yet within the space of a few days in June, 2009, I became a devotee. I spent the better part of that summer as a bleary-eyed spelunker in that great archive, YouTube, searching for the elusive source of Michael’s sublime energy.

“I never found it. But my first discovery, the “Rock With You” video (1979), made me passionately love the icon I’d spent my adult life avoiding. At length, his voice—-the color of golden honey, with gold flecks suspended in its viscous textures—began to seep into the inner layers of my skin.

“I’ve watched the video at least once a day since then, and I still haven’t tired of it. “Close your eyes, Don’t try to fight it; There ain’t nothing that you can do. Relax your mind…”

“This collage series, “And When the Groove…..” is my tribute to Michael in a favorite role, as one of history’s most accomplished seducers and hypnotists.”

And When the Groove #10f

And When the Groove #4a by Nina Fonoroff

And When the Groove #6a by Nina Fonoroff

Nina Fonoroff is an experimental filmmaker and visual artist who teaches in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of New Mexico.

www.ninafonoroff.com

apologia

I’ve been really unfaithful in posting regularly and apologize. I would love to spend a lot of time on this blog because it’s one of my favourite projects and I can never tire of seeing and sharing the inspiration of Michael Jackson. I have so many projects on the go and so many tasks and by nature, I love lots and lots of things so I find it hard to focus or pare down and prioritize. And so this blog will not be closed, even if I come back and forth to it erratically. So please don’t give up on me! There is a ton of cool stuff to go through even if the new posts are slow in coming, and I promise I’ll try to bring you more cool stuff in the near future.

love, Lorette xoxoxo

 

Dogs Dressed as Michael Jackson

Here’s darling lil Mikey with a floppy hound.

But these hot dogs are even more adorable!

Derek Erdman’s Michael Jackson art

Found this treasure by Derek Erdman. The below paragraph about is from his website. Check out the link below- a very creative person!

http://www.derekerdman.com/index.htm

“Derek Erdman is regularly called a Pop Artist, and this is understandable given that his tactics appear to intensify the preoccupations of the Factory tradition. Over the last decade Erdman has developed an increasingly efficient method for producing batches of art that he can make quickly, duplicate easily, and sell cheaply. According to this method his energy is concentrated in the plan (selecting source materials from which he will ‘borrow’ imagery), and the execution of each piece becomes semi-automatic, a series of choreographed tasks that he can carry out much like an assembly liner or a tap dancer might perform his job. The subjects of his paintings (second-tier celebrities, flash-in-the-pan current events, obsolete advertisements) are almost always borrowed from the moving spotlight of popular attention, and so the pieces themselves take on the form of commercial debris, relics of the recent surface-past. Occasionally they even turn up in thrift stores. In displaying and distributing his work (paintings, but also magazines, CDs, and pranks of all kinds), Erdman has demonstrated an unwavering preference for the banal and the widespread, favoring newsstands, restaurants, building sides, and balloons over galleries. And he has become an expert at harnessing the special hype-magic of the Internet (along with the party and various other spectacle-events that will circulate later in other people’s stories), which he uses not only as a mass-marketplace, but also to cultivate his own semi-celebrity, which carries his work, infusing it with everyday myth.” Hannah Woodroofe

amazing art by hitomi osanai

Dear MJ fans,

Today is a special treat- we have Hitomi Osanai from Japan. She is working on a project to do 365 drawings of Michael Jackson, one every day for a year! I love how different these pieces are. THey capture Michael’s fluid grace in a few lines, in a distinctive style I haven’t seen before.

“Hi. I am Hitomi Osanai from Japan. The movie “This is It” had  a big impact on me. I went to the movie 11 times. Since then everything in my life has changed. I can’t stop drawing Michael Jackson now.
I am an editorial designer and an illustrator. I used to contribute my illustration for  serial essays  in Japanese papers.
I am very happy I can dedicate my life to drawing Mike now.
I will be also glad if you visit my gallery and see more my stuff.”

http://hitomiosanai.deviantart.com/

Thank you so much Hitomi, for sharing these with us and best of luck with your Michael Jackson drawings!

Egyptian artist Khaled Hafez

from Visions of a Rusty Memory series by Khaled Hafez

I recall my excitement at discovering Egyptian born artist Khaled Hafez since much of his body of work resembled and had themes in common with a few years in my own art career. My style has changed and evolved considerably since then, but nonetheless still relies heavily on collage and popular culture. Of course, Hafez and I were making different statements and coming from a different cultural perspective.

While poring through a terrific book called Art of the Middle East by Saeb Eigner, I saw Hafez’s work, something from the mid ’90s, featuring Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley. Hafez frequently uses motifs of Egyptian gods in his work-here, the god motif surrounding the couple looks like something Jean Michel Basquiat might draw. The rough hewn collage work and texturing make for visual excitement.

from the artist’s site: (http://www.khaledhafez.net/home.htm).

“For over 20 years, Khaled Hafez has explored the continuous reproduction of dichotomies within and between the popular culture of his native Egypt, of France where he lived for several years, and of the United States – the ultimate consumer society and locus of political power, which seems to thrive on the marketing potential of divisive binaries.  Through painting and video, Hafez has concentrated primarily on the construction of certain categories and the overlaps between them:  East/West, sacred/commercial, old/new, good/evil, animal/human, male/female, and static/kinetic.  His work shows how these dichotomies rest on the international system of commodities that creates both the ideas of (cultural) similarity and difference, as well as affective attachments to certain histories and identities.  Hafez explores out how each half of a dichotomy has come to be signified through particular visual forms, figures, or objects.  This work suggests that it is the continual replication of these visual signifiers in mass media that creates emotions of love and hate, notions of collective memory, and visions of the future.  Dichotomies are attractive, then, because they have become seductive visual commodities.”

Jessica Winegar, Ph.D.,

Edmond Talmacean Dances to Bad by Michael Jackson

Tampa Bay’s Theresa Collington wrote this yesterday a fascinating story yesterday, also picked up around the world- Edmond Talmacean, a Romanian politician was chastised for busting a move on television. Click here to see the video. Edmond broke out the vibes to Bad- and he was not bad. Personally, I thought it was nice to see a guy in a suit kicking it with such tremendous joy. Here’s what Theresa wrote:

BUCHAREST, Romania – A moonwalking politician might not be the best reason to pay attention to Romanian politics, but the antics seem to be working.

Edmond Talmacean, a 40-year-old Bucharest politician, has inspired national headlines with his Michael Jackson-inspired moonwalk on a television show and his impersonations of the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. His impersonation of a well-known sports commentator during a serious political debate also stunned other lawmakers into silence.

“Dancing is another kind of political message to appeal to the younger generation, that it is good to have fun … that you can go to a disco and dance,” Talmacean told The Associated Press on Monday.

Party bosses, however, say enough is enough and have ordered him to tone down.

Prime Minister Emil Boc declared the routine was more suited to “showbiz” than politics, while Vasile Blaga of the Democratic Liberal Party said the fringe lawmaker should head over to the TV program “Dancing with the Stars.”

Despite the official disapproval, Talmacean is trending big time, gossiped about in coffee bars and hairdressing shops. Traffic to his political blog has soared, boosting it from 49th most viewed to the seventh in just two weeks.

“I think he expressed the way he felt which is good,” said Valentina Tudor, 25, a sandwich vendor in Bucharest, the capital. “It’s not as if he stole or did something bad. He is talented. I can’t imagine (President) Basescu doing the moonwalk.”

In Romania, the home of Dracula and other occult traditions, politics are renowned for being occasionally off-the-wall. President Traian Basescu and his aides have been known to wear purple on certain days to ward off evil.

Politician Mircea Geoana claimed that he lost the 2009 presidential race because Basescu hired a parapsychologist to launch a “negative energy attack” on him during a key debate.

Basescu has also appeared dancing with his wife or jiving with Gypsies — but his moves are far from Internet gold.

Talmacean promised Monday to keep a low profile until party elections next month but says he has no regrets.

“I danced, I sang. These are the qualities of the Romanian people,” he told the AP.

(Click here for original source of story.)

Michael Jackson for the Soul fanthology

Another four star review at Amazon- keep ‘em coming. That’s four out of four, at four stars, for Michael Jackson for the Soul: a fanthology of inspiration and love, by Lorette C. Luzajic and other fans.

To be fair,  two of the reader reviews are contributors, not just readers. I’m glad they enjoyed the book, too.
If you enjoyed it, could you drop by Amazon and tell them what you thought about Michael Jackson for the Soul?

The new reader review said:

“Love this book! Gave a copy to a friend, and as suggested by another reviewer, I included a pack of Kleenex!!!”

Click here to see the book at Amazon.

Hear that, folks? Michael Jackson for the Soul makes a wonderful gift. And in the spirit of Michael Jackson, one dollar from the sale of each book goes to Kids Help Phone to help get information and emergency services to children in need.