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Arty Cautionary Tales Featured Weirdness

Drug-Induced Self-Portraits by Bryan Lewis Saunders

Some of us are fairly aware how drugs can alter our perception of the world. Artist Bryan Lewis Saunders took this to the extreme in an experiment where he ingested a different drug every day and then drew a picture of himself.

Since 1995 Saunders has been drawing daily self-portraits but it wasn’t until 2001 when he introduced drugs into his system and his art. He believes the 45-day experiment may have caused some slight brain damage and that the drugs made him look really ugly. From the colourful childish influences of marijuana to the calming effects of Ambien to monstrous world of bath salts, have a look at how the different chemicals in the drugs altered Saunders’ perception of self.

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Arty

You Won’t Believe She is Levitating

And it’s a good thing that you don’t believe everything you read, you keen observer you. Natsumi Hayashi, a pretty teenager from Tokyo, Japan takes self-portraits at just the right moment in time when it looks like she is performing an incredible act of levitation. Hayashi takes hundreds of photos of her jumps in and around the capital city until she gets the perfect, most natural-looking levitation.

Have a look at some images of Tokyo’s levitating girl after the jump.

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Arty Awesomeness Featured

Julie Heffernan paints magical self-portraits

Today is one of those days when I’d rather be at home, shnuggled up with the dogs watching mindless sitcom reruns and drinking a steaming mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows, Jack Daniels and Prozac. Anyway I’m stuck at my desk and the next best thing is escaping into the internet, and today I found something truly beautiful – the paintings of American artist Julie Heffernan.

The paintings are as David Cohen, New York art critic aptly put, “a hybrid of genres and styles, mixing allegory, portraiture, history painting, and still life, while in title they are all presented as self portraits.” I think they’re what would have happened if Botticelli and Hieronymus Bosch had a baby, and magical realism and fairy tales had a baby, and those two babies had a baby, and that baby had a baby with LSD, and THAT baby could paint.

I can lose myself in Julie Heffernan’s paintings – they make me feel better.