We stumble over so many bril­liant artists while tra­vers­ing the inter­net that it would be a trav­esty not to fea­ture as many as we can here. So I intro­duce you to a new series of posts: Artists Of Today (And Yes­ter­day).

Stas Orlov

Stas Orlov — also known as Indi and Uno — lives in Moscow, Rus­sia. A mem­ber of Bang Bang Stu­dio, he pro­duces beau­ti­ful detailed pieces that look almost as if they’ve been drawn in MS Paint. His work is largely sur­real, deal­ing with themes from childen’s stor­ies, to pop cul­ture, to reli­gion, and so on.

Unfor­tu­nately this pro­file is tra­gic­ally short as there isn’t much inform­a­tion on him to be found, and cer­tainly not in Eng­lish. But, make sure to check out his afore­men­tioned blogs on Live­Journal, or his Pro­file on Bang Bang Stu­dio, to get an idea of just how pro­lific he is.

Takato Yamamoto

Takato Yamamoto is a Japan­ese Illus­trator. Born in the Akita pre­fec­ture of Japan, he gradu­ated from the Tokyo Zokei Uni­ver­sity in the 1980’s and mostly drew illus­tra­tions for com­mer­cial advert­ising. He then became inter­ested in Ukiyo-e, which he refined fur­ther into his “Hei­sei Esthiti­cism” style.

His work mainly deals with erot­i­cism, bond­age, and sur­real­ism, and more examples can be seen here.

John Bauer

John Bauer was born 1882, in Sweden. At the age of 16 he began to study art, and at just 18 he had dis­covered his love of surreal/fantasy work. His most fam­ous work is Bland Tomtar Och Troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls), a Swedish fairy tails and folk­lore annual, the first issues of which (1907 — 1910 and 1912 — 1915) were illus­trated by him.

Bauer’s career was cut unfor­tu­nately short when he died at the age of just 35, when he, his wife, and their three chil­dren drowned in Lake Vat­tern. To see his haunt­ingly sur­real illus­tra­tions and paint­ings in per­son visit the John Bauer Museum.