Like stills from some rainy noir film, these paintings are deceptively realistic in part due to their abstraction — unresolved details look like a trick of the lens rather than the work of a brushstroke.

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Philip Barlow‘s canvases capture all the elements we expect to see on an urban stroll — cars, people, street lights — but renders them into a haze familiar to photographers (and perhaps those who have had too much to drink).

Individual figures and other details blend together into a rainbow of colors against the night sky. Figure crosses ground. “The figures in the landscape serve as carriers and reflectors of the light that falls upon them,” says the artist. “Bathed in the luminosity, it is my hope that they would become more beautiful. To me, light is the ultimate subject because it embodies the pinnacle of all reality.”

“Although I work within a long tradition of landscape painting,” explains Barlow, “my depiction of the ‘seen’ landscape is simply a vehicle through which I navigate territory of another nature. A landscape less ordinary; where the line between the physical and the spiritual realm has seemingly been removed.”

However, these scenarios are not intended to be of a surreal nature. Hopefully they will seem curiously familiar and convincingly real.” Indeed, the more abstract the individual work, the more realistic it seems to appear.

Fuel me once, shame on you, fuel me twice and you’ll have to paint these huge storage tanks. You can bet the farm these creative tanks will fuel everybody.

The enormous fuel storage tanks populating the world’s many tank farms are usually painted, though not creatively. White is the preferred color: you don’t want a tank filled with huge quantities of flammable fuel to heat up on sunny summer days. Canvases so big and blank are tempting templates for artists, however, and a single artistically tinted tank can transform the mood of an entire tank farm. Take this 10.6 million liter capacity tank at Terminal NZ’s Mount Maunganui storage facility at the Port of Tauranga, spectacularly photographed by Flickr member Paul Oellermann (Paulos75) in July of 2013.

The tank was painted by Cut Collective, an Auckland-based commercial art studio. The 15m (50ft) tall by 30m (100ft) wide mural took four days and nights to complete and required over 200 spray cans of paint. The mural’s theme “represents youth and the idea of energy” according to Ross Liew of Cut Collective.

His & Hers

Flyover country just got a lot happier, though California isn’t exactly in “flyover” territory unless you happen to be, er, flying over it. The point (and we do have one) is that someone, some when, for some reason decided it would be a good idea to paint his & hers smiley faces atop two fuel storage tanks at a tank farm situated between Long Beach and Torrance airport. Another question… why is the male smiley grinning so widely while his lady companion appears much more reserved? Flickr member Rosanne James (rosanne_j) snapped the pie-faced pair – from the air, obviously – in the fall of 2011.

Pay The Bill

According to Flickr member and photographer Allen Forrest (AL904), tour boats ply the Cape Fear river near Wilmington, North Carolina.

We’re not sure how visually appealing such a tour would be, though at least the view improved once this fuel storage tank was painted with a beachfront scene of pelicans at play. Forrest captured the scene in June of 2016.

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Funky Farm More Creatively Painted Fuel Storage Tanks

Painted pump jacks with plenty of personality put the “pet” into petroleum at the venerable and vanishing Iron Zoo in and around Coalinga, California.

Formerly known as “Coaling Station A”, the town of Coalinga in Fresno County hitched its wagon to a different type of fossil fuel once the Coalinga Oil Field was discovered in the late 1880s. The subsequent oil boom peaked in the 1910s with pump jacks and steam injectors gradually replacing derricks. By the late 1960s one couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a pump jack… sparking a brainstorm in one Coalinga-area resident who wondered how the ubiquitous “nodding donkeys” could work for the greater good. Or at least, for her greater good.

Jean Dakessian Jones and her husband owned a motel that – due to the recent opening of Interstate 5 – was vacant more often than not. Jones knew she had to find some way to attract more traffic (literally) to their motel. Inspiration struck in the form of the pump jacks, whose form & function lent itself to artistic modification. “I had never seen oil pumps like those,” recounted Jones, “and my imagination saw them as all kinds of creatures. I thought that if people came off the freeway they would see a painted pump, go a little farther to see the next one, and on and on until they made it to Coalinga and saw our wonderful and inviting motor lodge. It worked!” And with that, the “Iron Zoo” was born.

Many of Jones’ painted pump jacks are off the beaten path with the most-photographed example – the zebra – being the most accessible. The images above were snapped by Flickr members Emerald Wu (whiteskylight) and 1Flatworld in 2013 and 2007, respectively. Note the ominous confluence of warning signs… it may be smelly but this is definitely not your average zoo!

Pumpjack Pennywise

To say the Iron Zoo had humble beginnings would be an understatement – it started with a single painted pump jack. Of course, the pump jacks weren’t Jones’ property and trespassing laws are rigorously enforced both for the safety of the public and to protect the companies from legal liability. Flickr member David Cohen (zampano!!!) captured this somewhat disturbing clown (aren’t ALL clowns somewhat disturbing?) in December of 2007.

Refuel Refugees

Jones played by the rules and in 1971 she contacted Marshall Newkirk, site manager for Shell Oil in Coalinga. To her surprise and delight, she found an ally in Newkirk. “After I painted the first one,” explained Jones, “he ran it by the head office and they gave me the green light to continue.”

Not only did Shell approve of Jones’ plan, they even chipped in to cover the cost of the paint – no small expense considering the company owned 23 pump jacks. By mid-1973, Jones had painted all of Shell’s pump jacks… and boy, were her arms tired. Flickr member Arlette captured the above bobbing goat in September of 2009.

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Petroleum Pets Coalingas Vanishing Iron Zoo

Artist Jeremy Mann works in early in the day or evening, and it shows in the dark, smudged and ultimately riveting way in which he captures streetscapes of major cities from New York to San Francisco.

Wiping, smoothing and layering oil paints with rollers, sponges and brushes, his works, like urban environments, are executions of complex and chaotic addition, evocative yet forever incomplete pictures of a place. He often applies broad marks with an ink brayer and wipes sections away with solvents. Getting increasingly experimental, he has even tried applying and moving paints with doorstops, window wipers and liquor bottles.

“Even that banana which turned out to actually be a good blending tool, painting with lettuce, though, I can tell you might be useless,” said the artist in an interview. “In this process of experimenting with tools, an artist inevitably discovers new techniques as a result of accidents and learning how to recognize those accidents as worthy or not, and then harness them or bury them.”

His paintings are as much about capturing the spirit of a place as its details. Rather than appearing as normal paintings, the pieces start to blend and blur, looking more like photographs shot on a rainy day with all the reflections of puddles, drips, and reflections enhanced. If anything, his recent works also seem to be growing more obscured and abstract over time, perhaps in part as his pallete of artistic tools expands.

As art writer Christopher Jobson explains: “Mann applies and wipes away areas of the canvas to recreate these hazy environments, adding layers of paint back on top of the slightly smeared works with more detailed strokes. This layered effects makes the works appear like double exposed images, two scenes gently blurring into one. The resulting paintings are dark and atmospheric, urban streets seemingly drenched in rain and mystery.”

Mann’s work goes beyond just urban landscapes, and some of his pieces can be seen come June in the John Pence Gallery (you can also see more of his work on Instagram and Facebook).

It took over 100 artists to paint this full-length movie, the first of its kind: a work where every frame was hand-painted, then combined into an epic animation about, in the style and using the techniques of Van Gogh (oil and canvas).

This first trailer of Loving Vincent shows the brushstroke style anyone familiar with the artist’s world will immediately recognize. The movie is about Vincent’s life, death and works, an honest look at what was anything but a carefree existence. His own work also shows up throughout, 120 of his masterpieces in total, smoothly transitioned into the frames as the narrative unfolds around them.

A great deal of care went not only into the planning process, but also the execution so that each frame is both original and unique but transfers seamlessly to the next, despite the number of painters involved.

Produced by Oscar-winning studios BreakThru Films and Trademark Films, production is still in progress in Gdansk, Poland, but this sneak peaks suggest it will be well worth the prices of admission (h/t Colossal).

More from the filmmakers: “Loving Vincent is an investigation delving into the life and controversial death of Vincent Van Gogh, one of the world’s most beloved painters, told by his paintings and by the characters that inhabit them. The intrigue unfolds through interviews with the characters closest to Vincent and through dramatic reconstructions of the events leading up to his death. Every frame in the Loving Vincent movie is an oil painting on canvas, using the very same technique in which Vincent himself painted.”