A Russian retiree’s beautifully painted satellite dishes do double-duty as works of art and functioning receivers for the orbiting descendants of Sputnik.

Love of Satellite

Russia knows satellites: the success of Sputnik-1 in late 1957 shocked the world and jump-started the Space Race. Fast-forward six decades and Yuri Kuznetsov, a retiree from the Ivanovo region, is compelling the world to appreciate Russia’s love affair with satellites once more… though in a much more down-to-earth manner.

Retro Retirement

When Kuznetsov retired from his career as a sailor, he returned to his small home village of Voznesenye. Like far too many retirees, however, he soon found that being at rest day after day was making him, er, restless. What’s an old salty seadog to do?

Inspiration from Above

Friends advised Kuznetsov to take up a hobby as a way of keeping himself busy. Having once been a painter – art, not houses – he figured he’d dust off his palette and crack open the ol’ paintbox. The only question left was… what should he paint? The answer came to him from above. Not TOO far above, mind you, just about rooftop level. Like, the place where people mount home satellite receiver dishes. Cue mental lightbulb!

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Dish Nyet Work Painted Russian Satellite Dishes

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.

Those popular home propane tanks that look like colossal cold capsules or dry-docked mini subs can be unusual showcases for unique folk art creations.

Ranging in capacity from 250 gallons up to 500 gallons, residential propane tanks typically sport white finishes or are left unpainted because, y’know, dark gas tanks under bright sunlight and all. Not all propane tanks are so exposed, however, and their sizes and shape invite an unlimited range of creative solutions. One of the most popular, it would seem, is turning the tank into a Beatle-esque Yellow Submarine.

Flickr member jhk&alk captured one such psychedelic homage to the 1967 film at Shelter Cove, on California’s “Lost Coast”, in August of 2014.

Flickr member istartedi snapped a very similar rendition (could the same artist be responsible?) featuring the Yellow Submarine’s iconic Nowhere Man on a propane tank situated some 240 miles south in the North Bay area.

Kitten of the Sea

It’s yellow, and it’s a submarine, but even The Beatles in their most trip-tastic moments couldn’t come up with the “USS Catattack”. We’re SO glad Pinterest member Jacqueline Faust (theArtisticFarmer) did, however, because this cat-themed backyard propane tank isn’t just awesome, it’s… clawsome!

Melonia?

Do watermelons give you gas? This one does, but we’re sure there’s no connection with the re-purposed toilet planter right beside. Flickr member vinky captured the above charming outdoor scene, possibly hailing from the tiny town of Washington, CA, for posterity in May of 2012.

Then there’s this watermelon-themed propane tank, complete with a faux-frog “guardian” in case the local gas pirates (is there such a thing?) get any bright ideas.

Animal Tank Farm

This pair of porcine propane tanks from Orangeville, Ontario don’t appear to be functional, unless one considers their prime function to be pieces of intriguing folk art. Flickr member Will S posted the above image of the heavy metal petting zoo in April of 2015. While we wouldn’t even think about welding a propane tank, empty or not, some folks ARE qualified to do just that. If you’ve got an hour (yes, an hour) to spare, check out this video from BILLSTMAXX in which the photographer/welder/artist creates one of the gas tank piggies.

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Canned Heat 12 Folk Art Painted Residential Propane Tanks

Abstracting views of the city, this huge installation uses computer algorithms to deform local everyday footage on a massive 14-by-23-foot display canvas.

Ordinary wall art can get old, especially when one passes it every day. In this case, hours of film can become thousands of unique compositions, slowly deconstructed into impressionist-worthy pieces on the screen.

ESI Design developed this trippy solution for the lobby of 515 North State Street in Chicago, a structure design by Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect Kenzo Tange built back in the 1990s.

As a contextual work,  it features shots of the Chicago River, city trains and waterfront amusements, all devolving dynamically. The designers created the logic and intent, but don’t actually shape the outcomes — this is done programmatically.

“Custom software analyzes each video for moving objects, so moments like a person walking, or a car driving become the ‘brushstrokes’ that slowly create each abstraction. As each video collides with the next, new compositions unfold in real time, literally creating thousands of possibilities.”

Meanwhile, the “display itself uses LED modules that are covered with a layer of vinyl diffusion, removing the harsh digital glare of bare diodes and giving the imagery a soft material quality instead. The entire display is framed with a painted metal molding, with the intention of referencing traditional canvas paintings.” Except even more so than paintings in galleries, each experience of this work is one-of-a-kind.

Taking to the skies in Berlin, a set of color-coded drones aims to make the biggest spray-painted mural ever made (at least by robots) using unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with programmed paintings. And this is just the beginning: painting drones could enable civic artwork in hard-to-reach places, and eventually serve practical applications, re-coating infrastructure and architecture.

Designed by architect (and director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab) Carlo Ratti’s, the Paint By Drone system employs sets of four drones, each loaded with its own paint tank. Like a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key [Black]) system much like modern printers, each contributes a layer to the piece. Together, these layers can add up to a full spectrum of color possibilities.

Ratti’s team has used drones before — as tour guides at MIT, for instance — and is now experimenting with ways to engage them with other activities in the built environment, testing their limits in a more public and large-scale setting. In this case, the sheeting that wraps scaffolding, ordinarily left blank and dull (or used for advertising) can be dynamically turned into something beautiful.

The drones can be adapted to work with different inputs, allowing passers by to submit designs, for instance, or to select sections of canvas to paint. For now, they are being deployed on a surface stretched across scaffolding, but the idea is to ultimately enable public art in more places — precision-guided small drones can reach high up on (or under) structures like bridges that would be difficult (and dangerous) for people to access directly.

More on the mechanics of the system: “A central management system regulates the drones’ operations in real-time, from image painting to flight, using an advanced monitoring system that precisely tracks the UAV’s position, detecting multiple devices simultaneously. Furthermore, a protective net placed on the scaffolding’s’ cover allows the drones to move into a safe space. Drones can draw content submitted digitally, via an app. The artistic input can come from either crowdsourced platforms or from a curator orchestrating the contributions of several people.”

“Paint by Drone represents a next step,” in their research, reports Carlo Ratti Associati, “on both vertical drawing and open-source design, which includes projects such as OSARC (Open Source Architecture) at the 2012 Istanbul Design Biennial and the Vertical Plotter system featured at Milan Expo 2015’s Future Food District, which entered the Guinness World Record as the world’s largest plotted image. The new concept pushes the previous boundaries of time and space, having the potential to be installed in just a few hours in a city and paint on any surface.”