While I’m normally a bit put off by environmentally-friendly products that tell you how environmentally-friendly they are so everyone else knows that you’re doing your part when you’re out and about, Racquel Youtzy’s design for this bottle is so well put together that I can’t help but like it. (It does look less practical than the bottles it’s designed to compete with, mind. Glass breaks too easily and while it’d be fine inside a home or restaurant, I can’t imagine taking it anywhere.)
Matthew Allen Smith is the artist for The Chronicles Of Solomon Stone, a comic written by my good friend and "creatively challenged wunderkind" (I’m only repeating what I read on the internet) Chris Sims. This was my (very early) Christmas present from both of them. You can look at more of Smithy’s art on his blog.
Damien Hirst stares into his portrait of a skull. This is the new Damien Hirst – Hirst the solitary painter rather than Hirst the art world’s flamboyant marketing magician. He has painted these pictures with his own hands, rather than employed minions to produce work under his name, as he has done in the past. But, he says, this is also the old Hirst. After all, like most artists, he started out painting rather than conceptualising and mass-producing. “I gave up painting by 16,” he says. “I secretly thought I would have been Rembrandt by then.”
