French Artist Creates Digital Street Art in the Sky

We humans are a quar­rel­some lot. But one thing that unites us is the time spent on our backs, gaz­ing at clouds for the plea­sure of iden­ti­fy­ing what­ev­er objects they may fleet­ing­ly resem­ble.

It’s a very relax­ing activ­i­ty.

I was sur­prised there’s an actu­al, med­ical name for it: parei­do­lia, defined by Mer­ri­am-Web­ster as “the ten­den­cy to per­ceive a spe­cif­ic, often mean­ing­ful, image in a ran­dom or ambigu­ous visu­al pat­tern.”

Thomas Lamadieu, the artist whose work is show­cased above, has a dif­fer­ent, but not whol­ly unre­lat­ed con­di­tion.

A pho­to post­ed by Art­zop® (@artzop) on

Most of us pre­fer to con­tem­plate the heav­ens in a bucol­ic set­ting. Lamadieu’s art com­pels him to look upwards from a more urban land­scape. The tops of the build­ings hem­ming him in sup­ply with irreg­u­lar­ly shaped frames, which he cap­tures using a fish eye lens. Lat­er, he fills them in with Microsoft Paint draw­ings, which fre­quent­ly fea­ture a beard­ed man whose t‑shirt is striped in sky blue. Neg­a­tive space, not Cray­ola, sup­plies the col­or here.

Think of it as street art in the sky.

Not every day can be a bril­liant azure, but it hard­ly mat­ters when even Lamadieu’s grayest views exhib­it a deter­mined play­ful­ness. It takes a very unique sort of eye to tease a pink nip­pled, stripe-limbed bun­ny from a steely UK sky.

Like many street artists, he takes a glob­al approach, trav­el­ing the world in search of giant unclaimed can­vas­es. His port­fo­lio con­tains vis­tas orig­i­nal­ly cap­tured in Hong Kong, South Korea, Ger­many, Spain, Aus­tria, Cana­da, Bel­gium, and the Unit­ed States, as well as his native France.

“The beard­ed man in my images stands for the sky itself,” he told The Inde­pen­dent, adding that his is a whol­ly sec­u­lar vision.

View a gallery of Lamadieu’s sky art here.

h/t to read­er Alan Gold­wass­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

The Cre­ativ­i­ty of Female Graf­fi­ti & Street Artists Will Be Cel­e­brat­ed in Street Hero­ines, a New Doc­u­men­tary

3D Street Art

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday


by | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.