Photo manipulations can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. The Manipulation of Photos can allow an artist to create ideas from the depths of their imagination that would usually be impossible to achieve. With the aid of Photoshop, if you can dream it, you can now create it. Below are 20 thought-provoking and imaginative Photo Manipulations, from various artists, which caught our eye.

Click an image to see more from the artist:

Click to see 20 more of our favourite photo manipulations.

Check out these amazing book art sculptures from artist Alexander Kozer Robinson:

From the artist: “My art practice focuses on the notion of the “inner landscape”. Using generally discarded materials, I make objects as an invitation to the viewer to engage her/his own inner life in order to assign meaning to the artwork.”

“The cut book art has been made by working through the books, page by page, cutting around some of the illustrations while removing others. The images seen in the finished work, are left standing in the place where they would appear in the complete book. As a final step the book is sealed around the cut, and can no longer be opened. As we remember the books from our own past, certain fragments remain with us while others fade away over time – phrases and passages, mental images we created, the way the stories made us feel and the thoughts they inspired”

Click here to visit Alexander Kozer Robinson’s site for more info.

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Animated installation inside the Stonewall Center in downtown Columbus, Ohio. This was 2 week project from concept to finish. Animation by Jon Stommel and Travis Czekalski, collectively known as “Rather Severe”, the photos were sequenced in After Effects to “Pickled!”, from Flying Lotus’s new album Cosmogramma.

Artist Adam Haynes was born and raised in rural central Oregon. After a stint in Portland doing apparel design for Adidas, he and his wife moved back to their roots in Bend, Oregon. More recently Adam has been busy with various freelance illustration projects including the Nike 6.0 campaign, some of which is shown below. He has shown his work in galleries in Portland and Seattle.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Francis Alÿs is soon to feature in a new exhibition at Tate Modern. His work, which covers a variety of media, is intriguing to say the least. He lives and works in Mexico City and is represented by David Zwirner, New York, and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich. Alÿs attended the Institute of Architecture in Tournai and the Istituto di Architettura in Venice before moving to Mexico City in 1986 where he started practising as a visual artist. His work encompasses many media often involving the participation and presence of the artist. These performed events are documented in video, photographs, writing, painting, and animation.

In his best-known work, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), Francis Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers outside of Lima, Peru. Each person moved a shovel full of sand one step at a time from one side of a dune to the other, and together they moved the entire geographical location of the dune by a few inches. Art critic Jean Fisher writes that “the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its truth.”

In Tornado, Francis Alÿs is running across a field, chasing a tornado that whirls and whips and plumes into the clear Mexican sky. It is a small tornado, it must be said, but big enough to engulf trees, and any passing Belgian that gets in its path: a storm of dust, stones, clods of earth, straw and animal droppings. The artist pants across the dry earth with his handheld camera and steps right into the the thunderous sizzle and roar, the no-visibility brown-out. Inside the vortex there is a sudden momentary stillness, as he stands in a column of dead air, before being pelted once again by the infernal dust. Time and again he races towards these high-altitude tornadoes before disappearing.

Alÿs is probably best known in the UK for the exhibition he mounted at the National Portrait Gallery last year, of over 200 amateur portraits of Saint Fabiola, collected from auctions and thrift stores, all based on a lost 19th-century original by Jean-Jacques Henner. The collection is still touring the world.

At a recent exhibition one room is entirely dedicated to silence, with rubber tiles deadening the sound of one’s footfalls, each tile decorated with a picture of a finger raised to the lips, like a sign in some old-fashioned library.

Alÿs has lived in Mexico City since the mid 1990s, and many of his works take place in the city’s teeming streets and around the Plaza de la Constitución, a huge paved piazza with a very tall flagpole at its centre. He has shepherded sheep around this flagpole, to the sound of church bells; he has filmed the city’s itinerant workers queuing in its shadow, as it sweeps like a sundial through the long day.

Once, he pushed a large block of ice through the streets, skidding and sliding till all that was left was a dirty pebble melting on the greasy tarmac. Sweating through the streets, you think he might evaporate, too, and that what we are watching is a man performing his own insignificance and futility. But I also imagine his persistence as a walking anecdote: “Did you see that stupid gringo, pushing that block of ice?”

Francis Alys’ art is soon to appear at the Tate Modern. They describe him and his work as so: Walking or strolling is a recurrent theme in Alÿs’s work, which often stems from notes and observations made while wandering around whichever city he is in. The Last Clown features a painterly animation of man going for a walk, along with a set of images which are studies for or details of the film. In total, the installation includes ninety drawings displayed on a glass topped table, and sixteen paintings on old canvases of various sizes propped on a long, narrow, pine shelf. Most of the images exist as pairs, where the picture is repeated with minor variations. This has precedence in a series of paintings Alÿs completed in 1993-4, collectively titled Déjà-vu. That series, also featuring a grey-suited character, was made up of a number of diptychs in which an image was repeated with very slight alterations.

More information on Francis Alys @ The Tate Modern.

Franvis Alys Interview:

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Francis Alys Ice:

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Francis Alys Railings:

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Artist Diego Gravinese was born in La Plata, Argentina in 1971. His work has been shown internationally over the past 15 years in New York, Paris, Madrid, Turin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He has worked with Ruth Benzacar and ZavaletaLab galleries in Buenos Aires and with DeChiara gallery in New York and currently lives and works in Buenos Aires.

Diego Gravinese also goes by the name Nekomomix. His work focuses around photo realistic imagery. His works are hand painted replications of photographs, no Photoshop or software etc is used. Gravinese’s use of light and colour gives the paintings an atmospheric quality.

There has been much debate over the years on whether the replication of photographs in paint can actually be considered art or just an example of exceptional technical skill. Where do you sit on that topic?

When I look at paintings such as these by Argentinian painter Diego Gravinese I think they are very impressive and eye catching, but then again so are the photographs that he references for his work. Is the art in the idea, the execution or both? I believe that Diego Gravinese is demonstrating extreme artistic technical ability, and therefore this is a definite form of art.

A photograph of Diego Gravinese with some of his works.

Following the success of our recent post showing a handful of works by artist Leandro Erlich, we decided to follow it up by showing you a few more of Leandro’s amazing pieces.

Leandro Erlich makes art which challenges our idea of reality. He is interested in what we see, the spaces we occupy and the contexts we find ourselves in everyday. He suggests that ‘what we take for granted is the whole concept of reality, because we assume that reality is something that is there, and is a fact and is unchangeable . . .’ Instead he feels ‘that reality is something we are dealt, and the final product of what is reality, is a matter of major construction made by us.’

Erlich constructs installations or complete physical worlds which the viewer enters. He uses whatever building materials necessary including mirrors and projections to create forms of reality. His work engages almost all the senses and we are invited to participate, even interact within the spaces he creates. By doing so we become actors on an elaborate theatre stage, experiencing an environment that is in part real, in part fiction. Leandro Erlich is Argentinian and in creating these spatial and psychological illusions he seems to align himself to the strong story telling traditions of South America where nothing is quite what it seems and the viewer is forced to suspend their sense of reality.

Charis Tsevis is an Athens, Greece based visual and graphic artist who can be summed up shortly and appropriately as a bit of a don at what he does. He has been commission to illustrate with companies such as AT & T and other equally established and reputable firms.

It seems Charis and I share more than art in common and both follow football “Soccer for out state side friends” and are of course very excited for the world cup. I watched the first match today, and plan to watch the next one tonight though it doesn’t fully kick off in my terms until England play. So what does this have to do with art? Well… Charis has spent a lot of time lately putting together a lovely collection of digital illustrations using a limited colour pallet to create portraits of some of the World Cup’s greatest talents all themed by his rendition of  a traditional South African pattern technique he has been studying.

Below are some examples of our favourites to see all of his work visit Charis Tsevis. The official website for his design firm is Tsevis.com Creative Design.