Thursday, September 3, 2009

Extra, Extra! Read all about it! Ross Racine is Totally Famous

So, we don't really know what happened, but somewhere between the beginning of Summer and Like the Spice's Costa Rican vacation, the digital drawings of LTS artist Ross Racine went Viral.

I mean we know that his strangely haunting, unbelievably intricate drawings are always a favorite at LTS art fairs and group shows, and now the blogosphere is actually exploding with over twenty mentions in the past four months.

What's really interesting is to see how the different people who write about Ross's work come at it from such different angles. There's the architectural viewpoint, for one. Architecture for geurillas observes " Row after row after spiral after spiral of organized, seemingly generic homes is supposed to be a system of order. But Elm Court, Sycamore Lane, and Poplar Street all share such similarities that it's often impossible to identify where one is." There's the voyeuristic. GPCB says "his images immediately fulfill my love for traveling via Google Earth and obsession with maps and aerial images." There's the vaguely befuddled Eins, Zwei, Drei. "i’m not bougie enough i don’t have enough art savvy to get how it’s a comment on the dreams of suburban culture." And a comment on Swiss Miss hits the nail on the head, saying "Love his stuff. Somewhere, someone mentioned that these works remind them of The Twilight Zone. I can see that… Everything looks perfect and clean, riding your bike down the street… until you pan out and see the layout of the suburb and realize something just isn’t quite right."

Yes, Ross is pretty much a weblebrity at this point. And we're glad to be just one of the many blogs to join his fanclub! After all, in the words of Urbanophil.net "Wer schon einmal durch Suburbia gefahren - und im schlimmsten Fall gelaufen ist - kennt die Problematik: Gleichförmigkeit und fehlende Orientierungspunkte. Mit diesem Dilemma einer städtischen Siedlungsform, die leider in großem Maße unsere Städte mitbestimmt (erinnert sei hier an den Vortrag von J. H. Kunstler) setzt sich der Künstler Ross Racine auseinander. Er zeichnet in einer Mischung aus Handzeichnen und Computerarbeit suburbane Landschaften."

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