The Brilliance!

Trends come and go in art & design. With the internet, it seems this is a day-to-day occurrence rather than something that takes months or even years to evolve, so when a new aesthetic, a new ‘look’ starts to stick and really hang around, it’s a pretty exciting thing to me. If you don’t already know Leif Podhajsky, you’ve probably at least seen his work somewhere already…seems like it pops up as the cover of one of the 5 daily Pitchfork-reviewed albums like once a week, I swear…Bonobo, The Horrors, Youth Lagoon, Foals, Tame Impala, Grimes, Shabazz Palaces…the list goes on. Anyways, there’s been a reemergence in recent years of I guess what I’d call a new psychadelic aesthetic. Trippy, choppy, hard to look at in a good way…it’s easy to see why Podhajsky has been tapped to work with so many of these bands. His work match up so well with the music. Probably the best compliment I can pay to his work is that you can easily get lost in looking at it much like you can get lost with a good song playing in your headphones. There’s a lot to discover. Totally unexpected color palettes, classic gothic, grungy, oily rainbows and golds and perfect symmetry and inverted imagery floating in desert landscapes with this beautiful sort of 70’s retro vibe but without the boring-ness that usually comes with ‘retro’ graphics these days…there are some other great artists doing work in this vein as well…Justin Blyth is always doing killer stuff, Sabrina Ratté, I’d even say Eric Wareheim (of Tim & Eric fame) has been one of the champions of this stuff with his videos for Major Lazer, MGMT, HEALTH…Anyways, check out Leif’s site and get inspired.