Kimberly Applegate: Calling Her A 'Painter' Doesn't Do Her Justice.

Above: two of Kimberly's more recent works


Artist Kimberly Applegate has finally found her niche. A painter I discovered on DailyPainters.com, she has cultivated a style and subject that are selling like hotcakes... or like knoll furniture in a clearance sale.

Admittedly I wasn't a huge fan of her daily painting work initially. I didn't include her in my post about chair painters because I felt her work was a little naive, and inconsistent. But over the past few months, she has begun pairing modern chairs with contemporary artwork and has found an audience that can't get enough of it. In doing so, her work is more consistent and mature, her compositions have improved and her technical skill is clearly better than one year ago.


Above: Daily painting "Saarinen's Tulip Chair with Hockney's Tulips"

While some are obviously superior paintings to others, they are all so likable and inviting that the bidding wars over each 6" square painting on ebay are increasing weekly.

Incredibly prolific (she churns one out every day) she has yet to repeat herself and the paintings just seem to be getting better and better.

Capitalizing on two trends of the moment, modern art and modern furniture, she pairs chairs from the likes of every respected designer from Saarinen to Wegner, Bertoia to Eames- even Philippe Starck, with artwork that compliments the chair by the likes of Rothko, Hockney, Indiana, Franz Kline, Warhol and so many others.


Above: Daily painting "The Butterfly effect"

Some are clever pairings, like the Butterfly chair with Donald Sultan's Butterfly silkscreen, and others have design elements that echo one another like that of the Matisse painting of Dancing Muses with their arms linked creating a circle and the Cherner Chair whose arms arc in a similar fashion.


Above: Daily painting "May I Have This Dance? (matisse and cherner chair)"

For you non gallery goers and newbie art buyers, the red dots mean they are already sold. If you want one you have to be quick and willing to pay at least $300.00+ . Believe me, I know, I wanted the Barbara Barry Chair painting (below) and lost out on ebay.


Above: Daily painting "Infinity (Barbara Barry Chair and Richard Serra etchings)"


Take a look at more of these great little daily paintings:
























And that's only one small facet of this woman's creativity. Her own bio on her bird painting blog (yep, she paints birds too) is very cute:

I earned my BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1999 and participated in the New York Studio Program through Parsons. I've schlepped a backpacker's easel across Europe trying to connect to my "painter ancestors"--they weren't kidding about the light in south of France. And if I ever win an Oscar for painting I will thank Vermeer, Kahlo, Hopper, Richter and Barney, to name just a few.

She's incredibly multi-talented, with numerous websites of her own. A painting website (on which you can really see a difference between her recent work and not so recent work), and an ebay store, 2 blogs and two online stores.



Live A Plush Life, whose site design is both inviting and inspiring and features notecards of hers as well as other pretty handmade items and a print shop of her chair paintings.






See all her daily paintings here on the Daily Painters site.
Or her blog, Joie de Vivre, here.

I have a feeling this woman is just beginning. Buy her work now, before you can't afford it.

Also, be sure to see my post" Artists Take A Seat: Beautiful paintings of Chairs"

Funky Find Of The Week: Fun Furniture From Feek

Some sweet seating: The Chunk Bar and Chunk One are hard coated foam seating modeled after chocolate bars. These are actual available products for purchase, despite the CGI renderings. Whether you like white or dark chocolate, a sofa or a single stool, they are delicious looking:






The Rocker C, coming this summer, is a foam rocker of modern clean proportions, available in various colors.:




more products from Feek:



.... to see them all, go here.

Five Cool Clock Screensavers To Hip Up Any Idle Computer.

With the following five screensavers your computer screen- and now your iPhone, too- will look very hip, whether you are or not.

Below are five (actually 6) downloadable clock/date screensavers that are both well-designed and function beautifully. Some are free, (but a donation to them via paypal would be nice), others are free to try but cost to purchase.

This is an updated version of this post, so most of these have been updated to work on the latest operating systems.

1) The Word Clock



Designed by Simon Heys, the Word Clock is a typographic screensaver for Mac OS X (and now the iPhone). It displays a fixed list of all numbers and words sufficient to express any possible date and time as a sentence. Word Clock displays time by highlighting appropriate words as each second passes. (also available in a few other languages)
Download it here.

Now he also has this newer version available for download:

download the above clock screensaver here


2) The Pong Clock



Pong ® Clock by Buro Vormkrijgers of the Netherlands is both a functional wall clock you can purchase and a free downloadable screensaver for Mac or PC. While this game of Pong ® randomly plays, the so called players score the time. The left player scores the hours, and the right player scores the minutes, creating an unusual timepiece.
Download it here.

3) The Drop Clock




Heavy Helvetica numbers drop into water in super slow motion. Available in white on black or black on white. Mac and Windows. Free to try, $15 to purchase license.
Download it here.


4) The FLIQLO flip clock



Nice, clean and simple. Designed by Yuji Adachi for Mac and Windows.
Download it here.

5) The Polar Clock



Hypnotic to watch. The moving colored arcs represent hours, minutes, seconds as well as month day and date. By Pixelbreaker. In it's third iteration, it's available for Mac, Windows, as an OSX widget and now available for the iPhone.


Download it here.


Other clock screensavers worth noting:

Clockness is a site that sells only clock screensavers, most are digital artwork, but they have some cool ones like a binary clock and the very simple clock.



The AJ screensaver lets you choose from 14 different clocks that feature the time and date including the handwritten clock by Yuga Nakamura and a nice looking timeline clock.