~*BUTTERFLY ART*~

Butterflies are a great way to integrate whimsy into fashion, art...anything really!  I had a butterfly/forest theme for our wedding this past August and it turned out great! (I'll feature a few pics in a later post ;)

In December of 2008 Dior "Homme" had an installation in their Paris store by a young Italian artist named Andrea Mastrovito.

"The project was commissioned by Dior Homme artistic director Kris Van Assche, inspired by his whimsical Fall/Winter '08 collection, which featured butterflies on everything from blazers to t-shirts, and even butterfly-shaped bow ties. Nine thousand black decoupage replicas serpentine across the ceiling and walls of the white boutique, like Hitchcock's birds only less menacing, and much prettier. They'll be around for a month before flying away in the new year."
-Wallpaper Magazine

Carlos Amorales Butterfly Plague Art Installation

"Mist" mixed media, OKOK Gallery, Seattle Washington, 2008

Paul Villinski's Beer Can Butterflies

As the butterflies alight on the walls of my studio, they lead into an exploration of formal, painterly issues. Often, they want to gather into a certain shape, or fly off on a particular tangent, and I let them. They function both as marks in these abstract, three-dimensional “paintings,” and as actors in curious narratives. Some pieces develop a quirky, magic-realist quality, as if a strange child has trained the insects to perform some ritual dance we are not usually privy to. Finally, the butterflies operate symbolically, and I try to develop a conceptual unity between materials, process, and imagery: metamorphosing littered beer cans into flocks of butterflies mirrors the act of transformation and rebirth that butterflies symbolize across all cultures.

Butterflies seem impossible. How can these ridiculously delicate creatures, apparently blown about by the merest breath of wind, actually fly many thousands of miles to migrate? How is it that an innate, intergenerational GPS guides them year after year to the same tree? Are we more like them than we suspect, or could we be?

--Paul Villinski

Pictures courtesy of whorange

I'm also loving these Butterfly Centrepieces