Patrick LaMontagne  

Alberta-based artist Patrick LaMontagne received a compliment on his portrait of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield from up on the International Space Station. "Thanks Patrick - what skill!" tweeted Hadfield.

Alberta-based artist Patrick LaMontagne received a compliment on his portrait of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield from up on the International Space Station.

Hadfield, who is aboard the ISS on a five-month stay, was tagged in a mention on Twitter about a portrait of him and he wrote back.

"Thanks Patrick - what skill! I wish you could be up here to see and be inspired by what we can see," he said.

The Canadian Space Agency wrote to LaMontagne on Twitter saying, "Well done! Nice blog entry too!"

According to LaMontagne,

There is no better legacy than to inspire those around you and the next generation to believe in the possibilities before them. I can’t imagine how many children are now considering futures in the space program because of Hadfield’s example. Whether they’ll remain on the ground as part of the team that sends us further into space or actually get to be one of the few who go, will be up to them.

LaMontagne painted the portrait to commemorate Hadfield taking over as commander of the ISS on March 13th. In a blog post, he says he was inspired by the images and videos Hadfield has been sharing from space.

The portrait was digitally painted in Photoshop CS6 Extended with a Wacom Cintiq 24HD. Final file dimensions are 32″X24″ at 300ppi.

The reference was a screen capture from the YouTube video that according to LaMontagne, "Meant the quality wasn’t great, but I muddled through. Photos are never used as part of the painting, all was painted from scratch. I wanted desperately to put stars in those windows, but they just wouldn’t be visible in real life, so I kept that urge in check."

 Matthew Cusick  

Matt Cusick's extraordinary collages use maps to form the geometry and color palette of his work, with the elevation maps and other cartographic images blending into his images.

B ased in New York, Matt Cusick has made garnered a reputation as an artist with his meticulous representations of people, animals, water and landscapes collaged onto panels using recycled maps.

In developing these collage pieces, Cusick slices segments of maps found in old textbooks, encyclopedias, and atlases and then forms the elements together into his compositions.

Most of Cusick's collages use the maps own colors to inform his palette, with the elevation maps and other cartographic images blending into his images.

From a distance, the collages almost look like vector based computer illustration, but viewing the pieces closer and over time reveals the subtlety of their construction.

Cusick explained how he got started using maps to More Magnificent Metropolis:

Frustrated with paint and brushes, I just started experimenting with some maps I had laying around the studio. I found that maps have all the properties of a brushstroke: nuance, density, line, movement, and color. Their palette is deliberate and symbolic, acting as a cognitive mechanism to help us internalize the external. And furthermore, since each map fragment is an index of a specific place and time, I could combine fragments from different maps and construct geographical timelines within my paintings.

Maps provided so much potential, so many layers. I put away my brushes and decided to see where the maps would take me. I think collage is a medium perfectly suited to the complexities of our time. It speaks to a society that is over-saturated with disparate visual information. It attempts to put order to the clutter and to make something permanent from the waste of the temporary. A collage is also a time capsule; it preserves the ephemera of the past. It reconstitutes things that have been discarded. A collage must rely on a kind of alchemy; it must combine ordinary elements into something extraordinary.

Cusick's provocative work below, Malvo features map locations and target imagery that made up part of the sniper's area of operation.