Here in Philadelphia, which has, I believe, more anti-graffiti murals than any other city in North America, I’ve seen my share of large scale and nicely done murals on the sides of buildings.

However, in Montreal, members of A’Shop, an artists collective that draws from the graffiti and street art culture, has created a mural that is inspired by Art Nouveau designs (primarily Mucha’s background designs), an approach I have not seen before.

Ironically, the mural is done using graffiti techniques and tools – spray paint. There is an article on My Modern Met that goes into the process of painting the mural, and another on the A’Shop site.

A few years ago, well known science writer Carl Zimmer was at a pool party with a scientist friend who studies genetics, and noticed a tattoo of DNA on his shoulder.

It prompted him to wonder if other scientists had similarly chosen to have tattoos related to their scientific pursuits. He put the call out on his popular blog, The Loom, and the responses became the basis of a feature he called the Science Tattoo Emporium (see my post from 2008).

Zimmer has now collected a number of the images into a book titled Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed.

You can see a few pages from the book on the Amazon preview, but you can view many more of the tattoos by browsing back through the posts in the Science Tattoo Emporium.

Instead of monsters and flaming skulls, we have tattoos of real animals, both prehistoric and extinct, and scientifically accurate skulls of various species.

In place of iconic hearts, we have biologically accurate illustrations of the human organ.

Throw in molecular structures of various compounds (in the example above, the molecule for LSD), planetary bodies, illustrations of the golden section laid out against a chambered nautilus shell, various scientific formulas and, of course, other interpretations of DNA strands — and you have a range of unusual and fascinating tattoo images.

Unfortunately, the tattoo artists, and/or the artists who created illustrations they may have worked from, aren’t credited.

Augustin Lesage was a French painter associated with “outsider art” (L’Art Brut), art created outside of normal cultural definitions.

A coal miner from the age of 14, Lesage supposedly heard a voice deep in the mine say “One day you’ll be a painter!”, followed by a succession of other voices, some of which he took to be the voice of his sister Mary, who died at the age of three.

He began with “automatic drawing”, a practice the Surrealists employed to produce art directly form the subconscious, but one also associated with communicating with the departed by spiritualists. He moved from there into painting, guided by the voices, and began to produce large scale canvasses in which he explored kalidoscopic images, repetitions of surface patterns and themes of spiritualism and symbolism.

Most of the images in this post, and those in many of the resources I list below, came from shawna-bo-bonna’s Flickr stream.

The two images above, bottom, which are both titled A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World but were done two years apart, became the inspiration for animations created in 2010 by Max Hattler (see my previous post 1923 aka Heaven and 1925 aka Hell by Max Hattler).