I love these artworks by New York dwelling, Nigerian born Lekan Jeyifous. I love the detail, the colour, the way some of it is familiar and some not. An architect by training, Jeyifous now creates beautiful artworks based on the built environment and human interaction with it.

In his own words :-

“The series contains abstracted planimetric drawings and eerily-serene cityscapes that suggest the changing contours of urban settlements. They represent an idea of a degenerate futurism, yet one might find similar typologies and scenes in places such as the favelas of Brazil and North Africa, and in overpopulated cities such as Lagos, Mexico City, and Mumbai. Though outputted digitally, the drawings possess a textured and painterly quality as a result of combining hand-drawn sketches, industrial textures, surfaces of deteriorated paper, and digital architectural models.
A constant interplay between digital and analog processes is important in my work, resulting in a highly layered set of documents. The drawings presented here started out as digital images that were outputted, sketched and drawn over, and scanned back into the computer in order to be retraced, textured, and layered.”

I see organisms and microscopic cells in these images, dividing and multiplying just as humans do in their ever expanding hold on the landscapes. Replication, mutation, movement, clustering, treading the well trodden path and the not so well known, creating new paths, tangents to follow.

I love how these artworks depict the man-made landscape and the natural at the same time and they are inspiring me for an artwork I will make based on some Google Earth imagery. If you want a really mind boggling look at some of our planet’s more interesting features, fly to Walla Walla, Washington, USA and have a scoot around between the mountain ridges and rivers. So many circles, it looks like an alien storage facility… If someone reading this actually knows what those circles are, please tell me!

You can see much more of Lekan’s beautiful art at
http://vigilism.com/Settlements-and-City-Strategies