Something Out Of Something

You have three more weeks to submit a work of art inspired by the writing of by Israeli short story writer, filmmaker, and graphic novelist, Etgar Keret. The Something out of Something Design Contest, which takes its name from a passage found in Keret’s forthcoming story collection Suddenly, a Knock on the Door is currently taking place on a blog of the same name, where submissions can be viewed and commented on by other entrants, readers, and Keret fans. Some of them are very silly, and some are shockingly beautiful. The winner gets $500, inclusion of the winning piece in a short story or film by Etgar Keret, and one signed and personalized copy of the new book. The contest ends on March 2, 2012. Keret speaks at Seattle Town Hall on April 25.

Wild Animals

Wild Animals - a beautiful self-published book by Dutch illustrator Rop van Mierlo — is already in its second printing. They're pretty tough to find around here, but you can buy one direct from the illustrator. Rop's biography states that "He is a man" who "once had a dog that bit off the tip of his ear." The rest, apparently, is history. More here.

Puss

From 1968 to 1974, a group of underground Swedish artists published twenty-four issues of "Puss" magazine — which translates as "Kiss," though the double meaning is unmistakeable - in English. Puss was an in-your-face explosion of irreverence with heaping helpings of body parts and burning flags which pissed on and pissed off just about everyone with their unrelenting satire.

The Puss crew included Lars Hillersberg, Lena Svedberg, Carl Johan De Geer, Leif Katz, Ulf Rahmberg, and "US correspondent" Oyvind Fahlstrom. Here's a google-translation of a 2007 Swedish interview with some of the surviving members.

I stumbled on Puss Magazine through the redoubtable 50 Watts, which then brought me to an extensive exhibit on extensive exhibit on Puss and Carl Johan de Geer at Boo-Hooray Gallery in New York. You can see much more here and read more about the magazine and artists here.

Mikel Jaso

I keep coming across the work of Barcelona-based Graphic Artist Mikel Jaso. Pretty nice stuff. More here.

Dingbat, Baby!

Got some empty space to fill? Spend some quality time browsing around Dingbat, baby! The dingbat inhabits the border between typography and clip art. Once reserved for serious print-related tasks like pointing, filling spaces, and exclamation, the dingbat now commands a higher level of respect and is useful for all manner of purposes. The cute and clever Dingbat, Baby sheds light on a different specimen daily. Click on the featured Dingbat to view and download its entire family. Just about all of the fonts shown are freeware or shareware and are eager to be adopted.

Weeds

Patterson Clark's day job is working as an artist for The Washington Post, where he specializes in science graphics and natural history illustration. When he gets home to his garden near Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, Clark rips out invasive plants like English ivy, white mulberry and multiflora rose, brings the plants into his basement studio, and has been perfecting the process for turning the invaders into paper, ink, and art. The current issue of American Craft magazine has more info and images on Clark’s process.

Thanks to Heidi K of Luminous Yolk for the tip!

100 Books

Two interesting books released recently which use the number 100 as an organizing principle.

Seattle 100: Portrait of a City is the culmination of a three-year project by Seattle photographer and filmmaker Chase Jarvis. Jarvis spent 36 months photographing a curated collection of creative people in and around Seattle. The book compiles 100 of his black-and-white portraits of the Seattle-based artists, musicians, writers, scientists, activists and filmmakers. Many of the photos are beautiful, and it's a worthy attempt to capture a snapshot of a city’s culture through its people. Jarvis is donating a portion of his proceeds from sales of the book to the King County arts and culture organization 4culture.

The Exquisite Book is a project dreamed up by designers Julia Rothman , Jenny Volvoski and Matt Lamothe, inspired by the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse. The editors asked 10 groups of 10 artists to contribute a page to the book. The first artist was given a few words to inspire their drawing, and each of the following artists only saw the page that immediately preceded their own. Each artist was given two weeks to complete their page, and the whole process took approximately five months. In addition to the three progenitors, the book features beautiful contributions by Caitlin Keegan, Lisa Congdon, Eunice Moyle, Tom Neely, Kelly Lynn Jones, Susie Ghahremani and Lorena Sim.

The book was designed by the New York design team ALSO and just published by Chronicle Books.

Project Thirty-Three

Project Thirty-Three is a sweet and sporadically updated online collection of vintage album cover art featuring simple shapes and typography-based graphics, scanned and archived by the owner of Jive Time Records, a Seattle music store specializing in second-hand and vintage vinyl. Categories include circles and dots, squares, rectangles and triangles, and typography-only.

Illustrated 3-Line Novels

I still love a little book I first blogged about back in 2008. Félix Fénéon's nouvelles en trois lignes or Novels in Three Lines features 1,220 brief, grisly news items the author—a Parisian editor, critic, and anarchist—wrote in 1906 for the newspaper Le Matin. Now, the Brooklyn-based illustrator Joanna Neborsky has come out with a glorious 128-page book of collages and drawings in which she illuminates a selection of Fénéon's miniatures in their English translation by Luc Sante. The book is just gorgeous, and is right up near the top of my holiday wish list. (Hint, hint.)

The always inspiring Journey Round My Skull has a large collection of unpublished and alternate drafts from Neborsky's book here.

Pictures of Clouds

The swirling photos of Hurricane season remind me of the “Clouds” photo series by the ever inventive Vik Muniz. Back in 2000, the Brazilian-born Muniz launched a public art project to coincide with a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the premiere of a full-length documentary about his work. Four times during a six day period a skywriter drew a series of clouds over the Manhattan skyline using an outline of a cloud designed by Muniz.

Muniz's aesthetic involves using unusual materials to create portraits and objects which he eventually photographs. The result is never what it seems at first sight - he deliberately deceives the spectator's eye and forces him to look again.

The fleeting nature of skywriting isn't so different from the fluid nature of pictures on the internet, the drawing of a cloud where we would expect to see a real cloud, the digital image of a storm briefly but powerfully representing a real event. The image is not the object. The map is not the territory.

The Owls

There's some interesting stuff going on at The Owls. Take some time to wander over there and check out the scene. For example, film critics Ben Walters and J. M. Tyree recently had a transatlantic chat about the Coen Brothers' first feature Blood Simple, which has been remade by Zhang Yimou; Moran Meis is in the middle of a long and rambling series of meditations on Roberto Bolaño; Photographer Ben Walters has been keeping a close eye on London graffiti; and many others are using the collective site to share their idiosyncratic writing & art projects. Worth a visit.

Cards Of Wu

Cards of Wu is designer Eric Nadler’s fictitious deck of divination cards. The images from the steadily growing deck are a perfect combination of woodcut aesthetic and Hieronymus Bosch insanity. Every bit as potent and nuanced as the cards in a tarot deck, these are the cards used by fortunetellers in forgotten or imaginary lands. More here.

Francisco Mora

Don't miss a rare showing of linocuts & lithographs by Mexican artist Francisco Mora at Davidson Galleries. Mora was born in Michoacán in 1922 and relocated to Mexico City in the 1940's where he was part of the seminal Taller de Gráfica Popular, a graphics workshop that built on Mexico’s rich tradition of printmaking in order to further a variety of revolutionary political and social causes. The picturess on display include many gritty graphic works depicting the daily lives of miners, farmers and Mexican laborers, as well as several finely rendered portraits of revolutionary giant Emiliano Zapata. Large displays of Mora's works are seldom seen outside of collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

The show at Davidson runs until May 29.

Miroslav Tichý

Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý is currently featured in a retrospective show at the International Center of Photography in New York. Tichý is an absolutely unique figure in modern photography - since the late 1950's he has lived in isolation in Kyjov, Moravia, using his hand-made cameras to take photographs almost exclusively of local women. The cameras are fashioned from cardboard tubing, string, and thread spools.

Tichý develops the photos and mounts them on frames of cardboard and scrap paper, adding finishing touches in pencil. Over more than 50 years he has developed a body of strikingly poetic, dreamlike images of feminine beauty in a small Czech town.

Of the unusual quality of his photography, Tichý says:

Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.

This is the first American museum exhibition devoted to the work of the reclusive and mysterious photographer. The show, which includes a number of Tichý's homemade cameras as well as approximately 100 of his photographs, runs through May 9.

(It's like Déjà vu all over again. This post may remind you of a similar post from a few years back.)

The Persistence of Sadness

Rafaël Rozendaal is some kind of html genius. The Persistence of Sadness is his latest piece. Turn up your volume and click on the rocks. But not while the baby's sleeping!

When you break out of that trance, there are plenty more to slip in to here. And don't forget his blog One Question Interview, still going strong.

The Mistake by the Lake

Photographer Chris Mottalini has taken a lovely series of photographs of makeshift enclosures in Buffalo, NY built by parents whose kids have to wait for the school bus in that town's famously brutal winters. The shelters dot the Buffalo landscape, but when I lived there they just blended into the background. I'm impressed that Mottalini took the time to notice them. The series carries the ignominious title "The Mistake by the Lake." Many more images here.

Superheroes! Now on Sale!

January is rolling along, and it's the perfect moment to pick up a bargain calendar. For example, the non-profit org New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE) out of New York is now selling off their stock of Dulce Pinzon’s 18-month “Superheroes” Calendar. Pinzon's Superheroes series features color photographs of Latino immigrant workers dressed as Mexican and American superheroes in their work environments. According to Pinzon, his work means to raise questions regarding our definition of heroism and bring attention to widespread ignorance and indifference to the workforce that fuels our economy. The calendar is now just 12 bucks and all proceeds go to benefit NICE. Buy it right here. More of Dulce Pinzon's work can be found here.

Baby it's c-c-c-cold outside

Katie Paterson is a Scottish artist whose works claim a very unusual middle ground between sight and sound. Past works have included launching snow from a thousand catapults and recording the sound as it landed; creating invisible fireworks that explode with black sparks; and beaming radio transmissions of music to the moon in order to record the results as they bounced back to her earthly receiver. In her latest piece, Paterson recorded the sound of 3 melting glaciers on Iceland (Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull and Solheimajökull). She then pressed the recordings onto ice records made of melt water from those glaciers. The records were played on 3 turntables until they were completely melted, which took around 2 hours. You can listen to one here.

Bike Repairs

In 2001, graphic designer Philip Carter published an esoteric little book called '1057', after the Highway Code number for the bike lane symbol used on British roads. 8 years later he is following up by collecting examples of symbols that have been repainted individually after the road they are on was repaired. He's using an ever growing Flickr site to gather the charming images. Check it out and contribute your own photos here.

Savage Illustrations

Illustrator and Art Director Joe Newton recently launched a new blog to show off the nearly 100 illustrations he's produced over 8 years for the sex advice column Savage Love. In Seattle, those illustrations are reproduced each week as teeny-tiny spot drawings in the Stranger. Newton's blog Savage Illustrations makes it much easier to appreciate the fine color and line work behind these charming drawings. Plus each image links to its original letter. Saucy!

Despite the subject matter they were originally commissioned for, the illustrations are cleverly safe for work.