The Arm (letterpress)
January 21st, 2009 by rbanks
Lovely letterpress set on Flickr.
Thanks to I Love Typography for a great post which included this.
Archive for the 'Art' Category
Hypercomics
January 15th, 2009 by rbanks
I enjoyed this “hypercomic” – a comic on an infinite canvas, by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey. Shown by Scott McCloud in his recent TED talk.
Lebbeus Woods’ fantasy world
January 6th, 2009 by rbanks
Lebbeus Woods has started a series of fantasy entries on his blog, tied to his beautiful sketches. The first is about a city built into rocky crags, the City of Earth. His prose style reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft, for some reason, creating a slight atmosphere of foreboding, that I’m not sure was intended. Maybe this is because I imagine the city he’s describing as vacant, abandoned for some reason (the sketches seem to support this). Anyone who’s played Bioshock knows this feeling.
“The particularly mountainous region I first encountered was certainly inhospitable to building. Jagged, rocky ridges were separated by steep chasms rather than welcoming valleys. Yet many large structures had been built. Clinging to the cliff faces, or cut into them, or set into almost inaccessible promontories, the structures were built largely of concrete with much the same color as the rocks. Adorning them were more delicate armatures of iron that were rusty, in much the same manner as industrial buildings I knew well from my own country. From these aspects I reasoned that this was a mining community, one in which the people were primarily engaged in cutting and digging into the earth to extract its hidden mineral riches. As I was to learn, this reasoning was only partially correct.”
City of Earth is followed by City of Fire.
“Here, in strata upon strata of volcanic rock, were spaces inhabited by a community of people engaged in some sort of industry. There were dwelling spaces, hollowed out from the dark earth masses. There were machines that captured an eerie form of light different from that far above. There were vast caverns in which I saw entangled, monumental forms that were like fragments of the lucid geometric volumes I had seen in the city above, but here broken into disparate parts and linked together by tendril-like passageways and conduits, creating a vast, indeterminate network, rather than a geometrically coherent form. All of this was revealed by an inner-earth glow, amid a constant, throbbing heat. It soon became clear that the harnessing of heat energy, as a source of motive power, I imagined, was the industry of this underground community.”
Burgerman sketch
November 24th, 2008 by rbanks
Novelty Still Running High
Originally uploaded by Jon_Burgerman
I’m a big fan of Jon Burgerman’s work, so this slightly sped up video of him sketching shows the way he creates his characters, almost by accident it seems.
New work by Maya Lin
November 6th, 2008 by rbanks
Some really beautiful looking new work by Maya Lin. Hope this exhibition comes to the UK.
“The Systematic Landscape exhibit, Lin’s second nationally traveling exhibit within 10 years, ranges from a 50-ton sculpture created by 65,000 pieces of 2×4 set on their ends (2×4 Landscape) to Rand McNally into which Lin has cut through page by page to create new fictional landscapes that feature canyons through France and a valley in southeast Brazil that bottoms out as a lake (Atlas Landscape series).”
Systematic Landscapes exhibit at the de Young Museum – Dwell Blog
Star Wars ABC cards
October 24th, 2008 by rbanks
A beautiful set of ABC cards for kids (really?) based on the Star Wars universe. There’s some serious obscurity in some of those names.
X is for Xam(s), the medical team who deliver a set of important twins at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
Y is for Yaddle, a little seen *female* Jedi of the same species as Yoda.
Z is for Zutton, need more be said?
Robert Walden – Ontological Roadmaps
October 2nd, 2008 by rbanks
Really love these images. I’ve started playing with slightly more abstract pen-and-ink images as the basis for a new set of woodblocks which I should get around to at some point. I feel weird about the abstract, for some reason. Woodblocks tend to be more literal. So I love seeing this kind of semi-abstract work as encouragement, even if they aren’t woodblocks. The use of ink on acrylic definitely gives it a print feel.
“Using ink, pencil and acrylic on paper his city structures move from linearity and order and gradually transform organically into urban sprawls. The cellular nature of these drawings, not surprisingly, also implies biological entities with tendrils, lichen colonies or even tree bark – nature’s little cities. Yet again these kinds of procedural drawings hint at universal pattern formulae generated by loop-based self-organising principles.”
Japanese craft
September 5th, 2008 by rbanks
I get confused between my Mingei (a Japanese folk art movement from the early 20th century) and my Wabi-Sabi (more of an aesthetic attitude or philosophy), but there’s no denying the beauty of traditional Japanese craft.
‘the mingei spirit in japan, from folk craft to design’ (an exhibition showing in Paris from the end of September to January 11th ’09)
“this exhibition considers the links between traditional craft objects and the impact of industrialization. it presents the influences of yanagi on craft traditions and the mixed relations between the traditional and modern aspects of the objects on show. the aesthetic and technical qualities of local japanese traditions are highlighted from when they were originally made to the moment when they found themselves threatened by the standardization of globalisation.”
Book cuts
August 19th, 2008 by rbanks
Some beautiful, and surreal, book cuts by Noriko Ambe, a Japanese artist living in New York. A similar visual effect on the faces as the Henrich Emille Rectangle, which I mentioned the other day. And not unlike the gunshot wounds received by the T-1000 in Terminator 2. Couldn’t avoid that geeky reference.
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