Entries Tagged 'Art' ↓

Artist Dan S. DeCarlo (1919-2001), below, is widely recognized as the creator of both the Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats strips. But he is best known as the illustrator who gave Archie—the comic featuring the eponymous redheaded teenager, plus his friends Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie, and the rest—their definitive form and line, the look by which they’re most known, and that modern artists must emulate when drawing the characters.

I think it’s for this reason that I love the two recently released Fantagraphics texts The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo, and The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo Vol. 2, edited by Alex Chun and Jacob Covey.

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Cover detail from Mansa Musa by Khephra Burns (2001)
Illustration by Leo & Diane Dillon

Technically, I’m a patron of Leo & Diane Dillon’s, the famed and widely awarded husband & wife children’s book illustrators. (I purchased a very small painting by them, at an extremely generous price, a few years ago.) As well, I’ve hosted them as guests on NONFICTION, my Friday 2 pm WBAI-NY radio show, commemorating their 50th anniversary in March 2007. (Leo has even said he’s a regular listener.)

But that’s just full disclosure stuff, because, what’s true is that I love their work with the kind of passion that almost halts one’s breath.

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Caricaturist Drew Friedman sums up the psychopathic presidency of George W. Bush in this illustration, “No Joke,” for Vanity Fair, brought to yours truly’s attention via Boing Boing.

That’ll teach those kids to sneak through your rhododendrons: This spastic The Zombie of Montclaire Moors sculpture, by artist Alan Dickinson

will claw his way out of your garden plot or family room corner, pleading for assistance with the most lifelike eyes you’ve ever seen. His macabre expression is captured in such great detail in quality designer resin and finished so realistically that you’ll swear you can hear him breathing!

Plus, wait ’til slugs start crawling out of its mouth!

Life-sized. $89.95 from designToscano, via the unstoppably awesome BoingBoing.

Edelgard Clavey, 67, December 5, 2003, then one month later

What is death?

Or, let me ask it this way: When, one moment, a person is alive, then, a moment later, they die, what has “happened,” or changed? Where have they, the person you knew and loved, “gone”? What is it that makes the difference between a person that you love and touch, and the shell you avert?

Questions of this sort inevitably course through one’s mind when contemplating German photographer Walter Schels’s and collaborator Beate Lakotta’s earthy, profoundly emotional portraits of terminally ill patients, before, and, their very first pictures, shortly after dying. (Thanks to very.fm for the heads up.)

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When I saw that the Smithsonian is running an exhibit ’til Nov. 8 on Rastafarianism—“Discovering Rastafari!” is the horrible title—my first thought was this: I’d have given my eyeteeth to have heard the ensuing comedy of errors when white, Ivy League-bred curators negotiated with Rastas for artifacts.

Then, it occurred to me that everything in the show is probably already owned by white Brits.

Then there’s this question, which The New York Times, itself, raises: Why is this exhibit in the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History?

the Rastafari exhibition does not really belong in the same museum as paleontological finds and collections of insects and gems. That placement is a relic of the 19th-century conception of the natural history museum as a temple devoted to exotic “natural” cultures and objects — evolutionary predecessors of the scientific West.

How unexpected.

Korean designer Cheol-Ki Jo’s radical redesign of a common houshold radio results in one with no knobs, slide pots, or other usual controls for volume and tuning.

Instead, users place stones of varied sizes on top of the wood case. Certain circular areas there are designed to electronically register pressure via “load cells,” as seen in the diagram at right.

From unplggd.com:

Depending on the weight being balanced upon the two radial surfaces, the concept unit’s volume and frequency are adjusted, making this less of an actual device and more of an art installation piece. It’s still an interesting idea (“Honey, can you give me back the speckled white stone and the three black pebbles so I can listen to NPR?”).

Art installation piece, or maybe children’s device, generating a true experience of discovery and play? Whatever, it represents some serious top-of-the-box thinking.

Talented caricaturist Donald Soffritti’s humorous “Decadence” series depicts superheroes, like Batman and Robin, Flash, and Spiderman, above, in their not-so-golden years. Plus, if you like the work of talented illustrators the way I do, the guy’s got a blogroll to die for.

From his Steampunk Workshop web site, Jake von Slatt not only talks the steampunk talk, but walks the steampunk walk. Here, he delivers step-by-step low-down on how he built this gorgeous Victorian desktop PC mod. You won’t believe your pince-nez as you eye the finely crafted detailing, below. Continue reading →

Each and every frame a painting: From Tarsem’s 2006 film, The Fall

Like the best directors—Scorsese, Spielberg, Hitchcock—Tarsem, right, 46, is known to peers by one name, though it’s his first, not his last. (His full name is Tarsem Singh Dhandwar.)

You, though, may know him by his visually delirious works: the landmark, 1991 R.E.M. music video, “Losing My Religion,” or 2000’s Jennifer Lopez thriller, The Cell. Continue reading →