Here we are, back home again from a wonderful trip to California and Seattle. Sorry I haven’t really updated the blog lately, but it was nice to take a break from everything. I’ll be back on track very soon, I promise!
(The photo above was taken by Andreas in the center of Copenhagen, two years ago, during the winter. And I’ve scribbled on it with my favourite app Brushes, for Ipad. I want to do more of that, it’s fun! Thanks Ando for letting me play with your art.)
Book publisher Penguin is launching a series called “Penguin Threads”. Penguin hired artist Jilian Tamaki, who first sketched and then hand-sewed the art on the cover of three classic novels: Emma, Black Beauty and The Secret Garden. The final covers are sculpt-embossed in order to reproduce the tactile feeling of the original needlework. Above, the beautiful cover for The Secret Garden. Below you can see the covers of the other two novels:
I personally really love needlework, especially free embroidery. I find it relaxing. If only it wasn’t so expensive to buy supplies (i.e. floss)…
The city of Turku, in southern Finland, is the European Capital of Culture for 2011. Indeed, the city organized a wide array of events to celebrate, and has introduced a quite interesting initiative: doctors in the municipality of Turku are prescribing cultural events to treat their patients.
“The cultural prescriptions available through doctors’ appointments in Turku health centres entitle free admission to certain main events during the Capital of Culture year” according to the Turku 2011 website.
The initiative is part of the “Art and culture for well-being programme” promoted by the Finnish government “to promote well-being and health by means of art and culture and to enhance inclusion at the individual, community and societal levels”. I found the initiative really interesting. I cannot even imagine my doctor prescribing a ticket to the ballet or the circus in order to treat my headache…but I guess I would appreciate it.
If you want to read more about this initiative – and read some of the research made in Finland about the healing value of culture – follow this link.
I have just found out about American artist Kerry James Marshall, and I really love his art. I need to find a catalogue of his work!
“Vignette 13″ 2008, K.J. Marshall
“Could this be love”
“Better Homes Better Gardens”
“Souvenir III”
“Vignette #2″
Marshall (below) was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in South Central, L.A. He currently lives in Chicago. He said: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go” (from the PBS website).
His work references a wide range of artists and art styles – from comic books to Renaissance paintings. In an interview with The Bomb he declared: “The issue for me has never been whether it’s possible to paint, but how to find a way to make painting exist powerfully in the face of all of the other options artists have available to them.”
If you want learn more about Kerry J.Marshall, here is a really interesting interview about his comic drawings project, “Rythm Mastr”, and here is another good interview from The Bomb (quite old though, is from 1998).
art by Hannah Rollings
A while ago, while browsing for books on Blurb, I found the work of illustrator Hannah Rollings. I just love everything she makes, and I ended up buying her book My Travel Journal. It’s a mix of old photos, paintings and drawings…and it is designed as a travel journal for kids. Beautiful! Below you can see more of Hannah’s art from different projects. And here you can find her blog, and her etsy shop.
I love the idea of a beachcombing drawing workshop! (Art by Hannah Rollings)
This is the cover of her book My BUG journal (awesome!)
And below you can see artwork from the book My Travel Journal.
Angie Levin is a British printmaker I really like. When I was in Stockholm visiting my friend Ellen, I bought 4 little reproductions of her art work, and I have just found out she has published a book, too (take a look here, is wonderful). I like the color palettes in her artwork, and the way she portrays flowers and plants.
Angie Levin: Wild Garden II
Screenprint
Angie Levin: Salthouse Linocut
Angie Levin: Spey Seedheads
Linocut
Angie Levin: cover illustration for Natural Garden Style
If you like botanical art you must check out her website!
Happy Valentine day/Buon San Valentino! Today I received tulip bulbs to plant, and a beautiful carnivorous plant called Dionaea. Andreas has received a nice review of his show on the Danish newspaper Information!! So we’re both happy Valentines.
After a day of writing I decided to post something on the blog. It was going to be an heart, and it took me a while to figure out how using photoshop, but I found a very good tutorial. That’s how basic my photoshop skills are right now! But I’m working on it.
The floral pattern I used is from a Japanese book I bought in Finland, Petite Pattern Book 2. I’m in love with it: it’s a collection of 300 patterns, including a CD-ROM with all the files in Jpeg and Eps. I have used it for my current banner, too. And the book is bilingual, not just Japanese :)
Petit Pattern Book is made by a wonderful design studio based in Tokyo, 2m09cmGraphics Inc. They also have a blog, but that is only in Japanese, unfortunately…
For more heart-shaped stuff this is another good tutorial I found. It’s for making heart shaped texts.
A while ago Andreas showed me an impressive photo gallery from the Guardian: it was a photo-reportage on the ruins of Detroit, Michigan. I was so stunned by the images, and at first I thought they were surreal digital manipulations. They are not. On the Guardian website I read: “In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city’s painful decline.”
These are some of the pictures from the book The Ruins of Detroit, by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.
United Artists Theater
Michigan Central Station
St Christopher House, ex Public Library
Fort Shelby Hotel
Ballroom, American Hotel
You can find more photos from the project on Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s website and on the Guardian.
Also, if you are interested in Detroit’s contemporary history, check out yesterday’s interview from the Daily Show, where Jon Stewart interviewed Paul Clemens, author of a brand new book called Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant. Clemens spent a year watching men disassemble a stamping plant in Detroit. Here’s the link to the interview.
postcard display inside Rigshospitalet
Rigshospitalet, the specialized hospital in Copenhagen, has set up a beautiful advent calendar. I love to find art in strange settings, and a public hospital facade is a great one.
Walking towards the building you will see windows lit up with artwork inside of them, and every day a new one is revealed. We went there and I took some photos…
close-ups of the artwork in the windows…
I’m curious to see the whole calendar! I will go and take more photos when all the windows are lit.
The artists who realized the windows above are, in order: Sophia Kalkau, Isabel Berglund, Hans E Madsen, Christina Bredahl Duelund, Lotte Tauber Lassen (if you click on their names you’ll be redirected to they websites).
I’m especially intrigued by the colorful window curated by Isabel Berglund. This is a picture of her artwork from the catalogue of the project.
She uses textile media, incorporating knitted yarn in her work. Below you can see a photo from an installation she made few years ago, City of Stitches. It’s a knitted landscape.
Anyway, apparently the city of Copenhagen has many strange advent calendars going on…we’ll try to find more. I know there is an underground artist, Kissmama, that every day of the advent takes the metro dressed like this,
photo via Ibyen.dk
…and exits at Kongens Nytorv, where he opens a new advent calendar window in the new Metro construction area. This is how Kissmama’s art looks like – I love this one!
Hope you had a nice weekend!
smiling at -5 degrees! Fabric Tape by Pugly Pixel
PS: some of you may know Rigshospitalet for Lars von Trier’s spooky TV series Riget (The Kingdom). If not, you must see it.
Now that it’s time to write Christmas cards, what about making your envelopes a little bit…creative? Or to be more specific, why not make your envelopes challenging for the postman? I just found this amazing project by British artist and illustrator Harriet Russell.
In 2008 she sent 130 envelopes to herself. These are few examples of how she concealed her address on them…
She designed crosswords, color blindness test, maps, rebus, cartoons, ciphers…
…and she received all the envelopes except for 10. Quite impressive!
She published a book on the project: Envelopes. Harriet Russell is a brilliant illustrator, check out her website here. My favourite is the book covers section.
