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Tag: art

Published August 13, 2021

Make Meatballs Sing: The Life and Art of Corita Kent

Available this month from Brooklyn-based independent children’s book publisher Enchanted Lion, Make Meatballs Sing by Matthew Burgess and illustrated by Kara Kramer is a new picture book about the life and work of the innovative and unconventional artist, educator and social justice advocate Corita Kent (1918–1986).

Matthew Burgess is the author of Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings, illustrated by Kris Di Giacomo, and last year’s Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring, illustrated by Josh Cochran, also available from Enchanted Lion.

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Published October 1, 2020

The Lord of the Rings covers by Johan Egerkrans

I don’t post a lot of fantasy covers here (less than I should, no doubt), but I rather like the look of these reissues of The Lord of the Rings trilogy available in the US from HMH this month. The covers were designed by Christopher Moisan with illustrations by Swedish illustrator Johan Egerkrans. There’s something about the cover of The Return of the King in particular that reminds me of classic pen and ink fairy tale illustrations by likes of Arthur Rackham and John Bauer.

The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King are available October 6, 2020.

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Published August 28, 2020

Amy Sherald on Making Breonna Taylor’s Portrait

“She sees you seeing her. The hand on the hip is not passive, her gaze is not passive. She looks strong!…I wanted this image to stand as a piece of inspiration to keep fighting for justice for her. When I look at the dress, it…reminds me of Lady Justice.”

Artist Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in 2018, talks about her portrait of Breonna Taylor for Vanity Fair‘s September issue, ‘The Great Fire’, guest-edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

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Published July 3, 2020

Work in Progress with Stanley Donwood

Artist Stanley Donwood talks about his artwork for Radiohead, his collaboration with author Robert MacFarlane on Ness, and his own book Bad Island, published earlier this year by Hamish Hamilton (and slated to be published in the US by W.W. Norton this fall).

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Published June 18, 2020

American Uprising

Inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’, artist Kadir Nelson explains how he illustrated the July 2020 cover of Rolling Stone to accompany Jamil Smith’s cover story on Black Lives Matter.

Nelson also illustrated the cover of June 22 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine has an interactive version of the cover, entitled “Say Their Names”, on their site.

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Published April 9, 2020

Coralie Bickford Smith: How To Become An Illustrator

In this really lovely video, designer, author and artist Coralie Bickford-Smith explains how to become an illustrator (even if you are shy!):

Coralie’s latest book, The Song of the Tree, was published in the UK last month.

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Published May 24, 2019

Geoff McFetridge: AIGA Medalist

“Dude… it sounds like you’re making it up.”

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Published May 3, 2019

Fight the Power with Joy

Theo Inglis, whose book Mid-Century Modern Graphic is published this month, has a lovely post on the AIGA Eye on Design blog about the work of artist, teacher, activist, and designer Corita Kent:

In 1962, Kent saw work by Andy Warhol for the first time, and her aesthetic changed markedly, becoming bolder, flatter, more abstract and brighter, often with saturated, almost fluorescent, colors. Her new style was so successful that it became became known as “nun art,” and was often imitated. Her adherence to the Pop Art aesthetic was well suited to her joyous aims: Kent said she wanted her art to “give people a lift” and help them get “more fun out of life.”

Pop Art’s celebration of the urban everyday also empowered Kent to introduce more quotidian sources into her text works. During the ’60s, she began to incorporate lyrics from pop songs, advertising slogans, and snippets of text seen on signs and packaging into her work, often pairing them with religious text. It was a move that elevated the ordinary to the spiritual, and became a frequent theme in Kent’s art and teaching. She found delight in the commonplace, and believed that the divine could be seen anywhere, even amidst the chaos of the modern city. Kent often took her students on urban expeditions—even day-long trips to gas stations and car lots—armed with cameras and viewfinders.

The largest ever exhibition of Corita Kent’s work in the UK, Corita Kent: Power Up, is currently on display at House of Illustration in King’s Cross until May 12.

Theo’s book is available May 7 from Pavilion Books. 

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Published September 15, 2017

Race, Power, Money: Olivia Laing on Jean-Michel Basquiat

At The Guardian, Olivia Laing, the eminently readable author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, and The Lonely City, on artist Jean-Michel Basquiat: 

There is a graphomaniac quality to almost all of Basquiat’s work. He liked to scribble, to amend, to footnote, to second-guess and to correct himself. Words jumped out at him, from the back of cereal boxes or subway ads, and he stayed alert to their subversive properties, their double and hidden meaning. His notebooks, recently published in an exquisite facsimile by Princeton, are full of stray phrases, odd combinations. When he began painting, working up to it by way of hand-coloured collaged postcards, it was objects he went for first, drawing and writing on refrigerators, clothes, cabinets and doors, regardless of whether they belonged to him or not…

…A Basquiat alphabet: alchemy, an evil cat, black soap, corpus, cotton, crime, crimée, crown, famous, hotel, king, left paw, liberty, loin, milk, negro, nothing to be gained here, Olympics, Parker, police, PRKR, sangre, soap, sugar, teeth.

These were words he used often, names he returned to turning language into a spell to repel ghosts. The evident use of codes and symbols inspires a sort of interpretation-mania on the part of curators. But surely part of the point of the crossed-out lines and erasing hurricanes of colour is that Basquiat is attesting to the mutability of language, the way it twists and turns according to the power status of the speaker. Crimée is not the same as criminal, negro alters in different mouths, cotton might stand literally for slavery but also for fixed hierarchies of meaning and the way people get caged inside them.

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Published May 25, 2017

Gerhard Steidl is Making Books an Art Form

Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker

Rebecca Mead’s long profile of publisher Gerhard Steidl for The New Yorker is a wonderful, fascinating read:

Each Steidl title is unique, printed with a bespoke combination of inks and papers. But to the informed eye, and the informed hand, a Steidl book is as distinctive as an Eggleston photograph. Unlike another German art publisher, Taschen—which is known for reproducing risqué images by the likes of Helmut Newton in enormous formats that would crush most coffee tables to splinters—Steidl produces books that invite holding and reading. Steidl dislikes the shiny paper that is often found in photography books, and prefers to use uncoated paper, even though it takes longer to dry and thus makes a printing cycle more expensive. He opts for understatement even with projects that would tempt other publishers to be ostentatious. “Exposed,” a collection of portraits of famous people by Bryan Adams, the rock star turned photographer, has no image on its cover. Bound in blue cloth, the book looks as if it might be found on a shelf in an academic library. Steidl wants his creations to satisfy all the senses. When he first opens a book, he holds it up close to his nose and smells it, like a sommelier assessing a glass of wine. High-quality papers and inks smell organic, he says, not chemical. To the uninitiated, a Steidl book smells rather like a just-opened box of children’s crayons.

I love this part about the attention to the detail:

Designing a book’s packaging is a process Steidl particularly relishes. “He wants to pick the cover, he wants to pick the endpapers,” [Robert] Polidori told me. “He treasures this limited one-on-one time with the artist. It’s almost a love act.” Sometimes Steidl indulges in a brightly colored ribbon for a bookmark, like statement socks worn with a formal suit. He pays attention to elements that barely register with most readers, such as the head and tail bands—colored silk placed where the pages attach to the spine. “It’s a tiny bit of fashion,” Steidl said. “With Karl [Lagerfeld], it is the buttons. With me, it is the head and tail bands.” For Gossage, he chose black bands and black endpaper, to contrast with the colored ink on the pages. The endpaper was made from cotton, and would cost thirty cents per book, as opposed to the seven cents it would cost if he used offset paper. “Using the cheaper one saves significant money for the shareholders,” he said. “But I am the only shareholder.”

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Published February 24, 2017

Alan Aldridge 1943-2017

British artist and designer Alan Aldridge died last week aged 73. In the words of designer Mike Dempsey, Aldridge “was a major influence on the British design and illustration scene in the 1960’s.” Although he is perhaps best known for his work for The Beatles, The Who and Elton John (not to mention his infamous poster for Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls) it began, Dempsey notes, “with his controversial post as fiction art director of Penguin Books in 1965 where he challenged the status quo, upsetting many on the way.”

The Guardian obituary explains how Aldridge got his start in design:  

Sheer chutzpah won him his first job at a design agency, where he passed off his girlfriend’s portfolio of work as his own and was hired for £3 a week. “I blag beautifully,” as he put it. When he turned up to work the following Monday and was told to wear a suit, he went to Bethnal Green baths and stole one.

He drew portraits in his spare time, and as news of his abilities spread, he was recruited as a trainee by Germano Facetti, the art director at Penguin Books. Aldridge worked his way up to designing book covers, then was offered a job as a junior visualiser at the Sunday Times. The paper had the UK’s first colour supplement, offering new opportunities in design and photography that Aldridge was keen to exploit.

His most memorable contribution was his transformation of a Mini into a four-wheeled work of art, handpainted by Aldridge in a hectic 24-hour session. It was the magazine’s cover image in October 1965, with the title Automania. Meanwhile he had still been creating covers for Penguin, and was lured away from the Sunday Times to become Penguin’s fiction art director. Aldridge set about creating a radical, freewheeling new look for Penguin’s catalogue.

Aldridge talked more about this unorthodox beginning in this video:

My introduction to Aldridge was the revised 1971 edition of The Penguin Book of Comics, the book he conceived with George Perry (the cover of the first edition, originally published in 1967, is pictured above). I found it on the shelf in my grandparents house and pored over the pages of reproduced art. The book was my first introduction to American comics, and the idea that comics could be taken (somewhat) seriously. I found Aldridge’s illustrations, which also appear throughout the book, confusing and fascinating in equal measure. I know they reminded me of Heinz Edelmann’s art for Yellow Submarine — I think for a while I assumed they were by the same person — but you can read about Aldridge’s own work with The Beatles in this 2005 article from Eye Magazine: 

Aldridge refused to call himself an artist, illustrator, or designer. Instead he was a self-styled ‘graphic entertainer’, a precursor of today’s designer-entrepreneur, who had created a moderately successful product called ‘Put-Ons’, tattoo skin transfers. He was also always pitching projects that could turn a profit. He even convinced Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager, to produce a book of Dylan lyrics. But when Sgt. Pepper’s was released in 1967, Aldridge had an idea that promised surefire success.

‘I noticed the initials of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ spelled LSD and decided that it would be fun to explore visually the hidden meaning in the Pepper’s lyrics. I called Paul (who I’d never met, but had his home phone number) and said I’d like to interview him [about this], and much to my amazement he not only said yes, he said let’s do it now and come right away to his house in St John’s Wood. You don’t argue with an edict like that.’ The interview and accompanying illustrations appeared in 1967 in The Observer under the headline: ‘A Good Guru’s Guide to the Beatles Sinister Songbook.’ Bags of fan mail rapidly followed. ‘It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that I was on to something. So I pitched a dummy of the book, The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics, which had three or four spreads of illustrated lyrics, to Peter Brown (Beatle manager Brian Epstein’s partner for many years) at Apple. The book would have all the lyrics from ‘Love Me Do’ to ‘A Day In The Life’ illustrated by famous artists; I think I even mentioned getting Picasso, Dali and Magritte! Peter showed the layouts to John and Paul and got the boys’ okay.’

Having Lennon and McCartney’s sanction, however, did not mean Aldridge instantly nailed the book. He still had to present the project to Dick James, owner of Northern Songs, which published and co-owned the Lennon / McCartney lyrics. ‘Dick liked what he saw, then curve-balled me,’ Aldridge winces. ‘An American publisher had come to him with a similar deal, and had offered a lot of money, but since I had the boys’ okay he’d give me two weeks to get a publishing deal that gave him an advance of £20,000, a huge sum in 1968.’ For a week, Aldridge phoned every publishing house in London and New York, explaining the urgency. He was, however, turned down by everyone. ‘Not because of the large advance, but because they all thought the Beatle phenomena wouldn’t last another year.’

The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes: The Art of Alan Aldridge, a catalogue of Aldridge’s work, is available from Abrams.

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Published January 17, 2017

Irma Boom’s Library

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for the New York Times

The New York Times visits Dutch designer and bookmaker Irma Boom‘s new library of experimental books:

Irma Boom pays careful attention to word choice. The Dutch designer, one of the world’s pre-eminent bookmakers, is loath to say “client” and refers to her projects as “commissions.” She also doesn’t call herself an artist.

Never mind that Ms. Boom, 56, was once in a group exhibition at the Pompidou Center, or that many of her books are in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. Her belief that she is not an artist could be a matter of culture — a product of her “Dutch rigor,” as the architect Rem Koolhaas, a close friend and collaborator, said.

But there are many who would at least consider Ms. Boom’s books works of art. Among them were the jurors of the Johannes Vermeer Award, the Dutch state prize for the arts, which she won in 2014. “Her books transcend the level of mere information carriers,” the jury’s report stated. “They are small or larger objects to admire, tempting us to read them with close attention.” She received 100,000 euros to put toward a “special project,” as the prize stipulates. “I cannot simply go and shop at Prada,” Ms. Boom said.

So Ms. Boom has used the prize for the quixotic, endless undertaking of creating a library of what she called “only the books that are experimental.” Above her studio here, the recently opened library is made up almost entirely of books from the 1600s and 1700s, and the 1960s and ’70s.

Those eras are when bookmaking wasn’t held back by conventions, Ms. Boom said, and when books “breathed freedom” in content and form. (Many of today’s e-books, by contrast, represent a “provisional low point” in the art of bookmaking, writes Mr. Koolhaas in the catalog “Irma Boom: The Architecture of the Book.”) Her library includes poetry collections, as well as exhibition catalogs that experimented with form — a book bound with bolts, for example, or contained within what seems like a three-ring binder.

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