Tom Gauld‘s new cover for The New Yorker.
(Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!)
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Published October 13, 2014
Tag: illustration
Published September 19, 2014
Self Initiated: Stanley Chow
Like their first film about illustrator and typographer Daren Newman, the second short in the ‘Self Initiated’ series by the folks from Manchester-based Daylight is about a local talent.
Even if you don’t immediately recognize Stanley Chow‘s name, you will have seen his illustrations for The New Yorker, Wired, and Entertainment Weekly among other places. Most likely, you have have seen his portraits of pop culture icons online too. In the film, Chow talks about his process, inspiration, and doing the work he loves:
You can buy prints of Stanley Chow’s work from his print shop.
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Published September 3, 2014
The Art of Comics: Chris Ware
Cartoonist Chris Ware is interviewed by Canadian journalist Jeet Heer in the latest issue of The Paris Review as part of the magazine’s ongoing ‘The Art of Comics’ series. You can read a short excerpt online:
1 CommentIt was the Peanuts collections in my grandfather’s basement office that really stayed with me through childhood and into college. Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, and Lucy all felt like real people to me… I’ve said it many times before, but Charles Schulz is the only writer I’ve continually been reading since I was a kid. And I know I’m not alone. He touched millions of people and introduced empathy to comics, an important step in their transition from a mass medium to an artistic and literary one.
Published August 22, 2014
Luke Pearson’s Hildafolk
We’re big fans of Luke Pearson and his ‘Hildafolk’ graphic novels in our house. In this video for publisher Nobrow Press he talks about drawing the books, and the most recent volume in the series, Hilda and the Black Hound:
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Published August 15, 2014
The Many Faces of the Novel
Grant Snider‘s latest illustration for the New York Times Book Review accompanied John Sutherland’s review of The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt, last weekend.
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Published July 23, 2014
Book Covers by Moker Ontwerp
I do like these book covers by Dutch design studio Moker Ontwerp:
You can see more of their handiwork here.
(via Theo Inglis)
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Published July 15, 2014
Book Posters by Gunter Rambow
If you follow me at all on Twitter, you’ll know that I’m working on a post about meta-covers, or book covers with books on them. It’s proving to be a much more difficult task than I first imagined, and it’s taking a very long time to pull it all together. It is, finally, almost done, and I hope it will be on the blog in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, however, I came across these remarkable book posters by German designer Gunter Rambow for S. Fischer Verlag from the 1970s while compiling images for the post, and I thought I would share them now while you wait.
There is also a book, Gunter Rambow: Plakate / Posters, that collects Rambow’s posters from 1962 to 2007 when the Museum fur Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt mounted a major exhibition to his work.
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Published June 24, 2014
Simon Schama on Illustrator Quentin Blake
Simon Schama profiles artist and illustrator Quentin Blake for the FT Weekend Magazine:
Blake comes straight out of this 18th-century tradition of rococo mischief, the arabesque ride through the storyline. I ask him if he ever thought of painting full-time? He tells me that he didn’t think he could make a living as a painter and then, more importantly, that his instinct was always for the marriage of words and image, the connections that propel a tale forwards. Though everyone who loves his work will have their own laugh-out-loud moments… Blake doesn’t think of himself as a humorist.
“The humour is a by-product [of the story]. You draw the scene, what people are doing, their reaction to it, and if it’s funny, it comes out. There are certain books where you play it for laughs but it’s always more interesting in a dramatic situation.”
‘Inside Story’, an exhibition of Blake’s work, opens at the House of Illustration in London July 2, 2014.
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Published May 16, 2014
The Great Discontent: Paul Sahre
You can be as happy or as miserable doing design as anything else you decide to do. It doesn’t matter what it is; it only matters that you commit to it. Do you care? Can you commit? That’s it. I don’t necessarily believe graphic design is any better or worse than other careers you can choose, but I do think the dedication has to be there. Yes, there is the dignity of work, but—and maybe this is just selfishness—whether you’re a plumber, a policeman, or an architect, if you don’t look forward to going to work in the morning, that’s really sad. That’s where a lot of people end up for various reasons.
Illustrator and designer Paul Sahre recently spoke to The Great Discontent about his work. It seemed like as good an excuse as any to post just a few of his book covers.
(NB: I really should add that cover for Satantango to this post)
Published December 20, 2013
Art Spiegelman: The Horror of the Blank Page
Artist Molly Crabapple interviews (and draws!) Art Spiegelman for Vice magazine:
Because of Photoshop we all know that photographs lie every second that they open up their mouths. You can’t really trust a photograph. It could have just as easily been a photoshopped collage. So, it’s probably more plausible to trust an artist. You get to feel whether you trust them or not… Artists tend to have to reveal more of themselves even when they try to be as scrupulous as Joe Sacco. It has a place insofar as concentrating on something has a place. We’re living in an ADD universe. The computer encourages that second-to-second dopamine rush as you go from click to click. What’s valuable about comics and print is they actually are a venue where you end up spending time.
Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix: A Retrospective runs November 8th – March 23rd at the Jewish Museum in New York City.
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Published December 19, 2013
Joe Sacco and Journalism
In this bonus footage from the W.W. Norton’s documentary short on The Great War, Joe Sacco explains his relationship to journalism:
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Published December 13, 2013
Norman Rockwell, American Romantic
Christopher Benfey reviews American Mirror, Deborah Solomon’s recently published biography of artist Norman Rockwell, for the New York Review of Books:
Solomon spends more time than Rockwell did worrying about his status in comparison with what she calls the “Abstract Expressionist ilk,” who “glamorized direct and unmediated gestures” and dominated highbrow taste during the 1950s. Rockwell, who was remarkably uncompetitive and nonterritorial, said, disarmingly, “If I were young, I would paint that way myself.” The Connoisseur of 1962, a painting now in the collection of Steven Spielberg that Solomon considers a “masterpiece,” depicts a balding man seen from behind, in a gray suit with hat and umbrella in hand, contemplating what seems to be a Pollock painting. The floor, bluish-gray and white squares and triangles, constitutes a contrapuntal abstraction. Rockwell had fun making his own drip painting, canvas on the floor, and had a photographer record the event just as Hans Namuth, in 1950, had famously documented Pollock wielding a can of paint over the canvas. It’s charming to learn that Willem de Kooning, a longtime admirer of Rockwell, claimed to think that Rockwell’s Pollock was better than the real thing. “Square inch by square inch,” he said, “it’s better than Jackson!”
(American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell is published by Farrah, Straus & Giroux, and is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)
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