Marvelous keen loony art
August 1, 2010 | Tags: animation, Brooklyn, high art, illustration
Just back from Animation Block Party, a three-day festival of short animated films in Brooklyn — many of them BFA thesis projects, some of them stunning.
The standout for me was Marvelous Keen Loony Bin, the 2005 senior degree animation project by RISD grad Lizzi Akana, now a Brooklyn-based animator and illustrator. Like all great art, it speaks for itself best…I’ll say only that the wild, grim humor in as much in the spirit of the immortal Nikolai Gogol as anything I’ve ever seen onscreen:
“Marvelous, Keen Loony Bin” from Lizzi Akana on Vimeo.
The utterly individual style brought to mind two other artists I love: Mr. Joe Sorren, whose work he graciously allowed me to use in a cover design for the literary magazine Meridian some years ago (the below is a more recent work) —
— and Gail Boykewich, who was featured in a July issue of the New Yorker and has an incredible wall-to-wall show at Mad One Jack’s in Hoboken until September:
