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:
Gail Boykewich in The New Yorker!
July 18, 2010 | Tags: film, Gail Boykewich, high art, illustration, New Yorker, painting
Gail Boykewich, a Prescient Media client and all-around brilliant artist, is the subject of a (brief) profile in this week’s New Yorker magazine. Congratulations, Gail!
The piece, in the magazine’s Talk of the Town section, highlights Gail’s work with the Inflatable Crowd Company, which provides inflatable extras for movie crowd scenes — most recently Angelina Jolie’s spy vehicle Salt. It’s hard to believe an inflatable doll could fool your eye, even in a crowd scene, but it can thanks to Gail’s hand-painted masks:
They’re just the start of her amazing work. There’s a great selection of her paintings in her online gallery, but the best way to see her work is in person — which you can do at a place called Mad One Jack’s in Hoboken, NJ.
They’re going to have an opening reception for her soon, and the info will be posted here as soon as we have it. We’ll see you there. Don’t forget your New Yorker!
Congratulations, Chad Harbach!
April 1, 2010 | Tags: big money, Bloomberg, Chad Harbach, high art, literature, Little Brown
When you can sell a book for enough to make Bloomberg News take notice, you know you’re doing something right.
A dear friend of Prescient Media’s, the indomitable Chad Harbach (co-founder of the excellent journal of ideas n+1), put his first novel on the market just weeks ago. (That’s him on the right at a NY Public Library forum n+1 led back in 2008. He’s trying as hard as possible not to leap at the leather-clad Trotsky impersonator who was, if we remember right, saying that global warming would be solved any day now in an R&D lab somewhere, since the history of humanity is the history of “man” subduing “nature.”)
The result of Chad’s nine years of labor on the book:
Five months ago, Chad Harbach was an out-of-work copy editor with an unpaid position at a literary journal and an unpublished novel: 475 pages centering on a baseball team at a fictional Wisconsin college. A few weeks ago, Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown agreed to pay about $650,000 for it, according to two people briefed on the sale.
Exactly how rare is that kind of money? Really, really rare.
It was one of the highest prices for a man’s first novel on a topic appealing to a male audience, said Jon Baker, a book scout who advises non-U.S. publishers. Harbach’s novel, tentatively titled “The Art of Fielding,” sold after a two-day telephone auction of eight publishers. “If you don’t have a vampire, you don’t expect that kind of money,” Baker said.
The really exciting thing — which, unfortunately, audiences in the seven or so languages the book has sold in won’t find out for another year or so — is that the book’s worth every penny.
The beauty of the flying shoe
September 23, 2009 | Tags: graphic design, high art, illustration, inspiration, publication design
Browsing through the inspiring gallery of winning designs from the Society of Publication Designers’ 2008 competition, I came across this image, a Merit Award winner in the front/back of book category by designer/art director Eva Spring and illustrator Alli Arnold:
Aside from the charm and simplicity of the image, what struck me was the shoe – straight out of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Shoe:
Of all the great things about the painting, nothing is better than the shoe. And that shoe was on my mind because I’d seen it this weekend at the Brooklyn Museum Yinka Shonibare exhibition:
A good idea is a good idea, wherever you steal it from.
The Blackheart Gang’s ‘The Tale of How: The Book’
June 3, 2009 | Tags: animation, Blackheart Gang, F5, high art
I had the very good fortune to attend the F5 Fest digital media conference in NYC in mid-April, and am still recovering from the overwhelming presentations by some of the best of the best in the business — not to mention the open bar from roughly 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. each day. (More on F5 to come in future posts.)
One of the oddest and most inspiring presentations came from a trio of illustrator/designer/director/musicians from South Africa — Ree Treweek, Jannes Hendrikz, and Markus Smit — who call themselves The Blackheart Gang.
They got the world’s attention in 2006 with a 4-minute animated masterpiece called The Tale of How:
While we’re waiting for the other two parts of a promised trilogy (including The Tale of Then and The Tale of When), and the gang mostly occupies itself with some very high-profile paying gigs for its sister project, Shy The Sun and appearances at digital media conferences that seem always to be compared with MTV Video awards presentations, the Tale of How now has an unlikely presence in the offline world: a coffee table book.
The hand of the master
May 24, 2009 | Tags: high art, low commerce
Two questions:
1) Is this Temptation of St. Anthony, recently purchased by a museum in Fort Worth for an estimated $6+ million, actually the work of the barely adolescent Michelangelo?
2) When the work is this stunning, does it actually matter?