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!
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.