skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Above: the previously mentioned stunning Italian Dinner furnishing fabric from Svenkst Tenn. (The piece shown here is about 80 cm high I think.) I will have to return to Stockholm one day to buy a few metres. It so beautifully encompasses the bounties of Italian cuisine that I declare all Italian restaurants and Italian-cooking-loving-kitchens should be decorated with it! Or mine, anyway.
Above: Vindija quality, detail from a yoghurt container from Croatia. That landscape is crying out to be magnified many times over yet again and turned into something grand...
Above: I have turned a sketch I did a few years ago into a piece of vector art for the iStock submission (as I discussed in the previous post). You would think that by having a sketch at the ready to trace the vector art wouldn't take that long, but it has taken me most of today. Drawing an entire picture by making bezier curves with a computer mouse is not much fun. It becomes fun when you finish drawing and start filling in the colours. The hardest part was doing the girl's face. It needed to look simple but not overly so, and a bit retro. I quite like the result but I'm not sure whether she should look happier considering she is on holiday.
Above: I am working on some illustrations to submit to the vector section of iStockphoto, having read about it in the current edition of Desktop. There's alot of rules: the work must be compatible with the Jurassic Illustrator 8, may not include pattern fills or images from an outside source like Photoshop, all lines must be joined and no transparencies are allowed. One must even sit a test in order to gauge whether the rules have been understood before submitting; and even send a jpeg of their driver's licence for good measure. A bit daunting, but I have decided to take the challenge anyway. The above will be part of my initial submission. An environmentally conscious babushka family. I thought it would be a nice way to combine tradition with a sense of the future. Or rather a future I would like to imagine, and believe may be getting written about by someone out there for whatever reason and require an illustration. Never mind if it doesn't, I have included it in my updated illustration portfolio anyway. 
Above: the colour palette inspiration for the illustration above. Part of the endpaper of Queen Elizabeth's Coronation Book, printed by The Herald and Sun News Pictorial Melbourne in glorious colourgravure. Purchased by me in Camberwell last Sunday for $3.
Above: As it appears in situ, on the pockmarked studio wall. Queen Cactus takes the Bus, while Jamila is ready to defend with her sexy* weapons of hook and chilli. Not sure yet whether Queen will be taking the bus or something else. *I have never used this word in my blog before. If I pepper my entries with these sorts of words, will my blog get alot more hits?
Above: Maybe this is where the "anthropomorphic" tag will start to loosen. I want to see how loose it can get, before it's completely lost. I suppose it depends on the context: this little 'figure' might read differently when not seen alongside his friends below. Or maybe not?
Above: The Mitre 10 Man has made another comeback. His smiling head is now attached to a satellite (1960's Sputnik era style) and he is juggling a pretty assortment of single cell organisms.
Above: after having completed the Rat for the Illustrators Association exhibition I am back onto the series that I keep referring to as 'animal vegetable mineral' in my head. That's still my overriding criterion for the three parts that make up each one (though I don't always stick to it). Another is 'head thorax abdomen' -- how insects are built -- though oddly I haven't included any insect parts yet. Time to find some. A hairy moth's body perhaps?
Above: a dear friend of mine, who doesn't have internet access, is having an important birthday in a week's time. I started making this scarf for her back in February, but I got stuck about a month later, and haven't gone back to it since. I kept confusing the grey for the red in the black & white graph. (Did the black dots represent red, or the white squares? I kept forgetting in the middle of every row.) I should have just coloured over the dots in the graph in red. Or maybe that was the squares. I hope my friend doesn't mind that her scarf won't be finished. Is the fact that it's Spring in Melbourne now a good excuse? Um, no. I think I've got a bit of knitting to do this week.
Above: a very pleasing book display in a shop window on the island of Sodermalm, one of the extremely lovely floating precincts of Stockholm.
Above: book jacket detail from the store above, showing lovely floral pattern. (I find European book jackets in general to be more pleasing than ours.)
Above: another shop window in Sodermalm: antiques placed on a piece of pretty floral wallpaper.
Above: even a supermarket advertisement can be aesthetically pleasing.
Above: detail from a cushion designed in the 1940's by Carl Malmsten. I love the various patterning overlaid on each coloured section, like textile design over textile design. This cushion lives in Florence now with my cousin. A nice bit of Sweden in Italy. (Could you get two more disparate but equally appealing European cultures?!)
Above: my proud purchase from Under, a cute little shop next to the hotel I stayed in on the Sodermalm. It sells new and vintage clothes, books and decoration mostly for children. All very now and very Swedish with that bright, simple aesthetic. [The following is an amendment made on September 29] A detail from my Barbapapa curtain/wall hanging. Barbapapa (French for fairy floss, or literally 'father's beard') was created in France in the 1970s. According to Wikipedia: "Barbapapa ... is a generally pear-shaped, pink blob-like creature who stumbles upon the human world and tries to fit in." I can relate to that, especially lately as I have been eating too much chocolate.
Above: fabric at home, wrapped and waiting to become a cushion cover. Printed linen purchased after hours agape at Svenskt Tenn, an incredible, legendary design house on the Strandvagen that has to be seen to be believed. This design from the Josef Frank archive is called "Poisons", although whether both grapes and tobacco are poisons is a matter for debate. Svenskt Tenn designs are simultaneously elegant and crazy and that's why I love them. I bought enough to make a large cushion and a handbag, and then I had no kroner left for dinner. One day when I am wealthy I will order a length of Frank's kitsch and beautiful Italian Dinner, and I will be satiated forever.
Above: this year's theme for the Illustrators Australia 9 x 5 Exhibition is The Year of the Rat. I had previously been thinking of making an artwork showing an innocent little lab rat cut open to display a very beautiful and glamorous version of his innards. (Perhaps it would be a way to restore his dignity.) At the time it was influenced by a a piece by Del Kathryn Barton which I had seen at Linden. It was a stuffed bird made of fabric, with disarmingly human-like eyes and it was covered in hundreds of old buttons. I liked how the 'real' eyes played against the crafty notions. When I received my annual piece of plywood and the accompanying theme and entry form, I thought: here's my chance. I like innards you see. I think they are rather beautiful, especially the versions that you find illustrated in mid century school books. But real ones are pretty as well. Ha! As I wrote that I just thought of a title: Many Treasures Rat.
Above: The Wheel of Fortune was completed as part of my Bus exhibition last year. This week I have entered it into I Art Sydney Road competition (part of The Fringe Festival). It has aged appropriately from sitting in my back garden, and now it has more of the vintage sideshow feel that I wished I could just magically have emulated when I painted it. (The talented carpenter was my friend Jason P.) If the work is chosen it will sit in a shop window. People will come up and spin the wheel and declare themselves unfortunate.
October addition to this post: I won third prize!!!
Objects found in my home, my books and magazines; painted onto thick paper using acrylic, then cut out with a scalpel and stuck to a surface with blu-tac. They can be re-arranged, like a matching game. Sizes vary, but most arrangements fit onto an A4 sheet of paper. Pssst: These examples have been scanned and the backgrounds cleaned up a bit in Photoshop!Above: The sweater is one that I made when I was nine. I found it at Mum's recently. The lady's leg comes from a Parisian mini-mannequin from the 1940's. (Mini sized couture gowns were made and displayed to promote the couturiers' skills and to please the Parisian public during rationing.)
Above: Jamila henna box from Sonsa, the lovely Turkish supermarket in Smith Street Collingwood. Hook from the Walt Disney version of Peter Pan.
Above: dinosaur with intriguingly human-like features from a Ladybird book.
Above: this one I am not that happy with and think I will amend it -- perhaps it could be holding something.
Above: this one is slightly evil, I like it. Easter Bunny wrapper from a Coles catalogue, Christian lady's safety vest with "Smile God Loves You" badge from (Un)Fashion by Maira and Tibor Kalman, neatly amputated finger from Farquarson's Book of Operative Surgery from the 1960's (not sure, it's not to hand -- ha ha).
Above: boy from Ladybird book.
The above were completed as part of my entry to Illustrative, a competition based in Berlin. The monkey and rooster from my first effort were included too with amendments, but stubbornly refused to be uploaded again. The first paintings from this series can be found by clicking here.
Above: the sum total of my artistic effort during my recent stay in Pucisca. Better than nothing-? The stone wall is very Island Brac, as is the little house. Onion from my uncle's little farm and ubiquitous summer washing. Bird from one of my mother's Chinese tea tins. Girl from my head.Photos, postcards and souvenirs from my trip up next.
Above: Sometimes I write sentences in my diary that seem quite profound at the time; and then a few days later don't make any sense at all. I like this one, because it kind of makes sense but kind of doesn't. Perhaps a series of drawings based on nonesensical diary musings would be good? -- I don't know.
Above: One of my proudest recent moments at work (Seed) was getting to design a set of Babushkas. I drew them up on the computer, rather than painting up a prototype set. Besides being alot quicker, it meant that I could grab colours and motifs from recent fabric designs I had already done. I wanted the babushkas to look like the other products that we had in store -- otherwise there would have been no point to us doing our own version.
Above and below: these photographs are of the one of the first prototypes. They were hand painted by ladies in Russia. Can you imagine?! I wish that I could have been there to watch, learn and perhaps even help them paint a few strokes. I am told that the ladies approved of my design, thinking it unusually simple but pleasing. Or something like that -- it must have sounded more impressive in Russian.
Above: the previously mentioned stunning Italian Dinner furnishing fabric from Svenkst Tenn. (The piece shown here is about 80 cm high I think.) I will have to return to Stockholm one day to buy a few metres. It so beautifully encompasses the bounties of Italian cuisine that I declare all Italian restaurants and Italian-cooking-loving-kitchens should be decorated with it! Or mine, anyway.
Above: Vindija quality, detail from a yoghurt container from Croatia. That landscape is crying out to be magnified many times over yet again and turned into something grand...
Above: Lodalientje, a plastic pin badge found at a second hand shop in Amsterdam. She is actually less than one centimetre tall. I have not had any luck in finding out who she is or what Lodalientje means, but I think she is very cute.
Above: my aunt's bowl. I realised during this year's visit to Croatia that my penchant for semi-kitsch fruit decorated kitchen items comes from her.
