cloudy/co News

I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon to find a yard sign I designed used as an example on the Walker Art Center’s blog. The sign is for a project here in the Twin Cities to get some citizen voices heard during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul this year. I haven’t lived in St. Paul for very long, but even I know that this is a Democratic town (the Minnesota Democratic party is called the DFL for Democrat Farm Labor, and St. Paul is historically a strong labor town)– it’s no wonder they’re having trouble finding volunteers to work at the convention.

This is just a quick note to my brothers (and sisters, real and in solidarity) out there who loved Legos growing up in the 80’s. There is a tantalizing sequence of Lego sets starting around the one-third mark of the movie– beginning with the space sets and moving through the castle and pirate sets. That era pretty much covers my childhood obsession with Legos.

Pictured above is (one of?) the first space sets we had around the house, from which the coveted “LL928″ brick arrived. My brothers and I would always find a place of prominence for the “license plate” on the space ships we built. The back of the ship, when you built the set from the instructions, opened to release a small moon buggy. There are other gems and triggers for the memory in the photo gallery as well. I can smell the musty basement and feel the rug burns on my knuckles from swooping our creations around.

Nostalgia is such an insidious elixir! I will not buy more Legos until after my daughter (due any day now) is born!

(at Gizmodo, via BoingBoing)

It’s like getting chocolate in my peanut butter! This American Life + Chris Ware =

(via Coudal)

This little bear (kind of looks like a dog to me) has appeared on the streets of New York. Until now I’d only seen photos, and I loved the idea, but now, seeing it on video, I love it even more. The ferocity of the beast is enhanced by its tremulous stance when the air pressure is too strong.

The grates on the street are air vents for the subway tunnels. Whenever a train goes by, the pressure wave of air in front of the train shoots up through the grates and inflates the sculpture. It’s a brilliant and creative use of otherwise lost energy. I wish I had thought of it! (of course, the Twin Cities don’t have subways, so…)

It turns out I still have a lot of information bouncing around my head regarding children’s book publishing.

Yesterday I was reading through some tweets, and Amy Crehore had posted some links to the work of Richard Selesnick and Nicholas Kahn (also here.)

This stuff immediately made me think of the work of my friend Ethan Murrow. Ethan was another Studio Art major in my class at Carleton, and it was always amazing to see what was going on in his corner of the studio. The first time I met him, he was carrying this huge canvas back into the building, and it was this gorgeous, raw landscape painting with straw and detritus clinging to the still-wet oil paint. He had an attachment to land and how humans interact with it, and this theme carried through his graduate work at UNC. I had never seen such work from my contemporaries, and I still think he is one of the best artists, formally and conceptually, that I know personally.

Ethan Murrow, “Off of Gaspé, ready to dive for the elusive whale”, graphite on paper 60″ x 96″, 2007.

Since that day, Ethan’s work has evolved and changed and developed into these huge graphite drawings on paper. They still hold onto that landscape aesthetic, at least formally offering humans interacting with the land. But now they also involve these brilliant convoluted stories of tragic experimenters, people whose only goal is to succeed, and who most often do anything but.

Installation view of “The Freshwater Narwhal Hoax” at Winston Wachter, Seattle, WA spring 2007

I won’t try to retell it because Ethan really does a much better job himself. He was recently interviewed for the Huffington Post regarding his current show called “Dust Mining” at Obsolete in Venice, California. I still haven’t gotten to see Ethan’s more recent work in-person, so if you are in LA, make sure you go see it for me and report back!

P.S. He doesn’t talk about it much, but Ethan is the grandson of renowned reporter Edward R. Murrow. I think I didn’t know that until several years after I met him. Ethan’s personal and artistic integrity is truly a tribute to his grandfather’s legacy.

SO MUCH AWESOME!

(via Coudal)

More musical Muppets:

Have a happy St. Patrick’s Day– don’t drink any green beer from the back of your fridge! Only from licensed bartending professionals!

I have been trying to hold back on the book purchases lately, since we have been moving around the country a bunch in the past few years. Let me tell you: boxes full of books are frickin’ heavy! It’s either that, or you have to pack a lot of smaller boxes, and then you just make more trips. Next time: movers.

Anyway, birthdays are good for a lot of things, but especially for getting things that you are not buying for yourself. I keep my Amazon wishlist(s) pretty full, though mostly as a reminder to myself of what I really want to buy or check out the next time I am at a bookstore. However, for my birthday last month I got a gift certificate to Amazon, and I could no longer hold myself back:

Not pictured is the copy of Graphic Design by Milton Glaser (which arrived earlier and has gotten its due lovin’), but in the photo are the contents of my big box of goodies:the latest edition of the Graphic Arts Guild Handbook, a contemporary drawing collection called Vitamin D, Charlie Harper’s Beguiled by the Wild, and Dave Cooper’s (aliased here as Hector Mumbly) Bagel’s Lucky Hat.

• Milton Glaser is an icon in the graphic design world. This book is a must-have for my library, and I love to see the mix of illustration-y with the design-y.
• Similarly, I’ve well-abused my old GAG Handbook, and it was time for the upgrade to this 2007 updated version. A must-have for the illustration professional.
• I’ve perused the Vitamin D book a couple times while I was in grad school, but I had to have my own copy. It’s really a great collection of where things have been going in the contemporary capital-A “Art World” drawing field. And it’s a beautifully-designed book, as you would expect from Phaidon.
• Beguiled by the Wild is even better than I expected. I fell in love with Harper’s beautifully designed creatures and illustrations a while ago after he started getting linked up around the web, but I didn’t realize the illustrations’ titles were going to tickle my inner word-nerd: “Jumbrella” shows the big elephants sheltering the baby elephant from the rain; “Owltercation” shows a murder of crows chasing an owl away. LOVE!
• And last but certainly not least: Bagel’s Lucky Hat is so beautifully illustrated, with lush colors, inventive perspectives and compositions, and lovely details embellishing the periphery. It is a high-caliber production, as we have grown to expect from Chronicle Books. I haven’t read the story yet, and while I would guess it is a great story, I wouldn’t care if it was lamer than Howard the Duck: the illustrations already make up for it.

While I’m sorry for the movers who will eventually have to move yet more books the next time we relocate, I’m not sorry to have these in my collection. The internet is great and all, but sometimes you just need more than 72 dots per inch to view the art.

Seeing the art in-person is better yet, but as we all know, money doesn’t grow on trees. At least not in Minnesota.

Today I’m prepping for the class I will begin teaching when the spring semester begins on Monday. It is entirely new to me, and only one semester old for MCAD, and it is called “Ideation & Process.” The general concept for the class is to train the students to think about their work in a fundamentally different way than what they are probably used to. The focus is not on the end product. The class instead turns our attention to the build up that should happen before we make that final product.

No, actually it is more abstract than that. Calling it a build-up suggests that there is an end goal. Really what we are trying to convey is that working as an artist or designer or in pretty much any other creative realm means just that: work. It is a steady perseverance that means generating a lot of bad ideas and bad drawings and bad work that will likely never see the light of day. You must keep at it in order to stumble over the really good ideas, the gems that end up at the front of your portfolio.

As a side benefit, while you are generating piles of ideas that don’t necessarily make sense in the current context of the work you are immediately focussed on, you inevitably spill a few unpolished thoughts that will seep into the back of your mind or get scribbled into your sketchbook or stashed in your web browser bookmarks, and you never know when they will leap forth again.

I’ve never taken a class that focuses exclusively on these types of ideas, but I’ve taken plenty of classes that suggest techniques or philosophies orbiting the concepts. I’m exited to compile and experiment and teach and learn from and along with my students. It is all about taking you out of your comfort zone so you can make some good mistakes and generate new experiences and create some new synapses in your crusty little brain. I am definitely out of my comfort zone, which by definition makes me uncomfortable. But the potential for discovery is huge, and much more than worth the discomfort.

Despite the fact that it is a pile of work and it takes discipline to come back to something day after day where you may not see the benefit for some time, I have a great job. I have a great teaching job that gives me access to other professors teaching these same ideas in their own ways, and I have the great job of putting these principles to work in my own studio.

And I pretty much get to draw every day. What job could be better?

And a Happy New Year to you, too!

This video struck a chord with me initially because of the paper plane, but it also makes me think of one of my favorite mainstream movie scenes, where the boy in American Beauty films a plastic bag caught in a swirl of wind. It is a lovely experiment with no grand motives or any sinister intentions:

(via Fark)