Alphabetical artwork emphasizing the spaces between.
Category: art
The Thing Quarterly: “Each year four artists, writers, filmmakers or musicians are invited to create a household object that somehow incorporates text. Every three months a new object will be hand wrapped in brown paper and string by the editors and mailed to subscribers.”[via jb]
The enterprising folks at Art House Co-op have launched The Sketchbook Project. Get a sketchbook, fill it up, send it back, and those of us in Atlanta in October can stop by and flip through them all. Proceeds are for a damn good cause, too.
I was browsing through the Library of Congress website and came upon some cool posters from the Works Progress Administration. From that, I put together a little collection of library propaganda, lovely pro-literacy silkscreens and lithographs from our government.
Plates from George Catlin’s 1844 North American Indian Portfolio. And I’m a sucker for celestial atlases, like Johann Rost’s 1723 Atlas Portatilis Coelestis—note the fold-out pages for color illustrations. The Linda Hall Library has a number of other cool digital collections.
Janice Harayda pulled a very interesting quote from poet Philip Larkin—he isn’t a big fan of poetry readings. The quote comes from an old interview in the Paris Review. I just finished the anthology Paris Review Interviews, Volume I, by the way. Very, very good reading. [via bookslut]
I had a chance to see the big Richard Serra exhibition at the MoMA this summer. The New Yorker has a gushing review of the show and the sculptor’s career.
“The typological arrayÄôs inherent ability to depict prevalence and repetition make it the perfect technique for examining the excess, redundancy, and meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption.”
I love this set of prints: illustrations of bearded guys. [via dooce]
An interview with Scott McCloud.
One of the eternal tensions of comics might be this dual aspiration that we have, on the one hand, to ensure that words and pictures are integrated. That they feel as if they were drawn by the same hand, feel as if they belong togetherÄîthat theyÄôre flip sides to the same coin. And, on the other hand, to take advantage of the unique potential of words, and the unique potential of pictures, which often sends them in opposite directions.
In the course of the interview, he also mentions Dylan Horrock’s critical essay “Inventing Comics,” which is worth a read.
I just found Moon River a few days ago. A blog with lots of old books, maps, design stuff. Right up my alley.
Some tribute/rip-off album covers from the world of hip-hop.
The Knockoff Project tracks album cover spoofs, tributes, & rip-offs.
A video of photos of circular things. Tires, letters, signs, holes, dials, etc. Great soundtrack to boot. [via krazydad]
Interaction of Color (review: 4.5/5)
The Yale University Press recently reprinted an expanded version of Josef Albers‘ classic book Interaction of Color. Unlike many books about color, this one eschews most discussion of optics and wavelengths and the physics of light. It’s not about theory and systems.
Instead, this one is meant to be a very hands-on book—experiment and observation. Each small chapter is dedicated to a particular color concept, a sort of visual consciousness-raising, if you will. Though it only takes an hour or two to read the book and ponder the examples, actually following through with the projects takes hours and hours of cutting out paper samples and ceaselessly arranging and rearranging.
To offer one tiny quibble, the layout of the text
really threw me for a loop.
The sentences are arranged in such a way
that they don’t continue to the true margin
on the side of the page,
neither making a justified block of text
or a comfortable right-ragged edge.
I’m not sure of the reasoning
for this decision.
But it really made the whole thing harder to read.
That aside, it’s a fantastic book.
Photos from the Eighth Annual Harbin Ice and Snow World in Harbin, China. The photographer was also there in 2003 and 2005. [via veer]
David Friedman did these sketches of people enjoying libraries. It was back in the 1960s and 70s, so there’s not a computer in sight. Kind of weird, in a way.
The Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopedia of a fantasy world written in a fictional language. There’s a full set of scans from the book on Flickr.
Check out the a full reproduction of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, one of the most famous early printed books. It was probably written by Francesco Colonna in the mid-15th century and beautifully printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499. There’s also a copy of the 1592 English translation (Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream), which attempts to preserve the typography of the original. And of course, Project Gutenberg has a plain text English translation.
Mark Larson 