Twit Archive 23-30 November 2011

Above, Pin Tailed Duck by John James Audubon, from the University of Pittsburgh’s digital library, via here.

Below the fold, a few more old tweets.

Twit Archive 16-22 November 2011

Above, beer and duck hunting, from a collection of Sebewaing Brewing Company labels.

Below the fold, more intemperate misfiring tweets.

Twit Archive 22-30 June 2011

Below the fold, tweets mostly on Libya and Syria, with a little art and music also.

Above, a painting by Gao Huijun titled Huang Tingjian - Autumn,  from a set at But Does It Float.

Robbin’ a bank

Season’s greetings from Peggy - and from the rest of us!

Paper plumage

There was an outbreak of collage in the house last month. Here’s one of the results, a bird by Peggy.

Artblogging: a gallery of libraries

BibliOdyssey: Beautiful old book illustrations, and then even more beautiful, even older, book illustrations, and then older and more beautiful still. This comes from a 16th Century manuscript of geometric perspective drawings.

50 Watts: Lots of great illustrations, mostly for books, and much in various styles of 20th Century modernism. The above image falls outside both these categories though, from a post on 19th Century Danish paper theatre designs. You might also like the posts on Danish children’s illustrator Egon Mathiesen, Japanese poster artist Tadanori Yokoo, and Mikhail Romadin’s children’s book Your Name? Robot.

Stopping Off Place: Lots of cool, even chilly, 20th Century book design, and then this, La Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval.

A Fuse #8 Production: On her School Library Journal blog, Elizabeth Bird of the New York Public Library has been running a poll of top 100 picture books, and another of top 100 children’s novels, some of which happily also have pictures.

Extra - added 7 July 2012:

Ptak Science Books: Eclectic antiquaria.

Curious Pages: Lane Smith and Bob’s blog of inappropriate children’s book recommendations has been dormant a while, but the archive is well worth revisiting.

Caustic Cover Critic: Pulling apart contemporary book jackets.

Kimberly Glyder Design: A portfolio of her book jackets for various US publishers, with occasional blogging about her design process at shelved books.

The Art Department: Blog of Irene Gallo, art director at science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books.

Excellent Kid’s books: Picture book reviews, including a very kind review of Sadie the Air Mail Pilot.

The Airship in Animal Land: A Flickr set labelled Children’s Books, but it’s mostly pages from this one pretty picture story.

East–West

At Swim Two Birds

A screen print by Peggy.

Birds on holiday

Earlier holidaying birds here.

Reticulated

A ‘reticulated giraffe and calf’ it says on this back cover fallen from an old Dublin Zoo guide book. The front cover is missing. Inside the remains of the book is a rare photo of an Irish snake. Also included is a list of collective nouns for various species of animals, including the lovely ‘an exaltation of larks’ but omitting the essential ‘a murder of crows.’

Birds and their sticks

Found perched in a French farmhouse.

Something is taking its course

I have been busy cooking in my kitchen, though there’s not much of it visible here. One thing has been the screen printing, an example above. That print is of the bird drawn for John Dog’s album, Battery Powered Mystery Action, as blogged on earlier here. It will also be appearing in the 3x3 Illustration Annual No.8 due out this December.

The nightingale will be added to the range in the shop shortly, along with a couple of other new prints.

Before that, the long awaited Het zeemans-ABC is to be published by Rubinstein of Amsterdam in October. This Dutch Little Golden Book, written by Nienke Denekamp and illustrated by yours truly, has of course been years in the making. It’s publication is being timed to link with the re-opening of het Scheepvaartmuseum, the Maritime Museum in Amsterdam which has been undergoing renovations for as many years as our little book has been in the works.

On the drawing table, work continues on two book illustration projects, one for Nobrow. I was happy to hear that the bird wallpaper I designed for Nobrow has been spotted in the British Library shop.

I have also been involved in the development of a horror film being produced by some of our weirder neighbours. We expect to see that go into production later in the year. More details to follow!

Free stick with every bird

The birds and sticks that I drew for issue 5 of Nobrow magazine are now available on wrapping paper, worth the price for the gold ink alone.

You can also wrap your desktop, Twitter page, or blog background, with my birds using this image and setting it to tile, or repeat, or whatever the word is, free for non-commercial use.

An earlier post on the birds and sticks is here.

The Realism Deficit 1

Little humour here I’m sorry to say, as the following post is an attempt to lay out a simple and hopefully robust argument on idealism and Realism in international affairs.

The ‘Realist’ point of view on international relations, as I understand it (comments welcome), sees all international conflicts as being driven by competing national interests, and believes that idealism is a  diversion, a mask, an illusion obscuring this fundamental truth.

The Realist sees a risk that idealism can lead a government to act against the national interest, and is therefore hostile to any humanitarian intervention, and to human rights playing any serious role in deciding foreign policy.

Swallows for spring

Digital proof of cyan, magenta, and yellow separations, from three drawings in pen and black ink.

City at the Edge of the World

Recently, Michael Sporn’s blog has featured a series of wonderful posts on the artist Lyonel Feininger. Michael’s posts are here: one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Feininger is renowned as a painter and printmaker, but also held in high regard for his early work as a cartoonist. Less well known are his efforts at toy design, both commercial and for his own family.

These photographs are from a 1965 book by two of his sons.

Lyonel Feininger’s love of boats, trains, and model making lasted from boyhood into old age.

As he developed his own style of lighthearted expressionism in his drawings, his model making moved from precisely detailed realistic reproductions to more playful caricatured forms. Living in Germany in the years leading up to World War One, he developed designs and prototypes of toy trains  for a Munich firm. The outbreak of war brought the project to a halt just as the models were on the verge of going into production.

For most of the war years Feininger lived a withdrawn life, and after the war, new toys appeared. His son, T. Lux, wrote:

If the model trains of 1914 had been reasonable, the toys of the post-war years don’t even try to be. Quite the contrary: proportion, harmony of related parts, any possibility of ‘functioning’ in the accepted sense of the word, has been abandoned. After 1914 my father made no more trains; from around 1920 on, houses, people and ships, are the subject matter of the carved playthings...

I can’t remember when exactly the toy town had begun; but in 1921 already my father writes that “the time for my periodical craze for making toys for Christmas is approaching. Every year I get the urge to saw wood into bits and paint them in bright colours. The boys take it for granted that I shall make ‘mannequins’ for them.”

These “boys” were then 15, 12 and 11 years old, respectively. Speaking for my brother Laurence and myself, I may say that we still did “take it for granted” that there would be new citizens for the growing city; but in view of his continuing production year after year one may presume that there was a direct reward for the artist in the gratification of his “annual urge.” In 1931 he still wrote of the “usual toy-making season,” but soon afterward, his saw and chisel began a long rest, not to be broken until he had entered his old age.

...the toy town and its inhabitants have only an early and a late period. The photographs combine examples of both. The long hiatus between the two phases, during which all this fantastic life went underground, remains visually un-illustrated.

In the post-World War II [New York] winter whittlings, the artist achieves an absolute climax of the witches’ sabbath begun so long ago. The last restraints have been discarded and “spooks,” regular ghosts in white winding sheets, even a horned, blue shape, doing their best to look “harmless,” make their appearance. There are also, for the first time, animals: owls, cats, an elephant...

Words and pictures from Lyonel Feininger; City at the Edge of the World, text by T.Lux Feininger, photographs by Andreas Feininger, published by Frederick A Praeger, New York, 1965.

Copyright 1965 in Munich, Germany, by Rütten & Loening Verlag GmbH.

Hello Bill

Toucans by Bo.

Twenty sticks and twenty birds

For lovers of ink-licked paper, Nobrow 5 is now available to pre-order. This latest collection from the East London small graphic press includes illustrators Paul Paetzel, Matthew the Horse, Meg Hunt, Golden Cosmos, Lab Partners, Ben Newman, and more, with Micah Lidberg (above) leading the charge on the cover, all printed in rose, mustard, blue, and gold.

Also in there is yours truly, with birds and sticks, and sticks and birds, below.

Update! The birds are now available as wrapping paper, distributed by Turnaround.

These birds were created by rendering separate pen and ink drawings on paper for each colour plate.

Details from three of the colour separation drawings. From left to right, drawings for the blue, red, and yellow plates.

Top: Nobrow 5 cover art copyright © Micah Lidberg.

Stuff for sale

Screenprints for sale! Small but perfectly formed! Cheap at the price! Drawings and paintings! And books, of course. Some in Dutch, and French even. More to come! All in my new Print Shop!

Tell your friends! Tell your enemies!

And for Londoners wanting to examine the merchandise before buying, some of the prints are also on sale at Eenymeeny, 8 Campdale Road, in Tufnell Park, N7.

Still life with murder

Hitchcockian Still Life by Irish painter Stephen Loughman.

Copyright © Stephen Loughman 1998.