Monday, July 31, 2017

MOMENTUM 9: A case for user-alienating design



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MOMENTUM 9: A case for user-alienating design
// We Make Money Not Art


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, webpage of MOMENTUM 9


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9. Image courtesy of the artists

I don't often mention the website of biennial, festivals and exhibitions. They are usually designed to look edgy, efficient and user-friendly. They are also remarkably easy to forget. The website of the Momentum 9 biennial website is a bit different. First of all, it is an art destination in itself where you can listen to podcasts from Third Ear that explore the Alienation theme of the biennial (i listened to one about space travel) and read Ylva Westerlund's graphic novel The New Hird.

But the reason why i wanted to write about the website of MOMENTUM 9 the Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art is that it doesn't look like anything i have experienced before. First of all, it doesn't seem to pride itself in being user-friendly. I remember cursing my way through the website when i first opened it. Where was the list of artists? And what's with that barely decipherable typeface?! At the same time, the design of the website was so intriguing and appealing i really wanted to master it. It's actually not difficult at all, just a bit disconcerting. Later, when i arrived in Moss for the press view of the biennial, i kept being drawn to the posters advertising the biennial in the city. They were fluoro green with enigmatic white doodles on it, the information texts had been printed on the duct tape used to hold the poster on walls. The more i saw of the visual identity of the biennial, the more i loved it and the more i wanted to talk to the designers responsible for it.

Their names are Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen. They are listed, and rightly so, among the biennial participating artists. Their work for MOMENTUM 9 involved designing a cacographic -yet strangely elegant- typeface, playing with subtitles and filling your retina with blazing green. Here's our little Q&A:


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, logo for MOMENTUM 9


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, logo for MOMENTUM 9

Hi Heikki and Tuomas! What was the influence for the visual look of the biennial? i'm guessing sci-fi and old movies with green aliens but would you mind explaining if you were inspired by specific movies, books, ideas, atmospheres, artworks?

Tuomas: I think the conscious influences we tried to take cues from were all more historical than sci-fi. The sci-fi thing is always there I guess though, as we both enjoy our bit of anime and/or cheeky sci-fi novel. But for this I think we consciously departed from the notion that an alienating distance can be found from the past as well as from the future. In this case, it was specifically the weird form the Latin alphabet took in Medieval times after the breakdown of the Roman empire, and especially the forms of a script called Merovingian cursive from the 6th and 7th centuries (the image is a scan from Nicolete Gray's book Lettering as Drawing):

Further than that, in terms of the theme of "translation", we were inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's use of subtitles in his Film Socialisme. There the subtitles only translate a few keywords of the dialogue into English — thus forming a 'Brechtian' alienating effect — and force upon the English speaking viewer that, for them, rare condition of not completely understanding what is going (and not having thing always translated to your native language).

The green colour was a bit of an afterthought maybe? At least I don't think we had a clear, rational reason for suggesting it. In the end the high-vis fluoro works quite well (when it is actually fluorescent), and I think the pairing of the colour and the weird type makes it feel way less historical — which is good and what were after I guess.


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9. Photo: Istvan Virag © PunktØ/Momentum 9


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9. Photo: Istvan Virag © PunktØ/Momentum 9


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9. Photo: Istvan Virag © PunktØ/Momentum 9

You are both listed among the participating artists. That's quite unusual for an art event to do so. Was it an idea that the curators had right from the start? And did it influence the way you approached the commission?

Tuomas: Yes, it was something they approached us with straight from the beginning, but it is something Heikki and I have done before. We're both part of this Finnish design collective GRMMXI, where, in 2015 and 2016, we designed the visual identity and all other relevant material for Baltic Circle, a festival of theatre and performance art in Helsinki. Like the Baltic Circle people, the curators of Momentum asked for an identity that would 1) fulfill the necessary communicative requirements of a visual identity, and 2) have something (expressive, conceptual, alienating) to say of its own. This naturally affected the way we approached the project — we didn't really need to hold back — but then the things the identity ended up "saying" as a whole had, in the end, travelled quite a distance from the original ideas that we begun from. And that's not a bad thing — I think we both hate the kind of graphic design that first lists out its conceptual premises and then goes on simply to fulfill them. That way can easily get quite cold, austere and humourless.


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9. Photo: Istvan Virag © PunktØ/Momentum 9


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9. Photo: Istvan Virag © PunktØ/Momentum 9

Was the visual identity of the biennial the result of a conversation with the curators? Or were you given free wheel?

Heikki: Both actually. While we were given completely free wheel on everything, we worked closely together with Ilari Laamanen, one of the curators. During the design process, we would skype almost every Saturday, bouncing ideas back and forth about the concept and execution of the designs and he would encourage us to experiment with even crazier ideas than what we sometimes proposed. This combination provided to be very fruitful. It was a fresh break from typical service provision or client-centric problem solving that graphic designers usually face into a more collaborative but still very autonomous work that felt meaningful.

Now i'm going to confess that i found the website a bit disconcerting at first. I wasn't sure where to click (yet, once i started clicking everything felt into place), the logo on the left upper corner was very unusual and there was this puzzling typography. Were you hoping that the website visitor would feel a sense of alienation when the page opened? Could you explain the choice of typography, symbols, etc?

Heikki: Yes, definitely! The website (and the whole identity) tries to challenge the often narrow confines of established (web) design practices, and the contemporary human conditions in digital environments by disrupting the experience users are expecting and accustomed to. This is something that goes hand in hand with the theme of alienation, and because the site is partly made as an "art piece" we didn't want to present it in the form of slick, start-up style web design or follow the template of other exhibition sites. We wanted to make the user stop, get maybe a bit perplexed or annoyed, but curious, and to explore the many materials on the site, while still getting the necessary information.

Tuomas: About the typefaces:

The weird, almost unreadable, uncial-inspired typeface was based on old Merovingian models. In addition to the peculiar looks and to the stuff stated earlier, we found it interesting because, while it still is a model of the Latin alphabet, it really did not fit into existing categories of lettering or type (such as humanist sans serif, slab serif, transitional serif, etc.). As such, it can be said to exist within a queer space — a space that challenges the legitimacy and semblance of natural order conveyed by taxonomic systems (I'm super grateful to Sheena Calvert, my RCA tutor, for informing of the notion of 'queer type').

The other typefaces are attempts to place something else in that space, although while making them a bit more readable. So the basic typeface is a slightly inverted contrast, semi-serif, calligraphic monospaced, with a duospaced alternative. This means that in the basic form of the typeface, each letter, number and punctuation mark is of equal width, but then that in the duospaced version there is a corresponding symbol for everything, only twice as wide. (One could here state that the fact that the typeface can actually be described this way, with taxonomic descriptors, makes it actually way less queer than it could be if it went completely beyond, but then again, I cannot think of another existing typeface that would combine all these features, and in the end one can only do so much.)


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, visual identity for MOMENTUM 9. Photo: Istvan Virag © PunktØ/Momentum 9


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, logo for MOMENTUM 9

How did you translate that visual identity into physical objects (I particularly loved the posters and the video) and communicate this sense of alienation into the 'physical world'?

Tuomas: We wanted to stay away from compositions as much as we could. Often, graphic design is so much about picking a nice, unobtrusive typeface and then making strong compositions, where positive and negative space counteract to create something larger than the sum of their parts. And I think we didn't want to do that here. So instead of compositions, we thought of the physical applications of the identity in terms of their texture. So some stuff is full of type, while something else might just have the logo or a bunch of lines. But almost everything is either quite empty or then full of stuff — there's no golden ratios or grid systems at play really. For us, texture is a much more malleable, vague and ambiguous term than anything along the point, line, plane -axis, and it was something really interesting and rewarding to explore.

Furthermore, the Momentum typefaces themselves were a fruitful starting point for this exploration. Usually what type designers and typographers aspire towards is an even typographic texture — that when you squint your eyes, a block of text transforms into a uniform block of grey, without any lighter or darker bits and pieces. This means is supposed to mean that a page is easy to read and easy on the eyes — that nothing pops out in an obtrusive way. For Momentum, we wanted to see what happens when you have a typeface that does produce an even colour, but where the lettershapes themselves are barely legible (the Uncial), and another typeface, where the individual characters are easily readable, but the overall texture of a page is super jumpy and uneven because of differences in letter widths.


Tuomas Kortteinen and Heikki Lotvonen, webpage of MOMENTUM 9

Trailer for MOMENTUM 9: BerlinARTlink Productions. Monica Salazar and Peter Cairns. Overness animation by Heikki Lotvonen and Tuomas Kortteinen. Music by Victoria Trunova

Finally, Momentum is "The Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art". Do you think that your work (this one in particular but also other projects you've made) have some particularly Nordic characteristics?

Tuomas: I don't know really. I never thought of my own identity as specifically Nordic or even Finnish, but then I moved to London, where both have suddenly become easy ways to explain things. I do think many UK graphic designers have an aversion to formal expression — they want to make things nice and tidy so that the content is 'framed' in appropriately conceptual, but still very inconspicuous ways. And I don't think an aversion like that exists within Finnish graphic design, at least not one quite so prevalent anyway.

While we worked on the project primarily in Finnish with Heikki and Ilari, none of us were actually in the same place (I was in London, Heikki in Amsterdam, Ilari in New York), and everything happened through skype and gmail. So we were submerged in quite different physical environments, which then leads to the question of how much of Nordic design project this was. Usually the way old school Finnish designers talk about their inspirations is not in terms of language or community, but specifically in terms of the natural landscape: the forest, the archipelago, the northern tundra. If you take that away, what is left of the 'Finnishness'? For us, I guess one could say it was a question of straddling borders, of having one foot out and the other one in.

Thanks Tuomas and Heikki!

Momentum 9, The Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art curated by Ulrika Flink, Ilari Laamanen, Jacob Lillemose, Gunhild Moe and Jón B.K Ransu remains open in various location in Moss, Norway, until 11 October 2017.

Previously: MOMENTUM9 – "Alienation is our contemporary condition", MOMENTUM9. Maybe none of this is science fiction and The Museum of NonHumanity.


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Photo



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Photo
// Hyperwave




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cypulchre: Valerian - Big Market by Ben Mauro ; OP: Lol33ta



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groovygraphics:Chris Foss



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Found: A Pink Dolphin Hanging Out Near Louisiana



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Found: A Pink Dolphin Hanging Out Near Louisiana
// Atlas Obscura - Latest Articles and Places

article-image

A celebrity dolphin made a couple of appearances in Louisiana this week. Pinky, an albino dolphin with a distinctly pink coloring, showed up in the Gulf of Mexico near Louisiana's Cameron Parish, a coastal area that meets the state's western border.

The dolphin was first spotted in this area a decade ago and has appeared on occasion since then. Last week, Pinky brought along a dolphin with more common coloring and was photographed by the local dolphin paparazzi. Later last week, Pinky was spotted again and filmed cresting through the waters of a shipping channel.

Albino dolphins are quite rare, but there are at least five that have been spotted in this part of the world, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Pinky's skin is actually devoid of color, but appears pink because of the blood running through it.


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WGSN’s colour director on the evolution of how humans perceive and define colour



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WGSN's colour director on the evolution of how humans perceive and define colour
// It's Nice That

Coloro-jane-monnington-boddy-wgsn-colour-opinion-itsnicethat

WGSN's colour director Jane Monnington Boddy tells the fascinating history of how humans have attempted to communicate and define colour, following the launch of a major new colour system.

Colour is one of the purest and most primitive forms of communication we have. It signals danger with the yellow and black of wasps bodies, while pretty pink flowers invite pollination. Throughout mankind's evolution, we've come to associate particular colours with emotional responses and triggers. Yet it's also one of the most subjective and disputed visual sensations there is.

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Color History: A New Blue Color is Born



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Color History: A New Blue Color is Born
// Artist Daily

The discovery of a metal gifted the art world with a new set of blue colors. Georg Brandt, a Swedish chemist and mineralogist, isolated a new metal: cobalt. This discovery contributed to a chain of events that changed the art world forever and gave us the vast blue color palette that artists know and love today.

The First Synthetic Blue Color

A new blue color was discovered, by accident! In the early 1700s, two German scientists—Johann Conrad Dippel, an alchemist, and Johan Jacob Diesbach, a pigment and dye maker—were working on creating a red pigment. Because of a contaminated potash, the experiment resulted in a surprising blue instead of red.

The world welcomed the birth of Prussian Blue.

Prussian Blue powder

How to synthesize the ancient Egyptian blue was lost at the time. Many painters had to make due with pigments such as indigo dye. Those pigments, unfortunately, had a tendency to fade. At the time though, it was use that or pay a fortune for lapis lazuli. The new Prussian Blue pigment that Dippel and Diesbach discovered replaced the expensive lapis lazuli color.

Prussian Blue was the first stable and relatively lightfast pigment. Japanese painters didn't have access to a long-lasting blue pigment and began to import the Prussian Blue from Europe.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai, a famous artwork which makes extensive use of Prussian blue

Expanding the Blue Color Palette

Prussian Blue was a revolutionary blue color for artists. It helped to kick off the exploration of new color development. Brandt's discovery of Cobalt was an important part of that exploration.

When Brandt discovered Cobalt and claimed it as an element, he had been trying to demonstrate that the blue color of glass was from a new element and not from bismuth, as many believed at the time. That element was Cobalt.

In 1802, L.J. Thénard used Brandt's work and expanded it further, creating a cobalt blue pigment for painting. Inspired by the cobalt oxide glazes on glass, he discovered how to use the cobalt element, aluminum oxide and phosphoric acid to produce the pigment. The French government played an active role in this development, encouraging and desperately seeking new products to help their economy after the Revolution left it in tatters.

Blue color | blue pigment | cobalt blue
Cobalt blue powder

The same quest continued when the French government announced a competition in 1824. Chemists were challenged to develop a synthetic ultramarine. Natural ultramarine was created with the expensive Lapis Lazuli gemstone. The natural pigment was more expensive than gold during the Renaissance!

Chemist Jean-Baptiste Guimet won the prize in 1828. Called French ultramarine, the synthetic color he created used several less expensive minerals but still produced the vibrant hue like the ground lapis.

Vibrant Blue Paintings

Painters finally had an affordable full color palette of both cool and warm colors. Many painters jumped into creating pieces with these new blue colors. This larger range of blue led to the creation of many iconic masterpieces, including multiple works from Van Gogh.

In Starry Night Over the Rhône, Van Gogh used all three of the new colors—Prussian blue, cobalt and ultramarine—to capture the nighttime hues of the Rhône river, according to the Musée d'Orsay.

"Starry Night Over the Rhône" by Van Gogh (1888). Painted a year before he painted the more famous "Starry Night." This work took advantage of all three new blue colors. (Wikimedia Commons)

A year later Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, again using the many new shades of blue to create a vibrant and moving work.

The post Color History: A New Blue Color is Born appeared first on ArtistDaily.


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The Color Series | 20 Gray Illustrations That Quiet Down a Busy World



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The Color Series | 20 Gray Illustrations That Quiet Down a Busy World
// Brown Paper Bag

Gray illustrations

If you're a long time reader to Brown Paper Bag, you know that I love color. I've spent more than a month (so far) on the The Color Series, which chronicles illustration, embroidery, and even sketchbooks to show how creatives will utilize a single color in their work. So far, I've selected vibrant colors like pink, green, and purple. But today, let's back off from brilliant blue and set our sights on gray  illustrations(or grey, for those across the pond).

Gray is often regarded as dreary or melancholy, like a cloudy day as it begins to rain. Many of the illustrations I've chosen show just that; the hue is perfect for a wintery scene. In these moments, the image feels quiet; Imagine walking outside during a snowstorm; that's when gray is at its best.

Gray illustrations are often of landscapes, and this neutral hue makes an image feel quiet—even if it's trying to scream. Check out how 20 illustrators use the hue, below.

Gray illustration by Lisa Perrin

Lisa Perrin

Gray illustration by Alesya Nesolenova

Alesya Nesolenova

Illustration by Anja Sušanj

Anja Sušanj (on Brown Paper Bag)

Gray illustration by Rebecca Green

Rebecca Green

Gray illustration by Julianna Brion

Julianna Brion (on Brown Paper Bag)

Gray illustrations by Isabelle Arsenault

Isabelle Arsenault

Illustration by Dinara Mirtalipova

Dinara Mirtalipova (on Brown Paper Bag)

Illustration by Esther Sarah Kim

Esther Sarah Kim

Gray illustration by Lior Katzir

Lior Katzir

Gray illustrations by Eleni Kalorkoti

Eleni Kalorkoti (on Brown Paper Bag)

Gray illustration by Lisk Feng

Lisk Feng

Gray illustration by Nastia Sleptsova

Nastia Sleptsova (on Brown Paper Bag)

Gray illustration by Olga Ezova Denisova

Olga Ezova-Denisova (on Brown Paper Bag)

Gray illustration by Chris Hagen

Chris Hagan(on Brown Paper Bag)

Gray illustration by Hannah Li

Hannah Li

Gray illustration by Akira Kusaka

Akira Kusaka

Gray illustration by Maggie Chiang

Maggie Chiang (on Brown Paper Bag)

Illustration by Carson Ellis

Carson Ellis

The post The Color Series | 20 Gray Illustrations That Quiet Down a Busy World appeared first on Brown Paper Bag.


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Sunday, July 30, 2017

Incarnadine | Definition of Incarnadine by Merriam-Webster

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incarnadine


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Jean-Claude Mézières



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Jean-Claude Mézières
// lines and colors

Jean-Claude Mezieres, French comics artist, Valerian and Laureline
I haven't yet seen the new Luc Besson film, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, but I have read a number of the French comics (bandes dessinées) on which the movie was based — Valérian and Laureline (alternately, Valerian: Spatio-Temporal Agent), created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières.

Mézières is an influential and highly respected French comics artist, though not well known here in the U.S. except among fans of Franco-Belgian comics.

He has worked on a number of comics and illustration projects over the course of his career, but is best known for his work on Valérian and Laureline, and as a concept designer for films like Luc Besson's The Fifth Element (including the designs that inspired the flying taxis).

Valérian and Laureline is a long running science fiction comics series that was originally serialized in the French comics magazine Pilote. It has been tremendously influential on both comics and film.

It's widely recognized to have been a distinct but uncredited influence on George Lucas in his designs and settings for the original Star Wars trilogy. There is an article on Core 77 that points out some of the parallels between scenes from the movies and prior comic panels from Valérian and Laureline. There is another article pointing out what Star Wars took from Valérian and Laureline on Popular Mechanics.

Mézières's style is more light and cartoony than the styles usually associated with American super-hero and adventure comics, but it gives the stories and the characters a jaunty, breezy character, and works well with Mézières's wildly imaginative settings.

The French Valérian and Laureline comics albums have been translated into English, and most recently are being collected into a series of volumes with three of the original French albums (what might be called "graphic novels" here) in each volume. There are three collected volumes available as of this writing.

You could start with Valerian: The Complete Collection, Volume 1 (Amazon link), and go from there to Valerian: The Complete Collection, Volume 2, or if you want to get right to the stories on which the film is most directly based (and that are the most overt space opera), start with Valerian: The Complete Collection), Volume 3. Beyond that, there are older printings of individual albums.

There is an official website for Jean-Claude Mézières, but it's in French and does not feature as many images as one might hope. It is useful, however, for it's listing of the Valerian albums (titled as Valerian, sptio-temporal agent).

The best resource I can find for Mézières' art is this article from 2015 on Dark Roasted Blend.

You can also find some originals on Comic Art Fans.

If you try a Google image search for "Valerian", it will mostly come up with promo pictures for the movie; try searching for "Valerian comics", "Valerian and Laureline", "Valerian et Laureline" or 'Jean-Claude Mézières".

 

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An Accidental Drop Soaked a Neighborhood in Pink Fire Retardant



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An Accidental Drop Soaked a Neighborhood in Pink Fire Retardant
// Atlas Obscura - Latest Articles and Places

Residents in Windsor, California, about an hour-and-a-half up 101 from San Francisco, got a unpleasant surprise from the air on Thursday: about 100 gallons of pink fire retardant, accidentally dropped from an air tanker onto their neighborhood.

Cars were covered in the stuff, streets were covered in the stuff, sidewalks were covered in the stuff. It was a pink mess.

Officials said that the fire retardant came from a plane operated by the state's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. It was returning from a blaze in nearby Penngrove when it accidentally unleashed some of its load. "I came outside [and] everything was pink," one resident, Alex Cruz told NBC Bay Area. "I've never seen this before."

Local fire crews soon came to clean up. The pink substance, which is sold under the brand name Phos-Chek, is 85 percent water, but contains a number of substances that can interact badly with car paint if allowed to linger. Officials were also wary of the chemical getting into local water supplies, so fire crews sealed storm drains before pumping what they could into trucks. The substance is not considered toxic to wildlife.

According to NBC Bay Area, the final tally of what was hit includes 12 cars, nine houses, and a camper, though it might've been worse; the plane was carrying around 900 more gallons.

"Looks like they stopped," Cruz told the station, "probably noticed they did something wrong."


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The Eternal Search of the Jodorowskys - Page - Interview Magazine

http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/jodorowsky-endless-poetry


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IT! - "Curse Of The Golem" (1967)



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IT! - "Curse Of The Golem" (1967)
// 13

Tonight's Saturday Night Special is one of the few monster movies from the 60's that we haven't done yet, so let's just check it out, because although it's kind of silly, it's really not too bad!

It's called "It!" and/or sometimes, "Curse Of The Golem!"

The star of the show is Dungeon perennial favourite Roddy (Planet Of The Apes) McDowall!

So just what is a Golem anyway? In Jewish folklore, a Golem is an animated anthropomorphic
being that is magically created entirely from inanimate matter like clay or mud! In this film, it is a sculpture!

This Golem appears to be having his way with this guy, and although he can move his arms and legs, this time he just fell straight down and crushed the guy under the weight of his 3000 pounds!

I love London's swingin' sixties neon lights!!

This is Roddy's wishshewas girlfriend as played by Jill (Horror House) Haworth in this dream sequence!

Roddy manages to take the Golem out for a destructive walk! I guess everybody was too stoned to notice!!

This shot is the epitome of non-hippie 1967 in my less than humble opinion!

Roddy can't take any more of the mayhem and murder and commands the Golem to go away and not come back, and when that doesn't work, he tries to set him on fire!!

Next thing he knows, the Golem is back in the museum!

Great shot of Roddy's pad!

The Golem is a lost and lonely soul! He was just doing what was asked of him!

The Golem is one tough customer! First they try and take him out with a bazooka blast, and then a tank, and when that doesn't work...........

...............They go completely mind-boggling insane.......and...

......Hit the Golem with a nuclear bomb!! WTF?!!

And even that doesn't stop the thing!!!

In the end, the only thing that can destroy the Golem, is the Golem himself, and that's what he chooses to do, and he walks off into the ocean and away from all the destruction caused by man that was far worse than anything he had done!! Talk about a story about misunderstanding! Wow!!

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It's Nice That | Pentagram’s Emily Oberman explains the logo for Spielberg's Ready Player One

http://www.itsnicethat.com/news/pentagram-ready-player-one-logo-spielberg-graphic-design-280717


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Riding Freight Trains With Thomas Kinkade



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Riding Freight Trains With Thomas Kinkade
// Gurney Journey

Before he was the Painter of Light™, Thomas Kinkade was a hobo. (Direct Link to YouTube).



So was I. In 1980, he and I decided to take a summer off from art school to ride the freight trains across America. Here's a vintage tape recording from that journey. The quality isn't great, but it's a memory rescued from oblivion.

Thomas Kinkade and James Gurney in Missouri
I first met Thomas Kinkade in 1976, when he was assigned as my freshman college roommate at UC Berkeley.

After Berkeley, we were both art students at Art Center in Pasadena. The train-riding idea began after we met a hobo named Bud at a freight yard in LA. He told us which cars to ride and where to catch them. We decided to give it a try. 

We got short haircuts and we packed our backpacks with sketchbooks, markers, corncob pipes, felt hats, uniform shirts, and a Tupperware full of a mixture of peanut butter and honey. We were inspired by the writers Charles Kuralt and John Steinbeck, and we wanted to do the same thing with art.



All that summer we slept in graveyards and on rooftops and sketched portraits of gravestone cutters and lumberjacks. To make money we drew two-dollar portraits in bars by the light of cigarette machines.

By the time we got to Manhattan, we had a crazy idea to write a how-to book on sketching. We hammered out the basic plan for the book on Burger King placemats.

By night we slept on abandoned piers and by day we made the rounds of the publishers. We eventually got a contract from Watson-Guptill, and The Artist's Guide to Sketching was published in 1982. It is as much about the adventure of sketching on the road as it is about technique.

One effect of that trip on both of us was that we got a healthy respect for how all kinds of different people look at artwork. We set up at the Missouri state raccoon-hunting championships with the goal of doing portraits of everybody's favorite dogs. The owners were very particular with the dogs' proportions and markings, and they weren't going to pay us two dollars unless we got the details right. It was a tougher critique than we ever got in art school.

We never returned to art school. My art-school friend Jeanette and I stayed in touch and we did some sketching trips together. She stayed through school to graduate from ArtCenter, and I learned what I could from her class notes.

But I got my art education from self-teaching and from working with Frank Frazetta and Tom Kinkade on the movie Fire and Ice in early '80s.

I was always friendly with Tom in later years, but we were both busy and didn't stay in very close touch. Our families went on a few painting excursions together during the subsequent decades, to Colorado, Ireland, and the Catskills of New York State. I was sad Tom died so young, because his fearlessness and exuberance were a big influence on me.



As a footnote, Thomas Kinkade's New York Times obituary in 2012 said that "Mr. Kinkade traversed the country by boxcar with another artist, James Gurney, to sketch the American landscapes that they encountered."

One of the commentators after the obit doubted the veracity of the claim: "Really? Do you believe that a man born in 1958 traveled around the US in a boxcar like some Depression-Era hobo? He must be laughing wherever he is, that someone was gullible to believe that myth-making."


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Friday, July 28, 2017

65K Year Old Ochre Paint Found in Australia



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65K Year Old Ochre Paint Found in Australia
// Gurney Journey

Photo by Dominic O Brien/ Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, Source
Archaeologists in northern Australia have found evidence for paint-making supplies dating back as much as 65 thousand years. This is some of the oldest evidence for human use of reflective paint, and it suggests that art-making was as central to human life as seed-grinding and hatchet-making.
"We found evidence for the mixing of ochre with reflective powders made from ground mica to make a vibrant paint. Currently the oldest known rock art in the world is dated to 40,000 years ago in Sulawesi (a possible stepping stone to Australia). But the abundant ground ochre and use of mica indicates that artistic expression took place in the region much earlier."
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