El Baile Del Sombrero!

Not long ago, I was asked by some Brooklyn musician pals to make some artwork for their album of children's music: "El Baile Del Sombrero". Charles Mister and Fatima Sfiligoi are the musician pair behind Abbasubi. Their new album is a collection of songs in Espanol, written by Fati, a native of Argentina. Charles composed the music, and together they have an album that is full of very sweet lyrics and festive tunes.
I was very happy to be asked to illustrate this album, as the lyrics are full of imagery and characters. After I created a collection of characters, the talented designer Mariana Canale did her magic with them, and composed the entire cd package:





The title comes from the Fati/Charles musical phenomenon which they originated with their kids, that one must dance wearing crazy hats. The hats are made of felt, and come from a hatmaker in Lujan, Argentina.
Here is a photo of some of these hats, modeled by our friend Flynn and the kids:


Motivated by the fact that they do live shows, Charles and Fati asked me to make them a puppet based on the rabbit, El Conejito Teo, from their album. This was a leap for me, to make a 3D puppet from a 2D design, as I consider myself somewhat spatially challenged. Thanks to this great Internet, I found this page which taught me how to make a mouth board. Many hours of trial and error later, emerged a large, yellow, felt version of Teo.

And he has a carrot:

Caps for Sale

Caps for Sale, told and illustrated by Esphyr Slobodkina, is one of my favorite books from childhood, for both the cleverness and playfulness of the story, and for the color and line in the illustration.


There's an interesting bio of Esphyr Slobodkina at Harper Collins and then there's a site devoted to her lifetime oeuvre at Slobodkina Foundation. This site shows both her children's books and her fine art over the decades. It's very interesting to see the abstract modernist thought process in her fine art in respect to her more folk-arty and representational illustration work-- it makes me look at the later for signs of the former.



When I was a child, I loved the repetition in this book, and I remember the dramatic surprise of seeing the tree with the trickster monkeys in it. I also remember loving the caps-- how there were a few of each kind, and how they were so nicely ordered atop our protagonist's head at the beginning and end of the story.

Not long ago, I heard about a "call for Hats" from NYCreates, asking for hats for people going through chemotherapy, with all hats to then be donated to the Heavenly Hats Foundation. My initial idea was to order some already-comfy hats from a chemo cap supplier, and invite friends over to decorate them. However, one of my crafty friends, Jocelyn Meinhardt, a talented and clever seamstress, playwright and artist, busted out and made three handmade chemo hats from patterns. They are all sturdily-made, beautiful, and styling. One of her 3 hats ended up winning the contest: in this photo, it is the hat in the second row, which is reversible! Both fabrics in this hat are extremely fresh and soft, and full of good feeling.



The the third and fourth row are the caps we decorated: black cap by Jocelyn, white cap with single flower by Emily (our model), tan cap by Laura, and cream cap with flowers by yours truly. We all wish for these caps to comfort and adorn their wearers, and we hope for them to be loving companions on their roads to recovery.

Hungarian Mustaches

Going back to the very first entry on this blog, I wrote about the Hungarian influence on my work, which stems from growing up in a home with Hungarian graphic design, folk art, and books all around. As it goes, I recently had an opportunity to make some Hungarian-influenced work for an actual Hungarian-influenced context. The Hungarian Cultural Center of New York City has been sponsoring a year-long celebration of Hungarian culture called Extremely Hungary, in both NYC and DC. They have flown in musicians from Hungary to play at Carnegie Hall, held readings with Hungarian authors, organized Hungarian food cooking demonstrations, and then most recently, sponsored a Mustache Contest.

I've been using mustaches in my Illustration work since I started Illustrating. They always seemed like they should been there on the faces of my characters. Mustaches make a great graphic presence on a face, and have always felt like a finalizing mark to make. Mustaches appeared in everything I made from editorial illustrations to pieces I made for art shows, such as this one from 2000:


As time has passed, I started to worry that I was using the mustache as a crutch, and I started to lay off a little. But then in 2009, the Mustache Contest came to town, and it soon became clear that I was to be making a collaborative mustache with Illustrator and friend Aya Kakeda.
I love Aya's work and need to devote another blog entry to say how much and why, but briefly here, I will say that she makes work that is funny and mysteriously dark in a compelling way, full of story, graphically interesting, and from her unique vision. Aya has her own connection to Hungarian culture, having spent a month working in Budapest with a team of New York artists, creating a miniature model of Manhattan for the Sziget Music Festival in 2007.

So we soon found ourselves meeting once a week to plan and craft a wearable mustache that we would enter in this Mustache Contest. Collaborating with Aya was a great experience of sharing a vision, and working together in many steps, each invented as we went, to realize it. We sketched our ideas, quickly agreed on the concept, and then basically proceeded to create this mustache out of felt, needle, thread, and glue.



Each week we'd meet and make more progress on figuring out how we'd fit in, the structure, stuffing or no stuffing, and most fun, the decoration.
The mustache came together as a dialogue between the two of us, and so it feels very right that it's a two-headed, connected form that we wear and move around in together.



Going through this creative process with Aya, I am convinced that collaboration is where the best ideas can emerge, and where the magic happens.

Last night, at Radegast Hall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Mustache Contestants, judges, and hundreds of friends of all gathered to celebrate and award the mustaches.
Aya and I won the "Dali" prize, for best art mustache. The runner-up, Francois Leloup Collet, was a beautifully ornamented Mustache Tree, which culminated in a mustache growing with bird's nests and birds. (I wish I had a photo of him. Here is a video that captures the mayhem of the event, and shows the Mustache in motion. Thank you Paul Adams, for taking and posting video of us, and Peter Hamlin, for the photos.

Paula Scher and Type!

Another artist/design whose work I admire for its alive-ness is Paula Scher. I recently heard her speak on a small panel about design, at the Museum of Art and Design here in NYC, that was put on by Slate Magazine. This was the first time I'd heard Paula Scher speak, and her articulate contributions to the discussion made me want to research her more. But I already knew I loved her work from seeing a print of a painting of hers, in which she ILLUSTRATED the New York map with subways and streets and neighborhood names. I'd never seen a map so infused with personality, life, humor and voice.



I was once told that one should think about type as a voice-- that choosing the type is like choosing the voice of a character. One can ask: how do I want the content of the words that I'm type-setting to sound? You can walk around reading signage on the street, and experiment with saying it out loud (at least in NYC) in the voice you conjure up from the forms of the letters. What I love about Paula Scher's maps is they are so full of 'characters' that they feel populated, alive, and noisy.

Here's a detail of her map of China that, to me, beautifully communicates the population density and the infinite voices that I imagine to be crowded amongst each other there:

And one more, of Florida, where the type is practically in motion, animated and swirling in the water... brilliant!


So while I was aware of Paula Scher's maps, I didn't realize that I've been living amongst her type all over the citi-- even right near the museum where I heard her talk, there's a Citibank around the corner, and Jazz at Lincoln center across the circle of Columbus Circle. She is everywhere, and how awesome is that?

I found this video produced by Adobe, where Paula Scher speaks frankly about her development in her use of type, and her design process. (Click where it says "Launch video".)

Paula Scher also gives a talk on TED
in which she uses the terms "serious" and "solemn" to contrast approaches that we can choose to take when we are faced with solving a (design) problem. I appreciate that she did the work of addressing this difference, and that she shared her discoveries.

After all this recent learning from Paula Scher, I became zesty about type too, and I started taking photos of appealing letter forms...hopefully soon I will start creating some too.

Maira Kalman on the Inauguration

A few days ago, Maira Kalman contributed her take on President Barack Obama's inauguration, as an eyewitness illustrator-writer-poet. It is beautiful! Maira Kalman chronicles her journey to and in D.C. through the sites that struck her eyes and soul. I love the immediacy with which she records and translates her perceptions- her art and words are direct, honest, and feel like they come from an open heart and mind. While they are not photographs, they have a quality to them that brings to mind the words of Photographer Walker Evans: “Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.”
We all saw this next image broadcast on TV or the internet, and had feelings about it-- I mentioned it in my previous entry, but Maira Kalman's version, by virtue of that she spent time with it, re-creating it in paint, says more. To me, this image is saying "I was there, watching this too! and so was this tree! and the sky! and this our feeling about it."

In this series, Maira Kalman pays attention to both nature and human culture, with a celebratory curiosity. Another artist whom I have admired and loved for many years, for a similar kind of seeing is Alice Neel. I will write about Alice Neel in her own entry, but had to tie her in here, because I get an Alice Neel feeling from some of the more directly observational pieces in Kalman's Inauguration series.


It's very touching to me how Maira Kalman chose the subjects the details of her Inauguration Adventure to communicate the excitement, joy and liberation that she felt in this event. She took us on a tour of her experience, but has tapped into the creativity of the people (historic and present) and the natural world that she felt were vibrating with the spirit of the day.
In this series and in her work in editorial illustration and children's books, Maira Kalman gives her audience a 'hit' of her tremendous creative life-force, which gives us all permission to create and be alive along similar lines-- it's as if she is sharing a deep-rooted language of creativity which we can all tap into if we would allow it. I believe it is for this, her smarts, humor, skill and wisdom, that Maira Kalman is a much-beloved artist/author in today's world. Thank you Maira!

Hooray!

Hooray for our 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama!! Hooray for everyone who helped him become the person he is, and who helped him to get to where he got to today! And Hooray George W. Bush, for flying away, off into the blue sky.

Goodbye George W. Bush

To celebrate the end of this 8-year disaster, I wanted to look back at some of the Bush illustrations I created over the years. Above is a portrait from a series I painted of all of the U.S. Presidents. (I am very excited to paint the next one...)

And below are some of the Bush illustrations I made for the Seattle Weekly Newspaper. When looking through my archive, I have drawings of Bush growing a Pinnochio nose, chopping down trees, riding a nuclear missile, and driving a wrecking ball through a group of senior citizens.

Here is a more harmonious piece:



And here's a hopeful one that came right before the 2004 election:


And finally, an illustration of what we should have been able to do to stop this at some point:



Creating politically-charged editorial illustration is a challenge-- how can the grey areas and complexities of any issue be addressed in a single image that needs to 'read' quickly? With the Seattle Weekly, I was lucky to be partnered with writer Geov Parrish, who was well-informed, but also wrote to the extreme to get his readers to react. Illustrating his column for a few years, I had the opportunity to engage in this challenge every week, and eventually get more comfortable with it. George Bush was a regular subject in this column, and for all the bad that he spread around, I have to say that I really enjoyed drawing him.