Nina's Illustration/Animation Blog

SVA MFA Illustration

2011-02-12T14:29:00.000-05:00

This past fall and spring I have been happily studying Illustration with a great group of 17 other Illustrators at the School of Visual Arts. This program is full of inspiring teachers and students, all focusing on developing ways of visual storytelling. We are having a show of the first semester's book project this Tuesday, Feb. 15 at the School of Visual Arts Gallery. The story we illustrated is Alex Rose's Ostracon, and all 18 of us chose a different approach to visually re-narrating the story... if you are in NYC, come see!

Elf the Musical

2010-11-22T22:43:00.001-05:00

Elf the Musical, recently opened on Broadway. It is the live-musical-theater interpretation of the movie Elf (2003) starring Will Ferrell. I recently had the opportunity to create illustration and animation for the show's projection designer, Zachary Borovay, who was in charge of telling the parts of the story that needed telling through supplemental visuals. My job was to illustrate a children's book that was projected on the stage while Santa (played by George Wendt) reads it in miniature form from the set on the stage's bottom corner. The picture book that is projected shows the progression of the protagonist, Buddy the Elf, as he goes through his journey from an over-sized Elf in the North Pole, to a New Yorker who finds a new family and then starts his own.
Below is a study for Rudolph, who appears in one of the illustrations.

In addition to creating the eleven illustrations that tell this story, I also had my Broadway choreography debut, animating a dancing penguin who is projected on one side of the stage during a dance number, and a prancing Rudolph who enters on the other side of the stage to be fed a carrot by Buddy. Below is an rough animatic for the Penguin doing his thing.

While it was fun and an honor to work on this project, a magical aspect of this experience is that Elf is being performed at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, on 45th Street in New York City.
Al Hirschfeld has been one of my Illustration Gods since I can remember. His work, which captures
the essence of his subjects in such economical line, has been my favorite since I was a little girl and my Mom would clip his illustrations from the newspaper so that I could hunt for the hidden "Ninas" in his drawings. I have needed to write about him on this blog, and this is a good time to do so.
So, to be continued...

Mustache Sisters go to The High Museum of Art, Atlanta

2010-10-20T21:38:00.001-05:00

October 31st is a new Holiday...at the High Museum in Atlanta, GA. It's called Dalí-Ween.
My mustache sister (Aya Kakeda) and I are in high gear, making our newest mustache to celebrate
artist Salvador Dalí. His late work has been on display at this museum since early August, and the exhibition garnered a great review in the New York Times in September. The spooky playfulness of Dalí's work feels like a perfect match for Halloween, and Aya and I are both very happy to have this opportunity to create a new mustache in his honor. We are also excited to fly down to Atlanta (unfortunately, not on this mustachioed airplane) to conduct a craft-workshop for museum-goers of all ages. The photo above is a sneak-peek of a Dalí-inspired motif we are using in our costume, informed by works like this.

Nice press for GFS

2010-09-06T13:33:00.000-05:00

Ghetto Film School got front page of the New York Times Arts Section today!
The article delivers a good description of the basics, except perhaps it didn't clearly explain that GFS is an after-school, weekend and summer program for high school students who are enrolled in other high schools during the day. GFS is also the creator of The Cinema School, which is a Bronx highschool that incorporates film studies/film making into its curriculum.

The article implied, but didn't spell out that in order to run an extra-curricular film school, help run a high-school, and have a commercial studio for alumni (The Digital Bodega) the small staff of GFS is an incredibly energetic, non-stop group of dedicated and inspiring people. I feel very lucky to have worked with them (teaching animation at The Cinema School), as I learned what it means to operate on all cylinders.

I hope that this article will draw interest and support from additional donors, collaborators, and students!

Teachers College

2010-08-31T15:32:00.001-05:00

This is a photo of a photo that I love, which I spotted when I recently went up to the Teacher's College up at Columbia University, to hear a lecture on early childhood development and recent findings on how children learn. The photo, of graduates from the 1969 Teacher's College class, holds a great feeling for me, of the excitement and optimism of teaching. Newly minted teachers, ready to go!
There was no photographer's credit, but this was among a series of photos hung in a main hallway there, documenting historical moments in the College. This moment of racial breakthrough adds to the photo's inspiration for me.

The event that brought me to Teacher's College was sponsored by the American Center for Children and Media in conjunction with a New York organization which I love, Women In Children's Media. The talk was given by Ellen Galinsky, who made poignant conclusions of many years of studying children in learning settings, in her book Mind in the Making. The event was created to help clue-in people like me, who work in childrens' media, about recent findings in how young children learn. This kind of connection of academic study with commercial practice is exciting and crucial, especially in the realm of creating "public" eduction for kids via the screen.

Silkscreen Poster for Jeff Tweedy special concert

2010-07-30T09:06:00.002-05:00

This is a silkscreen poster that I illustrated/designed as a commission from my pal Sheldon Schwartz, who co-owns the Chicago shop called Strange Cargo. The concert, 30 Songs/30 Friends, was a benefit for charity to which Jeff Tweedy generously donated his talents and time. Sheldon, one of the 30 Friends, thought it would be festive to have a poster for this event.
The poster was printed by my old pal Jay Ryan at The Bird Machine, also in the Chicago area. The poster project and the evening it celebrate friendships and remind me how we are all connected. Thank you Sheldon, thank you Jay!

Post-It Art at Giant Robot NYC

2010-06-30T08:47:00.006-05:00

Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson, are two of my favorite artist-illustrators working today. They recently curated their FIFTH Post-it art show, and first on the East coast, now up at Giant Robot New York. This is my third time participating in one of their Post-it shows, and each time I have been very happy to have the invitation to sit down and pour out my thoughts and ideas onto a surface that is familiar, casual, and small. The pressure is off, and the creativity is on!

Once again, I produced many throw-aways, but this is always a valuable process through which to go, and I am reminded of this each time I participate in one of these shows.
In this respect, I feel Mark and Esther are giving the Post-It show's contributing artists an experience that is very nurturing to creativity. They are also giving the viewers of the show a visual smorgasboard which stimulates the mind and delights the eyes.

The Cinema School Screening at Tribeca Film Center

2010-06-25T12:34:00.018-05:00

The Cinema School, in partnership with the Ghetto Film School, had their first official student screening this past week, at the Tribeca Film Center in Manhattan.
As I wrote in a previous post, I have been working with the students at this high school since January 2010, helping to teach them about animation and guiding them through the production of their individual short works. Seventy two brand new animators, born! I am very proud of the students for the work they created, and for braving it through the often repetitive, challenging, and tiring process of creating animation.

My Ghetto Film School colleagues and I chose 17 of the student animations to screen at Tribeca, along with a series of live-action shorts that students wrote, acted, and directed in the after-school Film Credits Program, shepherded by GFS's Derrick Cameron. Sitting in the audience, watching both the live-action and the animated shorts, I was entertained, inspired, educated, and proud.

Here is a photo of the 4-student panel of animators (whose worked screened that night) participating in an expressive Q and A by my co-teacher and Director of the Mid Winter Institute in Animation, Stosh Mintek:

(l to r: Keila Solomon, Ronald Pressley, Wendy Soto, Marquis Hendricks)

While I would love to post animations on this blog, the work belongs to the students and the schools... perhaps down the road I can get permission to post some of this great work. But in the meantime, here are some stills from some of the pieces that screened on Tuesday night at Tribeca:

Lueshen Swainson: "The Last Strawberry"(Claymation)

Ayanna Jones: "Finding Uno"(Hand-drawn animation)

Tasha Ritchens: "Lights Out" (Claymation)

Keila Solomon: "Runaway from the Bronx Zoo" (Flash animation)

Ronald Pressley: "Mr. Mug Goes Hungry" (Stop motion using objects)

Italian Opera Mustache for the Philadelphia Museum of Art

2010-05-31T12:39:00.004-05:00

My collaborator/Mustache Sister, Aya Kakeda, and I are up to more mustache activities... we're in the process of creating a new mustache commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for their evening of Italian Opera Music and Art on June 4th. Above is a photo of the mustache under construction. We use felt, glue and thread. This one will have beads too.

As folk art inspired our previous mustache, we tried to find some Italian folk imagery to inform this one. But it proved difficult to pinpoint a typical Italian folk art vocabulary through which we could try to have a visually collaborative "conversation". But we did find the ceramic art of Deruta, Italy to be very inspiring, especially this guy.

We also feature a symbol from Italy's capital, Rome: La Bocca della Verità, who represents a water-god, and whose mouth serves as a lie-detector test for anyone who wants to put their hand in there. Other imagery includes the lily (Italy's flower), and some Italian food items, like the lemon, the olive, and the sardine (see second photo, above).

Grey is the color of this mustache, because this is for Italian Opera night at the Museum, and we just felt that called for an "older" mustache. Aya and I will be there on June 4th, for the Art After Five event, with tables of craft materials for any museum-goers who want to make an Italian Masquerade Ball Mustache Mask with us.

(Felt scraps from making the mustache... I love felt! And working with Aya!)

Animation Dioramas at the CMA!

2010-04-29T07:28:00.003-05:00

The Childrens'Museum of the Arts in Manhattan is a hotbed of inspiration and a great place. While I've already given it applause in this blog, I was just there for a meeting, and ran into this powerfully awesome exhibit of clay figures and backgrounds in diorama form, which are from the last 5 years of stop-motion animation activity at the CMA. I was so excited by this work that I took a slew of photos...

BAMkids Film Fest 2010

2010-02-28T16:06:00.018-05:00

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has a great offering of live performances of theatre, dance and music... and they also have a cinema. This year I was excited to be asked to teach animation workshops in conjunction with the 12th annual BAMkids Film Fest.

The idea was that BAM, who had invited students from surrounding public schools to screen these films on a school-day, would provide an accompanying education on how animation works. So I was deployed to teach the idea of Persistence of Vision, the visual phenomenon of how we are able to retain an image long enough to overlap it with a subsequent image.

I employed the Thaumatrope, which was a perfect tool for the young kids to grasp this phenomenon, and we followed that lesson with making flip books. The students ranged from 1st to 3rd grades-- some of them I taught solo, and some I taught collaboratively with my pal, animator Tom Eaton. Tom's appealing and satisfying animation "Don't Smash" was part of the 11th annual BAMkids Film Festival, and we "screened" it at the workshops we did together, with Tom showing some of his accompanying drawings. The kids were really smart and fun to teach this stuff to, which made it very festive to meet them again at the screening at BAM. Tom and I were there as a small "panel" to talk about the films we just screened (which included one of each of ours), animation as a practice, and to answer questions. We enjoyed the intelligent questions which came from a theatre-audience-filled room of 6- to 8-year-olds.

On the Sunday of the BAMkids Film Fest, I was there at BAM with a small army of teenage artist/helpers, supervising two tables of Hands-on Thaumatrope-making for visitors. We had kids, parents, grandparents, and everyone in between coming by to make their own thaumatropes. It was rewarding to see people of all ages experience the surprise and excitement of making their images come together when then flipped their thaumatropes. I also enjoyed the fact that the thaumatrope was so quiet and lo-tech, in comparison to the green-screen music video station across BAM's lobby.

Animation, at The Cinema School

2010-01-31T21:14:00.019-05:00

This winter I had a unique opportunity to help spearhead an animation program in the New York Public School system, working with the talented and hard-working staff of the Ghetto Film School . Our job was to design a six-week curriculum on the history, techniques, and current industry of animation for the pioneering freshman class at a brand new high school in the Bronx called The Cinema School. This program would be an interruption of the students' normal course of liberal arts studies, and for the six weeks of this "Mid-Winter Institute", they would be screening animation, learning animation approaches, hearing visiting guest animators, and going on field trips to New York animation studios and places of learning.

Technically speaking, the students learned the stop-motion animation techniques of moving objects, claymation, and silhouette puppets. They also learned sequential drawing (working with light boxes) and Adobe Flash animation. While learning these technical approaches, students took classes in storytelling, where they learned methods and approaches which they then applied to writing a short script for their final pieces. They also screened short films, short animations, and feature animations and practiced film analysis. They also had a slew of guest speakers, from animators to storyboard artists, to writers, directors and producers. We also schlepped the students to New York City animation studios and museums.

To keep this from being too much fun, we had pop-quizzes, written assignments, and grades for all of the animation projects accomplished during this institute. At the beginning of the six weeks, students were each given a notebook in which to draw and take notes, and these notebooks were corralled at the end of each week for inspection and grading. Finally, the students were expected to create their own dialogue-less short, using the animation approach (stop motion or Flash) of their choice, following their own script.

As this was the inaugural Mid-Winter Institute, animation was chosen as a way to familiarize the students in this 4-year high school with aspects of film making that they can then apply to future curriculum work creating live-action film. (My hope is that some of them will have loved animation so much that they will want to continue to approach their film making using animation down the road.)

Why I am writing about this on my blog is that this program was completely inspiring to me. I was inspired by the innovative, focused, and tireless Ghetto Film School colleagues with whom I taught, I was inspired by the Cinema School and staff for being there, up and running, I was inspired by the students, who engaged in creating characters, stories and animation (which is hard work), and I was inspired by the many fine contributors to the program who either came to speak, who let us visit at their studios, or who supported the program through funding, interest and/or love.

I would love to share photographs of the students in the process of animating, or their great drawings/puppets/claymation figures, or the many inspiring guest speakers (John Canemaker, George Griffin, Frank Mouris, Signe Baumane, Jeff Scher, Norma Toraya, Ian Jones, J.J. Sedelmaier, Eddie Gamarra, Doug Vitarelli, Dave Levy, Linda Simensky...), or the studio visits (to Curious Pictures, Funny Garbage, Little Airplane, NYU Tisch, Weiden and Kennedy, the Museum of the Moving Image, MoMA's Tim Burton Show). It was a whirl wind of a lot of people of all ages putting their energy into learning and teaching animation and its accompanying lessons. Within the context of a public-school curriculum, this was deeply affirming to the value of Animation as a practice, a story-telling medium, and an industry.

Happy New Year 2010

2010-01-01T23:23:00.002-05:00

Sesame Workshop Reception

2009-11-02T11:12:00.005-05:00

I recently had to go to Sesame Workshop's Lincoln Center offices, to pick up a hard drive that I had left with a producer, and was happily surprised to encounter Grover taking a nap next to a poster image I illustrated for the Sesame website relaunch.
(Either a nap or a therapy session.)

On another trip back there a week later, to another floor, I saw Grover in the poster. While these aren't illustrations of great visual interest, I am simply proud that they are the vessels for these loveable and favorite characters.

Silhouette Animation

2009-10-17T20:31:00.020-05:00

A few weekends ago, I went to the Alliance Francaise in New York City to see a series of cut-paper silhouette animations, "Princes and Princes", by French animator Michel Ocelot. The engaging stories, all folk tales from around the world, were beautifully animated. And especially enjoyable to me, as someone who makes animations, is that Ocelot "introduces" each of these stories with 3 animated Animator-characters, an older man, a boy and a girl, who are sitting in their animation studio discussing the story they are about to tell. The audience was filled with French-speaking parents and kids, as this was a family event. I wanted to write about this because the animations were absorbing for both the very small and the older set-- they were simple AND sophisticated, both in form and content.
There are some posted on youtube-- my favorite story was the 6th of 6, about a prince and a princess who kiss before they marry, the prince turns into a frog, he tries to fix this by re-kissing the princess, she turns into a slug, slugs kisses frog in attempt to get out of their situation, prince frog transforms into another creature, etc., etc. and in the process, they learn to trust each other (and agree not to eat or crush the other one, depending on what animals they have become) until they eventually take on human form again at the end... but the prince is now a princess, and the princess is now a prince. It's a great tolerance tale, and the design of the story is a simple and elegant back-and-forth with movement and plot advancement. In my opinion, Michel Ocelot's simple and elegant visual form is the perfect vehicle for telling this story.

Meanwhile, Michel Ocelot's silhouette animation ancestor, Lotte Reiniger, also enjoyed a screening in NYC most recently, at the Museum of Art and Design, where they are currently celebrating Cut Paper Art with shows and events.

As an illustrator who uses cut-paper in my collage work, I have loved Lotte Reiniger's silhouette animations since I first saw her Prince Achmed. In the history of animation, Lotte Reiniger is significant for her beautiful animation work AND for the fact that she is one of the few independent animators of her era (it was around the 1920's when she started), AND she is a woman (with a husband who assisted her!).

About 12 years ago, when living in Seattle, I was asked by animator Web Crowell to create some cut-paper silhouette puppets with hinged joints, for an animated trailer he was creating for the Grand Illusion Cinema, a small art-house theater. I was just learning animation at the time, and was excited to make these puppets to be animated by someone who really knew the craft. Web's vision for the trailer was to animate 3D puppets he made out of found objects and sculpted heads, using stop motion. In the middle would be a 2D sequence with shadow-puppet references to movies throughout cinema-history. Web requested I make silhouettes puppets of key visual moments from Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, Mary Poppins, Dr. Strangelove, and, to my delight, Lotte Reininger's Prince Achmed. This was a great working/learning experience for me, and Web created a beautiful final piece which screened at the Grand Illusion as a theater identity before the movies played.

Lotte Reiniger's predecessors in the silhouette form, the Shadow Puppeteers of Indonesia, are enjoying a show at my favorite museum on the planet-- the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I read that Reiniger was influenced by shadow puppets of China, but I believe that Indonesia is best known for this art-form. If you happen to live near or to visit Santa Fe, this museum is a must-see full of folk art from around the world.

Happy Go Driver!: designing for the iPhone

2009-09-20T15:19:00.016-05:00

In the last several months, I've been enjoying watching the iPhone become a place to see interesting art and graphics. Visual artists can carry around a mini digital portfolio on an iPhone, which makes it possible to share one's work on the fly. And visual artists with the technical savvy, can create applications for this thing and find themselves becoming game designers all of a sudden.

I recently had the privilege to witness the development of a beautiful App. Atompatch is a team of two, consisting of illustrator/designer Peter Hamlin and conceptualizer/programmer John Balestrieri who recently released a game called "Happy Go Driver". It is a game about traffic management.

Peter Hamlin created some wonderful creatures, who drive their cars through and beautiful cityscapes that represent different "districts" of a metropolis.

These dynamic 'scapes have animated clouds and birds flying by on a top layer, which add even more depth to the interesting perspective of these landscapes. Excellent details, like a truck carrying bacon, or a single lollipop, keep the eyes delighted while experiencing the weirdly zen process of managing traffic with the tip of your finger. To get your version, go to the iTunes store in your iTunes and search for "Happy Go Driver".

Another App I want to toot, is the Slide-A-Ma-Jig created, designed and programmed by my pal, Illustrator Chuck Gamble. The Slide-A-Ma-Jig is a fun and funny mix-and-match body parts game where there are over 20 original characters whose hats, heads, midsections, and bottom parts can be interchanged. There are hilarious
sound effects for every move you make when "sliding", and backgrounds that you can switch as well. Chuck is the former Creative Director of Headbone Interactive in Seattle, where they developed a great look of digitally illustrated characters who inhabited worlds with photographic backgrounds. In the Slide-a-Ma-Jig, this look translates beautifully into the iPhone context. To get your version, you can visit the iTunes store and search for "Happy Go Driver".

Happiness resides in an Electric Car

2009-08-31T09:59:00.006-05:00

As a brief addendum to the previous post: Tiny Inventions' Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter have outdone themselves in collaboration with They Might Be Giants, to create this wonderful animation "Electric Car".

Tiny Inventions will be releasing a "making of" video on their site soon, which I am very excited to see. Ru "crafted" the characters and props by hand, and they were then joyfully animated with great dance moves, to illuminate the poignant lyrics of the song.

How can you deny an Electric Car?
I found a site with a history of Electic mobiles, and reading it, I was struck by the presence of the words "inventors/invention"-- perfect match for the artist-animators who created the visuals for this "let's move forward" song.

Could the power of music and art create in this video's target audience (and accompanying adults) a broader consciousness and love for cleaner vehicles? Let's hope!

Lecturing about Women in Animation, to Women in Animation, New York

2009-06-07T20:33:00.015-05:00

Recently, my Parsons Pre-College Program teaching colleague Ru Kuwahata and I had the opportunity to present a lecture to the New York chapter of Women in Animation, about... Women in Animation! Specifically, we spoke about Contemporary Women Animators and screened work created in this decade (and century). This was a survey of work that interests us and to which we've been exposed, but it was by no means an exhaustive look at who is making work right now. We wanted to show work that was made for personal expression, for clients, and for learning/school. And the idea for giving this talk was to share these animators who inspire us, with the members of the New York Women in Animation group, and SVA students who attended our talk, in the hopes that the inspiration would be infectious.

(School of Visual Arts on E. 23rd st., where the talks happen)

Last year, Ru and I gave another survey talk, about the History of Women Animators, which can be seen on Ru's blog, where she documented the main elements. Researching this talk with Ru was a very satisfying experience of geeking out with someone who shared my interest and excitement about animation, history, and Animation History. In the research process we explored work to which we'd respectively and collectively been exposed, and combined our thoughts about the work and the creators into a collaborative lecture. The actual talk was organized chronologically, with us showing clips and discussing the life stories, influences, and techniques of the women animators we featured. The audience at that talk was lively and engaged, and we had a good discussion after wards with some members contributing personal stories of working with some of the animators we featured.

For this year's talk, we approached the research differently as we had the opportunity to ask questions to the living women animators we were presenting. We emailed these animators a list of questions, asking about technical training, process, women animators who influenced and inspired their work, and advice to other animators. In return we got thoughtful answers that informed the bulk of our talk, which we structured with clips and stills. As a bonus, we had 2 of the animators we presented, Signe Baumane and Nina Paley, in our audience, to answer questions and inspire the NY Chapter after we finished the talk.

I am lucky in that in my colleague Ru, I have found an inspiring friend and co-presenter of lectures! Ru works with her husband and partner Max Porter, in their studio Tiny Inventions where they make beautiful, funny, cute and impressive work.

I love to talk with Ru about how things are going on their current project, which is a personal animation that will be about 11 minutes long. Ru and Max are diligent, passionate, and continually engaged in their work. The still above is from their upcoming animation: "Something Left, Something Taken".

Co-teaching, co-presenting, and chatting with Ru, I feel I have a mini-Women In Animation group, where we share information, support and inspiration. The larger organization-- the official Women in Animation, is the same on a larger scale, where resources, motivation, and learning are shared and spread.

El Baile Del Sombrero!

2009-05-20T13:45:00.016-05:00

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

2009-05-03T06:56:00.017-05:00

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

2009-04-17T09:22:00.014-05:00

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!

2009-03-27T12:57:00.017-05:00

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

2009-02-01T15:09:00.024-05:00

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!

2009-01-20T22:36:00.006-05:00

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

2009-01-15T16:57:00.019-05:00

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.

PostIt

2009-01-07T16:30:00.004-05:00

Hello to the Post It Show III, which is still up at LA's Giant Robot Gallery. I was happy to be part of this show (under my pseudonym, Nina Frankel), along with hundreds of other artists. Making work for this show, I was guided by the PostIt's low-key-ness, which got me into an art-making process which went something like this: have an idea, grab a PostIt, try it out... while working on that image, get another idea, grab another PostIt, start that idea, an on, and on. I'd soon have about 20 PostIts gestating together on my desk. Then I would look to sort out which were not worth pursuing and which had possibility. From every batch of 20, there would be two or three that seemed they would make it to full fruition. In the end, I sent off 24 to the show, and have a big stack of rejects to keep for future inspection-- maybe these will serve as good ideas for later, and maybe they need to be recycled.

Here a survivor, that made the trip out to LA for the show:

Hungarians in OuterSpace

I'm grateful to Mark Todd and Esther Pearl Watson for curating this show and giving so many of us this nudge to experiment and produce. And thank you to the PostIt, for being a liberator of ideas and a receptacle for creativity.

Sculpey 2009

2009-01-06T10:54:00.011-05:00

This is the New Year email card I sent out to friends and clients this year, and I thought I'd put it up on this blog to start the new year off with a little Sculpey.

Sculpey is my 'recreational' art form-- I have been working with it for about 12 years, and find it very fun. The best are the colors that you can mix-- it's such a good feeling to take chunks of raw Sculpey, mix them in your hands, and see a new color emerge. For anyone who mixes paint, this is an exciting tactile experience! It's also satisfying to me mix subtle or moody colors out of the very bright raw materials.

These Sculpey lions were made for two people whom I love and admire very much, to stand by and watch over them during cancer treatment. The one in the background was named "Chemo-sabie" by its recipient, and one in the foreground was named "Chemo-simba", as a brilliant riff on the other one's name, by its recipient.

I love creating characters in 3D, and while I haven't yet used Sculpey for any stop-motion animation work, one of my hopes for 2009 is to make that happen.
(Here's a link to my stop-motion heroes, Aardman.)

There is a good resource on the Sculpey site, called Sculpey 101 which I recommend checking out. To supplement, here are some things that I have learned from using Sculpey over the years:

-While Sculpey is non-toxic, I suggest getting a dedicated toaster oven from a garage sale for baking it, and not using your kitchen oven. Also too, you can get a mini-pyrex casserole dish for the oven's tray, to use instead of the metal one that might come with.

-Always underbake your Sculpey-- I find that when you bake it until it is brittle, it will break that much sooner. Take your Sculpey out of the oven before you think it is done. It will continue to bake/harden after you remove it, with the heat it has taken in.

-If your Sculpey creation is to stand, make sure you place it as you want it to stand, on the baking tray.

-You can coat your Sculpey with clear nail polish, or Sculpey brand's clear fixative.
This does seem to make the pieces last longer. I haven't discovered a matte finish, but am sure there are products out there.

-If you are mailing Sculpey to a friend, go overboard with packing. There is nothing sadder than your recipient telling you they opened your package only to discover your loving gift, dismembered.

-And finally, if you are an artist who is used to 2D, I highly recommend getting yourself some Sculpey for exploring the next dimension. I now bring Sculpey to my Animation class at Parsons- once the students have settled on their character designs in their sketchbooks, we make them in Sculpey. This process is valuable for getting to know their characters even more, and then they have a little pal to place next to the Computer for inspiration, when working.

Happy Holidays! 1950

2008-12-31T22:14:00.010-05:00

Last month, while digging through my parents' stuff in preparation for a move, I discovered some family treasures about which I will be writing in the new year. One surprise finding was this pair of holiday cards made by my grandfather Albert Kner, in 1950. They are paper collage, done in a style that I hadn't quite seen from my grandfather before. In fact, they are in a style that I have embraced: simple and bold shapes. Needless to say, I was excited and touched to find these and to feel this connection. I love the playfulness with which my grandfather chose the different papers and textures for these two images-- the velvet for Santa's suit, the gauze for the clouds, the silver for the wings of the angle.

Inside these cards, printed in letterpress green letters, it reads: "Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year from the Kners *1950*". I don't know how many of these my grandfather would have made and sent out at the time, but I can imagine him very methodically printing the inside text, methodically cutting out all of the illustrative elements for the covers in multiples, and then methodically affixing them.

The colors of these cards, 58 years later, is bright and alive.

Janet Hamlin

2008-12-10T22:36:00.022-05:00

Janet Hamlin, Figurative Illustrator

Janet Hamlin is a figurative artist and illustrator with very strong powers of observation and empathy. I admire her skill and the clarity with which she sees and 'gets' her subjects. Janet is able to get right in there with the subtle postures and features that make a person who they are.
I love the sketch atop this entry, because it is so active in line, and so much about her act of seeing as translated through her hand and onto the page. This kind of sketch shows the fundamental skill which is the basis for her ability to then produce a more developed representation of someone in all of their complexity, like Woody Allen. I love this portrait Janet drew of Woody Allen, because she was able to capture both his physical and spiritual appearances, attached to which are the confidence and ease of her drawing ability.

Janet has illustrated for the Associated Press for many years, has drawn many books for children and grown-ups, and most recently and famously, has found a niche drawing in high-profile courtrooms. It was Janet who was sent to Guantanamo Bay several times this year to draw the 9/11 trials. There, under tremendous pressure, she was able to witness and capture the courtroom scenes. And it was she who so open-mindedly went back to correct an infamous nose. You can read about it in the New Yorker Talk of the Town

Janet teaches figure drawing classes at Edward Hopper's boyhood home, Hopper House, where she has been leading
her students to higher planes of observational and drawing achievement.
I know Janet as family and friend, and have come to be a big fan of her daughter Nancy's artwork, as well. Here are a few Nancy Hamlin Ryan treasures to enjoy:

Two portraits of important people in her life

A piece inspired from learning about The Day of the Dead

And my favorite... Germ School!

The Inspired Turkeys of Leah Guenther

2008-12-02T18:52:00.021-05:00

I have had the good fortune to spend the last three Thanksgivings with the talented and inventive Leah Guenther, who, each year, has brought along a supplemental Turkey of her own creation. Inspiring visually, conceptually, and digestively, Leah's turkeys all have sweet expressions, are hilarious (just by virtue of their being), and are cleverly assembled. Behold...

2006 (the debut)
The Bread Turkey

2007
The Sweets Turkey

Profile:

2008
The Lettuce Turkey
Front:

Three-Quarters, aerial:

Rear:

Notice how body parts were carefully selected for form as as they could possibly represent function. I love the variation of gullets from year to year, as well as wings and tail feathers. To me, they all embody a very Proud-to-Be feeling-- I think this comes from their festive tail feathers, especially. The spirit of these turkeys also conveys to me idea of 'imagining what could be, and making it happen'. Leah made something new by freshly combining what was around. I love this mode of thinking and find that some of the most satisfying solutions come out of this process.

For Thanksgiving, it is especially poignant that while so many turkeys are killed and consumed, some are also being created anew...

While Leah resists being considered the artist that she truly is, her creative accomplishments extend beyond the turkey realm. Leah spearheaded the creation of 826 Chicago which is the Chicago chapter of the National 826 Writing, Reading and Publishing non-profit organization geared to helping kids develop themselves outside of school. One of the most beautiful and touching collections of writing and drawings that I have ever seen, A Sunday Afternoon Hotdog Meal sprung from the hard work and creativity of Leah Guenther, her 826 Colleagues, and the Kids of 826 Chicago. This book contains short essays about what the 826 Writers (and Artists) have found to be noteworthy about their experiences of living in Chicago. The collection is sweet, hilarious, and well-crafted, just like the Turkeys. And it has that Proud-to-Be quality about it that makes it very joyful to behold. Consider obtaining a copy for yourself, or supporting the 826 National Organization.

Obama in the Garment District

2008-11-19T17:59:00.010-05:00

Hooray!

Even two weeks after the election, it's still sinking in-- and how thrilling to see these additions to the windows in my studio neighborhood!

I love that someone Photoshopped the Obama Family "sitting in the lawn" of the White House (see upper right poster in window). I believe in the power of creating an image in the service of helping to envision something before it becomes real.

Now there are endless variations of three dimensional Obama objects for sale here, and everywhere. Products sprung out quickly and are now ubiquitous. I wonder how Barack himself feels about the spectrum of Obama Stuff available... and if they'll soon have Obama Perfume and Colognes for (whole)sale here too.

Perfume is a common item for sale in the Garment District (it's the invisible garment, is it not?). As an addendum... a day after I finished the above entry wondering when we'd see Obama perfume, there it was!

Smells like... hope? change? And when applied, it activates the wearer's ability to achieve his or her full potential and thus become excellent.

My Studio Neighborhood

2008-09-30T21:10:00.023-05:00

I work out of a shared studio space in New York City's Garment District, and have been taking photos on my way to and from work whenever I'm moved to do so. For a few months I have been meaning to pay a little tribute to the neighborhood in which I work, on this blog. This neighborhood is full of stores selling bootleg Dora the Explorer product, bootleg perfumes, wigs, watches, bling jewelry and cel phone accessories, and, of course, garments! I find the neighborhood stimulating and a bit frenetic-- there is so much human invention, production and entrepreneurship crammed into these city streets, and there is a lot of action on the sidewalks.

Along with connecting to the pervading wacky + inventive human spirit of this neighborhood, I discovered that I have a familial connection as well: my paternal Grandfather had a small shop for leather goods and tailoring about a block away from my studio, in the 1940s. He had been a tailor/clothes manufacturer working with leather before the family fled France during WWII. Here in NYC, he set up shop for a brief time, before returning to France after the War. Before the war, my Grandfather had produced leather helmets and jackets for motorcycle riders (picture 1930's leather helmets with straps) and pieced these goods together from scraps. Here in the States he was able to continue figuring out ways to make similar work, especially thanks to the opportunity and relative openness available in this country at that time.

One of the most worthy-of-celebration aspects of the human spirit, to me, is our ability to create and invent out of what's available to us. My grandfather and the generations of people from all over the world, working in this neighborhood to create and make available new inventions, are an inspiration to me.

Some leather-goods shops are still here (see the top image in this post and this one below), however dark and dingy they seem when I peek in... but the connection to my Dad's Dad and what his work represents, is palpable on these streets.

Tools for working with leather

Scraps

Shapes!

Folk art motifs in the form of balloons!

A dramatic stage set for wigs

And below... Hair Mayonaise!

Teaching Animation At Parsons

2008-08-20T09:35:00.013-05:00

Since 2006 I have been teaching Animation Design in Parsons School of Design's Pre-College Academy Program. This is a program for teens who are interested in art to have a college art experience, and learn techniques and approaches that aren't normally offered in their high schools.

During the school year, we meet once a week, but during the summer, we meet daily. This August, we had a 2 week Academy that I team taught with Illustrator/Cartoonist Leah Hayes.
Students learned about character design, story telling and sequential narrative, and design/layout in Cartooning class. Then, in my Animation class they learn principals of Traditional Animation (anticipation, squash + stretch, drawing for movement, drawing frame by frame), and how to apply them to Adobe Flash (our tool for animating).
The students learn a great deal in a short amount of time, and I am always very impressed by how far they go.
Here's a "pencil" test done by student Olivia Accardo, for her Sea Creature character:

And this is what she came up with for her "final"-- this was all done in 9 days of learning and experimenting.

Eventually I will blog more about student work and show the class compilations online.
But in the meantime: one student surprised me the other day by sending me this link to his blog, which details his experience in the program and shows his daily progress in both classes. As one of his instructors, I was very excited and proud to see this, but subjectively speaking, I think it offers a good report of the learning process that one goes through to figure out how to make their character come to life.

They Might Be Giants: Here Come the 1,2,3's

2008-03-21T23:08:00.007-05:00

While this cd/dvd set was released in February of 2008, I am just now getting around to celebrating it here on this blog (where it's basically still February). They Might Be Giants
"Here Come the 1,2,3's" is an inspired series of songs with such bopping beats that you can't not dance around the room when you listen to them. And just when you thought the music couldn't be better, you'll discover a dvd with animations for each of the songs.
I am honored to be amongst the animators who were asked to work on this project:
in the Spring of 2007 I got a call from TMBG to please animate their song about Number 9, called "Pirate Girls Nine". This was a very exciting prospect for me, as I love music, love their music, and am happy when working on kids' educational projects.
Something very special about this project in particular was having John Flansburgh of TMBG, as the art director. He was extremely smart, funny and encouraging during the process, and I felt it was a collaboration in that he was guiding the vision of this piece while understanding and speaking my visual language. This band is so overflowing with creativity and is so super-productive that I am pretty sure they must have read this book. I would love to be able to crank out a tenth of what they do, but am just very happy to have had the chance to work with them and hopefully some of it rubbed off.

Here are some stills from the animation "Pirate Girls Nine":

and the animation can be found on the above-mentioned cd/dvd package, and can also be see via podcasts. Eventually, I will have it on my site as well.

The secret brain behind this animation, and the person to whom I owe a million thanks for his help, is Peter Hamlin. He not only inspired the palette, but he put forth a great effort helping me get this project done in the relatively short time we had. We animated my drawings using Flash, and Peter has since continued on to do his own music animations using After Effects, for Enstereo.

Thanks also to Tim Wilder, who helped get this output to its final form.
And last but not least, to animator Lucy Blackwell, who brought the 'Giants to me. I will be blogging about Lucy in more detail down the road, and my hat is off to her for her visionary animation work on this album for the song about Number 4, called "Apartment Four".

My Beating Heart

2008-02-11T18:05:00.000-05:00

Speaking of vision, here I applaud the inventiveness of one of my studio mates, Yury Gitman (Banana Design Lab), who has been inspiring me by proximity with his experimental process, his problem-solving, and his diligence. Yury is a Toy Designer/Inventor, who teaches Interactive Toy Design at Parsons here in NYC. What is an interactive toy, you ask? Well, in the case of his newly released collection called My Beating Heart , it's a soft pillow that has the pulse of a 'heartbeat' inside of it. The pillow remains just a quiet, soft presence until you activate the heartbeat by pressing the subtly-placed switch sewn into the label on the hem. Then, when you hug the pillow to your chest, you feel its heartbeat next to yours. After several test-squeezes when passing by Yury's work area, I have determined that this is a very cozy and soothing item. Inside these soft and squeezable pillows are some electronics... here is a glimpse of some of the electronic hardware that made its way into this pillow... and a glimpse of Yury, working hard in his workspace.

It's a pretty magical fact about our hearts, that we have cells in there that produce electrical currents, which made them beat. There's more info on that here, and don't forget to enjoy the illustrations and animations on this site (especially the man with the yellow swisscheese speedo, getting the ECG)...

I appreciate that Yury uses the metaphor of electrical currents in the heart in this elegant form = content way. And I love that these beating heart pillows are the result of one person's vision and creative energy going towards making something to help more people feel more connected to the life force.

Super Tuesday

2008-02-04T11:26:00.000-05:00

While this is a visual arts blog, I have to state here that Barack Obama is my candidate... and it's for his Vision.
He uses his unique life experience,his intelligence,his heart and his voice to inspire, create, bring ideas and issues up for discussion, and to hopefully make things better.

I think these are all essential elements to art and art-making too.

As an addition, there's a feature on the NYTimes which has portraits of voters across America being interviewed about their choice of candidate: it's a great core sample of people who live in the USA and what is going on in our minds about hopes, priorities and values.

If you like faces (as I do) and hearing how individuals express themselves-- given a short window in which to do so-- about issues that face all of us, you will enjoy this media piece.

2008

2008-01-31T22:19:00.001-05:00

Before January comes to a close... Hooray and Welcome 2008!!! May we all work intelligently to help each other as much as we can this year.

Sara Varon, part 2

2007-11-22T00:02:00.000-05:00

Last week I had the pleasure of an evening of Crafts and Snacks with Sara Varon. She's very organized and has already conceived of and silkscreened her 2008 New Year's pack for sending to clients and friends. I admire Sara's orderly approach to her work, and it was satisfying for me to watch her assembly-production line. She's very careful and focused with what she is doing, and I could see that she approaches all parts of her process-- even repetitive tasks like folding and sticking adhesive goo in her cards-- with the same care that she puts into her illustration work.

(click on photos to see expanded and in detail)

Having a cozy craft night with Sara made me feel like we were a pair of friendly creatures doing a project, which is often a theme in her work. She and I are from a similar gene pool (see photo), and so in this case we have an intra-species friendship.

The World of Sara Varon

2007-11-04T19:47:00.000-05:00

Sara Varon is a comics artist, illustrator, printmaker, teacher, boxer, creator of delicious baked goods, and friend, to name a few of her talents. I have been a fan of her work for about 6 years, and my admiration continues to grow with her work. Her most recent graphic novel, Robot Dreams, published by First Second Books, is my current favorite, with her previous book, Chicken and Cat, a close second.

According to me, Sara's specialty is exploring interspecies friendships-- a relevant theme for all of us on this planet.
Her work often conveys a sweet and peaceful space that can exist between two (or more) creatures when they are having a regular daily experience, or an adventure, or are making something together. Often there is a project to be accomplished, and I love how Sara visually takes the reader through each step: having a sense of Sara's methodical and organized approach to her art-making, I appreciate how she conveys step-by-step processes in her work. I also appreciate (re: love) the expressions of her characters and how she shows their reactions to new, interesting, or upsetting things that present themselves on their paths in life. Here are some examples of this, from a series Sara did for the Walker Art Museum:

But in her world, interspecies relations are not always harmonious, and Sara is not afraid to explore conflict:

In her book Robot Dreams, Sara shows a range of what can exist between two creatures. it is the story of a friendship between a dog and a robot and how their relationship goes through an estrangement-- it is completely pictorial and one the most emotional stories I have ever 'read'. Not having explored too far in the genre of comics and graphic novels, I can't say this with authority, but I feel that with Robot Dreams, Sara has plowed new ground in how she shows the complexity and depth of feelings that can occur on both sides, when a relationship goes through big changes.

Móra

2007-07-19T16:59:00.001-05:00

Continuing with the theme of the Children's Museum of Art, there is a wonderful children's book publisher in Hungary- Móra- which has been putting out books with gorgeous and inspiring illustrations for many many years. When I was visiting the beautiful town of Pécs, Hungary, in 2002, a sweet antiqvarium (aka: antique bookstore) owner gifted me this likewise sweet book,
published by Móra: while can't read Hungarian, I do know that this book is about the Weather and its many forms. The illustrations are fresh and modern, and from 1971. I love their simplicity and directness, and the cheerful feeling conveyed that any kind of weather is okay to experience. Looking through this book is a refreshing break from worries about climate change and imminent environmental meltdown. But moreso, it's time spent enjoying simple, thoughtful, stylized yet direct visual communication.
Here are some more samples from the back and inside, to enjoy:

Stay tuned for more on Móra... there are many beautiful books from them to celebrate.

The Very Inviting Children's Museum of NYC

2007-07-16T16:35:00.001-05:00

Last week I finally checked out the CMA--New York's Children's Museum of the Arts and saw a bunch of really great work such as this swim scene above. It's a hands-on museum with work stations throughout the space-- each station is hosted by an
artist/staff person who is there to guide children and parents through different art-making processes. I was only there for a drive-by, but was tempted to sit down and make something because the atmosphere there was so open and inviting: each table had supplies laid out and chairs waiting around the perimeter, waiting to be occupied. At some of the tables sat a kid and a parent, or a few, but the atmosphere was calm and nice. Artwork populates the whole space as well, so it's a combo museum/studio. They also have classes for kids, which sound very appealing.

(Especially interesting to me as a teacher of animation is that they have lo-tech animation classes here.)

Here some photos of artwork that I especially admired, from the museum-- however, and unfortunately (with the exception of the apartment building below) they don't have the artists' names displayed...

Some nice, big portraits:

An apartment building with interior:

Jump roping:

Big Puppets:

Electric Garden

2007-06-06T23:47:00.001-05:00

Hello Again after a long bit away. This post is to let you know about a show opening tomorrow night in Portland, called Electric Garden, which features the artwork of the very special Peter Hamlin. Peter is a Painter, Illustrator, Designer and Animator, as well as the creator of my website. It is from his mind that sprung the idea for this blog. In Electric Garden he is showing paintings with intricate detail based on the theme of the show, whose info can be seen here at www.compoundgallery.com/gallery/2007/06/06.php (this link is not hot for some reason)
Betsy Crawford and a dynamic duo named APAK will be showing as well-- if you are in the area, tomorrow night is the opening- 7pm!

The Ceramic Art of Saya Moriyasu

2007-03-15T17:55:00.000-05:00

I've been wanting to spread the word about the wonderful world of Saya Moriyasu's art for several years... and now I finally have a place to do it. Saya makes beautiful, sweet, soulful characters in clay (and sometimes in 2D) that embody spirit and story. Her clay forms often have a dual function: besides being characters, they are often also lamps, containers and vessels.

Pictured here are two of the members of my personal and prized Saya Moriyasu Collection. The mustachioed trumpet player, when you remove his head, is also a bottle form into which one could put something with a stem. The Lady, whose head is an open vessel, can hold small things that shouldn't be misplaced. She's a nice reminder to me of how we contain needed items in our heads (if we should be so lucky...).

Saya and I became friends in Seattle, WA, in 2002, and I was lucky to spend time in her studio, visiting, and sometimes making small clay works too. Her studio has an atmosphere of positivity, hard work, and constant creativity + productivity. I loved being there. Saya comes from a family of Artists and Engineers, and I see both of these powers carried on and at work in her artistic approach. She has curiosity, can-do-it-ive-ness, and an Experimenter's ability to try different solutions until she finds the right one. Saya recently began a new series of miniatures, which are for sale. Here can see a fun animated showcase of these miniatures. And here you can visit Saya's website to see it all.

The Bird Machine

2007-03-04T21:18:00.000-05:00

Last week I visited my pal Jay Ryan at The Bird Machine. Among his many talents as an artist, Jay designs and prints silk screen posters here at the shop where he works with fellow Artist and Printer, Mat Daly. They are sometimes accompanied by Jay's Dad, Jack Ryan. Here are some photos I took during my visit.

I love to visit The Bird Machine because the atmosphere there is friendly, full of humor, and is buzzing with possibility. Since I've known Jay (from high school Art class in the late 80's) he has had a strong, graphic approach to the marks he makes. It's rewarding to see how he has developed this sensibilty, and I marvel that he created a place- the well-oiled The Bird Machine- to manifest this vision and approach to his work.

I've only discovered silkscreen printing for myself a few years ago, and love the inks, the flatness and texture of the color on the paper, and the process of printing itself. At The Bird Machine, it's exciting to see this process so alive and relevant to every day. And it's inspiring to see how the Bird Machine Artists (which also includes not-picture-here-artist/illustrator Diana Sudyka) use this medium with very appealing results.

Embroidery, cut outs, and childhood

2007-02-26T11:34:00.000-05:00

Here is the prime example of an inspiring item around which I grew up, about which I wrote about in the first blog: a Hungarian embroidered pillow. This black pillow has always been a happy site-- I love the drama of the black background with the bright colors and shapes floating on top. The complex pattern is visual entertainment to me: there is movement, mystery and personality in these forms and how they relate and fit into one another. In this photo, the pillow is upsidedown: please twist you head to see it from how its creator meant the motif to be seen.

Growing up, I was also lucky that a kind and smart person gave me this craft/game called "Fuzzy Felts". It had a black piece of felt-on-board the same size of the box, that was the stage for placing these different shapes of colored felt on top. You can see that the effect of a Fuzzy Felt composition was similar to the pillow. The drama of the bright colors on the black, the strong forms, and the fitting of shapes are, to me, an invitation into an animated world similar to that of the pillow (but without the Hungarian flavor). Taking the photo of the interior of the Fuzzy Felts box, it struck me that the way the shapes are sitting in the different compartments of the box is just like how I store the pieces of painted paper that I cut out and keep for the next collage. Let this be further proof of the beneficial influences of childhood play!

Artist Andrea Dezsö

2007-02-21T08:31:00.000-05:00

To continue the Hungarian theme: last week I went to a show at the Hungarian Cultural Center here in New York City, to see the work of Romanian/Hungarian artist, Andrea Dezsö.

In two very Hungarian words I will describe her work: TOTALLY AWESOME.

This is a show of tiny sewn embroideries, illustrating the superstitious belief system of the artist's Mother. They are a brilliant combination of funny, dark, clever, and beautiful. The work is intimate in subject matter and scale. I suspect that anyone with a superstitious mother, of any nationality, will feel a connection
to this work.

Andrea is an accomplished artist in many media, and an educator. You can her other work, and more examples of these embroideries on Andrea Dezsö's site.

Welcome to Nina Frenkel's Art Blog

2007-02-18T18:06:00.000-05:00

Greetings and welcome to my site, and to this blog, where I will be writing about
and sharing the visuals of that which I find inspiring to me, as an Illustrator and Animator.

There are many artists past and present who have influenced my work, and I
will tip my hat to them in this blog, as well share my new discoveries.

To start things off, I'm going to answer a question about my work, which sometimes arises when people see pieces like this:

"Why the Hungarian theme?"

I grew up in a house full of Hungarian folk art and the graphic design work and books of my Hungarian-born Mother's family, the Kners. Embroidered pillows, ceramic pitchers, beautifully bound books printed from the Kner Press, the original book cover illustrations done by my grandfather, Albert Kner (more on these in a future blog), all populated the house. The shapes and colors of the folk art have influenced my work on a formal level: but my experience in this family, the family stories, and the atmosphere surrounding these many pieces around which I grew up, are all important parts of the engine which drives my work.