Blog

Tag: Art

Calligraffiti

by Dan
Art & Photography / March 17, 2010

If, like me, you're interested in graffiti, street art, hand-drawn lettering and calligraphy, then you might well get a kick out of this video of Niels Shoe Meulman preparing his Calligraffiti show in Amsterdam. The video was directed by Marco Grambia & Sven Super with music by Musicmusic:

Here are some books on street art available from Raincoast that you might be interested in:

Guerilla Art

Sebastian Peiter and Goetz Werner

Guerilla Art features interviews with graffiti-inspired street art pioneers Futura Ramm:ell:zee and Blek le Rat in which they discuss their own work, how street art was born out of the days of subway train graffiti spraypainting and tagging and how the new movement of street artists are doing things differently.

Rackgaki

Ryo Sanada and Suridh Hassan

Rackgaki covers the graffiti scene in Japan and showcases the creativity within this new and relatively unexplored form of contemporary Japanese art and illustrates the work of the major artists or writers working in Japan today.

 

 

Stickerbomb and Stickerbomb 2

Studio Rarekwai

Stickers are an essential part of the street art movement. Inexpensive and easy to produce, they act as a kind of informal business card for some graffiti writers, and a quick and effective promotional tool for many artists and illustrators.

The Stickerbomb books are collectable, fully-peelable sticker books featuring illustration, graffiti, and graphics. Both are filled with amazing collections of over 250 specially commissioned stickers by artists, illustrators, and graffiti writers from around the world.

 

 

Street Sketchbook: Inside the Journals of International Street and Graffiti Artists

Tristan Manco

From the leading authority on the graffiti and street art scenes, Street Sketchbook provides an exclusive look at the private sketchbooks of 65 international street artists, including Canadian artists TurfOne (Montreal), Royal (Ottawa), Luke Ramsey (Victoria) and Labrona (Ottawa).

 

Subway Art: 25th Anniversary Edition

Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant

The 25th Anniversary Edition of the seminal Subway Art is a large-scale, deluxe format hardcover, with 70 additional photographs and a fresh introduction and afterword. A book for collectors and the curious, it illustrates the passion, creativity, and resourcefulness of unlikely kids inventing an art form destined to spread worldwide and spawn the present-day street art movement.

(Calligraffiti video via Thinking Type on Twitter)

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Cartographies of Time

by Dan
Art & Photography + Design & Typography / March 16, 2010

How do you draw time? What does history look like?

Cartographies of Time by Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg is a fascinating history of visual representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Beautifully illustrated, the book features a wide variety of timelines and maps from medieval manuscripts and contemporary websites.

Here are a few of the incredible images from the book:

There is a short review of Cartographies of Time at Book Forum.

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Illustrator S.britt Interviewed at Grain Edit

by Dan
Art & Photography + Kids / February 16, 2010

Eccentric illustrator S.britt, who has done lots of wonderful work for our friends at Chronicle Books—including the illustrations for the spooky Over in the Hollow—was recently interviewed by the wonderful GrainEdit (but don't expect any straight answers!):

Well, after many years of struggling with remedial reading and basic comprehension, I was finally able to complete my very first children’s book during last Thursday evening’s bedtime story jamboree and prayerfest. I think the book was entitled Go, Dog Go! but don’t quote me on that since I can’t seem to remember anything past the part where the dog goes. However I am very excited about starting my next children’s book, Atlas Shrugged. Really, I like any book about choo-choo trains... As far as the process goes, it’s really no big secret. I just visit the local library or bookstore, select a tome that piques my interest, and pitch a powerful choking fit until someone eventually agrees to read to me. And if that doesn’t work, I threaten to wet myself and anything else within a five foot radius.

Over in the Hollow
by Rebecca Dickinson
illustrated by S.britt
Chronicle Books
ISBN 978-0-8118-5035-3
$18.95 hardcover

Also Available:
School Years: A Family Keepsake Of School Memories

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DIY @ MOV

by Siobhan
January 20, 2010

 

Calling all Vancouver crafters!

This Thursday, January 21, the Museum of Vancouver is hosting what's bound to be a fun evening of creativity and craft. DIY@MOV is billed as a "A Night of Social Crafting" -  there will be music, snacks, drinks, plus a craft market, and workshops:

Blim: button-making and screen printing workshops
Knitgirl: Knitting and Craftivism
Kirsti Wakelin: drawing/ exquisite corpse.

The DIY@MOV event is part of a new exhibit at MOV called The Art of Craft:

Art of Craft showcases 173 spectacular fine craft works in three parts:

Unity & Diversity: Selected Works - 75 pieces from across Canada recently on display at the 2009 Cheongju International Craft Biennale in the Republic of Korea.
 

By Hand/BC and Yukon - 51 pieces from Canada’s West Coast with a focus on the artists’ creative processes and studio environments.

Craft from the Republic of Korea - 47 pieces demonstrating the excellence of traditional and contemporary crafts.

Get all the details on the DIY@MOV event and the Art of Craft exhibit the on the MOV site - then come out and celebrate DIY, craft, art and design ... or whatever you want to call this stuff.

Personally, I love how these terms are overlapping, intersecting and merging more and more in recent years. Creativity is creativity, and, in my opinion, the tools or media you use don't determine what you create or how it should be perceived.

In that spirit, two of my favourite books on the list explore the ever-growing world of "makers":

Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft and Design is an overview of some of the amazing talents in the crafting community in the US today - people who have been part of the huge resurgance of craft that's been taking place for the past few years. Handmade Nation is also a film - watch the trailer.

By Hand: The Use Of Craft In Contemporary Art approaches the Art/Craft topic from another angle: showing how media and techniques and traditionally considered "Craft" - such as embroidery and knitting - are being used in the "Art" world. The paperback edition of By Hand is coming out in April 2010.

(Of course my list does not include all the lovely how-to and inspirational craft books. For a good list of these, check out the Chronicle Craft Catalogue for Spring 2010 (PDF).)

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The Third & The Seventh

by Dan
Architecture / January 15, 2010

The Third & The Seventh is a beautiful full-CG animated short film by Alex Roman.

According to the filmmaker it is an attempt "to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal."

It is simply stunning...

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

 

If you liked this film, you might also want to take a look at these book as well:

The Bldgblog Book by Geoff Manaugh

Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design by Sarah Bonnemaison and Ronit Eisenbach

Architects Today by Kester Rattenbury, Rob Bevan and Kieran Long

Flexible: Architecture That Responds to Change by Robert Kronenburg

Ghost: Building an Architectural Vision by Brian Mackay-Lyons

Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete by Jean-Louis Cohen and Gerard Martin Jr. Moeller

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