Our first Writers’ Project interview of the year is now live!
This time, we talked with Christian Patchell, or “Patch” as he’s better known, a cartoonist and designer who recently published a book on his experience with cancer.
You can check out the interview at the Writers’ Project homepage. While you’re there, be sure to check out previous interviews for more advice and inspiration!
From my French counterpart, Murielle, comes this post about Jitesh Patel, an amazing London-based paper artist — sculptor, I might say. As Murielle explains:
Jitesh Patel founded his studio in London in 2007. The artist works on paper in the form of multifaceted 3D creations and with a resolutely graphical style. A feast for the eyes, these achievements offer the ultimate results in advertisements for the Alpina Yogurt as well as in the streets of London.
You can see one of Patel’s street art projects in the image above; to see the intricate paper birds and butterflies he crafted for Alpina and learn more about his work, check out his website.
Cecilia found this amazing story on CNN about the so-called “Post-it wars”:
The first shot was fired four months ago, when employees at French computer gaming company Ubisoft… put up a Post-it note image from the 1980s classic “Space Invaders” on the window.
The bank BNP (Paribas), across the street, then fired back with a Post-it Pac-Man. Since then, Post-it images have been cropping up all over the city; you can see some of the other images at this website.
It’s always fun to check our Flickr page to see what our friends and fans are up to… most recently, we’ve got some lovely motorcycle drawings by picturesofmaya, and some ever-fabulous calligraphy and sketches by Gentian.
Thanks again, guys — very inspiring!
We’ve featured the work of calligraphy artist Lorna Mulligan here before. Now through the 4th of September, she and fellow members of the Les Calmars calligraphy group are exhibiting at Carrefour Culturel in Baie-Saint-Paul, Québec. By way of preview, Lorna sent us the following two pieces, entitled L’océan and Le ciel (click to enlarge):
Of them, she writes:
My pieces are on handmade paper (Saint-Armand) using Herbin inks, sumi and gouache… All of my pieces for this exhibition are based on fragments of text taken from Victor Hugo’s Contemplations, a collection of thoughts, poems and reflexions, published in 1856. His evocative words conjure up images of nature and landscape for me, becoming gestures of ink.
Must be something in the air.
From my French counterpart, Murielle, come some things that I thought were worth sharing: a short film about dingbats by typographer Lucy Brown, and the wonderful website of London publisher Visual Editions, where they “think that books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell; with the visual feeding into and adding to the storytelling as much as the words on the page.”
It strikes me that this isn’t dissimilar to the sort of visual journaling that some of our you do… finding new ways to represent things, exploring different visual concepts, etc.
What do you think?
In response to my review roundup came a few things worth featuring on their own. For instance, this inky mashup by Susan McLaughlin, at whose blog, Depingo Ergo Sum, there’s lots more inky, arty goodness to be found. She even wrote a poem about it:
I’M DRAWING MYSELF with a digital pen
I’m making it loose and flirty.
But I’ve got a yen for the pen of yore
when ink splashes made me dirty.
Click here to see the image in its full-sized glory.
It’s been a while since we’ve posted reader artwork on these pages, but Lisa Lefemine just emailed us these lovely sketches and I figured we should share.
Also of note is the fact that Lisa draws with ink; the king above was done with J. Herbin, as were these whimsical cows:
Lisa sells her work for $10 a piece, so if you like what you see, get in touch with her on Facebook!
The Skin reading is live! If you remember, Karen got involved with the project several years ago, tattooing the word “you” on her chest as part of a larger story by the artist Shelley Jackson. Last month, we made a video of her, which Jackson then knit into a longer video story. You’ll catch Karen around minute 8:20.
Incidentally, our French counterpart, Murielle, blogged about Karen’s video and discovered this cool interactive map of where Skin Project participants live.
A few years ago, Karen participated in artist Shelley Jackson’s Skin Project, a story that was “published” word by word in tattoos on the skin of volunteers.
Now, Jackson’s piecing together a reading from videos of those volunteers. It will be hosted on the Berkeley Art Museum’s website starting on March 1. In the meantime, here’s a video I took last week of Karen saying her word.
Karen will be posting her own thoughts and experiences soon. If there are any other words out there who’d like to share their stories, please get in touch!
