My first example is the album cover for "Ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch" by Frank Zappa. First of all I think it's hilarious, and also I find the concept behind the image quite funny and interesting. It was created by Roger Price as a 'Droodle'. 'Droodles' were invented by Price in 1953 and he described them as "a borkley-looking sort of drawing that doesn't make any sense until you know the correct title." A book was published the year of their conception which started a craze around 'Droodles' including college newspaper ads offering prizes for 'Droodles' submitted by students and a televised game show. This album cover is one of Price's original 'Droodles'. Another caption he had for this particular one was 'Mother pyramid feeding her baby'.
I find this an interesting example of applied illustration as Frank Zappa decided to use it after it had already been created, making this more a case of an applied album in a way. Nevertheless I still find it very amusing and it chimes very well with the humour which can be found in Zappa's music.
My second example is the clothing company 'By Parra' which features illustrations by the artist Parra. Of course, illustrations on a t shirt don't have necessarily have to be funtional so pretty much anything goes. What I like about Parra's imagery, specifically it's application to clothing, is that you can see that an artist has created it. The images are very well considered in terms of shape, colour and composition and there is a sense that time and effort was put into their conception. I think it speaks of a quality over quantity aesthetic, one which rivals the cheap, mass produced throwaway nature of somewhere like 'Primark', carrying the feeling of art and individuality, or something the wearer can care about, in a nicely subtle way.
The only downside of this is that clothing designed and made in this way is often expensive and thus perpetuates it's own rarity in a way. It's sort of quite exclusive and perhaps comes with a slight air of pretension because of this. It's a difficult balance between the scarcity and high cost of items such as these being exclusionary but also preserving their worth.
Despite the risk of it being quite naff to include 'Waitrose' packaging in this list, I do actually really like the packaging used on this particular range (waitrose 1), designed by the 'Waitrose' graphic design and packaging team, who incidentally won the Design Business Association 2011 Design Effectiveness Awards, for its work on their last own brand 'Essential Waitrose' range. I think the 'Waitrose 1' packaging design is very elegant and employs fairly sophisticated imagery in a very tasteful way. It fits well with the Waitrose brand identity and I'm sure would appeal to their typical consumers (decidedly middle class). The only thing I don't really like about the design is the big number 1 which I feel lacks a little sophistication compared to the imagery, but a big part of this is that i just don't think it's a very good title for the range so it's not entirely a design issue. I think considering that was the name, it could have been worse.
The French animated film 'Belleville Rendezvous' is probably my favourite animated film, not least because of the quality of the imagery and drawn characters. Indeed, every person in this film, even background characters, is considered in such detail that everything about it becomes incredibly lifelike, expressive and convincing, despite the fact that much of the illustration comes in the form of vaguely disgusting caricature. It was written and directed by Sylvain Chomet and, despite claiming to be chiefly an animator; he also worked as an animator for this film, he is also responsible for the drawings, and it shows. The drawings and realisations of characters and settings sit so well with the way they are animated that the film very much feels like a labour of love, envisioned as one entity from the beginning as opposed to seperate elements which would need to be pulled together.
I saw a book in 'Colours May Vary' which contained 380 pictures of rubber stamps used at train stations across Japan, some no longer in use. I am very keen on these, firstly because I love the look of oriental written language (perhaps due simply to my being unfamiliar with it living in a western society). I find that the lines, marks and shapes which make up the Japanese alphabet (and other oriental languages) to seem much more expressive and gestural than the western alphabets. Maybe this is because I cannot actually read it and so am forced to engage with the forms on a purely aesthetic level, something I have neglected in the western alphabet because i understand what it means immediately and inherently, and am therefore not given a chance to consider it's appearance as separate from what it represents.
These stamps were created as souvenirs, each unique to one station and depicting significant landmarks at it's location, which could be collected by tourists in little books. In my opinion they are very aesthetically pleasing and satisfying and if i was travelling around Japan, I would definitely be motivated to collect them.
I have long been a fan of Robert Crumb's work, for several reasons. Firstly, I really like the sort of bristly aesthetic of his drawings and that despite the fact that he has actually had clear 'phases' where his style has changed or evolved, it is always recogniseable as his own. Secondly, I kind of like the fact that he is an incredibly skilled draughtsman who creates technically superb drawings, but uses his talents to create images which have largely perverse and offensive themes, and often contain purposefully low brow humour. I find an ironic comicality in this trait.
I admire his balls to the wall approach to satire, creating work which is so incredibly grotesque in some of its themes (and graphically), and yet remain confident in its ability to satirise popular culture, and often America and its percieved values and patriotism. I think its easy to find his work offensive in a cheap and smutty way, but in the context of its inception (the 'underground comix' movement of which he was such an integral part) it holds up as something truly authentic and important; a voice raised in opposition to America's growing appetite for quick fix culture, tawdry goods and products, and general commercialism.
"Most
of my adult life I had this towering contempt for America." (Robert Crumb)
"As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of
the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn't much like
it. I witnessed the debasement of architecture, and I could see a decline in
the quality of things like comic books and toys, things made for kids. Old
things seemed to have more life, more substance, more humanity in them."
His work is also often self referential or autobiographical, tying together his cynical sense of humour, existential neuroses and self deprecating perspective into a rather scornful analysis of himself and his life. It's as if he is his own psychiatrist. I find it incredible that he puts such detailed accounts of such personal aspects of himself and his life out into the world. It takes real balls to publish that much intimate detail if one is as strange as he is, even if it is comedic, and I know I would never be able to do it myself. This is another reason I applaud his practice.
How he makes work and practical elements of his practice
"I
use the old Strathmore vellum surface paper, which is the best paper you can
get in the Western world for ink line drawing. It has a good, hard surface." (Robert Crumb)
"Throwaway
pens are no good - I never liked them. I've tried them all." (Robert Crumb)
"With
comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every
drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want
all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process." (Robert Crumb)
"Some
things I won't do for any amount of money. Like for instance, there's a couple
of CEOs of very large corporations that offered me lots of money to do special
pictures for them. And I just refused to do that. Even if it was a million
dollars I wouldn't do it." (Robert Crumb)
It seems his work is always self driven, his success therefore all the more impressive in that he always creates work for himself first. This, I believe is what makes it so convincing. There is a definite sense he believes in everything he produces, although on the other hand he is so intensely prolific and just seems to draw impulsively, suggesting he decides what to do with certain work after he's created it. This was the case for many characters he came up with in the 60s (e.g. 'Mr Natural'), a strange new, more cartoonish style born from an LSD induced haze which lasted around two months.
Where does his work exist?
Everywhere. Since he began producing work for the 'Underground Comix' movement in the mid 60s he has not stopped and his work is now highly regarded and in many spheres of the art world. He has subsequently had numerous exhibitions all over the world, two documentaries made about him and even a stage play based on one of his characters, as well as the plethora of comics and books which he himself has produced or which have been put together about him and his work (his most ambitious project perhaps being his illustrated version of the entire Book of Genesis.
I had a massive phase of trying to emulate his densely cross-hatched style in my own work a year or so ago but have since drifted away from trying to do that, I often lack the patience to create work like that and my work would probably have ended up becoming very derivative. In another sense I feel that Crumb's work is so idiosyncratic, both thematically and stylistically, that taking influence from it would always become too obvious and so, whilst he remains one of my favourite illustrators and comic artists, he is one who's presence is felt too strongly for me to follow the example of.
"I often think of the truth like the skin of an onion- you peel it back and what do you find? Another skin. And beneath that, another and another. Truth always has behind it, a more fundamental truth. A prime measure of an artist's work is how "true" it is. A dumb cartoon is empty, without originality. It offers cliches- surface without content. Crumb speaks reality and truth. If you are a discerning Crumb reader, if your interest goes beyond "the dirty parts," then you know him intimately. You know Crumb's life- his happiness, his disasters. You've gone deep inside his brain, into his sex, hate, love, dreams. He lays it all bare. He probes, he delves, he peels back the layers." - Harvey Kurtzman (creator of 'Mad Magazine')
Thoughts
I went to 'Thought Bubble' today and have mixed feelings. The magnitude of the event was impressive however, once entering I found that there actually weren't many stalls which were appealing to me personally. It was interesting to walk around and see so many different things but most of the stuff on display there seemed to be sort of naff superhero/ fantasy comics. In fact, most of the work I really liked on display was all part of the same stall, published by the same publishers - http://www.breakdownpress.com/. I sort of expected that to be the case but maybe not to the extent that it was. I definitely do not think it was worth the ticket price of £18 (£16 pre booked). It seems incredibly pricey to me, especially as one actually buys things there as well.
I think next year I would like to plan it a little better and figure out specific events, talks etc. I might be interested in as maybe then it would make the ticket price worth it. As it stands, I was a bit underwhelmed.
Highlights and things I bought
I did find a few illustrators/ stalls I really liked in amongst all the crap and even bought some things on top of the monstrous ticket price. Korean artist Kim Jung Ji was doing some live drawing and whilst I am not a big fan of his style, he can draw unbelievably well without any reference material or even penciling first so it was interesting to watch him do some drawing and marvel at his technical prowess.
There was a stall there from the publisher's 'Breakdown Press' (as I mentioned before) which had loads of really great stuff for sale. I could have happily bought everything on that stall, most notably the "Window Pane" series by Joe Kessler, the "Treasure Island" series by Connor Willumsen and "Ding Dong Circus", a collection of work by Japanese cartoonist Sasaki Maki, spanning the period from 1967 to '74, which I bought.
I also bought a smaller comic by Stathis Tsemberlidis called 'Neptune's Fungi'. It's a fairly abstract sort of sci-fi themed work with nice minimal drawings and no text. It came a stall put up by http://www.decadencecomics.com/ which is the combined effort of Tsemberlidis and someone else called Lando.
