Friday’s make a nice day to sit back, drink some tea, and look at art. Here are some of my favorites that have crossed my path this last week.
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello is a highly-awarded animated short done in a beautiful silhouette style. For plenty of info, including plot summaries, check out the Wikipedia article.
Directed by director/animator Anthony Lucas, the DVD has a runtime of 26 minutes, which looks to be a very well-spent near-half-hour. You can buy the DVD from their store for $24.95.
(link via Drawn!)
Dennis Brown uses vivid colors and soft lines, but most appealing is how much character and emotion his work portrays. Along with the paintings, he has some first-class sketches to look through, and a book available if you like his work.
(link via Drawn!)
Lines and Colors has been mentioning some really great artists lately. So many, in fact, that it is difficult to keep up. So here’s a list of sorts of artists that appealed to me.
- Jamie Caliri (link via Lines and Colors via Drawn!, actually)
If you haven’t seen Dragon, the wonderful, essentially wordless, animated ad for United Airlines in which a father tucks his son in bed and flies off on the back of a bird to meet with knights at a round table, defeat a fire-breathing dragon and bring home the rewards, you’ve missed the most beautiful 64 seconds of animated television in recent memory.
The drawings were lively, fresh, slightly cartoony but highly rendered and with delightfully realized and very imaginative backgrounds and settings. I was immediately taken with the visual joie de vivre and went home happy with my discovery, but disappointed that I couldn’t carry home a stack of Barbucci albums with my Moebius, Beltran and Gillon.
Grounded in traditional drawing and painting techniques, Dixon now prefers to work entirely digitally. Professionally he does concept art for the gaming industry.
So as not to copy out their entire archives (bear in mind I’m catching up and in the future I’ll ‘appear’ more selective), I also really like: Craig Mullins (pirates!), Gilles Tréhin (autistic savant), and Tsukahara Shigeyoshi (more animation).
If you’re interested in buying some nice art prints:
The Foundation Gallery has some beautiful silkscreen prints for $25-$40 in very limited editions. It’s sad, thematic work involving war, violence, capitalism, and heroism.
Penelope Dullaghan has a lovely thumbnail gallery of her work. She only has a few prints available, as well as a tee shirt and two original paintings, but they’re certainly worth checking out.
If you like creepy pictures of weird children in weirder costumes, you should certainly go check out Misery Children. All the prints are $50, but it’s just what you need if you’ve been looking for art featuring a squid baby in a bear suit with a bluebird.
(prints links via weheartprints)