Graphic Journey Blog

Cutie

This is Honda's EV-N concept electric car which will be unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show next month. It is packed with green technology and lots of other innovative stuff including, secreted away in the passenger door, a unicycle. Now that's what I call 'cool', but I wont, because I hate that word. So let's say smashing!

Beautiful Bunker

This really is a ‘must see’. The Curve Gallery at the Barbican – which is pretty damn cavernous – has been brilliantly transformed by the Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski into the most wonderfully evocative space. A cross between film sets from David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. 

It is an unsettling, eerie and atmospheric space evoking a different emotion in everyone who enters. What we are confronted with is a series of dimly lit spaces and rooms devoid of life. Part wartime bunker, part derelict factory. Decaying, dusty and desolate. 

The sheer mastery of the illusion is breathtaking. Every bit of seemingly monumental concrete and rusting steel is actually made of wood and artificially distressed, exactly like a theatrical set. I have never seen a space so successfully transformed. 

So get down there and experience it for yourself. It’s free and runs until 10^th January 2010. Find out more here.

Eyes wide open

London based photographer Jillian Edelstein is embarking on a rather fun project to dovetail with the introduction of the new Sony Ericsson Satio mobile. Sony have commissioned her to use the Satio’s in- built camera to photograph eyes. But it's not the usual run of celebrities that Edelstein is used to snapping…

No not them, as lovely as they are. This time it’s the likes of you and me. She will be photographing 112 eyes in 12.1 hours at Sony Ericsson’s London store. So if you would like your eye featured as part of this very special project all you have to do is apply online here. The project will take place the first week in December. Sony Ericsson will be streaming the results live on their website. So if you are not lucky enough to be selected keep looking in to see what Jillian will make of it. And to see more of her work click here.

Passed their sell by date?

I have often written about the voice on this blog – awareness of, its use and effectiveness. Well, over the passed week the whole issue of singers in the, shall we say, Autumn/Winter of their years came up in the media. 

The octogenarian crooner Andy Williams was in town recently to plug his book and album. He performed live on the Jonathan Ross show. It was all rather tragic really – a weak quavering voice, straining to hit the high notes a million miles away from the dashingly assured, sweated clad entertainer of the 1970’s and 80’s. And this week saw the release of a Christmas album from no less than Bob Dylan...

The reviews have differed wildly but what is certain is the quality of Dylan’s voice. It is shot to pieces, sounding more like Tom Waits with an inflamed throat - and that’s being generous.

But it can sometimes work. Joni Mitchell, a contemporary of Dylan, had the voice of an angel – clear, pure and pitch perfect. A life of singing, heavy smoking and the natural ageing process has given her voice a patina of experience, which has taken it to another place.  It is very beautiful, as can be heard on the album, Travelogue released in 2002 with wonderful orchestrations by Vince Mendoza

But sometimes I wish the coterie of people surrounding our singing legends would say, ‘I think it’s time to hang up the career’, leaving their legacy of quality intact for us all to cherish.  

Hear for yourself. 

Andy here

Bob was here but  unfortunately YouTube has removed the link, so listen on itunes or Spotify

And listen to Tom Waits singing Silent Night here

Joni here

Think about it

 

Travelling light

There was a time when all you needed was a little pot of Indian ink, a nibbed pen, some Kent or CS10 board, plus your imagination.  The images below (with the exception of one) are from a book I bought back in 1963. Its title - Drawing for Radio Times. It was by R.D. Usherwood who was art editor of the magazine from 1950 to 1960. It was a period when Radio Times was printed letterpress and the finest reproduction screen was only 65dpi.

So simple clarity was the order of the day.

These restrictions produced a plethora of highly individual and beautiful work from a stable of regular illustrators who graced the pages of the magazine. Each week I would cut out and keep the illustrations created by my favourites. I’d copy them, using the techniques that I thought they had used – blotting, scratching, smudging and even using my fingerprints. I was never brave enough to send my offerings to the Radio Times.  Here is an example of my efforts from the early 70's...

These little works of art that appeared in the magazine were there to attract and entice you to the programmes  they were highlighting.

The tradition of using intelligent, and gifted illustrators continued well into the 1970’s under the skilful art directorship of David Driver.  Driver steered the Radio Times into a new era of colour and more sophisticated methods of printing. In the process he introduced not only a large number of new and highly talented illustrators but lashings of  inspiration and suprise. Sadly today the Radio Times is an utter mess – typographically, photographically, journalistically and most of all illustratively.  Instead of creating a unique personality for itself it apes the many listing publications now on the magazine racks. It is a casualty of crass commercialism treating its readers like morons. 

To give you a sampling of the Radio Times in its heyday for  monochrome illustration, here is some work from the 50s and 60s…

 

Jim Russell 

Christopher Chamberlain

Jim Russell 

Robin Jacques 

Leonard Rosomann

Geraldine Spence 

Terence Greer

Barry Wilkinson

Words of wisdom

Whoever wrote this deserves a house point. It lightened a grey day...

Class act

It is rare to go to the cinema and come away being deeply disturbed and moved in equal measures.

But it happened to me last week and I am still turning over the images and dialogue in my mind. The film was Fish Tank directed by Andrea Arnold.  This is her second outing in the world of features – her first being the excellent Red Road.

Arnold follows in the territory trail blazed by the great Ken Loach, the under- belly of British society, but very much from a deeply felt feminist prospective.

Fish Tank centers on the life of Mai, a hardened, angry and brutalized 15 year old who blocks out the grimness of her daily life with alcohol, violence and dance. Living in the transparent world of a high-rise council estate, where we see lives played out by the under privileged inmates, set against a backdrop of music, abuse and deprivation.  Language is reduced to little more than aggressive barking, peppered with extreme expletives, even from Mia’s 8-year-old sister.

The tiny cell like rooms are filled with visual squalor and filth. TV is pumping out a mix of banal celebrity based programmes and endless gyrating dance videos.  The latter being aped by the young girls living on the estate, and seemingly the height of their aspirations. I do not intend to outline the whole film here, as I would urge you to see it. It is a very important piece of British new wave cinema and Arnold has a place at the top table.

It may seem a bizarre juxtaposition to link this film with the highly entertaining Little Miss Sunshine of a couple years back...

But at the heart of that film was the sinister sexualization of very young girls via the seemingly innocent beauty pageants run throughout the USA.  This same trait is evident in Arnold’s film but via the dance routines played out on the council estates copied from the endless diet of pop videos pumped out via MTV style stations.

Arnold’s landscape is educationally barren where the future of the children is destined to reflect their own, mostly single parented, brutalized families.  There is a glimmer of hope in the actions of the Mia, the main protagonist, but only a glimmer. What I was left with was the bleak view of the male species - a horrid predatory creature ready to take advantage at every opening.  A toughly depressing, but nevertheless, essential piece of viewing.

Andrea Arnold's 2005 Oscar winning short film, Wasp is a remakable debut and is clearly a maquette for Fish Tank. It is well worth a view. But have a stiff drink first...

You can view Wasp here

Trailer for Fish Tank click here.  Little Miss Sunshine click here