Helen Musselwhite for Creative Review

Paper Collage by Helen Musselwhite for Creative Review. Top: sketch, bottom: finished work. Images from Creative Review and Helen Musselwhite.

"For this month's issue of CR, illustrator Helen Musselwhite created a charming wildlife scene using nothing but a selection of the latest coloured, metallic and translucent papers."


About her wonderful work in paper Helen Musselwhite says:

"By the use of bold colour, strong graphic line and familiar images I create highly individual and visually appealing pieces of art that make an instant impact. My work has a distinctive hand crafted quality that pays respect to all forms of mid century design, folk and ethnic art, as well as current and future trends.

Each piece combines the hand cutting, folding and scoring of a wide range of papers and card that are further worked on to create patterned and textured surfaces. They are then used to build scenes in box frames which are often complex and consist of many layers. This process means that each item of work is truly individual with no two pieces the same. Influenced by the natural world each piece is manipulated to become an intriguing place, a glimpse into another world of fiction and fairytale."

Public Space Typography

Public Space Typography flickr set. Click on the link to go to the flickr page and see the individual images with explanations.

"Typography traces its origins to the first punches and dies used to make seals and currency in ancient times.

The first known movable type printing artifact is probably the Phaistos Disc, though its real purpose remains disputed. The item dates between 1850 BC and 1600 BC, back to Minoan age and is now on display at the archaeological museum of Heraklion in Crete.

Typography with movable type was separately invented in 11th-century China. Modular metal type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty around 1230. It was independently developed in mid-15th century Europe with the development of specialised techniques for casting and combining cheap copies of letterpunches in the vast quantities required to print multiple copies of texts."


I'm so passionate about found typography and this is just a really great flickr set! (The same person also have a few other flickr sets of found graphics well worth having a look at).

Alberto Korda: A Revolutionary Lens.

Alberto Korda: A Revolutionary Lens. Photographs by Alberto Korda. Edited by Mark Sanders, Cristina Vives. Foreword by Diana Diaz. Steidl, Gottingen, 2007. 440 pp., Illustrated throughout, 13½x10".

"Alberto Diaz Gutiérrez-better known as Alberto Korda-is internationally recognized as the master of revolutionary Cuban photography. His most famous image is his powerful 1960 portrait of Che Guevara, 'Heroic Guerrilla,' which has since become the most reproduced image in the history of photography - though Korda never received any royalties from its reproduction, because he made the photograph for the Cuban newspaper, Revolución.

It is less well known that, prior to the 1959 Revolution, Korda was considered the 'Avedon of Cuba,' a progressive fashion photographer whose portraits of leading Cuban models, such as Norka, graced the covers of fashion magazines around the world. Likewise, his work of the 1970s and 80s, in which he explored underwater photography and also returned to fashion, has been largely neglected.

Alberto Korda: A Revolutionary Lens covers every aspect of Korda's extraordinary output, paying particular attention to his work in fashion, Cuban society and the Revolution. It also includes his extensive documentation of Castro and Che.

All prints have been produced under the supervision of José A. Figueroa, Korda's photographic assistant throughout the 1960s and 70s."

Leira.

Leira. Photographs by Morten Andersen. Hit Me! & Akershus Kunstsenter, Oslo, 2006. 61 pp., various color & b&w illustrations, 10¾x8¼". Limited edition.

"Leira is a river just outside Oslo, where the photographer was born.

This project represents a 2 year photographic romance with the river, nature and the landscape around it.

As such, it is something of a departure for Andersen, whose previous work has had a more distinctly urban feel, often reminiscent of Daido Mariyama and other Japanese street photographers.

The limited edition is housed in a simple white paper slipcase, signed and numbered by the artist and includes an unsigned 7x9 inch RC gelatin silver photograph of a river landscape."


A "2 year photographic romance with the river, nature and the landscape around it" from a city-focused photographer really struck a cord with me.

I'm very much a city person, but with a profound kinship and feeling of spirituality towards nature.

The colour palette, the light, the feeling of texture and spirituality in these photographs are simply breathtaking I think.

The Talented Chicken.

The Talented Chicken. By Parisa Mahmoudi. Parisa Mahmoudi, 2009. Unpaged, numerous illustrations. Images from and more images here.

"The story is about an insistent mother hen, who is determined to push her chick to sing, to fly, to swim - while ignoring the fact that it is only a chicken."

I would love to see more of this sweet book! It's truly beautifully illustrated and the story is clearly communicated and understood even for those of us who doesn't speak Persian. A reminder of how similar we all are across the culture barriers...

Nine.

Nine. Photographs by Josef Hoflehner. Text by Francis Hodgson. Most Press, Wels, 2008. 96 pp., 74 duotone illustrations., 12x13". Signed copies available.

"Josef Hoflehner's ninth book features his recent work from Japan, India, Canada and United States.

[Hoflehner] brings freshness and originality to objects often photographed before - for this book he captured some of the most spectacular places, including the Taj Mahal, New York City, Niagara Falls and Florida Keys, among others.

'Nine' opens with an introduction by Francis Hodgson, Head of Photographs at Sotheby's."


I like the architectural shapes of some of these images (something I'm very fond of generally).

I get along without you very well.

I get along without you very well. With Chat Baker. (Link to clip from Karolina).

"Chesney Henry "Chet" Baker Jr. (born Yale, Oklahoma, December 23, 1929 - died Amsterdam, Netherlands May 13, 1988) was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhorn player and singer.

Specializing in relaxed, even melancholy music, Baker rose to prominence as a leading name in cool jazz in the 1950s. Baker's good looks and smoldering, intimate singing voice established him as a promising name in pop music as well.

But his success was badly hampered by drug addiction, particularly in the 1960s, when he was imprisoned. He died in 1988 after falling from a hotel window."


I was feeling this very much yesterday, but I think it might actually be the most perfect music for this Sunday. Me and my vintage gold espresso cups are enjoying it very very much! Hoping you will too...

Paper Cut Maps by Famille Summerbelle

London Map (Bright Turquoise) and Paris Map (Bright Pink). By Famille Summerbelle. Printed on 270gsm embossed white paper. Based on an original paper cut by Famille Summerbelle. Printed in Paris. A2 format (42cm x 59.4cm).

"The name Summerbelle is an amalgam of our two family names and the French ‘Famille’ is just a simple but meaningful nod to Julie’s nationality!

What matters more is what we are trying to achieve. Our designs and accessories are created to achieve a delicate balance in decorating a child’s room: an inspiring and reassuring space for the child which retains the creative, elegant warmth that we try to achieve throughout our homes. A room for everyone."


These wonderful maps - prints made of original paper cuts by Famille Summerbelle - are just sensational.

I adore the attention to details, the colour choices, and the idea of it! So, so well done! (found via Oh Joy!)

Let's Let It Happen

Image from le love.

"Afraid of the dark, my poor young thing,
who met spirits of another kind,
among the white-clad ever noticing
others of evil mind,
now I want to sing gentle songs to you,
they deliver from fear, cramp, coercion rude.
They do not ask that the evil should rue,
They do not ask for the fight of the good.
Then you shall know that all that lives
deep inside is of the same kind.
As trees and plants it can grow hesitantly,
by its own law upwards inclined.
And trees may be felled and flowers be broken
and branches die with their strength dried up,
but the dream is concealed - wills to be awoken -
in every living drop of sap."

My Poor Young Thing... by Karin Boye. From 'Karin Boye: Complete Poems'.

Drawn Covers

Covers drawn by John Paul Thurlow.

"This is an hommage, an attempt to create cover art for every great magazine I own (+ a few I wish I owned). It's never a straight crib and it's not about perfection, the source magazines are simply a playground for my imagination...

Covering covers lets me combine some of my favourite things; portraiture, pencil sketching, typography, graphic design, and ideas - there's usually one in there somewhere.

The occasional photos illustrate the Covers process: I draw A3 & A4 sections which I sometimes collage or retouch in Photoshop.

The COVERS typeface is Akka (a nod to Carlo Scarpa) redrawn by hand, of course..."


I'm so impressed with this project (found via style bubble) - it's for sure something I wish I would be good enough at drawing to do myself.

Papercuts.

Papercuts. A book of Paper craft. By Matthew Shlian. Matthew Shlian, 2009. 68pp., full color illustrations, 8,5x11". Includes CD with PDF files of each design + blank templates and bonus characters. Signed copies available. Images from Matt Shilian's blog.

"As a paper engineer my work is rooted in print media, book arts and commercial design.

Beginning with an initial fold, a single action causes a transfer of energy to subsequent folds, which ultimately manifest in drawings and three dimensional forms.

I use my engineering skills to create kinetic sculpture which have lead to collaborations with scientists at the University of Michigan. We work on the nanoscale, translating paper structures to micro origami. Our investigations extend to visualizing cellular division and solar cell development. Researchers see paper engineering as a metaphor for scientific principals; I see their inquiry as basis for artistic inspiration.

In my studio I am a collaborator, explorer and inventor. I begin with a system of folding and at a particular moment the material takes over. Guided by wonder, my work is made because I cannot visualize its final realization; in this way I come to understanding through curiosity."


This is an interesting guy, and I really like this book! Found via core 77.

paper dolls

Connie Francis Paper Doll.

"Connie Francis (born December 12, 1938) is an American pop singer best known for several international hit songs including "Who's Sorry Now?", "Lipstick on Your Collar", "Where the Boys Are", and "Stupid Cupid". She topped the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart on three occasions with "Everybody's Somebody's Fool", "My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own" and "Don't Break the Heart That Loves You"."

This is the "full uncut set" of the original Connie Francis Paper Doll (available to download and print out to play with).

Starting the week off with an old school paper doll with some killer outfits is a good idea... (found via emma veronica johansson)

William Henry Fox Talbot.

William Henry Fox Talbot. Text by Geoffrey Batchen. Phaidon, London, 2008. 128 pp., 56 color illustrations, 8½x5½".

"The father of modern photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) developed the process by which photographic images could be reproduced, but he has yet to be sufficiently appreciated as a photographer in his own right.

Over his photographic career he made more than 5,000 images which included fascinating pictures of his home Lacock Abbey, portraits of his family and friends, and still-lifes of botanical specimens, cloth and household objects.

A key intellectual figure of the nineteenth century working in science, mathematics, astronomy, politics and archaeology, he is arguably the most important figure in the invention of photography. His practice established many of the medium’s most familiar genres and he was devoted to the the advancement of photography, publishing the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, in 1844-46 to reveal the potential of the medium to a wider audience.

This monograph features many of Talbot’s best-known landscapes made around Lacock Abbey and some of the first negatives of the ever made, but it also includes lesser-known and previously unpublished work that reveals the extraordinary diverse scope of his work. His photographs reflect and embody the social and cultural issues of the time, but they are also fascinating, often beautiful, images that are still engaging today.


Geoffrey Batchen is a prolific author, curator and editor and a specialist in the theory and history of photography. He has written a number of books including a detailed analysis of photography’s emergence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997) and a collection of essays on photography and electronic culture, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001). His book Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance accompanied an exhibition of vernacular photographs that he curated for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2004, and which travelled on to Iceland, England and the United States. He teaches the history of photography at CUNY Graduate Center in New York, having previous taught at the University of New Mexico and the University of California, San Diego."

Morning.

Images from emma nygren's blog and coffre à trésors.

"When the morning's sun steals through the window-pane,
happy and cautious,
like a child who wants to surprise
early, early on a festive day -
then I stretch full of growing exultation
my open arms to the coming day -
for the day is you,
and the light is you,
the sun is you,
and the spring is you,
and all of beautiful, beautiful
waiting life is you!"

Morning by Karin Boye. From 'Karin Boye: Complete Poems'.

Lets be very Swedish about it...

A Camp playing on Allsång på Skansen.

A Camp being slightly subversive on the most Swedish of programs.

I might be the only one who doesn't get this program, but I've always had a fondness for this song - and this is how you do midsummer dress up (hat off to Nina Persson).

Lets start the weekend off being very Swedish about it...

bee hives

Images from bee hives' flickr.

"Sun Light Filters through morning-fresh air. Through breezy linen curtains; it washes mutely over the room. Across the pale wood floors, onto her bare shoulder, it brushes her cheek. Illuminate her silhouette. A young child's laughter echoes from the other room. The day is new. And all is before us."

Description of the perfume Blanche from Byredo.

Lets shield ourselves from the rain and bleakness outside, lets pretend it's tea and strawberries and summer and sun...

Heavy Light. Recent Photography and Video from Japan.

Heavy Light. Recent Photography and Video from Japan. Text by Noriko Fuku, Linda Nochlin, Christopher Phillips, Akiko Otake. Numerous contributing artists. Steidl / ICP, Gottingen, 2008. 312 pp., 135 illustrations, 8x9".

"Japanese contemporary artists have mined some distinctive territory in the past decade or two - from the Superflat movement, to the referencing of traditional art objects like scrolls or contemporary pop phenomena like manga. Within these conventions, certain themes continually surface - nature in conflict with the manmade world, costuming and the search for personal identity, and the child as cultural icon.

Heavy Light identifies these themes as they are evidenced in recent Japanese photo-based art, and examines how they are reshaping Japanese tradition.

This volume is published in conjunction with the major Spring 2008 exhibition at New York’s International Center of Photography, which includes a diverse selection of artists: Makoto Aida, Naoya Hatakeyama, Naoki Kajitani, Hiroh Kikai, Midori Komatsubara, Yukio Nakagawa, Asako Narahashi, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Tomoko Sawada, Risaku Suzuki, Miwa Yanagi, Kenji Yanobe and Masayuki Yoshinaga.

Also featured in this volume are extensive interviews with the artists, offering accounts of their working methods and their thoughts on the influence of contemporary art on Japanese culture during the last several decades of rapid change. In addition, art historian Linda Nochlin and writer Akiko Otake provide invaluable essays."

wells&more

wells&more book flips two ways. By dn&co.

This book "utilises the mechanic of cutting every other page by 5mm so that when flipped in different directions the pages viewed are either graphic content or photography".

The wells&more book was developed by dn&co and the photography is by Satoshi Minakawa. I found this video over at swissmiss.

Picturing Eden.

Picturing Eden. Essay by Deborah Klochko. Introduction by Alison Nordström. Numerous contributing photographers. Steidl, Gottingen, 2006. 192 pp., 160 color illustrations, 8¾x11".

"Over the course of the last five decades, American attitudes toward the natural world, and our place in it, have see-sawed drastically.

The launch of the mid-20th-century environmental movement coincided with the rapid expansion of automobile-stoked suburban sprawl; nature worship swam into the mainstream alongside headlong consumption and disposability.

Our desire to experience nature has led us to wilderness preservation and destination resorts, exotic game hunting reserves and ivory-billed woodpecker mania, ecotourism and volcanoes that erupt on a timetable.

This checkered consciousness is neatly reflected in the George Eastman House exhibition Picturing Eden. The catalogue features an introductory essay by museum director Anthony Bannon, and an illuminating conversation between the show's curator, Deborah Klochko, fellow curator Merry Foresta, author Rebecca Solnit and professor of landscape architecture Louise Mozingo.

Klochko has included the work of 37 artists, trying to capture the range of feelings that the Eden story evokes in us in the early 21st century. It's a generous guest list, featuring some well-known names, and many less familiar. Best of all, the show is truly global, with Europeans, Asians and New Zealanders represented, as well as the expected American points of view.

Can nature ever be taken on its own terms by human beings? Some of the photographers are plainly of the opinion that human nature is nature, that we have an innate, intuitive need to identify with other forms of life. Others regard nature as a crawly miasma, filled with guts, bugs, pain and unknown threats. The garden, the human-decreed "natural" space, is an age-old, metaphorical battlefield, representing everything from the relationship between nature and culture, to spiritual fulfillment, to the separation from God. The various imagemakers use the garden as a backdrop for alienation, elegy and speculation about human hubris; interpretation is left very much up to us."

Review by Phil Harris from the photo-eye Booklist fall 2006.

Found Paper Journal.

Found Paper Journal. By Rowan Morrison. Rowan Morrison, 2009. 128pp., numerous paper qualities, 7.5x5".

"The 3rd edtion of our popular Found Paper Journal has a newly designed cover, yet stays true to its sleek, minimalist and practical aesthetic.

The FPJ is 7.5" tall and 5" wide and features about 128 randomly-assorted pages collected from old accounting ledgers, graph paper, legal pads, letterhead stationery, sheet music, grammar-school writing paper, loose leaf, Braille, job application forms, certificates, and vintage papers of all styles.

The covers feature sleek, rounded corners and are made of sturdy chipboard embossed with an new scissors illustration by Narangkar Glover, and a hand-stamped logo on the back. Perfect bound with animal-free glue. The paper assortment is unique for each individual book so no two journals are entirely alike."


I found this wonderful journal over at Book By Its Cover and as I wrote there I too - like Julia - used to gather together different forms and papers as a child and make little things with them (in my case books).

I still have an enormous soft-spot for any kind of paper or forms and collect them to this day to use as inspiration or in my work.

I guess it might therefore not come as a complete surprise if I say that I just love this journal! Hope you like it too...

A Buddhist Fantasy.

Image from Dear Nike (1 Henry Moore 2 Herbert Bayer).

"Unlocked is the world's copper gate.
High in its gate-vault here I stand,
and what I see is infinitely great,
and no sight is so without end.

However deep I look, however far,
my gaze receives no help beneath.
All that I know exists no more -
not great, not small - not life, not death.

One single step on pathways free,
and for me all return is closed...
Why do you quake? Up, follow me!
For the universe's copper gate is forced!"

A Buddhist Fantasy by Karin Boye. From 'Karin Boye: Complete Poems'.

MoMA: Stage Pictures: Drawing for Performance.

Stage Pictures: Drawing for Performance. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. SundayArts Choice segment. With Jodi Hauptman, curator in the department of drawings. Audio and video, 3min 20sec, 2009.

"Visual artists have long been interested in the stage as an arena for experimentation, and their interdisciplinary collaborations have immeasurably enriched the history of modern art.

Stage Pictures presents a selection of designs for dance, theater, and opera from MoMA’s drawings collection. The exhibition highlights set and costume studies, as well as more abstract suggestions of light and mood, spanning a century of visual experimentation on the stage - from the total theaters of the Ballets Russes and the Bauhaus, to Lincoln Kirstein’s formation of an American ballet company, to Pop performances and contemporary epic opera.

These works demonstrate how artists have used drawing strategies to, as one critic put it, “anticipate an event”: interpreting texts to create dramatic mises-en-scène, imagining bodies in space and motion, and manipulating illumination and shadow.

Featured artists include Fernand Léger, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Marc Chagall, Diego Rivera, and Jim Dine.

In this SundayArts Choice segment, Jodi Hauptman, curator in the department of drawings, presents the highlights from this exhibit."


The exhibition Stage Pictures: Drawing for Performance will run at the MoMA until Sept 7th (2009).

Like soap bubbles to the sky

Image from coffre à trésors (uncredited).

It's really damp outside today so I thought we'd put some happiness on that. Beautiful, light, colourful umbrellas flying like soap bubbles to the sky!

The wonderful photograph I found on one of my absolute favourite photo journals/blogs coffre à trésors (unfortunately uncredited).

UPDATE:
Lovely coffre à trésors informed me the image is not from the ALTER/MODE exhibition, which I initially thought, and unfortunately she can't remember where from.

Hopefully she will remember (or someone else knows?) as don't really like posting images without credit...