Recently in Art Category

  Frank Frazetta began working in the comic industry at the age of 15 back in 1944. That began a huge career as a comic artist doing characters like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Lil' Abner and Little Annie Fanny. You'd think that would be enough but he went on to become one of, if not, the most recognizable fantasy artist in the last fifty years. As book cover artist he defined the style of Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. Indeed, his influence on sword and sorcery and planetary romance is extraordinary, even seminal. He has become the leading fantasy poster artist and many of his paintings are instantly recognized as classics. Originals sell for hundred of thousands.

  It's easy to understand Frazetta isn't to everyone's taste with his double Y males in loin cloths and nubile women of heaving bosom and curvy hip, but you have to admit his place in popular culture and admire his turn of the brush. Besides, Frazetta didn't want you to take his work all too seriously. Look at the Ralph Bakshi and Frazetta's film Fire and Ice, it's brimming with gusto cheese and no apologies. He may have fallen out of favour as the world's most popular poster artist but people were starting to get him again. That's why at the time of his death, May 10 age 82, his work is entering a revival. He's going to be around for a long time. Frazetta forever.

About a yearish ago the Street Fighter Tribute art book came out as part of the celebrations of the games 21st anniversay. It was a cool book and a big success.

Since then the same guys have come out with a tribute book for the another game called Darkstalkers. As an art book Darkstalkers Tribute is as cool and groovy as Street Fighter Tribute, even better.

Darkstalkers? I had not heard of Darkstalkers. I know I'm not a console game guru, but I sure as hell know Street Fighter. Why not Darkstalkers?

However, there was a member of the Planet crew who was thrilled at such a tribute and she encouraged me to take the art of Darkstalkers as seriously as the Street Fighter.

I'm glad I did, but I was still no more enlightened to what Darkstalkers actually was. So I asked.

Of all the hot commercial "lowbrow" artists today I strongly suspect James Jean would have the fastest growing following. And going by his super extensive portfolio you'd wonder if he's not the hardest working. Regardless, his growing popularity and stature as the illustrator of looking through the groovy darkly is well established.

Originally from Taiwan James Jean graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001 at the age of 23 and it didn't take him long at all to become a regular cover artist for DC Comics, particularly the Vertigo line, particularly for the comics Fables and Umbrella Academy. And from there it didn't take him long at all to start garnering awards and a wider notoriety.

 

 

 

Having accepted commissions from the likes of Rolling Stone, Atlantic Records and Nike James Jean's biggest step into the world of commercial art and design has most likely been his extensive work in 2008 for the fashion label Prada. He developed a complex but unique look that they've very much taken to heart for their signature range. James Jeans' work is also featured in stunning ad campaigns, billboards and shop layouts themselves. And it all seems to culminate in this beautiful animated short that stands entirely alone as a work to appreciate seperate to its marketing purposes, which of course is quite clever branding from a marketing perspective. 

 

The most remarkable thing about his commercial success is also the very reason for it. And that is his exotic style and technique. Cause though he has used classic interpretations and explored the images of mythology and fairytale his personal interpretation has developed into something incredibly refreshing for the commercial world. And his prolific and fast working ability must make him a boon.

Thanks to his ever-growing popularity his work is being compiled and published. Sadly, his portfolios Process Recess 1 & 2 are no longer available. The Hallowed Seam (PR 3) just came out but is quite different to his earlier portfolios, instead being a collection of studies and such that appear to come from his sketch pad or moleskine. More like his earlier portfolios is Kindling: 12 Removable Prints.

 

   

Very cute is his postcard book XOXO: Hugs and Kisses. But my favourite publication would have to be Fables Covers: The Art of James Jean Vol. 1. Not just it is the best collection of his art, even when restricted to covers he did for the Vertigo comic series, but that each work is shown in various stages along with commentary on the process.

Fables Covers is already hard to get, though I hope for a new printing in the near future. But it does seem James Jean's printed material quickly becomes things of rare beauty. But don't to fret too much. There is clearly a long and illustrious future for James Jean. And even though he has stopped doing the Fables covers I think we'll see more of his haunting mythologies and landscapes of the quixotic. And his following will only continue to grow.

Filling in the Blanc

It is hard to imagine that someone else could take Mel Blanc's crown as the voice-over king. Blanc was born on 30th May 1908 and after a successful career on radio he first voiced Porky Pig in 1937. He kept doing voices for cartoons till his death on July 1989.

It would be crazy to try to list all his achievements as a voice actor so here's a partial list of characters we can attribute his voice to; Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Yosimite Sam, Pepe Le Pew, Sylvester the Cat, Foghorn Leghorn, Henery Hawk, Marvin the Martian, Elmer Fudd, Wile E Coyote, Speedy Gonzales, Tasmanian Devil, Barney Rubble, Dino, Mr. Spacely, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy, Deputy Droop-a-Long Coyote, Captain Caveman and Twiki (from Buck Rogers).

And if you know some of these voices (and you should) it is amazing to think that the voice of Tweety is the voice of Foghorn Leghorn and the voice of Speedy Gonzales is the voice of Barney Rubble

It is the hundredth anniversary of the man who was both Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, including when they appeared in Who Framed Roger Rabbit in '89. It is fitting to remember one of the most important figures ever in the history of cartoons.

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Birds Of Britain

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Wild Things Set Free

Where the Wild Things Are was first published in 1963 and from there has become perhaps the most beloved children's picture book. Certainly, it remains a fond favourite for children who've become adults and reread those ten special sentences to their own children.

But, it's not just those ten sentences that make this book so extraordinary, it is the images that famed designer / illustrator Maurice Sendak has put with them. They may seem simple, well-drafted children book images but they go beyond that. Those simple lines evoke a rich world and dynamic actions, actions parents and children enact as they share the story together.

Being a wild thing. Grrarr!

If you are like me, you are waiting for the Spike Jonze directed, David Eggers written adaptation. But while you are waiting you can check out Terrible Yellow Eyes. It is a site for displaying the works of artists and designers paying tribute to Sendak's original work. Gory Godbey is the administrator of the site and he's doing an excellent job as his tribute is shared by many a talented artist.

Do visit Terrible Yellow Eyes not just if you are a fan of Sendak but if you appreciate modern pop art, cartoon art and the kind of stuff Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose like to display.  

The pop art scene is at an all time high. Perhaps not in the world of city centre art galleries, but within the realm that divides the academic and the commercial it is rocketing along. Cool exhibitions and groovy art books are the standard. So too are the prints and vinyl toys. It's a happening thing. Something I'm greatly appreciating.

Two artists finding good niches, if not prominence in this current rich arena are Tara McPherson and Mark Ryden. Their work is rather different from each other's but they seem to easily sit together. They comfortably share the same room of pop-surrealism. Granted, they sit at different ends of the room, but all the same they share the space.

McPherson works more in the style of poster art and print making, using strong contrasts in colours, keeping her compositions clutter free, her lines simple, eloquent, being very aware of her two dimensional surface to play on her three-dimensional shapes. Tara McPherson was born in '76 and grew up in Los Angeles and other parts of California. Her skills developed out of the world of animation, comics and poster gigs. Exhibitions and commissioned work for publication was then a not-so-simple hop, skip and jump.

Ryden follows the path of traditional painting and the techniques of fine art. He has a craftsman's discipline but dances all along the line of painting history from Heronimous Bosh to Diego Rivera. Mark Ryden was born in '63 in Oregon, studied in Pasadena and lives in California. His influence is classical symbolic art and pop ephemera and the cultures that surrounded such art, from secret societies teen idols, from old toys to Freud. The language of dreams seems to have a lot to do with his texts and subtexts. Ryden's career has been pretty much as an exhibition artist but his works naturally pops up everywhere. You can't have a book or magazine article about pop surrealism without a reference to Ryden.

The notable contrast between McPherson and Ryden, besides the obvious one of styles, is their manner of humour. Both are humourous artists, both are playing on the idea of art as self-important forms of philosophy. But Ryden employs a dark irony. He has cute animals and sweet little doll-like children, but in the context of the worlds they inhabit, they look creepy, disturbing, and even violent in some hidden ritual kind of way. Ryden plays on a paranoia that under the surface is the sinister, but he also shows that underneath can be the transcendent, albeit through some ritualised symbolic status. Regardless, the works become mesmerising for all of it. You are compelled to seek for secret messages.

Tara McPherson puts her heart on her sleeve. Though that heart can more often look like a hole through the chest.  Like Ryden she plays with dream, but hers are waking dreams, fantasy dreams that touch on many aspects of the emotional life, especially of the female spirit. She touches on sad themes and angry themes, hopes and fears, but there's no alternate meaning, she keeps it up front. To me most of her work is about searching, learning, finding truth where all is illogical. All with a charming veneer of honesty and cuteness, but not Ryden's creepy kind.

I really like both their pre-rendering drafting techniques and their pencil studies and preliminaries. I fully understand why those works are cherished like their finished paintings. I also like how they both explore outside the two-dimensional medium and have done sculptures and vinyl toys. Their art worlds are wanting to be more intertexual and interactive.

Tara McPherson's work has found a bit more of a commercial home over Ryden's, appearing in Vertigo comics and magazine illustrations. Still her exhibitions are very successful and she's about to come out with a second book Lost Constellations, after the first, Lonely Heart, hit the mark. Her art is also very much at home adorning journals and diaries. But I find her Somewhere Under the Rainbow Coloring Kit exceptionally cool. I love the whole packaging from colouring book with crayons and a clear plastic schoolbag nicely decorated.

Ryden's work has gone more in the direction of prints and very exclusive art books. Too exclusive in my mind. Still, we have his Bunnies and Bees Micro Portfolio #3 of fourteen prints. And his art books Fushigi Circus and The Tree Show. Otherwise his work will always make appearances in new pop modern art anthologies like The Upset: Young Contemporary Art and the annual Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art.

The New Year has begun.

But before we start to look forward, I want to have a glance back. Planet Blog started in September of 2008 and during that time I tried to cover topical, cool and groovy pop cultural moments. Favourites seem to be the ones about The Phantom, The Day of the Dead, Errol Flynn, War of the Worlds, Banksy, Philip K Dick and Bettie Page.

However, I missed some things because they were before the blog began or I just couldn't fit them in. For instance, I would like to have written about the 100th Anniversary of Wind in the Willows, one of the most endearing works of literature.

I would have lamented the passing of Roy Scheider. Amongst all his many films he was best known as Sheriff Brody from Jaws, but with that amazing performance in All That Jazz, he showed he was one of the last great leading man character actors. I'd have acknowledged the great b-movie actress Beverly Garland who had a long, successful career but will be remembered by me for her strong performances in '50s cult classics like Not of This Earth and It Conquered the World.

I would have saluted Arthur C Clarke, his remarkable contribution to science fiction and the bridging of art and science, and of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I would have expressed my regret at the tragic loss of two writers; David Foster Wallace, a master of irony in fiction and non-fiction and his major tome Infinite Jest, and Tom Disch, a significant writer of allegorical literature, satire, essays and poetry. Disch especially deserved a wider audience than he had during his life. I hope both only grow in stature. I'd especially like to see Disch's cult classics Camp Concentration and 334 contunie to garner a receptive audience. His children's book The Brave Little Toaster will forever be a classic.

I would have done a nice spread on the art of Dave Stevens, creator of The Rocketeer and the first major artist to seek to immortalize Bettie Page (his work does appear in the Bettie Page post). I'd have a final salute to Ollie Johnston, the last of the great Disney animators who worked on Pinocchio, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Bambi. And I would have done a spectacular showreel of the amazing work by special effects artist Stan Winston. Stan gave us the Predator, the Alien Queen, the Terminator, the Jurassic Park dinosaurs and innumerous effects and creatures ending with the Iron Man suit just before his unexpected death.

I have received some nice feedback (all of it welcome) for the topics and artists covered and the attitude Planet Blog takes, but I have been amused by it being referred to as a bit morbid with its "Death of the Week". I'm afraid that probably won't change while humanity has yet to achieve immortality, but I do try to make my obits works of salutation and celebration of cool dudes and dudettes and to pay tribute to remarkable works of sub-cult-alternate-general pop culture.

Enough looking back, time to look forward, or at least to the here and now; there's plenty to write about, plenty to cover. We've got a whole year a head of us full of neat stories and images.

So, I guess the best thing to do is to get on with it.

Robin Pen

Street Fighter began in the arcades of Japan 21 years ago and has since become not just the most famous fighting game of them all but the most recognizable game ever. It's still going strong despite all the competition. You have to admit, that's not a bad run. I have to admit, I haven't played an awful lot of it.

But over the years it has been ever present in my popular consciousness. The arcade, buzz-bop sounds, the anime characters, the crazy game music are easy for me to recall. I also remember the Jean Claude VanDamme movie, but I recall little except Raoul Julia hovering about in his awesome General Bison outfit and mincing the furniture. I also quite enjoyed the animated Street Fighter 2.

Best of all was Jackie Chan's Street Fighter skit in City Hunter.

This year Street Fighter turned 20 in the US and that has been celebrated. In October, Capcom, the creators of Street Fighter, published Street Fighter Tribute; original art depicting characters from the games in various scenes, poses and actions. I guess you can call it a fan art tribute, but the artists are largely professional and all are talented. They bring a nice cross section of styles to the already well designed Street Fighter look, quite nice for any manga, character or low brow art appreciator. All are poster worthy works and are most successful at capturing the pop-myth-iconography of the Street Fighter universe.

It reminds us that Street Fighter isn't just a landmark in interactive entertainment but is a pop cultural institution. Its influence outside the arcades and home consoles is undeniable. Not just the massive influence on game design, but present in graphic design, sequential art, subculture iconography, the development of a swag of Saturday morning cartoons, fashion and even music. Basically, if Capcom stopped producing Street Fighter games tomorrow, its legacy would be influential for a very long time to come.

In short, Street Fighter forever!

For those who need an introduction, Banksy is deservedly the most famous or notorious (what you will) street artist in the world today. Though he started his exploits in the streets of England, he is of international renown for works in such locations as New Orleans, Paris, Los Angeles, Melbourne and the Israeli West Bank. He's also a master prankster and pretty much the figurehead of anarchic protest art. I have no doubt he has earned his place in art history. His book Wall and Piece is one of the coolest and cleverest art books you can get today.

There's no question of his technical abilities and his versatility as an artist. How he can take another work of art and redefine  it to be seen in a contemporary, socio- political viewpoint means he's an appropriator in the most skilled and respected sense. But what I love the most about his work is the humour. It is sun-  bleached wall dry with a strong sense of the charmingly wicked (I love his rats). I like how he makes a point of his work enhancing a location and never detracting. I know that not all would agree on that, especially municipal councils.

And somehow, Banksy makes that a message in itself. The real risk of the work being removed adds a different sense of permanency to the pieces. Don't just pass them, stop and look, really look, soak them in; keep them in the memory, for tomorrow they may well be gone.

Of course much of his work is stenciled and can be repeated elsewhere and any new work is photographed immediately and extensively. There is an irony to the fact they are regarded as graffiti, as disposable when other mediums make his work so very permanent. I don't think that escapes Banksy, and he even makes fun of it. 

Banksy is going very strong right now with new things appearing all over the place. Recently he open the Village Pet Store And Charcoal Grill in New York and it is a very clever, disturbingly funny and quite poignant place to visit. I don't know if he's a vegetarian or not, but he certainly doesn't want people to be deliberately ignorant of what they like to eat. It's one of the best works of prankster art in recent years.

All this means he bears close scrutiny and further investigation, not as a notorious vandal, but as the leading light to this most recent and exciting art movement. The first real book to discuss him is Banksy's Bristol: Home Sweet Home by Steve Wright. Banksy's home city is Bristol and it's a happening place cultural wise. Banksy is clearly at home there, being the place he developed his talents and coming back to visit from time to time. I suspect Bristol is secretly proud of him and I think they should be.

Hi-Fructose is an "Under the Counter Culture" quarterly magazine presenting subversive art or what we like to call lowbrow. Hi-Fructose Vol. 9 is out and, as you would expect, is brimming with glorious works "alternative to the norm".

At first it looks very similar to the also cool Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, but Hi-Fructose has less emphasis on commercial style design and more on individualistic art. Indeed, they are different enough that they compliment each other and both are equally recommended. But it feels a bit more of an event when a new issue of Hi-Fructose arrives.

It seems to celebrate the artists more richly and push the envelope of pop-surrealism and individualistic arts a little bit further. It feels almost a little more pure. It also uses high quality paper and printing. Hi-Fructose tries to be the magazine as work of visual art in itself.

A minor frustration about Hi-Fructose as apposed to Juxtapoz is that back issue become rare very quickly. I   guess that adds to the excitement of a new issue, but means newcomers cannot go back and see what new and exciting art has been presented. And I'm sure that's the very reason for the forthcoming Hi-Fructose Collected, a selection from the first four volumes.

Getting back to Juxtapoz, though dedicated to the more lowbrow end of art it tries to have broader appeal by including design, street arts and cultural aspects. In its earlier days it was more like Hi-Fructose in content and attitude.

I think they like where they've gone, but I think they can miss the old days just a little. Perhaps in response to this they just published Juxtapoz Illustration, a showcase of the current crop of quality pop surrealists with galleries of their works.

As an art book of lowbrow it's as good as they come. It's also an excellent guide to who's doing what's hot in contemporary graphic arts. They've also published Juxtapoz Tattoo, but I'll talk about that another time.