Rethinking the Colour Wheel
When we’re taught the colour wheel in art class, we learn the 3-primary colour wheel. Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colours, orange, green, and violet are the secondary colours. This is where we get complementary (opposite) colours as…
Picture Book Report
Got some time on your hands? Oh, good. One of the sites I like to visit each day is the Art Cake, an excellent art blog that posts stuff pretty much daily – today one of the posts featured the…
Nicolas Delort
I happened to stumble across the work of Nicolas Delort, a Parisian illustrator. He works in a variety of styles and media but I was most impressed by his work with this scratchboard-y technique – very time-consuming and requiring a…
James Rosenquist F-111
So hey, I’m back from New York! On an artistic level my visit to the MoMA was unquestionably the high point, not only because they have a number of my favourite modernist art works on display, but for the current…
New Yorker Cover Contest
Françoise Mouly is, amongst other things, the art director for the New Yorker. Earlier this year she started a companion blog to her book, Blown Covers, a book of rejected New Yorker covers. It’s taken on a life of its own…
The New York Earth Room
If you are familiar with New York, then you already know that Soho is the kind of neighbourhood filled with nooks and crannies where the oddest things can turn up. If you go to 141 Wooster, ring the buzzer and…
Maxime Bruneel
Maxime Bruneel’s work is a lot of fun. Hand-drawn typography, surreal animated sequences that flow into one another, flashing colours… what’s not to like? Unless you get seizures, I suppose. Looking through the video on his site I fell in love…
Arthur Rackham Toes
I would be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard of Arthur Rackham. Quite possibly the most famous English illustrator of the early 20th century, he illustrated dozens of books in a variety of styles. My personal favourites are Alice’s Adventures in…
Happy Father’s Day – Max Ernst, “Pieta” or “Revolution by Night”
Happy Father’s Day! There is some irony in posting about Max Ernst’s portrait of his father in “Pieta” or “Revolution by Night” (1923). For one thing, Ernst thought his father was an idiot. Take it as you will, this definitive…
The Dot and the Line
The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics was one of the first cartoons I ever saw that made me go “wow, how about that”. I was a kid at the time and kids are pretty hard to really…
