Chris ware: This American Life 11:38

 

A little gem for you today…

Ira Glass and Chris Ware work together on this episode of the radio show “This American Life”, making it a very special episode indeed. Ware did hundreds of drawings, resulting in a 22-minute story with sound and images, about a little boy who’s obsessed with old buildings that are being demolished: Lost Buildings.

 

 

More info and DVD version here.

Comics and Jazz: Louis Joos 12:09

 

 

Louis Joos is the master of moody jazz comics.

He was born in Auderghem (Belgium) in 1940 and is now a veteran comic artist who is perhaps not very well known to a large audience but most definitely has had his influence on a younger generation.

Although he did go to art school (The academy of fine arts in Brussels), he didn’t find what he was looking for there and only later managed to “find his groove” by cultivating an attraction towards different artistic fields: cinema, on one hand, but more importantly: jazz music!

About his time in school he said:

 

‘Drawing is asking yourself many questions. And at the ACA (= academy), I didn’t find any answer to it. Tapestry teachers would give us old-fashioned and desperate illustration lessons. So, I had the feeling that I was learning nothing on the technical point of view as well as on the human point of view. To me, drawing is not just a gesture but rather a mentality.’

 

To make a living he worked as an illustrator for educational books but his career really started when he sent his first comics to the French publishing house Futuropolis.

 

 

In some of his earlier work he tried using color…

 

 

Bit of course, he is best known for his rough and energetic black and white drawings…

 

 

Joos’ comics do not always have the most thrilling stories. They thrive on mood and atmosphere. Check out the drawings in this comic with music by John Coltrane…

 

 

Louis Joos has made a lot of illustrations for children’s books as well (he was recently nominated for the international Hans Christian Andersen award for this) but obviously, most of his output, besides comics, has been for Jazz related publications and his own free work: drawings, screen-prints, paintings and sketches…

 

 

More Louis Joos on www.louisjoos.com.

StudioVisit(19): Nadine Nakanishi 12:32

 

 

Nadine Nakanishi is a painter and printmaker and one half of the silk-screening poster design studio Sonnenzimmer she runs together with Nick Butcher. I had never heard about these people before, but the video interview below immediately peeked my interest. It showed a woman with a unique combination of punk-attitude and pragmatism on one hand, and a tendency towards abstraction in her work on the other.

Her painting informs her design work and her printmaking liberates the process of creating images. Somewhere in an interview, she says:

 

In design, they teach you in  “form and func­tion”. I have come to real­ize that good form holds func­tion regard­less of func­tion. If some­thing is beau­ti­ful the form works.

 

Take a look at the video and, if you want to have some further reading, check out the links to some more interviews below.

 

Nadine Nakanishi : Profile from middle mind project on Vimeo.

 

 

If you want, you can read some more interviews with Nadine Nakanishi I found lingering around the net. Just click the pearls of the pearltree I made.

 

 

 

You can also find more of her work at Yoneko.net or the sonnenzimmer-site

 

(Found via The Middle Mind Project)

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Faceout Books 12:33

 

 

A blog dedicated to book cover design with lots of great work but also interesting interviews with the designers behind the projects.

Administrator Charles Brock describes the purpose of Faceout Books as follows:

 

This venue has been created to appreciate the practice of book cover design. This is not a blog to rip apart what we dislike—everyone has a different aesthetic. This is a blog about the challenges and outcomes of a project. We are here to teach and be taught by one another.

 

Do spent some time at Faceoutbooks.com…