My selection of good stuff from the world of illustration last year:
Event
Secret 7" at
Somerset House - the annual project bringing together music and art for a good cause featured hundreds of sleeve designs for 7 tracks (The Rolling Stones – Dead Flowers. Diana Ross & The Supremes –
Reflections. Underworld – Born Slippy (Nuxx). The Chemical Brothers –
Let Forever Be. St Vincent – Digital Witness. Peter Gabriel –
Sledgehammer. The Maccabees – Go). Sleeves were displayed for a month and then auctioned anonymously for £50 each. Here are some favourites...
David Biskup
Jack Hudson
Jean Julien
Print
I saw this image, from a series called
Games Room by Portuguese image-maker
Joao Fazenda, for sale at
ELCAF and fell in love with it. The colour palette is minimal but vibrant, while the image has a serenity and calm about it. It's jungle and penthouse all at once and I would like to live in that apartment! Especially with the lion! The series explores the idea of landscape as a constructed fiction - you can see the rest of the images
here.
Book
Pablo by Julie Birmant and
Clement Oubrerie - a graphic biography covering Pablo Picasso's early bohemian life in Montmatre, Paris, is compellingly written and stunningly illustrated. At 342 pages it's a substantial graphic tome to get your teeth into. Aside from the beautiful artwork this sort of biography is an amazingly entertaining way of absorbing the atmosphere and events of the period, rather than having to rely on art history books or run-of-the-mill biographies. Pablo sits nicely on my shelf alongside
Kiki de Montparnasse - another impressive graphic novel about the modern artists including Picasso, and their muse Alice Prin. I can't recommend them enough.
