Checking out the ever-excellent art blog, I Need A Guide, I saw a bunch of work by Meghan Howland. Howland is a Massachussetts native who now works & lives in Portland, ME.
Ennui, 2012
Howland is one of those artists who does not have a lot of online material, but I did manage to track down an artist’s statement from a couple of years back explaining her work:
It has been said that new emotions surface when we see the beauty in something that has almost been destroyed, and I agree with this.
In recent bodies of work there has always been this common origin, created though a careful and methodical undoing of the “shackles of the present”, and a retreat into the past. Both fictional and actual, biographical, and even autobiographical at times, caught in a hybrid world of fantasy and existence, of love and hate, euphoria and cruelty.
A lot of it stems from an emotional kinship, the concept of portraying and establishing communication with the excluded or neglected, the (naive), but also the exposure of the false, and the wicked.
There is also an awareness of what some say is the rotting underbelly that is our inherited world of decadence. With that said, my work sometimes references social media, fashion, and art history, representing the consequences of indulgence, greed, and sloth, and by using the powers of paint, injecting it instead with a new range of emotions, of possibilities.
– Mayo Street Arts
Lamp Light, 2012
I’m not convinced this statement applies to her newer work and without the benefit of a more recent statement to go by, I will have to rest on the fact that I simply enjoy Howland’s work visually.
Solo, 2011
More of Meghan Howland’s work can be seen on her website.
Tapes, 2011
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Another collective noun – today, a Pod of Walrus. Walrus appear to be collective noun in of themselves, like “deer” or “fish”. Although, to be technical, when speaking of a group of different fish species, it is accurate to say “fishes”. P is a letter in the collective noun alphabet rife with possibility – it was hard to make a choice faced with options such as a prickle of hedgehogs, a passel of hogs, or the classic pride of lions. I stand by my decision – walrus are fun to draw.
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”– from the Walrus and the Carpenter, Lewis Carroll
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Guillermo del Toro is the director of a pile of great films, including Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth. His future projects include a new version of Beauty and the Beast, a new version of Frankenstein (referencing Bernie Wrightson) and he is (tentatively) working on a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror classic, At the Mountains of Madness. He has a rich and well, creepy vision that he carefully constructs starting with detailed sketchbooks.
These sketchbooks are works of art by themselves… Here’s a few pages from his Pan’s Labyrinth sketchbook:
And here’s a few from his Hellboy sketchbook:
This is my notebook, which I carry wherever I go. You can see it’s been rained on; I should really take better care of it. It contains visual ideas, character notes and plot details for Pan’s Labyrinth; everything from historical background about 1930s Spain, to the design of an insect, to the chemical meanings of the faces of the moon, to the way I want to destroy the hand of a thug. Sketching a film can sometimes be more fun than actually making one, particularly with all the economic problems you have to deal with. Maybe one day I’d like to have my own gallery, paint full time and express my ideas that way.
– The Guardian UK
Famously, del Toro once lost his sketchbook for Pan’s Labyrinth (before going into production) by forgetting it in the back seat of a London cab. The cabbie did some detective work and returned it to del Toro. Lucky us, as del Toro’s sketchbooks have now been collected by Harper & Collins, published as Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
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Another collective noun – today, an Obstinacy of Buffaloes. Or should I say buffalos? Or simply buffalo? The experts disagree. Then there’s the whole bison/buffalo thing. For the sake of clarity I drew African Buffalo. The small white bird is a cattle egret, a small species of heron that follows around herd animals like buffaloes.
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I found a pretty nifty art blog, today, Eye-Likey. It is a visually rich, easy-to-find-your-way-around-in kind of website that showcases a pile of really great artists. One artist I hadn’t heard of before (among several) is the incredibly awesome illustrator/ artist Miroco Machiko. Machiko lives & works in Osaka, Japan. My regular readers know I’ve been making a lot of drawings of animals and birds lately, so since Machiko does a lot of work based on animals and birds I was of course naturally attracted to the subject. It’s how she handles it that is really inspiring, though. Here’s a few tasters:
You can see a metric heckload more of Machiko’s work on her website.
