Mia Christopher

Mia is an American artist. I discovered her via Olivelse (thanks!) and I love her works. Expecially, because she has that sense of “full emptiness” that I like so much. You can understand what I’m saying just looking at her works, where big empty spaces are seen as colors or music.

She has a great taste in mixing colors, too, in a very simple sequence of forms full of rythm and movement. And at the same time you see these objects suspended in midair, like a symbol or something like a vision. Yes, I guess it’s like a color vision.

When she draws people, they are caught and freezed perfectly but she leaves you the opportunity to fill time and space with your immagination. They are single forms in space but at the same time you can feel their life before and after.

I find this ability to freeze and give sense of time and movement at the same time just amazing, and very rare to find.

Here, from her Flickr, her works, and I hope you’ll like them as much as I do. You can also read an interview made for Art Together on Brown Paper Bag. Her webpage is here. And you can purchase her work on Etsy or Little paper Planes. Or have you Iphone or Blackberry cover here.

 

 

Something really good – Liguria terra leggiadra

At the beginning of November in Genova a storm destroyed the city and killed six people, and two were children.

A friend of mine, Eloise, decided to act and she handled a project called E’ la Liguria terra leggiadra. Together with illustrators, designers and bloggers from al the country she built a calendar of 13 months, every month an image, and every month a sentence taken from a piece of poetry by Vincenzo Cardarelli.

Olimpia Zagnoli, Pao, Nina and other little things, Pao, Alessandro Baronciani, Alicucio, Cecilia Ramieri and many others worked on this calendar. All the money will be donated to the Comunità di San Benedetto al Porto, to rebuild and promote projects for the recovery of these lands.

You can purchase the calendar here (coming soon) and read (in Italian) more information here.

Jockum Nordström

If you don’t know the work of Jockum Nordström, here with a good suggestion to start.

From February 10th to April 24th, during Drawing now (Salon du Dessin Contemporain), you will have the opportunity to visit a monographic exhibition dedicated to this artist.

 

He also published a book with the imprint Pastel, Marin et son chien, that can be purchased here. I couldn’t find  and edition in English or other languages, but if you could, let me know!

T-book#1: about synthesis

I take and share with you this news from Il Post about the first experiment of micro-fiction made by Twitter.

Andrea Maggiolo is a writer and created Micronarrativa, a project born on Twitter where in 140 characters had been created stories of ordinary people. The idea had been taken from a Vanni Santoni’s work called Personaggi Precari and now it will be published in a book by the independent publisher Libellula Edizioni, with illustration of Riccardo Guasco.

100 words, 140 words, or 3 minutes, if we’re talking of movies: everything seems a competition to concentrate stories in less time and words than usual.

Since Facebook and Twitter entered in our lives, I think our way to communicate changed.

Everything started earlier, with Internet. The fact is that we spend a lot of time online, we have an immediate need of communicate things, and we have all the tools to do that. Few words, few time, and lack of attention. During a marketing seminar, a couple of years ago, the professor told us that posts on our corporate blogs should be no longer than a screen shot. Readers are tired and they can’t stand, in many cases, a longer conversation.

In my work experience this is not so true. And it’s impossible to speak about some topics in few words. I always loved synthesis: I consider it a sign of a clear thought through words. But I studied literature. And the infinite nuances of words and the architecture of text is amazing and fascinating, and it’s gift of the writer to the reader.

Simplify is a good point for everthing, because it pushes to the roots of any image, problem, story. It’s also, in a case of a book or of an article, an important economic element you have to take into account while you’re wrinting.

Sometimes synthesis is a way of writing, a style, a form, just like happens with haiku. In this case, less words are used to evocate sensations, feelings, places or anything else, and the search of the right word is a very difficult and high practice, and every word chosen is used in its inner and deepest sense and sound.

I haven’t an idea, a position regarding these experiments with words. These are scattered thoughts.

I think that languages can’t be controlled. They simply evolve together with society and human needs, and they are defined by their use and the medium. For this reason, I am asking myself how much these kind of short stories are a literary exercise and how much are a virtuosity of the writer, trying to apply rules of the online medium to the written, on-paper one.

I’m curious to see how the new media and social networks expecially will influence the writing practice. This Micronarrativa is interesting under many points of view: writing, language, topics. What will happen next?

The animal fair

Yesterday I finally received my copy of The animal fair by Alice and Martin Provensen (New York, Merrigold Press).

I finally could read it and I found it very funny. I simply wanted it because I love Provensen style in illustration, but I admit I’ve never read anything. Sometimes it’s difficult to find a picture book with the same high quality work on images and text. The truth is that I often find picture books with weak stories, and this disappoints me.

In this case, instead, I found a smart book on animals. There are tales, plays and little poems, and also wordless stories. Sometimes animals are humanized, sometimes they are in their skin of wild beings, sometimes they are funny and amazing. As I work with picture books I can see and evaluate many volumes, but believe me, it’s very difficult to find something like this (and this had been published in 1952!).

Said that, if you want to read something about Alice and Martin Provensen, here and here you got something more about them. Did you know they worked on the image of Kellogg’s Corn flakes? I didn’t… On “Today’s inspiration” a very interesting post about this topic.

And here with a gallery of images taken from their books.

Here for you the perfect instructions about “How to sleep through the Winter (Hibernate)”. Enjoy!