Tag: graphics

David Kindersley

The Lettering of David Kindersley

Born in Codicote in 1915, David Guy Barnabas Kindersley was a British typeface designer and stone letter-carver, the grandson of the Arts and Crafts potter Sir Edmund Elton. He was educated at St. Cyprian’s School, a preparatory school for boys in Eastbourne, and later, attended Marlborough College for three years, at which time he left due to rheumatoid arthritis. 

Kindersley traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Academie St. Julian where he studied French and sculpture; he continued his sculptural studies under the Induni brothers, Peter Guiseppe and Joseph Vincent, both of whom were marble carvers in London. In December of 1934, Kindersley became an apprentice to Arts and Crafts sculptor and typeface designer Eric Gill at his workshop in the market town of High Wycombe. While at the workshop, he worked on several important commissions, including St. John’s College in Oxford, London’s Dorset House, and Bentalls, a department store designed by architect Maurice Webb and located in Kingston upon Thames. 

David Kindersley left Gill’s workshop in 1936 and opened his own shop on the River Arun, where he continued commission work sent by Gill. On the death of Eric Gill in 1940, he settled Gill’s affairs and continued work at his own shop until 1945, at which time he relocated to the county of Cambridgeshire. Here Kindersley developed his own style and methods, his decorative carving embellishments, his use of heraldic ornamentation, and his taste for carving lettering on slate.

In addition to teaching calligraphy at the Cambridge Art School in the late 1940s, Kindersley received a major commission for carved relief imaps to be placed in the American War Cemetery. He also became a consultant for film titles, through the influence of his cousin Sir Arthur Elton, documentary filmmaker and head of film production at Shell Oil. A major commission under taken by Kindersley 

In 1946, Kindersley established his first completely equipped letter-cutting workshop at Dales Barn in the village of Barton. He was joined by his wife and stone-cutter, Lida Lopes Cardozo, in 1976. A major commission undertaken by Kindersley and his wife was the distinctive large metal gates of the British Library which transformed its artistic “British Library” metal letters into a functional use. This project was followed by the gates at Queens’ College’s porter lodge; inspired by the same principle, the gates are composed of the letters “Queens College” wrought out of metal. 

David Kindersley is known for his accurate letter-spacing system. He designed the “Mo T Serif” typeface in 1952, which was originally submitted for the British Ministry of Transport for road signs. Kindersley created the “Itek Bookface” and, in collaboration with Will Carter, designed the book typeface “Octavian” for the Monotype Corporation in 1961. The Cardozo Kindersley Workshop publishes a number of typefaces based on Kindersley’s work, including the 2005 “Kindersley Street”, also known as “Kindersley Grand Arcade”, which is based on his 1952 “Mo T Serif”. 

David Kindersley authored two major works on typeface, the 1976 “Optical Letter Spacing for New Printing Systems” and the “Computer-Aided Letter Design”. Very interested in Sufism, he also published a book “Graphic Sayings” which contains his typeface plates bearing sayings by the Sufi mystics taken from the writings of Sufi author Idries Shah. 

Note: Kindersley’s workshop, now known as The Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, relocated to Victoria Road, Cambridge, in 1977. Upon Kindersley’s death in 1995, Cardozo, along with Graham Beck and a crew of five, continued the design, carving, printing and gild work.

Second Insert Image: Granville Davies, “David Kindersley”, Gelatin Silver Print, Printed 2005

Bottom Insert Image: Rory Cooron, “David Guy Barnabas Kindersley”, 1989, Bromide Fiber Print, 45.5 x 27.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London

Salem Beiruti

Salem Beiruti, “Cernunnos”, 2020, Digiatal Art Print with Watercolor and Gold Gouache

Born in Lebanon, Salem Beiruti is a conceptual artist and illustrator residing in Madrid. Working after graduation as an art director in the fields of advertising, graphics, and fashion design, he has more than seventeen years of client and freelance work. Upon his move to Madrid, Beiruti became a full=time illustrator and artist.

Beiruti’s skillful digital illustrations are unique and inspired by such artists and photographers as Patrick Fillion, Paul Freeman, Issauro Cairo, and Francisco Prato. His project  of mixed-media works “Morphosis” is a result of his personal journey as a man of an Arabic mid-eastern culture and its traditions to the man he is today. The art book was published in June of 2017 by German publisher Bruno Gmnuender.

Salem Beiruti’s “Cernunnos” is based on model Francesc Gascó.

For those interested in purchasing a print, Art of Salem is offering all prints at a 40% discount for Easter 2021. Please reference Ultrawolves when ordering. Thank you.   https://www.instagram.com/artistsalem/

Conan Chadbourne

Digital Mathematical Images by Conan Chadbourne

Born in 1978, Conan Chadbourne received his BA in Mathematics and Physics from New York University in 2011. He has worked in the fields of experimental physics research, digital imaging and printing, graphic design, and documentary film production.. Chadbourne lives in San Antonio where he works as a freelance graphic designer and documentary film producer.

Chadbourne  draws inspiration for his work from his experience in mathematics and the sciences. He is motivated by his fascination with the occurrence of mathematical and scientific imagery in traditional art forms, and the mystical, spiritual, or cosmological significance that is often attached to such imagery. 

Mathematical themes both overt and subtle appear in a broad range of traditional art: Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Buddhist mandalas, intricate tilings in Islamic architecture, restrained temple geometry paintings in Japan, complex patterns in African textiles, and geometric ornament in archaic Greek ceramics. Often this imagery is deeply connected with the models and abstractions these cultures use to interpret and relate to the cosmos, in much the same way that modern scientific diagrams express a scientific worldview.

Conan Chadbourn’s works have been exhibited at the Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas; The Art Center of Corpus Christi,;the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art in Dallas, Texas; and the Bridges Conference for Mathematics in the Arts.

“There are 212,987 distinct ways to partition a 4×4 grid of square tiles into component shapes composed of contiguous tiles, assuming any two such partitions are considered equivalent if they differ only by a symmetry transformation such as a rotation or reflection. There are exactly thirteen of these configurations which partition this grid of sixteen tiles into two component shapes of equal area, each composed of eight tiles. This image presents this set of thirteen equal divisions of this group of tiles.”

—Conan Chadbourne, Discussing his image “Concise Lesson in Uniform Partitions”

Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1970. He graduated in 1988 from the Idyllwild Arts Acacemy in Palm Springs, California. Fairey earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992. He is one of the most infuential street artist of our time. His art ranges from screen prints, stencils, and stickers to posters, paintings and murals. His most famous art includes the Obey trademark, images of Andre the Giant, and the propaganda poster of Barack Obama.

Shepard Fairey’s work combines the elements of graffiti, pop art, business, Marxist theory and advertisement. The imagery is conveyed in strong graphic renderings with a color pallette of mostly reds, blacks, and whites. His art is distinctly political in nature and supportive of social causes.

Alfonso Ossorio

Alfonso Ossorio, “Saint Martin and the Beggar”, 1940, Ink, Gouache, and Watercolor on Paper, 52 x 37 cm, Ayala Museum, Manila, Philippines

Born in August of 1916 in Manila, Alfonso Ossorio was an abstract expressionist artist of Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese heritage. At the age of fourteen, he moved to the United States and attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island, graduating in 1934. Ossorio studied fine art at Harvard University from 1934 to 1938, and continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became a United States citizen in 1933.

Discovered by art dealer and collector Betty Parsons, Alfonso Ossorio had his first show, featuring his Surrealist-influenced works at New York’s Wakefield Gallery in 1940. Following World War II service in the US Army as a medical illustrator, tasked with drawing surgical procedures on injured soldiers, he took some respite in the Berkshires, a region in western Massachusetts known for its outdoor activities. It was there at the 1948 Tanglewood Music Festival that Ossorio met Edward Dragon, a ballet dancer, who would be Ossorio’s life-long partner. 

Through his connection with Betty Parsons, Ossorio became acquainted with the work of Jackson Pollock. Becoming both an admirer and a collector of Pollock’s expressionist work, he and Pollock soon developed a close friendship and reciprocal influence on each others work. Later in 1951, through critic and art historian Michel Tapié, Ossorio established a contact between Pollock and the young Parisian gallery owner Paul Facchetti who realized Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Europe in 1952.

In Paris in 1951, Ossorio and Edward Dragon frequently met with artist Jean Dubuffet and his wife Lili. While they were visiting, Jean Dubuffet wrote the text for his monograph on Ossorio entitled, “Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio” and introduced Ossorio to art critic and collector Michel Tapié. Tapié organized a one-man show at the Studio Paul Facchetti of Ossorio’s small, luminous “Victorias Drawings”, which Ossorio made while visiting the Philippines. Produced using Ossorio’s experimental drawing technique of wax-resistant crayon on Tiffany & Co. stationary, the works in this series are counted as some of Ossorio’s most innovative. 

Dubuffet’s interest in art brut opened up new vistas for Ossorio, who found release from society’s preconceptions in the previous unstudied creativity of insane asylum inmates and children. In the 1950s, Ossorio began to create works resembling Dubuffet’s assemblages. He affixed shells, bones, driftwood, nails, dolls’ eyes, cabinet knobs, dice, costume jewelry, mirror shards, and children’s toys to the panel surface. Ossorio called these assemblages congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.

On the advice of Pollock, Ossorio and Edward Dragon purchased an expansive 60-acre estate, The Creeks, in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, in 1951, where they lived for more than forty years. Alfonso Ossorio died in New York City in 1990. Half his ashes were scattered at The Creeks estate and the other half came to rest nine years later at Green River Cemetery, alongside the remains of many other famous artists, writers and critics. 

Alfonso Ossorio’s works can be found at The Creeks, the Harvard Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, among others.

Alfonso Ossorio

Alfonso Ossorio, “T.R.Russell E/M 2nd Class”, 1943, Ink, Gouache and Watercolor on Paper Mounted to Paperboard, 22 3/8″ x 18 ¼”

Born in Manila to affluent Filipino parents from the province of Negros Occidental, Alfonso Ossorio received European and American education in the 1940s and 1950s, which placed him in the fortunate position of witnessing pivotal moments in Western modern art. From 1934 to 1936 he studied fine art at Harvard University and continued his studies at the Rhode island School of Design.

Ossorio’s early work was influenced by surrealism and later was influenced by his friend Jackson Pollock. In the early part of the 1950s he was pouring paint onto canvas in the style of the abstract expressionists. Ossorio had a lifelong engagement with Catholicism which entered into his work. After meeting Dubuffet, whose art brut movement interested Ossorio, he started creating assemblages which he called congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.

Alice Lex-Nerlinger

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, “Racecar Driver”, 1926, Vintage Silver Print from an Original Photogram, Private Collection

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, was born in 1893 to the owner of a gas lamp factory on Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Between 1911 and 1916, she studied painting and graphic art at the Teaching Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts under painter and lithographer Emil Orlik and other teachers. 

Personal experience of the First World War and the atmosphere of artistic experiment in 1920s Berlin created provided a source of ideas for Alice Lex-Nerlinger’s artistic works: heroism versus the soldier’s death, man and machine, capital and labour, state and censor, and not least, the misogynist. She found stimulus and confirmation in groups of artists with similar attitudes such as the Abstrakten (the Abstracts) and the Association of Revolutionary Fine Artists in Germany founded in 1928. Like Alice Lex, these groups rejected Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism as bourgeois art. She expressed her political convictions by joining the German Communist Party (KPD) along with her husband Oskar Nerlinger in 1928.

Photographs, newspaper clippings and strikingly contrasted colors, such as red and blue, provided the ingredients for Lex-Nerlinger’s socially critical montages, specializing in photomontages and colored spray painting. Her work was often produced in sequential series creating rhythm and multi-dimensionality. Lex-Nerlinger succeeded in translating the complexity of political statements into simply structured individual images or compositions which prompted discussion and inquiry.

In 1933 Lex-Nerlinger was expelled from the German Association of Fine Artists by the National Socialists and banned from practicing her profession and from exhibiting her artwork. Censorship and this ban on her artwork drove her into engaging in underground political activities against the regime. 

Alice Lex-Nerlinger did manage to survive during National Socialism in Germany; but, fearful of persecution and house searches, she destroyed some of her artworks. After the Second World War, she worked in the German Democratic Republic primarily on official portrait commissions. She was honored with a honorary pension in 1960, which she received with the support of the Germany Academy of Arts, and was honored with the Patriotic Order of Merit of the GDR in 1974. 

Alfonso Casas Moreno

illustrations by Alfonso Casas Moreno

Alfonso Casas Moreno was born in Zaragoza, Spain in 1981 and studied teaching and later fine arr, specializing in illustration. For the last seven years, he has lived and worked in Barcelona.

Alfonso Casas has worked as an illustrator for several companies including Vodafone, Reebok, ING and others. He is the author of several books, including “Amores Minúsculos”. He is also the illustrator of “No Without My Beard” , written by Carles Suñé and published by Lunwerg Publishers in 2015. Alfonso Casas’ illustrative work has appeared on the poster for the Teatro Lara Theater  in Madrid.

Calendar

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of June, Solar Year 2018

Another Room Painted

June 12, 1890 was the birthdate of the Austrian painter and graphic artist, Egon Schiele.

In 1906 Egon Schiele applied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna, where Gustav Klimt had studied. Later that year he was sent to the more traditional Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1907 Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt, who at that time mentored younger artists. Klimt accepted him for training and introduced Schiele to the Wiener Werkstatte, the arts and crafts workshop associated with the Vienna Sucession.

Schiele’s early work from that period between 1907 and 1909 shows a strong influence by Klimt and the Art Nouveau style. In 1909, free of the constraints of the Academy’s conventions, he  began to explore not only the human form, but also human sexuality. Schiele’s work was already daring, but it went a bold step further with the inclusion of Klimt’s decorative eroticism and with what some may like to call figurative distortions, that included elongations, deformities, and sexual openness. Schiele’s self-portraits helped re-establish the energy of both genres with their unique level of emotional and sexual honesty and use of figural distortion in place of conventional ideals of beauty.

In 1910, Schiele began experimenting with nudes. His 1910 “Kneeling Nude with Raised Hands” is considered among the most significant nude art pieces made during the 20th century. Schiele’s radical and developed approach towards the naked human form challenged both scholars and progressives alike. This unconventional piece and style went against strict academia and created a sexual uproar with its contorted lines and heavy display of figurative expression. At the time, many found the explicitness of his works disturbing.

In 1913, the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich, mounted Schiele’s first solo show. Another solo exhibition of his work took place in Paris in 1914. During the war Schiele’s paintings became larger and more detailed, when he had the time to produce them. By 1917, he was back in Vienna, able to focus on his artistic career. His output was prolific, and his work reflected the maturity of an artist in full command of his talents.

Schiele was invited to participate in the Secession’s 49th exhibition, held in Vienna in 1918. He had fifty works accepted for this exhibition, and they were displayed in the main hall. He also designed a poster for the exhibition, which was reminiscent of the “Last Supper” with a portrait of himself in the place of Christ. The show was a triumphant success, and as a result, prices for Schiele’s drawings increased and he received many portrait commissions.

In the autumn of 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic that claimed more than 20,000,000 lives in Europe reached Vienna. Edith, his wife whom he  married in 1915 and who was six months pregnant, succumbed to the disease on October 28th. Schiele died only three days after his wife. He was 28 years old.

Brian Kenny

Brian Kenny, “Crocodile Tears”, 2011, Entropy Parade- Collaborative Portfolio with Slava Mogutin C-Print, 40.6 x 50.8 cm Image on 50.8 x 60.1 cm  Sheet. Edition of 10

Brian Kenny is an American multidisciplinary artist. He graduated from Oberlin College. Kenny is a long time collaborator of Russian born artist Slava Mogutin, with whom they run SUPERM project from 2004. Kenny exhibited in galleries, museums and alternative venues around the globe.

He created commissioned works for Yacine Aouadi, Walter Van Beirendonck, PetrouMan, Max Kibardin, Bruno Magli, Matthias Vriens-McGrath and Please Do Not Enter. One of the major themes in Kenny’s work is exploration of his own sexuality, checking the boundaries between genders. In 2014, Kenny collaborated with Visual AIDS foundation to raise awareness of the disease.

Steve Minty

Steve Minty, Muertos Night Deck Playing Cards

Muertos is an original set of American playing cards designed by Steve Minty and produced by the United States Playing Card Company (USPCC). It is independently crafted and honors the holiday that celebrates life and death; Dia De Los Muertos. The Muertos deck takes the classic aesthetics of Dia De Los Muertos and is updated with the tradition of playing and my experiences growing up. It depicts the social classes and history of the culture while simultaneously giving off a contemporary elegant luxurious feel.

Reblogged with thanks to Steve Minty’s site: https://www.steveminty.com

Great site. Decks of cards, medals, pins. Just bought the Night Deck.

Tom Lane

Tom Lane “Gypsy Tonic Number 29″

Tom Lane, otherwise known as Ginger Monkey is a graphic designer and lettering artist with 11 years of experience in the industry. He has worked for an eclectic range of clients, from global commercial corporations to design studios and advertising agencies to small start-ups and individuals. He works closely with clients to produce high quality crafted artwork, packaging designs and branding.

Tom currently lives and works in North Devon, UK.