Tag: illustration

Jack Balas

Three Paintings by Jack Balas, Oil and Enamel on Canvas

Born in Chicago, Jack Balas earned a BFA and MFA in sculpture from Northern Illinois University. He first began painting in the 1980s and was swept away by the western landscape. After college Balas moved to Los Angeles and worked as a cross-country art-shipper, driving a month-on/month-off route between California and New York that took him regularly through Scottsdale and Tucson.

Eventually Jack Balas moved away from sculpture and began making paintings that recreated the narrative feel of maps, annotated with numbers and texts, and brief stories with images inspired by his experiences as an art trucker. Balas began painting in earnest while teaching figure drawing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Balas’ goal is to create transcendent images that reveal the fictions surrounding great paintings as well as speak to the present with text and mark making. His current work focuses on the depiction of athletic young men, offered as a counterpoint to the unexamined tradition of equating great painting with the female nude. Balas’ men are presented as Everyman, – variable, philosophical, vulnerable, flexible and eager to please.

Cigarette Cards: The Parisian

The “Parisian”, 1888, Commercial Color  Lithograph,  Issued by Allen and Ginter Cigarettes, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This trade card was from the “World’s Smokers” series (N33) issued in 1888 in a set of fifty cards to promote the Allen and Ginter brand cigarettes; the company was located in Richmond, Virgian. Printer’s samples were included in the set, as well. The printer’s sample cards are on a thinner card stock without printed text.

Each card in the series measures 2.75 x 1.5 inches. One card was packed in each box of ten cigarettes.

Ishirō Honda, “Mothra” ; Film History Series

Promotional Poster for Ishirō Honda’s “Mothra”, Columbia Pictures, 1962

A kaiju is a Japanese film genre that features giant monsters, usually attacking major cities and engaging the military and other monsters in battle. It is a subgenre of tokusatsu entertainment, which deals with science fiction, fantasy, or horror.

Tokusatsu has its origins in early Japanes theater, specifically in kabuki with its action and fight scenes, and in bunraku, which utilized some of the earliest forms of special effects, specifically puppetry. Modern tokusatsu, however, did not begin to take shape until the early 1950s with the conceptual and creative birth of Godzilla, one of the most famous kaiju monsters of all time.

Mothra is a kaiju that first appeared in Toho Company’s 1961 film “Mothra”, developing into a recurring character in the Godzilla franchise. She is typically portrayed as a colossal sentient caterpillar or imago moth, accompanied by two miniature humanoids speaking on her behalf.

Unlike other Toho monsters, Mothra is a largely heroic character, having been variously portrayed as a protector of her own island culture, Japan, and the Earth. She became one of Toho’s most poputlar monsters, second only to Godzilla in its total number of film appearances.

Tishk Barzanji

Illustrations by Tishk Barzanji

Tishk Barzanji is a visual artist who moved to London in 1997 and is based there. He studied Fine Art at Richmond upon Thames College, and Physics at Loughborough University. Barzanji’s work touches on the modernist movement and surrealism and is inspired by his childhood in Kurdistan. His process is about understanding the living space in a fast moving world and the human interactions within these spaces.

Charles Keeping

Charles Keeping, Detail of the Illustration, 1970, “Hades’ Chariot” from the Book “The God Beneath the Sea”

“The God Benaeath the Sea” is a children’s novel based on Greek mythology, written by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen, illustrated by Dharles Keeping, and published by Longman in 1970.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet, “Paysage aux Argus”, 1955, Collage with Butterfly Wings, 20,5 x 28,5 cm, Collection Fondation Dubuffet, Paris

“The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.”

“Art doesn’t go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.”                                                                             ― Jean Dubuffet

Waldemar von Kazak

Illustration by Waldemar von Kazak, Unknown Title

Waldemar Kozak is a contemporary Russian artist, who was born in Tver in 1973. In 1995 he graduated from the Tver Art College with a degree in graphic design. A year after graduating from college, Kazak mastered Quark XPress and Aldus Page Maker programs. He worked as a designer in advertising and book design before immersing himself in illustration. His dark digital images flirt with surrealism and social commentary, using sexual tension and bizarre characters to capture viewers’ imaginations.

Owen Davey

Owen Davey, “The Hundred-Eyed Giant Argus Panoplies”, 2016, Cover Illustration for the Directory of Illustration #33

Owen Davey is an award-winning illustrator living and working in Leicester, England. He graduated with a BA degree in illustration from Falmouth University. Davey was the illustrator of the iPad App of the Year 2015 game, “The Robot Factory”.

Davey created the artworks for the cover, endpapers, title page and contents page of the Directory of Illustration #33. The book is an annual of work by professional illustrators which is sent out to Art Directors and the year’s theme was centred around the idea of ‘Made You Look’. He decided to approach the images with a loose narrative idea around the Ancient Greek story of Argus, a hundred-eyed monster…

Zeus began an affair with a beautiful nymph named Io but when his wife Hera returned home, Zeus turned Io into a white heifer to hide her. Not deceived, Hera demanded the cow as a gift and sent Io to a hundred-eyed giant called Argus Panoplies to guard her. Furious, Zeus sent Hermes to slay Argus. Hermes attempted to lull the giant to sleep but then stabbed him with his sword. Hera honoured Argus by placing all but two of his hundred eyes into the tail of her favourite bird, the Peacock. Io eventually returned to her original form.