Choose your feed
Subscribe via email
I am lucky to have grown up with a designer father and a reader mother; one of the first books I remember pulling down from the lower shelves as a tiny rugrat was something about architect Adolf Loos. I was hooked. I practically ate books for breakfast.
Beyond the words I took in, I'm thinking about the visual language that was taught to me back then, and how that language still knocks around inside my head—the colors, the shapes, the sheer bizarreness of the tales told in ink and paint. A lot of it was dark (which explains an awful lot about the other stuff knocking around inside my head), and a lot of it was utterly earth-shattering to my little brain.
At first I was going to just list a handful of these artists as a sort of stroll down memory lane, but I want to share too many images for a single post, so I'm doing this series-style. It only seems fair to provide some sense of the breadth of each these artists; each image, each book, builds on the next, stringing together an entire world in just two dimensions. Let's start with Tomi.
THE UNDERGROUND SKETCHBOOK OF TOMI UNGERER
This book, together with Osborn's the Vulgarians, permanently scarred me for life. I knew they were dangerous when I was reading them, long before I had any idea what they meant, just from the style of illustration. Of course, the sexually explicit imagery had something to do with it, too. The Underground Sketchbook (and other works, like The Erotoscope) seemed to channel all the cynicism and human ugliness that he left out of his children's books and even commercial advertising. Of course, that's not entirely true; his children's books did hint at the darkness and depravity of humanity but, y'know, for kids. The following few images, some of the mildest in the book, are from the copy of the Sketchbook that I permanently borrowed from my parents' bookshelf (it was published in 1964).
CHILDREN'S BOOKS: MOON MAN
Remember those individual film strip players in your grade school library? You'd check out the player at the librarian's counter, choose your film strip story (which were almost always the same selection throughout the year), and then find the furthest-away cubicle and try desperately to load the strip properly. Finally, you'd slide the cassette tape into the slot, align the strip with the sound, and off you'd go. The narrator would read a page of the book, then you'd get the beep (always too loud), and you'd roll the film strip forward one frame. This was how I read Moon Man. It always made me horribly sad to think of such a lonely, lovely figure so alienated from the world around him. Ah, childhood...
CRICTOR
And then there was Crictor, a light-hearted tale of an old woman and her hero snake.
NO KISS FOR MOTHER
I feel guilty to this day for loving this book so much (sorry, ma).
And here, finally, is the man himself:
Beyond the words I took in, I'm thinking about the visual language that was taught to me back then, and how that language still knocks around inside my head—the colors, the shapes, the sheer bizarreness of the tales told in ink and paint. A lot of it was dark (which explains an awful lot about the other stuff knocking around inside my head), and a lot of it was utterly earth-shattering to my little brain.
At first I was going to just list a handful of these artists as a sort of stroll down memory lane, but I want to share too many images for a single post, so I'm doing this series-style. It only seems fair to provide some sense of the breadth of each these artists; each image, each book, builds on the next, stringing together an entire world in just two dimensions. Let's start with Tomi.
THE UNDERGROUND SKETCHBOOK OF TOMI UNGERER
This book, together with Osborn's the Vulgarians, permanently scarred me for life. I knew they were dangerous when I was reading them, long before I had any idea what they meant, just from the style of illustration. Of course, the sexually explicit imagery had something to do with it, too. The Underground Sketchbook (and other works, like The Erotoscope) seemed to channel all the cynicism and human ugliness that he left out of his children's books and even commercial advertising. Of course, that's not entirely true; his children's books did hint at the darkness and depravity of humanity but, y'know, for kids. The following few images, some of the mildest in the book, are from the copy of the Sketchbook that I permanently borrowed from my parents' bookshelf (it was published in 1964).
CHILDREN'S BOOKS: MOON MAN
Remember those individual film strip players in your grade school library? You'd check out the player at the librarian's counter, choose your film strip story (which were almost always the same selection throughout the year), and then find the furthest-away cubicle and try desperately to load the strip properly. Finally, you'd slide the cassette tape into the slot, align the strip with the sound, and off you'd go. The narrator would read a page of the book, then you'd get the beep (always too loud), and you'd roll the film strip forward one frame. This was how I read Moon Man. It always made me horribly sad to think of such a lonely, lovely figure so alienated from the world around him. Ah, childhood...
CRICTOR
And then there was Crictor, a light-hearted tale of an old woman and her hero snake.
NO KISS FOR MOTHER
I feel guilty to this day for loving this book so much (sorry, ma).
And here, finally, is the man himself:
Labels: art, creativity, personal, politics, writing
0 responses:
Post a Comment
<< Home