Merry Christmas!

illustration by Maurice Sendak
(click to see full size)

Treats or Tricks...

(illustration by Adrienne Adams)

Happy Halloween!

More Music for Halloween

Illustration from A Woggle of Witches by Adrienne Adams (1971)

A virtual mixtape of spooky music for you (listen to last year's mix here):

Richard William's 'A Christmas Carol'

In 1970, Richard Williams, known for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Thief and the Cobbler, directed an animated version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol for the American Broadcasting Company. Ken Harris, who worked on a number of Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera cartoons as well as How the Grinch Stole Christmas, served as chief animator. The animation style, aimed at an adult audience, is based on original 19th century engravings for the book by John Leech and Gustave Doré. The resulting film is dark and completely unique. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in 1972. Watch it below:

Happy October!

My favorite time of year...

Poe as imagined by Charles Addams

Perigee Moon

In honor of this weekend's perigee moon, the largest of this year, a poem from one of my favorite collections of Mother Goose rhymes, illustrated by Charles Addams (click image to view larger):

Girls and boys, 

Come out to play.

The moon does shine

As bright as day.

Come with a hoop,

Come with a call,

Come with a good will,

Or not at all.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night

(watercolor illustration by Edith Blackwell Holden, 1906,
from The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady)

I've been listening to an old recording of Truman Capote reading his story, "A Christmas Memory," written in 1956. It is sweet, funny, nostalgic and sad, as the best Christmas stories are. This American Life has a slightly abridged version of the 1959 recording on their site, which you may listen to here.

Wishing you visions of sugarplums and a very merry Christmas!

Christmas illustrations...

One of the great joys of my childhood was receiving Cricket magazine in the post. Cricket was (and is) an amazing literary magazine for children, full of stories, poems and beautiful illustrations. At a young age it introduced me to some of my favorite authors and illustrators. I still have most of my back issues, many worn from reading and re-reading.

Cricket's covers were always glossy and beautiful. When I was little and living in Hawaii the snowy, wintry pictures made it feel like Christmas despite the balmy temperatures and palm trees. Here are some of my favorite illustrations from winter issues of Cricket, spanning from 1985 to 1993 (click images to view larger)...

"The Little Fir Tree" watercolor, pen and ink drawings with numbered captions by Erik Blegvad from the story by Hans Christian Andersen, from the December 1991 issue:

"The Ice Maiden" pastel, watercolor, and acrylic painting by Leo and Diane Dillon, from the February 1993 issue:

Old Kris oil on canvas by NC Wyeth, 1925, from the December 1985 issue:

"Stellar Angels" watercolor, tempera, and colored pencils by Tomie dePaola, from the December 1989 issue:

"Dragons and Gargoyles of Princeton" pen and ink, watercolor, colored pencil, and magic marker by Lynne Cherry, from the January 1986 issue:

Tiptoes

I found some very old watercolor drawings while transferring files...

Costume sketch details for The Nutcracker ballet; dancing Sugarplum Attendants, the Prince's slippers, and the Rat King respectively.

Books and Black Holes

Lincoln had his melancholia, Churchill had his black dog, and I occasionally fall into black holes. Sometimes I can be in one for quite some time before I realize I have to dig myself out. It helps to remember things I like; in the past I have used this as a place to share things that make me happy, but I've gotten out of practice. So, it seems a good time for spring cleaning, both here and in my head.

Books are some of my most favorite things, and I was lucky enough to recently find a copy of the first American edition of Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. I first read it as a teenager, but the copy I borrowed from the library was printed in black ink with no illustrations. My beautiful new (old) copy has text printed in the proper red and green with 26 illustrations by Roswitha Quadflieg illuminating the chapter heads, one for each letter of the alphabet.

Here are some images from the book... more pictures, including Roswitha Quadflieg's full alphabet can be found here.







If you've never read The Neverending Story run out and get a copy; even if it's a paperback in black and white you won't be disappointed. If you're able to read it in the original German then lucky you!

..and if you're still reading this after all this time, or still checking in, hello again.

the forest for the trees

Today I've started making a tiny forest out of twigs, and I'm excited to see how it will turn out.

For inspiration I've been looking at the work of Russian artist Ivan Bilibin. Here are two of his illustrations, published in 1900, of the red rider who brings the sunrise and the black rider who brings the night from the Russian fairytale Vasilisa the Beautiful.

(click for much larger images)


The full story can be read here. Baba Yaga the witch, who flies around in a giant mortar and has a house on chicken feet, makes an appearance. It is well worth reading.

For the last several nights as I've been going to sleep I've found ladybugs on my bedside table. I've been visited by red ones with black spots and black ones with red spots. Even if I let them out the open window they come right back in. I wonder if they'll be back again this evening?


(detail from the Alexander Marshal Insect Watercolors Album, ca. 1600-1680)

noodleheads, nincompoops, mooncalfs, ninnyhammers & fools

"The highest form of bliss is living with a certain degree of folly."
-Erasmus

When I was little one of my favorite books was an edition of The Wise Men of Gotham, retold and illustrated by Malcolm Carrick. The people of Gotham were said to have feigned foolishness to keep King John from staying in their village in the 13th century. The stories recount villagers drowning eels, sending rent away tied to a hare, failing to trap a cuckoo in a hedge and other misadventures.

The book is silly and wonderful and had an incredible smell the way some books do, a bit like a mature cheese. When I was very small I somehow thought this was because one of the tales was about a man rolling his cheeses down a hill in the belief they would take themselves to market. This and other Gotham tales can be read on Project Gutenberg.

Another story about a fool who is not entirely foolish is the Russian fairy tale The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship. It is about a simple young man who wins the hand of the Tsar's daughter with a flying ship and the help of a strange band of travelers. Here is the first part of a 1990 stop motion puppet version by Cosgrove Hall:

A full version of the story can be read here.

Happy April Fool's Day to you!

light and shadow

Yesterday was so sunny I got a tan working at my desk. Today is decidedly wet, so I don't think there's a danger of it happening again.

My new camera is on the way. I should be able to photograph things in progress on my desk soon, but until then here are some beautiful things made by other people.

Paintings on perforated canvas by Anne-Karin Furunes:

Pictures of Portraits IX / Finland 1918, 2006


Pictures of Portraits I / Finland 1918, 2006

Work by Drew King:

Central Park Reservoir, acrylic paint on cut paper


Intersecting Paths, mixed media on paper

Anything can happen, child.

I spent a snowy night a few weeks ago driving down from the mountains with my sisters and listening to Shel Silverstein poems on CD. I just found the Shel Silverstein website, which is suitably silly and has some great audio clips of Silverstein reading his poems, making noises and playing music. The excerpt from The Giving Tree accompanied by Silverstein on the harmonica is really lovely.. but then the story did always make me cry when I was little.


"There once was a tree... and she loved a little boy."

Thursday

(illus. by Edward Gorey, 1994)

(my new old 1920s kimono)

We're deep into the post-Christmas lazy days here. Today I'm going to a screening of Jim Henson's fantastic puppet film Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas at the arts center and then to a VIP tour of the Jim Henson exhibition. I got lots of knee socks for Christmas.. I know it sounds boring, but I'm really excited about them.

visual poetry

Our internet connection is so bad it has taken me all day to upload images.. grr.
Last night I went to see some friends play music in a confused club (Joel has pictures on his journal), was sat upon by a girl in sparkly underpants and accused of being bookish by a woman in a corset and a monster mask. I think I had a good time.

I meant to put these up a little while ago.. they are Shaker visual poems, produced in a similar way to automatic writing and considered gifts from heavenly spirits.





They remind me a bit of Adolf Wölfli's work. More examples and information can be found on UbuWeb, which also has recordings of adaptations of Wölfli's musical works here, along with an amazing archive of sound recordings.

Oh, and some friends received a well deserved 4-star write up in the Guardian today. Congratulations!

busy busy busy!

I returned last night from a few days of teaching in Bristol, seeing friends, watching lots of Ray Harryhausen and getting rained on. I managed to do a lot of designing on the train which put me in a very good mood. I also found some random Edward Gorey images in a 26-year-old book on theatre posters and illustration. They were badly reproduced and I only had a scanner of dubious quality at my disposal, but here are copies of a few (click to enlarge):

what do people do all day?

For a long time I've had a running list of jobs I'd like to try out for a day. I added a couple more this week, and remembered some old ones...

- Using a flame gun to lay down warning strips at the edge of train platforms (I saw a man doing this once, and the flame gun was truly amazing)

- Running the big water cannons on a fire-fighting ship (a new addition)

- Church bell ringing (but only the ones that are so big they pull you up into the air)

- Operating one of those massive crane winches

When I was little I used to want to work in a paper factory as well, but then I realized that industrial machinery is not all anthropomorphic and smiley-faced as it is in Richard Scarry books.

what I learned today

shadows

Very many sad and difficult and awful things in the last few weeks.. I am trying to remember what is good.

I first saw some of Lotte Reiniger's animated silhouette films a few years ago. The movement she managed with flat cutouts is more elegant than that of much three dimensional puppetry.

The Little Chimney Sweep:

The BFI has more of her short films and clips available to download.

This was created using black paper and a light table by Edward De Leon:

It's rough, but gives a bit of hope for simple animation in the face of masses of rubbish.

And digitally animated but still roughly in the spirit of traditional silhouette films, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.