Wow I had a hard time getting down to writing this week’s BLF. I’d thought I’d gotten the jump on it, but then Inspiration just flew away.
So I’m just going to blurt it all out. Without the clever transitions I was envisioning. Some of this stuff is NSFW just so you know before clicking on the links.
Much of my work is about the sexual implications of objects, leading me to be interested in the designs of sex toys so when I ran across a couple of references to the Sqweel, i.e. this on line I was immediately taken by it’s weird mix of organic and mechanical. How well it would actually work for anything I don’t really know. But it also reminded me of two other things. One is a prop in a scene scene I’m almost certain that I saw in Bob Guccione’s Caligula and the other is from this drawing, by Tomi Ungerer.(That’s a terrible picture I just shot because I couldn’t find a reasonable version of it online.)
Weirdly enough the next day there was a profile of Ungerer in The New York Times
Ungerer was one of those European Illustrators who could draw like a madman and really framed the Sixties graphic sensibility. Taschen had a great book of his erotic stuff called Erotoscope, which seems to be out of print. Getting my own copy down to look up the drawing showed me that I had screwed up the dust cover a bit, and now that I see what used copies are going for on Amazon, I regret that even more.
It takes a lot of looking at drawings to keep me going on my own drawings. This bit from Milton Glaser is a big help, not only for what he has to say but for the boggling grace with which he’s putting down lines.
The Times also had a link to this blog: http://inklines.blogspot.com/ which has some sweet drawings that aren’t so much to my taste but I do love the steady working method and devotion that he brings to the process. For the Times story see here.
I also ran across an archive of the work of Karl Hans Janke an eccentric artist and inventor. Lots of fanciful flying machines.
Finding his work also led me to this beautiful blog: http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/ which has a wealth of odd illustration.
Finally three unrelated things:
Spezify is a newish search engine with a different kind of interface. Try heading over there and entering “Tomi Ungerer” into the search panel. I can see the way that I wouldn’t work for certain types of things. But there’s something very appealing to me about the collage way of looking at information.
Kate Bornstein twittered about this band, and now I just want to be their groupie.
Some one posted this (Coulrophobics beware) in the Live Journal Vintage Ads community. I love all of the type on this package. I spent a bunch of time looking for faces like that of the Sugar Smacks logo. Any one have any ideas of what typeface is?
Tags: big link friday, drawing, sex