The lovely Andrea Kalfas lives and works in Baltimore and spends her hours drawing up a storm of illustrations, among them visual treats for children and serial treats for adults (see above). We love her giddy use of color and sense of restrained whimsy—nothin’ cutesy here, folks! Just pure and skillful loveliness.
To top it off, Kalfas maintains an adorable blog detailing her process and providing slices of the illustratin’ life, including a recent project that involved drawing Tarzan and jungle scenes. Jungle scenes! Gotta love ‘em.
Night Owl Paper Goods is a small company that produces the prettiest letterpress goods you’ve ever imagined. Their work combines the soothing colors and tactile forms of children’s book illustrations with the simplicity and expressiveness of Swedish and American folk artists. Also involved: lots of adorable animals (otters, whales, see above) and the ingenious methodology of eco-friendly wood cards, which are exactly what they sound like but ten times as cool in real life. Trust.
There are journals and mini-notepads too— we especially love the pocket-sized spiral bound variety, which are perfect for secret missions and impromptu investigating. There are calenders and tote bags, too, for planning and lugging (respectively). Most of all, we love the fact that the Night Owl creators have turned a passion project into a repository of items that are both functional and enchanting. Color us charmed.
Clearly, the colors that Peter Burr uses are alarming. Perhaps it’s because they’re warning you about the difficulty of extracting the razor-sharp hooks of Burr’s mesmerizing art out of your delicate retina. Whether he’s animating, puffy painting, collaging, or music-making in his cell phone grunge group Hooliganship, Burr goes all out, producing work so violently chromatic and beautifully blatant, it loops all the way back around to the realm of the the exquisitely subtle.
Check out some of Burr’s animated work on either excellent volume of the Cartune Xprez DVDs.
We’d all agree that the worst part of being a baby is the color-blindness. Fact: cones don’t begin functioning until a baby is 4 months old, which means that the world before that time is sadly rainbow-free.
It follows that as a color-seeing grown-up human we should take full advantage of our abilities and surround ourselves with interesting hues. Take Pantone, for example— the company that calls itself “the global authority on color”— which started in 1962 as a manufacturer of color cards for cosmetics companies. When Pantone recently branched out into the world of everyday goods with a collection of mugs and espresso cups— each reproducing a classic hue like 3395 C SPEARMINT or 520 C GRAPE— it gave coffee-drinkers one more way to saturate their lives with bright hues. Yet another reason to be glad we’re not babies.
A very brief introduction to Charley Harper, Cinncinati-based artist and king of style. If you’re unfamiliar with the man’s visual style, this short n’ sweet primer will whet your appetite. Todd Oldham wrote that “Charley’s inspired yet accurate color sense is undeniable, and when combined with the precision he exacts on rendering only the most important details, one is always left with a sense of awe.”
Well said. After you’re done with the video, check out the book.
A pastel rainbow of brash, geometric lines are contaminating a disquietingly familiar landscape. Sharp streams of light are pouring down upon us now like extra-strength silly stream, firework trails fading into the night– precariously dangling fiber-optic cables transmitting the secret signals of an impotent global conspiracy. Jules de Balincourt’s artwork is fixated on depictions of an America on the verge of collapse, contrasting the dark drone of a disaster premonition with the relentlessly colorful spurts of his bright abstractions. Pitting nostalgic depictions of luxury vacation resorts against comically ominous text and the threat of a natural world in crisis, Balincourt’s work often feels like a smiling pastiche of political art– but you get the feeling that his concern for the future is entirely genuine. Terror and humor overlap in a bewitching duality of the kind that only a Frenchman living in New York could hope to produce.
Korean photographer JoengMee Yoon’s Pink & Blue Project was prompted by his own five-year-old daughter, whose obsession with pink was so strong that she refused to wear any other color, and insisted on playing with only pink toys. It wasn’t long before Yoon discovered other children (and parents) with the same spellbound affliction, building identities around the single color that corresponds to their gender. Crossing boundaries of nationality and socio-economic status, Yoon’s project starkly examines the state of childhood under globalization, where prefabricated ideals and desires are marketed to children from birth.
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