alain corbel - illustration

I had a terrible time in art school, as everyone who knows me personally has heard a thousand times over, but what knowledge and skill I DID learn came primarily from my illustration teacher, French artist Alain Corbel.  He is an incredibly creative and interesting person and his art is amazingly versatile.  He works will all sorts of different mediums, but what to me has become his signature look is executed in colored pencil on watercolor.  Truly, though, everything he does is good, and manages to be often very simplistic while perfectly styled, with a masterful color sense glazed over the top.

Selections.6

The fact that these cave images are hand-tinted gives them an even more surreal air.

Cave of the Winds, Manitou, Colorado

corny sculptural illustration, courtesy of Eleanor Frame scrapbook, volume ii

Sports injury

Skeleton discovered with some sort of ornamentation

Multi-level gravesite

Skeleton Couple

Prehistoric rendering of hunt scene

Ornate matrimonial log

Log of births, late 1800s

Deaths log, late 1800s

Selections.5

On this day in Special Collections - Curious Balkan Ceremonial Garb....

Long have I loved the swooning accordions and heart-wrenching cries of Balkan music (thank you, Beirut circa Gulag Orkestar, be still my heart).  Goran Bregovic, Boban Markovic and other of the regions most famous musicians give the listener an almost tactile sense of the blood-drenched history of the Balkan lands.

Needless to say,  I was thrilled when I came to the section in in the Ryan WWI photographs collection entitled "American Red Cross in the Balkans."  There weren't near as many images in this section as with others in the albums, but I certainly paid the most attention to it nonetheless.  The images feature a beautiful spectrum of weathered field-toiling people, and I have selected some of the most poignant and interesting ones for your viewing.

This ceremony was of great interest to me.  The pictures related to it bear no labels, but feature twin sisters and a few other girls in gilded outfits with elaborate breastplates displaying a vast number of coins.  Based on a few other photographs, it seems that the ceremony must be a sort of math-making or coming-of-age type affair.

I am smitten with this little child.

Horses trudging through deep hay

Pinup Bomber Tshirt design

I have been working all year on various t-shirt designs for silkscreening, and I have finally come up with a few solid versions of some that I really like.  This version of the above pictured design is not superb, but the design itself I dig.  I need to work on the stencil for it before I burn it onto another screen, as one can see, the fishnets came out far too chunky, instead of retaining the more delicate quality of the upper part of the image, namely the detail of the bullets.  The project is, nevertheless, progressing...

Sketchbook.4

Natural history studies, mostly of rabbits, from M. Meheut

selections- Eleanor Frame Scrapbook - Holiday cards vol. 1

The process of photographing Eleanor Frame's extensive, three-volume scrapbook series proved somewhat tedious.  The boss over at Spesh' Collects' wanted legible photos of the hundreds of glued-in newspaper clippings, 60% of which were wedding announcements.  The books hailed from the early 1940s, and so they were not as deteriorated as the previous scrapbook I had documented from 1919, compiled by one Gaylord Simons.  The latter nearly fell apart like butter with the brush of a hand.

The project was made worthwhile, however, by the few pages that would come along containing a panoply of vintage holiday cards, mostly Christmas-related. 

a peek inside the rare book room, undersize shelves

plaid dog, flocked ears

me gusta una velocipede

Silver bell ringer

And . . .

Christmas is for smokers, too, especially in the 1940's...

Smoking is the quickest way to look cool and stay warm on the north pole

wishing you a warm holiday by a crackling fire, whatever form the flame may take

Bomber santa

behold these cutesy labels

sk8r grl

Now it is time for a true story: once, for Christmas, I actually did get a donkey.  He didn't look at me lovingly like this one though, in fact he was so smart that he was impossible to ride let alone attach an ornamental poinsettia buggy to.  

here he is. this is Festus at his new home.  After my grandparents literally had to sell the farm on which Festus lived, they found him a new home with a friend.  Happy holidays, Festus (Festus doesn't read my blog).

always waiting

 

Curious but festive holiday lamb-deer hybrid....why didn't I think of that