Applied Arts photography/Illustration winners issue is out!

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A brief update from my posting on February 29th..

Domesticating efficiency : Lillian Moller Gilbreth

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Lillian Moller Gilbreth [1878-1972] is perhaps best remembered for motherhood. Her children wrote the popular books Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes about their experiences growing up with such a large and famous family. But Lillian Moller Gilbreth was not only a mother; she was also a scholar, inventor, author, industrial engineer, industrial psychologist and a recipient of many honorary mentions/awards.

A pioneer in ergonomics, Dr. Gilbreth patented many kitchen appliances including an electric food mixer, shelves inside refrigerator doors, and the famous trash can with a foot-pedal lid-opener. She is best known for work simplification and industrial efficiency, to help workers in industry, which she shows in her classic Time & Motion Studies. She is one of the first scientists who recognized the effects of stress and lack of sleep [fatigue] on the worker.

Together with her husband , she pioneered industrial management techniques still in use today. She was one of the first 'superwomen" to combine a career with her home life.

After the death of her husband, Frank Gilbreth, with whom she partnered in the management consulting firm of Gilbreth Inc. and co-authored many of the worker studies, Lillian Gilbreth continued their work and extended the work into the home in an effort to find the 'one best way' to perform household chores. She also did studies to assist the physically challenged : for example, she designed an ideal kitchen layout for a person afflicted with heart disease.

Lillian Gilbreth was an industrial engineer for General Electric and worked on improving kitchen designs. Gilbreth interviewed over 4,000 women to design the proper height for stoves, sinks, and other kitchen fixtures. In 1966, she became the first women to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

More here:

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The seed of growth and development or Helen Keller's "Aha!"

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“Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.”
--Helen Keller--

From the moment early humans created words, the seed of the library was there, in the beginning, with the word.

The Miracle Worker, the classic play [and film] of Helen Keller's life, depicts this seed at the moment of sprouting. The six-year-old Helen, deaf, blind and locked for years in a silence of darkness and almost wild with frustration, stands at the pump, her hand under the running water. Her teacher Annie Sullivan is spelling "water" in sign letters repeatedly into Helen's little palm - - probably for the hundredth time.

Then there is that stark moment of epiphany when the child, for years bereft of any way to communicate, makes the sudden connection between the cold water and the fingers insistently making shapes in her palm. In that moment, a human child skips over eons of human history, leaping from the inchoate and languageless state of man's prehistory into the world of signs.
Later, Helen Keller wrote that she wasn't fully conscious until she had language:

"It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old. The morning after my teacher came she gave me a doll. ... As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. .."

Source : here

International illustration exhibit in Lecce, Italy

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I will be writing and posting photo's about the event after the vernissage, May 3rd 2008.

Stay tuned!

4/5/2008
for now, here are some links that cover the Lecce exhibition 1,2,3,4.
[**ERRATUM: Suana Verlest should be Suana Verelst]

[Translation Button]

Surrealism meets elderly lady

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Look carefully, and you see the tiny wrinkly waves the fish produces while she knits..
This collage-sketch is absurd, strange and perhaps somewhat disturbing. Does it come close to surrealism ? Does it have anything to do with symbolism ? Or any -isms aside, what does it convey ?

A group of artists, the Surrealists sought to explore an inner reality beyond the rational world. They often used symbols to portray bizarre, dreamlike landscapes and were influenced by the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud.

The Surrealists were interested in more distinct forms than the Impressionists, who often depicted objects dissolved in bright sunlight. Like Dada artists, they experimented with new subjects. Unlike Dada artists, the Surrealists were not in favor of anarchy as a way of protesting politics and war. Andre Breton, poet and critic was known as one of the founding fathers of the Surrealist movement. In his treatise of 1924, First Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton defined the doctrines of the movement. In it, Breton emphasized the importance of an "automatic" approach and a dream state for creativity.

One of the most controversial and key figure of the Surrealist movement was Salvador Dali. He was intrigued by Freud's ideas of the unconscious mind, and the symbolic significance these ideas held, inspired most of his art. Dali, more than many other Surrealists, combined realism into his strange landscapes, giving them a startling, familiar quality. His goal was "to record unconscious objects as precisely as possible."

Neo-primitivism

"Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning." Igor Stravinsky

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A Russian art movement originated from the book Neo-primitivizm (1913) written by A. Schevchenko.

This book introduces a new style in painting with elements of cubism, futurism and traditional Russian folk art. The work Neo-primitivism in the West is also used as a wider term to describe the work of artists who aspire to the aesthetic of primitivism. One of these artists is Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky [June 17th, 1882 - April 6th, 1971], who was a Russian composer. He is considered by both the West and his native Russia to be the most influential composer of the 20th century. An example of primitivism in music is Stravinsky's third ballet, The rite of Spring. When it first premiered in Paris, a riot erupted in the audience — spectators were shocked and outraged by its pagan primitive sound, its harsh dissonance and percussions and the pounding rhythms — but but it too was recognized as a masterpiece and influenced composers all over the world.

Little Red Cap is off to Lecce, Italy..

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Above are 3 of my prints that are flying to the International exhibition of Illustration at the
Apuliae Libreria in Lecce. Anybody who's in the vicinity between the 3-24th of May, hope you can check out the exhibition...

IF_fail

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Feelings of self-worth
Each of us has a concept of self and each of us decides how worthy that self is.
We also have a self ideal, a standard against which we evaluate our behavior.
Threat to our ego occurs when we fail to reach goals dictated by our ideal self. Such failures lower our self worth and lead to feelings of inadequacy which manifest themselves in "hurt feelings" and in hypersensitivity.

A little over a month now, I started writing daily "Morning Pages", inspired by Julia Cameron's books. Morning pages are a way to dump your daily "garbage" and pour it onto the page first thing in the morning. This is not a new concept but was also used by Jung. "Morning Pages" function as a mental cleansing where you write for 30 to 45 minutes in longhand [about 3 typewriting pages] anything that jumps in your mind: things that happened the day before, things that bothered you, things you dreamt about or things you want to do but still haven't gotten around to do.
After a few days of writing these pages I started to notice little changes within my regular pattern of thinking: I was a little bit more focused, less irritated and definitely more goal oriented. [

Spring is here!

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Quebecs' winter is finally making room for the next season. The snow is
melting and spring is here; with it comes all the ickiness of left-behind
dog poop and garbage that was covered by an almost 6-month long winter!

Hurrah!

Save the whales!

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"Over exploit, cheat, deplete. The cycle of greed behind the global whaling industry drove one whale population after another toward oblivion.It is still not known if some species will ever recover, even after decades of protection. The statistics say it all. The blue whales of the Antarctic are at less than 1 percent of their original abundance, despite 40 years of complete protection. Some populations of whales are recovering but some are not. Only one population, the East Pacific grey whale, is thought to have recovered to its original abundance, but the closely related West Pacific grey whale population is the most endangered in the world. It hoverson the edge of extinction with just over 100 remaining."
Source: Greenpeace

The illustration is part of the book "When I am Big", published by Azro Press

Homage to a Flemish master

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The image I created, is a copy of a detail of the painting "The farmer's dance", by Breughel, which I originally did in pencil and then digitally manipulated. It turned out as if it was a woodcut or lino. I'll post the original pencil drawing soon.

My hero, or at least, one of my absolute heroes, Pieter Bruegel (the Elder) was a Flemish artist active in Antwerp and Brussels, famous for his paintings and drawings of landscapes and scenes of robust peasant life, and founder of a dynasty of artists that remained active well into the 17th century. Bruegel's art is often seen as the last phase in the development of a long tradition of Netherlandish painting beginning with Jan van Eyck in the 15th century. This tradition transformed the abstraction of medieval art into a more empirical view of reality.

Examples of peasant folk subjects include "Peasant Dance" and "Peasant Wedding" (both 1568). The two stamps both show a detail from the painting "Peasant Dance". With this work Bruegel created an entirely new genre: the farmer and his life were artistically immortalized for the first time.

Throughout his life Bruegel felt attracted to the harsh life of farmers, who until that time was only tolerated at best, but in "Peasant Dance" became a hero. The painting belongs to the Albertina Museum in Vienna.

Ornery or ill-tempered

Does he personify "The pet peeve" ?

Miffed ? peeved or p***ed off ?

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And what does it all stand for ?

[Pet Peeve]: "The term originated from the word 'peeve', and is relatively recent - its first usage was in 1919.
The term is a back-formation from the 14th-century word 'peevish,' meaning ornery or ill-tempered." A "peeve" is something that annoys or irritates one, and since irritation is a highly individual emotion, one's "peeve" mileage may vary from one's neighbor's. I am "peeved," for instance, by people who assume that my license plates (which refer rather cryptically to books) mean that I spend every waking hour rooting for the Buckophiles, conversely, are probably peeved at the cool disdain with which I disclaim any pro-Buckeye sentiments. For a word that expresses a universal (one presumes) human emotion, "peeve" is a remarkably recent coinage, first appearing in print as a verb only in 1908 and a noun (the thing that peeves) in 1911. Both "peeves," however, arose as what linguists call "back-formations" of the much older term "peevish," meaning "ill-tempered," that first appeared in the late 14th century. Back-formations, the derivation of a "root" word from a more complex form, are common in English -- the verb "to sculpt," for instance, was formed from the much older word "sculptor." "The precise derivation of "peevish" is uncertain, but it may be related to the Latin "perversus," meaning "reversed, perverse." The original meaning of "peevish" was simply "silly or foolish," but by about 1530 it had acquired the sense of "irritable, ill-tempered or fretful." Surprisingly, it then took several hundred year to develop "peeve" as the word for the irritating agent or action "pet peeve," meaning the one thing that annoys you more than anything else, first appeared around 1919. The "pet" (in the sense of "favorite") formulation probably owes its popularity and longevity to its mild perversity ("favorite annoyance" is a bit oxymoron-ic) as well as its snappy alliteration."
[source: here]

Never again!

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"NO, I am not going !
Never again do I want to move,
never again do I want to drag my stuff to another house,
never again do I want to lose my friends,
never again do I want to be in another neighbourhood,
another school, never again .."

"Why?" asked his mother.

"Because it is just too heavy, " sighed the boy.—
[published by Cego Publishers 2006/collage, pencil, gouache]

At the shrink's office.. :a fictional garden

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"Oh, what is he saying?'
[collage, gouache, pencil,ink]

Floral design

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Not exactly a garden, but some happy [somewhat with a Victorian flair]
floral designs I've done for soap packaging in various colors.
[digital, type]

Trust = inspiration ?

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I am looking for a shift in my life, but don't really know
where or how I should turn, if I could only
stop,
listen..
and
wait..

I find by observing water, watching it, following it, it quiets me, it makes me listen and be still. Sometimes I find there is too much noise around us, within us and we forget ourselves, we forget what we really can be. Is it this kind of a state we have to attain [observing, concentrating and listening] to find a peace within, to trust in ourselves and in that what will come ?

"The flow of creativity is a constant. We are the ones who are fickle or fearful. I have learned that my creative condition and my spiritual condition are one and the same. Making art is an act of faith, a movement toward expansion. When I am stymied in my work, I am stymied in my spiritual condition. When I am self-conscious as an artist, I am spiritually constricted. I need to pray to loose my self-centered fears. I need to ask for selflessness, to be a conduit, a channel for ideas to move through."
[excerpt from the book Finding Water by Julia Cameron]

17th Applied Arts Photography & Illustration Awards

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I know I've shown this image a few times on this blog but I am [very] happy to announce that this illustration "The Legend of the German Shepherd" will appear in the Photography & Illustration May Annual issue of Applied Arts Magazine !
[I'll be posting the published piece in May]

Leap into the unknown...

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digital, sketches, collage, gouache, type