My friend at work pointed these ads out to me. Not a new concept, but a funny one. Dragon Noodle Co.’s  ads feature purposefully poor translation (or maybe just made up stuff) and nonsensical imagery to promote their sushi bar in Las Vegas. Floating baby heads, food with legs and bottles of rabbit liquor abound.

Last Saturday Meg and I went to MassMoCA and saw the Sol Lewitt wall drawing project created by an initiative between MassMoCA and Williams College. A team of sixty two artists and students executed the drawings from April to September 2008. LeWitt’s wall drawings from the 1960s and 1970s were usually executed with lead and colored pencil, many of the wall drawings at MassMoCA were as well, but executers also used paint varying in thickness and gloss. The exhibition takes up three floors and is organized in progression from light paint to thicker glossier paint and then to drawing. It was amazing to see such large geometric shapes and colors. At times my eyes couldn’t take the color vibrations. I can’t imagine working on some of these. Posted above are pictures I took of some of my favorites. I only included one crazy color wall. I preferred the more subdued one. Maybe I’m getting old  You can check out MassMoCA’s website to see more.

Broken Bells features artist–producer Danger Mouse and James Mercer, the lead vocalist and guitarist for the The Shins. I’ve only heard the music that’s on the site, but it seems like a great album. Plus if you buy the limited edition music box you get 44-page notebook that includes photos and illustrations, a glow in the dark sticker sheet, a poster and 2 post cards with the cd. I love design work on this package. Even if the music was lame, and is sounds like it’s not, it would be worth it just to get the music box. If I could only justify spending the $40. I may have to just go with buying the album.

Update: My friend Sarah saw my post land in Facebook and let me know that you can listen to the whole album on NPR’s site.

Two weeks ago my studio did a weekend monotype workshop at Zea Mays Printmaking. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot about monotypes. I think what I liked most about making monotypes was the experimentation from one piece the next. Trying one technique, liking aspects of it and then repeating what I liked and adding something new to the next print. A good portion of the weekend I played around with making transparent shapes and overlaying them on one another; something I’ve been playing with in my illustration work for a few months. I’m really happy with how the print above came out. It took 6 passes through the press, the first laying down the off white color and then each pass afterwords laying down a larger circle than before. The color is exactly what I was looking for and I like the relationship the large group of circles has with the small light colored circle to the right of it. My concept for the print was to represent a comparison of humans to God. Humans being made in God’s image but not having His glory or power. I can’t wait to do more. I think in the future it would be interesting to try and depict this relationship in a way that brings the two objects closer together, not necessarily making humans closer to in stature to God but closer in intimacy.

Something I’m going to start doing a bit more is post some of my own work. This painting started as a sketch I did for Christianity Today Magazine about a man who died of throat cancer. The magazine went with another sketch that I equally liked but I thought it would a shame not to do a final for this image as well. Like I’ve mentioned in other posts I’ve been very interested in concentrating circles. One of the things I find fascinating about them is that they can be used to point to things. When adding color they can create an emotional and physical response like this one pinpointing the associated pain of the cancer or like in Luke Painter’s animation (see here) an emergence and build up of power. Another part of this paining that I enjoyed making were the cells. I looked at a lot of beautiful and grotesque images of cancer cells. They have an amazing motion that was fun to try and capture.

Luke Painter is a Toronto artist with some nice simply styled flash animations. I really liked the Fortress of Solitude animation. The green circles are great. I’ve been working with circles like that in my own art as of recent. See all of them and some wonderful drawing as well on his site.