I decided to showcase another artist that I’ve recently been getting into, an American-born, Italian-raised textile designer by the name of Alexander Girard, 1907 – 1993.

Girard worked with Herman Miller, George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, and is best known for designing the La Fonda del Sol Restaurant in New York (1960) and the interiors, textiles and ephemera for Braniff Airlines (1965). With a penchant for folk art and a strong eye for colour, his work is still freshly contemporary despite having a distinctly quasi-psychedelic vibe. His palette, whilst seemingly full of clashing colours, has such a strength of character to it that it seems natural and right.

I love the simplicity and boldness of his graphic style and the sense of playfulness it imbues. Designers seemed to have so much more fun with their work in those halcyon days when experimentation was encouraged over mere productivity.

He’s definitely one to check out if you like a strong line and an adventurous palette!

More information about Girard at The Museum of International Folk Art

Girard’s work at Braniff Airlines

Interviews about Girard’s body of work

1. LADY GAGA’S BAD ROMANCE. I know, I know — and yet, she does write her own songs, and she has her own sense of style (the wheelchair/invalid dance in Paparazzi?!), and you can play this song over and over if you’re caught in a bad roma-roma-ramma… etc. Oh, and the monster dance moves? Go ahead, watch the video now. I’m breaking out my monster claws at the next party.

2. PRESIDENTIAL FLASHCARDS. Go to the “One Spot” at Target where everything is a dollar, and get this set of Presidential Flashcards with a prez portrait on the front and fun facts on the back. I spent yesterday memorizing all of the presidents in order. I’m sure that will come in handy… never. (Whose the dude with the cool hairdo in the pic above? ANSWER BELOW.)

3. BIG LOVE. Rumor has it, the fourth season just began, but, as an HBO-less human, behind on the times, I just finished the first season ($26). There is a voyeuristic thrill in watching this rendition of modern-day polygamy, which, according to this one time I flipped on Oprah, still happens outside of crazy, fundamentalist-Mormon compounds. Oh, and it stars Gennifer Goodwin as one of the wives, and Amanda Seyfried as one of the daughters.

4. PENGUIN DELUXE CLASSICS. The covers of the Penguin Deluxe Classics almost make we want to read books I loath, such as Ethan Frome, which has its very best heartbreaking/hysterical scene immortalized on the cover. Many of the covers instead immortalize scenes in comic strips, including Chris Ware’s (you should know him) cover for Candide:

5. TRUE BLOOD (watch the trailer!). So, I was totally not on the vampire bandwagon until I watched the first season ($45 on amazon.com, but I think it’s on sale at Target!) of True Blood (the second season didn’t do it for me, so I didn’t finish it, but I still recommend the first) about a near-future world in which Vampires have come out of hiding to attempt to peacefully co-exist with humans (and have hot, naked HBO-sex with them). Sookie (Oscar winner Anna Paquin! Love her!), a minding-reading southerner, falls in love with Vampire-Bill (hot, but pale). Best of all, it’s produced — with some episodes written and directed by — Alan Ball, Oscar-winning writer of American Beauty. Finally, the title sequence runs like a music video about redemption and sin (read about it on Wikipedia):

ANSWER: William Henry Harrison! If you can’t remember anything about him, don’t worry, he was only president for thirty-two days!

Copyright Adweek.com

Once upon a time a quiet, but slightly mad, Welsh illustrator met a loud, but extremely mad American journalist and a legend was born. One horse race, a drug-fueled drive from Las Vegas to California, several wrecked hotels, many wrecked minds and countless destroyed mimeograph machines forged the lifelong friendship of Ralph Steadman and Hunter S. Thompson.

Steadman’s slightly acerbic satirical doodles at “Punch” and “The Daily Telegraph” in the UK had gained him a respectable, if small, following amongst the liberal readers and critics, but it wasn’t until he snagged a commission from “Scanlan’s” to illustrate Thompson’s piece on the infamous Kentucky Derby in 1970 that his surreal and twisted scratchings came to life.

Copyright Ralph Steadman

“This man had an impressive head chiseled from one piece of bone,” recalled Steadman later. “and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy-brimmed sun hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multi-coloured patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants, and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near 6-foot-6 of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand.”

Thompson’s gonzo style of journalism – putting himself at the heart of any story and relaying his experiences of the moments in a dark stream of consciousness – held a mirror up to Steadman’s crazed artistic sensibilities and made him look ever deeper into his own nightmare visions of the world.

Copyright Ralph Steadman

The spray and ink blot style of illustration was not a new thing. From Ronald Searle’s grubby little prep school boys of St. Custard’s to Gerald Scarfe’s cruel caricatures and around Quentin Blake’s whimsical drawings for Roald Dahl, the calculated mistake of splashed black ink had always been a feature of satirical portraiture.

Steadman turned it into an art form with elements of collage and touches of fine art in amongst the savagery. He’s won many prestigious design and illustration awards, worked with other authors, done graphics for companies and records and written his own novels. Yet it’s his work with Thompson that fuels the legend to ever-greater heights: bats and rabid dogs, bleak desert landscapes composed of twisted telegraph poles and infinite perspective lines, bloated bureaucrats with gaping mouths and US matrons with cruel features and monstrous bodies.

Copyright Ralph Steadman

And it’s his drive and creative zeal, even at the age of 73, which sets him apart. “I must have a feeling that: ‘Oooh I’m really excited about this!’ The most depressed times I have is when I just don’t wanna do anything. A living hell is not being creative, being utterly devoid of any creative impulse whatsoever.”

Check out the work of Ralph Steadman at his official website

Buy gorgeous Steadman prints

Read his excellent autobiography

Check out more Gonzo art in a coffee table book

Drool over his stunning “Alice in Wonderland”

I read E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman for a class this year. It is a kind of disturbing and thrilling fairy tale that I had previously only known through Freud’s interpretation in The Uncanny. While reading it, I faintly recalled that this was the same man who authored The Nutcracker, which also always seemed disturbing, what with that seven-headed mouse and all.

So, I went in my xmas-book-archives and found the fabulous edition shown above. I am obsessed, and anyone who has come to my house in the past three weeks has been forced to look at it. It is a translation of the original text, not some dumbed-down and docile version “for children.” Not only that, but it is illustrated by Maurice Sendak, author of the children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are! He apparently drew the illustrations for the book to accompany the set and costume design for a ballet production.

Detailed illustrations occur throughout the text:

“She is overwhelmed with growing up and has no knowledge of what this means. I think the ballet is all about a strong emotional sense of something happening to her, which is bewildering.” — Maurice Sendak, NPR interview

There are also full-page illustrations, or, best of all, full-page spreads:

During the adventure to the magical capital, there are four beautiful full-page spreads in a row (oh, and a wild thing peeks his head out in one of them!):

Anyway, now that I’ve shown you all that, here’s the bad news: it’s out of print. Here’s the good news: it looks like there are still some old copies for sale on amazon.com in paperback and hardcover.

1. Goldtone Banjolele Deluxe from Musician’s Friend, $450 (too shiny and would prefer the banjolele sold at the Old Town School of Folk Music’s store on Lincoln Ave. …thank you to the guy at the store who let me hold it…)

2. Yama Syphon Brewer from Clive Coffee, $50

3. Save the Manatee club membership, $25

4. Hohner Melodica from Musician’s Friend, $35

5. Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet from Amazon, $167

6. Blue Microphones Snowball from Amazon, $72.30 (so I can record songs about pies and bucolic fields…just kidding.)

7. Itazura Coin Bank (White Kitty) from Strapya World, $21.70 (watch this and you will be convinced)

8. Proximity Magazine subscription, $30 (even if you’re illiterate, you can still admire the STUNNING typography and layout)

9. Speedball Ultimate Screen Printing Kit from BLICK, $85

10. Keyboard stickers by Christopher Morno DeLorenzo, $15 (B for Bowie!)

And that’s the end of our wishlists.

Of course the Stickers and Donuts team’s greatest wish is to hear from you (we know you’re reading!  Google Analytics does not lie!)  SO!  Now it’s your turn.  What’s on your wishlist? Fulfilling the S&D wish not a good enough reason for you to comment?  Well, here’s a bribe.  The first 10 people who comment (excluding any S&D writers, however, they are encouraged to comment regardless) will receive a S&D surprise.

I’m following Tricia’s new series of “People you should know”, and today it’s graphic artist Chris Ware!

You may have come upon Chris Ware’s most famous piece of work, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, a very impressive graphic novel. Most people I know never finished it actually, because it’s very dense, and has almost 400 pages of very neat and tiny text, tiny tiny drawings and a very detailed and complicated back story. To be honest, it took me more than a year to read it in its entirety, with more than 3 unsuccessful attempt.
So, you might ask, why should I know this guy, if he does complicated and headache-inducing comics ? Well, here are some reasons :

1. He is VERY talented :
Let’s be clear : Chris Ware is a genius. A never-goes-out-and-looks-kinda-weird genius, but a genius all the same. To begin with, he almost never uses computer. Yep, that’s right, all this over-detailed artwork is hand-drawn. The typo too. He HAND DRAWS all text in his books. If you think it’s not that difficult, just take a look :

This is all made by hand. I can barely write an address on an envelope without scratching it all and starting over a dozen times.

2. Nobody else can tell a story like he does
Ok, Jimmy Corrigan is weird and to this day, I’m not sure I understood everything right. But you have to admit, Chris Ware has a unique and marvelous way to tell a story. It’s all flow, sequential, flashbacks, fantasy… Here is an example :

See what I mean ? It’s just square boxes, and then it’s so much more. Just try and follow the train of thoughts here. Magical.

3. He’s very prolific
This guy is crazy. He does so many things, I can’t keep count. He is a contributor to the New Yorker, he does lots of jazz-related work, he self-publishes numerous graphic novels… The insides of his brain must look like a very busy factory. But that means YEAH for us Chris Ware lovers, because we can’t run out of stuff to read/see/enjoy.

4. He has created great characters
Jimmy Corrigan, sure, but also Rusty Brown, the nerd collecting action figures that lives in his own world, Quimby the Mouse and his love/enemy Sparky that cat’s head (yes, cat’s head), the Super-Man, a depressed anti-hero, Big Tex the cow-boy, the lonely girl with the fake leg… And much more.

So, I hope by now, if you didn’t already know Chris Ware, you’re eager to see more.

I’m leaving you with a video of Quimby animated by John Kuramoto for This American Life, set to Andrew Bird’s song “Eugene.” Enjoy !

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

I will readily admit that my love of books is an obsession that has extended beyond the normal. I spend more time drawing them than I do either reading them or writing them, though I’m probably better equipped for the later.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart:  I am, I am, I am.

No matter! I am busy making a series of classic book desktop wallpapers! Remember, way back when, when I provided you with your very own Catcher in the Rye wallpaper!? Wasn’t that fun??? Yes? Good! Now for The Bell Jar! My edition of The Bell Jar is perhaps the ugliest in existence. I think it’s some movie edition (was there a movie???). But when I re-drew it in my ugly, wobbly hand, I found it weirdly more pleasing, math has never been my strong suit, but it is as if ugly squared = pretty!

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell.  I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

The silence depressed me.  It wasn’t the silence of silence.  It was my own silence.

So, I’ve got many sizes, shapes, and styles for you! I know everyone’s computer set-up and style is different. (My personally customized setup with my dual-screens is thus:)

But enough about me. Here’s some free backgrounds for you!!!

iphone / ipod touch

1280 x 800 (Version 1)

1280 x 800 (Version 2)

1440 x 900

1680 x 1050

1920 x 1080 (Version 1)

1920 x 1080 (Version 2)

1920 x 1200

Do these bright and cheery quotes make you want to read The Bell Jar? Have a go! With a better cover! Unless you like ugly covers for their kitsch value, then get this one. Or, check out Sylvia Plath’s fantastic sense of style in this old post, Sylvia Plath, Fashion Icon.

Despite a sea of failed series attempts, here is a new attempt: PEOPLE YOU SHOULD KNOW.  I will feed you, the curious creative person, another creative person who you should be aware of.  Perhaps you will find inspiration or a kindred soul.  I CAN ONLY HOPE THAT THIS EXPRESSED HOPE COMES INTO FRUITION.

On the topic of FRUIT (applause, applause), this pivotal inaugural edition features Ignatz award-winning MINTY LEWIS. After discussing my recent foray into comic books, my roommate lent me PS Comics.  It’s glorious!  Irrefutably whimsical, PS Comics is a compilation of 14 comics that explore relationships and loneliness…through terriers and fruits.  And sometimes salt shakers.  This cast may seem absurd, but Minty’s characters are excellent vehicles of human emotion.  The stories are enriched with depth and insight (Minty gives dating advice through the story of a Salt and Sugar shaker romance), and encourage you to reflect upon daily interactions with others.

A list of other Minty items is available here.  I highly recommend Papercutter issue ten, which has the lovely Minty back cover below.  NOTE: If you ever visit my apartment, expect to see a framed copy of this image very soon.

Note: Top image background is from PS Comics, comic excerpts from (clockwise) “Yorkig Schoolmates,” “‘Me’ Time,” “Salt & Sugar,” and “Bitter Fruit” (I feel your pain, Pear.), bottom image from Papercutter issue ten.

Chris Van Allsburg is up there on my list of favorite children’s author/illustrators. You will certainly recognize some of his books which include Jumanji and The Polar Express.

Chris’s books give readers that happy/sad feeling akin to nostalgia, and are almost always insist on awesome feats of the imagination, but The Stranger, one of his more melancholy books, is simply about a mysterious man who arrives at a farm after losing his memory. The tale has hints of fantasy, but they are more subtle than jungle apes and trips to the north pole.

As usual, the illustrations are perhaps the most beautiful part of Van Allsburg’s tales:

Roxaboxen is about a town that children make out of rocks and boxes:

My favorite thing about the book is that neither the author (Alice McLerran) or the illustrator (Barbara Cooney — a very famous children’s book illustrator, you’ll probably recognize some of the books she’s done) ever go into the children’s book cliche of showing the world of Roxaboxen “as the children see it.” No, the children still live in an ugly, barren land, and their town is literally of rocks and boxes. And no, they do not have random fabulous supplies, their jails are the bushes and their cars are old stearing wheels:

The children make up rules on a whim (you can’t speed in a car, but you can go as fast as you want by horse). I think it really encourages children to have their own fun with whatever supplies they have. In fact, that is exactly what I did as a child, forcing my friends to build little rock houses by my dead, hollow apple tree. I insisted on being Mayor. Their acquiescence, I later discovered, occured because they thought I wanted to be “The Mare” (though they couldn’t figure out why).