Combining Visual Art Mediums

Slight Change,

Do to unfortunate timing and some technical issues I'll be posting "The reason why there's not more Wookie Jedis" next week.

I ran into an interesting article that came out over this past weekend from The Boston Globe. It was about the great Art Spiegelman of MAUS fame. It appears the dance company Pilobolus has courted Mr. Spiegelman into creating a joint venture of Cartooning and dance. You can check out the amazing article here (or click on the image below.) Reading this made me smile. You see two years ago I had the pleasure of working with the Community Dance Project (CD Project for short, a project though Happendance) in doing the exact same thing, combining dance and cartooning. To read more about that project check out my old blog post here. The project with Pilobolus has gone the next step from what I had done with CD Project. Art has created an animation style "Seventh Dancer" to be projected with the other dancers. On top of that the dancers appear to take some time doing some silhouette/shadow work to "Interact" with the animation. I only hope I will get a chance to see this in video. I have a feeling it will be an incredible thing to witness.

Dancers from Pilobolus rehearse "Hapless Hooligan in 'Still Moving,'" a collaboration with cartoonist Art Spiegelman. (Matthew Cavanaugh for The Boston Globe)

It's seeing like this that make me wonder is there anything that art can't be applied too? What's the next meshing of art forms that's going to find a handhold? Never constrain yourself as to what you can create, the capabilities of creation are truly limitless.

On to another bit of subject matter, This is my birthday post, I'm officially 31 years of age today. Just as I expected it doesn't feel any different. But I digress.

The following is a poster I had way too much fun creating. It was for the 2010 Russel B. Nye Lecture at Michigan State University. This years Lecture was by Shelley Fisher Fishkin of Stanford University. She came and talked about American literature and how non-American scholars viewed it. Well, more particularly the prose on the body of work from the famous American author, Mark Twain. I think a quote I used on the poster sums it all up "The cultural conversation about Mark Twain that is most familiar to scholars in the U.S. happens in English. But writers have been reading and responding to Mark Twain in languages other than English for at least 138 years. This talk looks at what we can learn by seeking out and attending to writing on a canonical American author published outside the U.S. in languages other than English."

For the poster I wanted to create original art that would wrap the whole concept together. I created a quick illustration of Mark Twain with a strong shadow. Then I scanned in the piece, colored it, set up a background, and made my color choices. Now I still had incorporate the fact that this Lecture was based on non-English languages. So utilizing the shadow on Mark Twain I placed foreign book titles, that discussed the works of Mark Twain, in a slightly darker color. I really like this piece and wanted to share it sans text.

I should have all technical issues sorted out be next week and then I'll have a quick little Comic to share with everyone.

Until then,

-Jacot