It's Not William Tell, It's the Czech New Wave.

Coming up alongside other celluloid luminaries like Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, and Jan Němec, Věra Chytilová helped comprise the New Wave in Czech cinema. Chytilová was one of the only female filmmakers in Czechoslovakia who came into prominence just before the Prague Spring, a time of cultural and political liberalism when the country was very much under the thumb of the Soviet Union. Besides being concerned with avant garde aesthetics, Chytilová was also focused on representing an experience 
                                                                                                                     which was specifically female.

Her 1966 film Sedmikrásky, AKA Daisies was banned by the government for being unpatriotic in its depiction of food wastage. The two female protagonists, both named Marie, engage in pranks which are relentless and epic--with themselves becoming the inevitable target of their own destruction. Today, it's probably her best known work as its scope is simultaneously absurd and feminist, and as it's an excellent example of (what I'm gonna call) proto-psychedelic-special-effects brilliance. 

1970s lesser known Ovoce stromu rajských jíme, AKA Fruit of Paradise (or even We Eat the Fruit of the Tree of Paradise) again features layering techniques which are nothing short of Brakhage-esque. The film's glacial pace and supreme lack of narrative coherence was, for me, a little difficult to endure. None-the-less, there are lots of gorgeous images to enjoy, and you have to respect anyone willing to take on a feminist revision of the book of Genesis. I made a triptych of film posters celebrating it (mostly because the DVD cover was terribble), and you can check them out below. To create these, I captured a still I liked (while viewing the disc on the computer and using the print screen function) of an "Eve" figure with her arms folded across her chest. After drawing a 4-layer deep vector image of her, I had some fun making graphic shapes out of letter forms, adding some tripped-out transparency layers, playing with psychotropic color palettes, etc. Although Pauline Kael is a real film critic, the quote that appears on the second poster was manufactured by me!

Ich liebe Friedensreich Hundertwasser!

Pardon my Deutsch, but I need to get to Vienna some day to check out the fabulous KunstHausWien. This museum houses the only permanent collection of works by the above mentioned Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Known for both his art and his architecture, he was responsible for building the museum and  making it look awesome, inside and out!

The Austrian artist, whose self-appointed name translates roughly to Peace-Kingdom Hundred-Water (gotta love that German compound noun action), was always a left-of-center kind of guy. Born to a Jewish mother, he posed as a Christian and became a member of the Hitler Youth during WWII to avoid persecution. He would later create iconographic images for flags, coins, and stamps, including one for the 35th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; But, by far, his poster art leaves the most lasting impressions. One of Hundertwasser's central concerns was the environment, and much of his work expressed a desire for humanity to reconcile its place within the natural world.

Earlier this spring, I experimented with redesigning an identity system for KHW (although it was nearly impossible to improve upon the existing one). By way of  its curatorial choices and by its own architecture and design, KHW presents an alternative to the stereotypically hard, symmetrical, and minimal Western European visual ethos.  Much like the artist around which the whole enterprise pivots, KHW spirals out from the middle and frolics in the margins of modern art. I tried, in my design, to evoke what I imagined Hundertwasser's aesthetic personality to be if it were personified: a colorful and flamboyant entity, covered head to toe in decoration at once whimsical and organic; not exactly childish, but bursting forth with the exuberant hues of a child's imagination, playful and bright, with no surface ending in straight lines or hard edges. I enjoyed getting familiar with Hundertwasser's way of handling typography. I am not normally a big fan of logos made entirely out of letterforms, but his letters made for such interesting graphic shapes I had to incorporate them. The result was something of a compromise. I probably ended up with more than 20 versions in various color palettes. I have included my favorites below, in all their eyeball-biting glory.

Violet Hour Art

First Post is a happy one: The Violet Hour LP is finally being born. Vinyl is pressed, inserts are printed, and silk screens are about to be shot. With any luck, the sleeves will look something like the first two images below--it's a three color print (chartreuse, turquoise, and copper) on natural cardboard. The insert was created in Illustrator using photography by David Bergander (Andriana's Husband) and manipulated digital images of gouache birds originally painted by me. The last image is an alternate version of the cover which will probably turn into a web graphic. Click on any image to enlarge.