Mindscape In Cyberspace

Early Story Illustration (1989)
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One more illustration from the initial days of my career in pre-digital era. In 1989-90, I used to work for a daily news paper as an illustrator and commercial artist. The attached illustration is one of the hundreds illustrations that I have drawn for them, during this period. Being a literature enthusiast and an avid reader of all literary forms, I used to enjoy the stories as well, for which I was supposed to draw the illustrations and my formal education in language and literature used to help me a lot to come up with the most effective illustrations for them.

Story Illustration for Newspaper (1990)
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One more story illustration from the early days of my career as an artist and designer. Pen and ink is still one of my favorite analog drawing media and I guess, my love for this particular media has started back in 1989-90, when I was working on these illustrations for a Bengali Daily.

Story Illustration for daily newspaper (1989)
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This illustration is from my old paper-made folder of story illustrations from the my ‘teen’ days that I have done for news paper, during 89-90! I started working as an illustrator and commercial artist while I was still in my college, pursuing my graduation in Literature.

This particular illustration is one of my favorites from that era. I still remember very clearly that how I used the nozzle of a watercolor tube to draw the basic thick lines to form the figure, directly on the paper without any pen, pencil or brushwork and then tried to bring out the details with small strokes and thin lines of a felt pen. The thick, long lines drawn by nozzle  and the finer and shorter lines by felt pen, when juxtaposed with each other, broght out the field of depht, quite successfully, irrespective of the limitation of space, tones, and colors.

Since 1996, a San Francisco-based cartoonist Chad Frick has been entertaining Internet users of all ages, with his strange but humorous fantasy world and his bizarrely cute but amazing characters, like Beettleboy, Doctor Fingo Ho, Prof. Nanweep, Lester, Cats, and those unforgettable Dancers who dance on your clicks. I remember, the first time I visited YukYuk.com, back in 1998 or 1999, I was simply amazed by his drawing skills and technical knowledge. After that, I have visited YukYuk.com, regularly and spent hours, interacting with his animations, all carrying a small note saying “More you click, more you see’. In ‘98, there were not too many on-line games available on Internet. So, Chad Frick’s YukYuk.com has successfully attracted me and other Internet users, till he stopped updating the site. But all his illustrations, interactive cartoons and animations are still available at YukYuk.com.

Later, after the initial spell was over, I started checking more details about Chad Frick and I was simply amazed when I saw his Botanical illustrations. The detailing in Chad’s scientific illustrations are simply great and this explains why Chad’s ‘unnatural’ characters, being so unreal, look so natural!! Chad’s strong sense of anatomical structures of ‘real’ life-forms of ‘natural’ world, definitely helped him to create his strange, bizarre, unnatural, unreal world of YukYuk.

I was flipping through the portfolio site of a Dutch illustrator and graphics designer, Lennard Schuurmans. As soon as I landed up on the homepage of v-i-a-v-i-a.nl, the first thing that caught my eye is the underplayed warm colors like yellow, red, pink, bright green surrounded thick black lines, confident and strong. I liked the way these lines are interacting smoothly with the tonal narratives of the images. I also appreciate the way he used black against these warmer colors, creating a chaotic harmony of multiple events, in his images.

The organic shapes and figures, juxtaposed with a techno-mystic, humorous, slightly bizarre world, sometimes can create an uncanny feeling and that IS the flavor of his works. I have noticed subtle influences of oriental forms like the perspective sense of early Chinese or Japanese paintings in his compositions or influence of new age Japanese comics in his character drawings. I guess he has used those elements very consciously to create the ambiance for his imageries - from busy composition like this one or this one to his sad faced monkey characters like this one or this one. However, these actually added nothing but more visual value on his works. Lennard also used the form of underground Wall Graffiti in a modified mood on his Paint works and Typographical works, along with flat undertones of warm colors and a range of various motifs taken from techno-comics to underground wall graffiti to morphed organic shapes.

One more thing I liked is the strong presence of an apparently complicated narrative in all his works which actually lures you to interact with his images, even the ones which look somehow repulsive, initially.

Lennard Schuurmans’ illustraions can be viewed here »
VIA VIA - v-i-a-v-i-a.nl »

I came across an impressive on-line exhibition called ‘Comic Abstraction‘, presented by MOMA. The full title of the exhibition is ‘Comic Abstraction - Image-Breaking, Image-Making‘. The exhibition physically took place at the Museum Of Modern Art, from March 4 to June 11, 2007. It was organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, MOMA. It featured famous artists, illustrator, animators like Arturo Herrera, Takashi Murakami, Polly Apfelbaum, Ellen Gallagher, Sue Williams, Michael Majerus, Inka Essenhigh, Juan Munoz, Julie Mehretu, Franz West, Garry Simmons, Phileppe Parreno and Rivane Neuenschwander. The website - Comic Abstraction is a nice and comprehensive on-line representation of the exhibition.

I liked the work by Rivane Neuenschwander and the way she tackled and questioned the political agenda of a canonical work in comic book history. In her ‘The Return of Ze Carioca’ (1960), she consciously tries to disassemble a historic edition of a popular comic book featuring, Ze Carioca aka Jose Carioca, the famous Brazilian parrot and a popular ‘Disney’ character, created in 1941, during World War II, when Walt Disney was visiting Brazil to support American relations with this region. She feels that Jose Carioca, the character created by Disney, is actually based on the ’stereotypical cliché of the Brazilians’ and helps to ‘crystallize the national image of a Malandro or a rascal in local language and confronts this ‘implicit political and racial undertone’ by over-painting the figures with bright flat colors and the text, with blank opaque white.

It reminds me the famous book of a baby-faced European comic book hero - in which, he goes to South America, preaches ‘morals and ethics’, ‘enlightens’ the local guerrillas with ’social values’ and ‘teaches’ them about revolution. It also reminds me, the dumb and expressionless faces of Africans or Asians, as they are pictured in this particular comics series.

I also liked, ‘Speech Bubbles’ (1997) by Phileppe Parreno, because of the subtle reference of political undertone it carries along. Parreno’s work is not an image but an installation with clusters of helium-filled balloons with shapes of the speech bubbles of a comic book. Parreno’s idea of a ‘good image’ is also very interesting. According to him, “A good image is always a social moment.’ I agree with him!

The On-line Exhibition can be viewed here »