As we near the end of our journey through the alphabet some of you may have noticed a slight itching in the back of your eyes. Maybe you’ve felt hunger pains, not in your belly, but at the midpoint of your head. That’s where your visual cortex is found and that hunger signals the beginning stages of art addiction. Other symptoms include a compulsive need to discover all the names of teachers and friends of a particular well-known artist, exploding bookcases due to the weight of too many art books, and a deep knowledge of auction houses and their scheduled public viewings. Lastly, hives.
Don’t worry, the addiction is relatively benign and plenty of support groups exist. Just remember, it’s a scavenger hunt which has no list and never ends.
Note: Click on images to see them larger and in much higher quality.
Tadahiro Uesugi
While Tadahiro may render his works in a fairly streamlined manner, his organization of shapes and use of color is anything but simple. His charming retro style illustrations attracted the notice of stop motion director Henry Selick, who subsequently tapped him to shape the visuals of the animated film Coraline.
Euan Uglow
Beauty in painting is often equated with free spontaneous brushwork, an immediacy recorded in the surface of the painting. However, there is a different, more subtle beauty that is born from painstakingly calculated brushstrokes, a beauty that’s earned one inch of canvas at a time. Euan Uglow’s methodical painting process produced work of this nature. His planar style has been an influence on numerous contemporary artists including Jenny Saville and Alex Kanevsky.
Nicolas Uribe
Modern figurative painters either reject the developments of the past 100 years of art or happily gobble them up and make them their own. Nicolas has freely sampled from the buffet of the twentieth century. His figurative works are wonderful explorations into the use of pattern and repetition as it relates to our sense of reality.
Kitagawa Utamaro
Utamaro’s name is synonymous with Japanese wood block prints. His works are diverse and include everything from simple single figure portraits, to various erotic scenes, to complex multifigure illustrations of spirits and demons. His prints went on to serve as compositional influences to the European Impressionists.
C O L O P H O N
The SMeltery, a one-man foundry run by French type designer Jack Usine, distributes interesting and experimental fonts, many for free. This week features Usine’s typeface MEgalopolis Extra, with a number of his other faces on backup: GEronto Bis, AUdimat, TRottoir, PAtronne, and JUstice Mono.
We are Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon. We live in a pocket-sized apartment in Brooklyn where we collect neat, weird things. Our home is abundant with books, old furniture, mismatching tea cups, and a cat named Cipher. We both illustrate stuff for money so we can continue to invent stories, buy shoelaces, watch puppet shows, and eat sandwiches.
