As we continue 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.
Gashu Sumeragi Natsuki
Her illustrations are a wonderful blend of Manga style with traditional Chinese art. The bulk of her work focuses on the historical settings of China and Korea which suits Gashu’s style perfectly.
Kay Nielsen
A Danish illustrator who gained notoriety from his various fairy tale illustrations, much like Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. His elaborate watercolor and ink illustrations are whimsical, richly detailed tableaus influenced by Japanese woodcuts and Aubrey Beardsley. He later went on to develop the look of several key sequences in Disney’s Fantasia.
Mikhail Vasil’evich Nesterov
A recent discovery for us, MIkhail was trained in the Academic Method at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia. He blends realism with a design sense straight from Art Nouveau. Unfortunately his paintings remain largely unknown in the States.
Carlos Nine
If T.S. Sullivant, George Herriman, and Salvador Dali were pureed in a blender, the result would be a Carlos Nine smoothie. His crazed, constantly shifting, almost hallucinogenic forms are probably one of the most unique visions in the world of illustration and comics.
Alex Niño
Alex is a Filipino comic artist who has worked in and out of mainstream comics since the 1970s. He gained much of his notoriety from his work in various horror and fantasy anthologies, primarily Creepy, Eerie, and Heavy Metal. Like many other artists in this alphabet, he later found employment at Disney, where he worked on designs for Atlantis and Mulan.
Phil Noto
Noto has built a world out of 1960s spy novels and bubble helmet sci-fi as interpreted through vintage advertising and magazine illustration. Streamlined design, arched eyebrows, and punchy colors abound.
C O L O P H O N
Caecilia, perhaps the the first slab serif with a true italic, was designed
by Peter Matthias Noordzij and released in 1991 by Linotype.
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.
