Wednesday, October 19, 2011

living artist research 6: Alexis Deacon, Stian Hole, Taro Miura

1. Alexis Deacon
http://www.alexisdeacon.co.uk/
Deacon's work combines classic children's book traditions with a distinctly present sensibility, his characters lonely aliens & monster families where forest dwelling creatures & fairies would have been. His hazy, never over-worked drawings are executed small-scale in pencil, blown up & rearranged via photocopy, & then put on high-quality paper & watercolored/gouached. He occasionally seals an image to rework it with a layer of linseed oil; a technique I'd like to try.



2. Stian Hole
http://www.literaturfestival.com/participants/authors/2008/stian-hole
Working in digital collage, using found imagery & photoshop, Stian Hole makes work with aims to transcend the time-specific quality of the medium as it ages. Aware as he is of how dated it will someday seem --as it is dependent on technology, always obsoleting itself-- he has the old-fashioned mind of a collector, gathering textures, digital photos, scans, sketches, notes to combine into narrative compositions, with execution a spacial sensitivity & colors that allow the works to read cohesively & step outside of the distraction of the construction to communicate to a reader of any age.



3. Taro Miura
http://www.taromiura.com/
Japanese Taro Miura illustrates for advertising, children's books, magazines and book-covers, drawing influences from modern art, old picture books & ads, citing the japanese phrase that translates "new ideas come from knowledge of the past". For his board book Ton, Miura depicts purely visually the ways humans transport objects of increasing weight, distinctly drawing from Constructivism, rendered in the muscular 20's & 30's flat color with simplified, stencil-like text.


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