Things #15: Seventy-five surrealist aeroplanes, a magic garden, and three kaleidoscopic prints!

Date
6 June 2014

In the great words of Ovid “all things change, nothing is extinguished,” and in this week’s things extraordinary transformations happen right before your very eyes. Within the metamorphic cluster, you’ll see the Trellick Tower transformed into a cautionary tale; paper transformed into a leisurely, labyrinthine garden; geometric shapes transformed into gleeful personifications; and aeroplanes transformed into wasps and arrows and even surrealist sleep. One thing’s for sure, after flicking through these kaleidoscopic enigmas, things will never be the same again.

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Alessandra Genualdo: Illustrations for The Boy Who Always Looked Up by Ryan Gander

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Alessandra Genualdo: Illustrations for The Boy Who Always Looked Up by Ryan Gander

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Alessandra Genualdo: Illustrations for The Boy Who Always Looked Up by Ryan Gander

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Alessandra Genualdo: Illustrations for The Boy Who Always Looked Up by Ryan Gander

Alessandra Genualdo: Illustrations for The Boy Who Always Looked Up by Ryan Gander

Ryan Gander’s imagining of the tale The Boy Who Always Looked Up transports the story from the dense and dark Bavarian forest of Heinrich Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter, into a sleek and grey world inspired by Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower. Alessandra Genaldo’s accompanying illustrations are simple and sparse, rendered in an exquisitely soft colour palette and featuring chunky characters that look like modernist paper dolls. The story is just my kind of cautionary tale, because instead of saying that mind-wandering is a bad thing like in the Hoffman story where the boy falls in a lake and drowns, Ryan suggests the very opposite. At the end of the tale, the little boy Ernö gazes up and says: “It’s empty up here in the sky, and when I look up I feel like I can do anything, that anything is possible.” The captivating ideas made into captivating images by Alessandra suggest that having your head in the clouds is not such a bad thing after all.
www.alessandragenualdo.blogspot.co.uk

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Jiro Bevis: Print

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Jiro Bevis: Print

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Jiro Bevis: Print

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Jiro Bevis: Print

Jiro Bevis: Prints

To brighten up our bare walls, Jiro Bevis sent us these bold and flashy new posters. The London-based illustrator did some incredible work for our annual last year, and it’s great to see more explosive, vibrant work spilling from his brain in the form of snappy, popping prints.
www.jirobevis.co.uk

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David Janes: Seventy-Five Aeroplanes

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David Janes: Seventy-Five Aeroplanes

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David Janes: Seventy-Five Aeroplanes

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David Janes: Seventy-Five Aeroplanes

David Janes: Seventy-Five Aeroplanes

The charming illustrations cross-hatched across the pages of David Janes’s hand-bound book vividly imagine what would happen if you crossed a plane with a shrimp, or a plane with an anvil, or a christmas cracker, or the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The eccentric designs are Terry Gilliam-esque and contain plenty of Magrittian wit and whimsy; some of David’s concoctions seem even to have rocketed straight out of the aviation dream sequences in The Wind Rises. We featured David on the site a little while back, and it’s great to see more intricate illustrations soaring from his imagination, and to see that they still contain hints of the enigmatic Gorey.

Loosely based on the magazine Aeroplanes of the World by Douglas Rolfe, but a dream-like reimagining, David’s inky renderings allow you to take imaginary trips on a plane the shape of the Mona Lisa, or on a flying contraption navigated by the Angel of the North. A wonderfully absurd and unpredictable book, that has the power to take you on an enchantingly uncanny journey.
www.davidjanes.co.uk

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Emily Rand: In the Garden

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Emily Rand: In the Garden

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Emily Rand: In the Garden

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Emily Rand: In the Garden

Emily Rand: In the Garden

There is a simple narrative floating amongst the flora of Emily Rand’s thread bound zine. The publication has just been printed by London-based Hato Press, a wonderful Risographic print studio which we wrote about a couple of days ago. An abundance of dots, lines, squiggles and die-cut edges transform the paper pages into a garden of elm trees, chestnut trees and thistles; into a world of hedges and bushes and weeping willows. Hidden amongst the green foliage is a red feather, which discreetly leads you on your way through the lovely, layered depths of the zine.
www.emilyrand.blogspot.co.uk

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Mike Perry: Zine

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Mike Perry: Zine

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Mike Perry: Zine

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Mike Perry: Zine

Mike Perry: Zine

We updated you on Mike Perry only a few weeks ago, and now he’s sent us his latest multi-coloured creation. Inside you will find a profusion of fruit and flowers and castles and mountain tops, a handful of suspicious eyes and personified shapes wearing trilby hats, and a doodle of a daunted dog. The clashing highlighter colours filling in the lines make your eyes tingle pleasantly, and the dense, interlocking illustrations are easy to get lost in, like a contemporary, cartoon Hieronymus Bosch.
www.mikeperrystudio.com

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Madeleine Morley

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