Yesterday I was reading through some tweets, and Amy Crehore had posted some links to the work of Richard Selesnick and Nicholas Kahn (also here.)

This stuff immediately made me think of the work of my friend Ethan Murrow. Ethan was another Studio Art major in my class at Carleton, and it was always amazing to see what was going on in his corner of the studio. The first time I met him, he was carrying this huge canvas back into the building, and it was this gorgeous, raw landscape painting with straw and detritus clinging to the still-wet oil paint. He had an attachment to land and how humans interact with it, and this theme carried through his graduate work at UNC. I had never seen such work from my contemporaries, and I still think he is one of the best artists, formally and conceptually, that I know personally.

Ethan Murrow, “Off of Gaspé, ready to dive for the elusive whale”, graphite on paper 60″ x 96″, 2007.

Since that day, Ethan’s work has evolved and changed and developed into these huge graphite drawings on paper. They still hold onto that landscape aesthetic, at least formally offering humans interacting with the land. But now they also involve these brilliant convoluted stories of tragic experimenters, people whose only goal is to succeed, and who most often do anything but.

Installation view of “The Freshwater Narwhal Hoax” at Winston Wachter, Seattle, WA spring 2007

I won’t try to retell it because Ethan really does a much better job himself. He was recently interviewed for the Huffington Post regarding his current show called “Dust Mining” at Obsolete in Venice, California. I still haven’t gotten to see Ethan’s more recent work in-person, so if you are in LA, make sure you go see it for me and report back!

P.S. He doesn’t talk about it much, but Ethan is the grandson of renowned reporter Edward R. Murrow. I think I didn’t know that until several years after I met him. Ethan’s personal and artistic integrity is truly a tribute to his grandfather’s legacy.

I have been trying to hold back on the book purchases lately, since we have been moving around the country a bunch in the past few years. Let me tell you: boxes full of books are frickin’ heavy! It’s either that, or you have to pack a lot of smaller boxes, and then you just make more trips. Next time: movers.

Anyway, birthdays are good for a lot of things, but especially for getting things that you are not buying for yourself. I keep my Amazon wishlist(s) pretty full, though mostly as a reminder to myself of what I really want to buy or check out the next time I am at a bookstore. However, for my birthday last month I got a gift certificate to Amazon, and I could no longer hold myself back:

Not pictured is the copy of Graphic Design by Milton Glaser (which arrived earlier and has gotten its due lovin’), but in the photo are the contents of my big box of goodies:the latest edition of the Graphic Arts Guild Handbook, a contemporary drawing collection called Vitamin D, Charlie Harper’s Beguiled by the Wild, and Dave Cooper’s (aliased here as Hector Mumbly) Bagel’s Lucky Hat.

• Milton Glaser is an icon in the graphic design world. This book is a must-have for my library, and I love to see the mix of illustration-y with the design-y.
• Similarly, I’ve well-abused my old GAG Handbook, and it was time for the upgrade to this 2007 updated version. A must-have for the illustration professional.
• I’ve perused the Vitamin D book a couple times while I was in grad school, but I had to have my own copy. It’s really a great collection of where things have been going in the contemporary capital-A “Art World” drawing field. And it’s a beautifully-designed book, as you would expect from Phaidon.
• Beguiled by the Wild is even better than I expected. I fell in love with Harper’s beautifully designed creatures and illustrations a while ago after he started getting linked up around the web, but I didn’t realize the illustrations’ titles were going to tickle my inner word-nerd: “Jumbrella” shows the big elephants sheltering the baby elephant from the rain; “Owltercation” shows a murder of crows chasing an owl away. LOVE!
• And last but certainly not least: Bagel’s Lucky Hat is so beautifully illustrated, with lush colors, inventive perspectives and compositions, and lovely details embellishing the periphery. It is a high-caliber production, as we have grown to expect from Chronicle Books. I haven’t read the story yet, and while I would guess it is a great story, I wouldn’t care if it was lamer than Howard the Duck: the illustrations already make up for it.

While I’m sorry for the movers who will eventually have to move yet more books the next time we relocate, I’m not sorry to have these in my collection. The internet is great and all, but sometimes you just need more than 72 dots per inch to view the art.

Seeing the art in-person is better yet, but as we all know, money doesn’t grow on trees. At least not in Minnesota.

I have made a bit of cloud art myself in the past, but this is one I wish I had been able to make:

It was commissioned for British Airways from the team at Troika. Here’s more about the project.

Beautiful!

(via VVORK)