Φ II (2011), Listerine ‘Clean Mint’ mouthwash on stainless steel, Steve Bishop.

For me, this Toronto-born, London-resident RCA graduate has an eye for texture and colour which lends some of his otherwise lean and scrupulously fabricated works a sensitivity that is hugely appealing.

The Lipsett Diaries, animated film, Theodore Ushev.

In late 2011, the Barbican Centre and the London International Animation Festival screened Theodore Ushev’s ‘The Lipsett Diaries’, a lavish 14min animated tribute to celebrated 1960s experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett.

Lipsett began his practice experimenting with with audio collages of ‘found sound’ before moving on to create elaborate montages of both audio and video and a hugely influential series of films, arguably producing his best work for the Academy Award nominated film ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ in 1962.

Despite this promising mainstream debut, the exposure marked the start of a slow personal and professional decline which was to end in tragedy. Lipsett took his own life after suffering from years of worsening mental illness and critical reception.

Theodore Ushev’s animation career is as improbably young as Lipsett’s brightest period was short. A graphic designer by training who turned to animation just six years before his first short, Ushev already boasts an impressive array of film credits, awards and glowing reviews.

The Lipsett Diaries’ liquid, expressive visual style and compositional complexity is the outcome of a process Ushev describes as obsessive, and it’s difficult to disagree. Over a two year period of self-imposed near-isolation, Ushev painstakingly hand-painted thousands of frames of animation in gouache, and re-drew hundreds more using Lipsett’s film or staged photographs and film as reference.

The Lipsett Diaries is driven by a spoken narrative written by Chris Robinson and voiced by actor Xavier Dolan, and is a surreal blend of autobiography, biography and fiction. In fact, it’s tempting to describe Robinson’s approach as a kind of literary portrait in bricolage.

The voice-over is an array of dislocated phrases and narrative fragments, freely combining excerpts from Lipsett’s personal notebooks, lines heard spoken in films, literary quotations, the few verifiable facts about Lipsett’s reclusive personal life, and, most interestingly, raw autobiographical accounts of Chris Robinson’s own life re-purposed to fill the gaps in the available truth of Lipsett’s.

The event also featured a rare screening of three films by Lipsett himself, followed by an appropriately candid Q&A with Ushev, during which he discussed the motivation for, creative process and reception to his film.

After the Q&A I had the opportunity to briefly speak with the artist about the film’s distinctive soundtrack, produced by Oliver Calvert who in turn, amongst other musicians, drafted in David Bryant of Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor to provide his familiar bombast.

For Ushev, Bryant’s input was crucial. His score is a serrated wash of swells and disquieting murmurs; a combination which proves unsettlingly effective in illustrating the unpredictable psychological episodes to which the bipolar Lipsett found his life held hostage.

The film is absolutely fantastic. It’s hugely ambitious, sensitive, deftly impressionistic and obviously the work of people for whom attention to detail and meticulous authorship is critical. I think Arthur Lipsett would approve.

Collision, animation, Max Hattler.

Hattler’s metered and mesmeric SYNC was one of the more interesting films shown as part of the experimental programme of this year’s London Short Film Festival.

Collision is a clearly of the same family and was made around the same time, but trades the esoteric geometry of SYNC for a bright, irreverent and enjoyably unsubtle carnival of warring iconography.

More in a Series of Possibilities, Anthony Discenza.

Discenza clearly owes a debt of inspiration to Ed Ruscha’s arid, sky-written, fatalist wit, but rather than pairing snatches of language orphaned from context with graphic shallow-palette mountain ranges or barren urban scenes as Ruscha does, Discenza’s stark word works toy with the absurdity of the language of mass culture.

(image via nevver)

(Source: nevver)

‘Sob, Sob’, painting, 2003, Kerry James Marshall.

via tobia

(Source: raimentsandrose)

The cover of the first issue of ‘Jungle Jim’, the brilliantly designed new bi-monthly African pulp fiction magazine.

In an interview at London’s Southbank Centre in February, E.C Osondu - Nigerian author and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing - suggested that what African literature as a whole needed to improve its international reach was not more high brow fiction and memoir but populist genre fiction. ‘Jungle Jim’ seems to fit the bill perfectly.

‘No Brain’ by Etienne de Crecy, Music Video.

Directed by Fleur & Manu.
Produced by DIVISION.
Post production by MATHEMATIC.

Pushed into deeper holding, ‘relief painting’, Gregory Euclide.

I can confidently predict that the work of Minnesotan painter/sculptor Gregory Euclide is about to make a decisive transition into the mainstream.

‘Pushed into deeper holding’ is set to adorn the cover of one of the more anticipated music releases of recent years: the melancholic folk act ‘Bon Iver’s eponymous second LP.

The artwork is one of Euclide’s many omnivorous sculpture/painting/collage pieces; delicately assembled from acrylic, eurocast, horse hair, moss, paper, pencil, pine needles, sedum, sponge and tape.

(via the fox is black)

The Funeral, collage (detail), Seiko Kato.

Another excellent collage work; this time not a recent discovery but dislodged from my memory of the excellent Pick Me Up Contemporary Graphic Arts Fair at London’s Somerset House held in March.

Kato’s works attracted a huge amount of attention, and for good reason: much of the work is thrillingly dense and literally deep, with layer upon layer of meticulously scalpel-cut illustrations combined to dizzying effect.

Paper cut construction video, Bianca Chang.

“Each layer of paper is hand plotted and cut using a pencil, surgical blade and ruler. The cut-out of each layer gets incrementally larger about an axis to make a smooth void when finished.”

(via Creative Review)