Month of Love - Forbidden Fruit

I may have skipped last week's challenge for Month of Love, but I'm back this week with the final 'Forbidden Fruit' challenge.

I have been really into the design of vintage seed packets lately, so I decided to do some packets for the seeds of fruits featured as forbidden fruits in mythology. Here’s the classic apple from the story of Adam and Eve. Also the pomegranate eaten by Persephone that keeps her in Hades six months of the year.

Day #6&8: William Morris & the Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts & Crafts movement was a design movement that arose in the second half of the 1800’s. In response to the aggressive expansion of industry and shoddiness of mass produced items, artists of the movement sought to return to hand produced crafts. William Morris became the leader of the group with the establishment of his business Morris & Co, which produced many handmade textiles, wallpapers, and furniture, as well as his Kelmscott Press printing company.

A very strong underlying theme in our trip was the Arts & Crafts movement, we visited lots of relevant sites and it somehow managed to sneak into unsuspecting places as well. So obviously the first stop on our Arts & Crafts tour had to be the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. This we followed up later with another walk along the Thames past the original home of the Kelmscott Press in Hammersmith and on to the home of Emery Walker, the immaculately preserved Arts & Crafts home of a printer who worked with Morris.

  Along the River Thames in Hammersmith

Read more about the stops on our Arts & Crafts tour after the jump...

Day #5: Kew Gardens

While gardens and plants are a major source of inspiration for artists and designers I will try and keep my slideshow of pictures of plants to a minimum, though my unfortunate boyfriend will not be as lucky as the rest of you. But, I mostly want to focus on the piece of art we found there.

My mother and her grade school friend, our wonderful host, both love gardens and are avid gardeners so it only made sense we would end up in a garden eventually. But Kew, the Royal Botanical Gardens, is an absolutely breathtaking park with an extraordinary variety of plants, trees, greenhouses and gardens (there were even live peacocks just wandering around). 

When we came out of the first huge greenhouse we discovered our (non-vegetative) favorite thing in the park, which was the Rose Garden Tea Party, an installation created by Kirsti Davies & Giles Thaxton which featured a variety of edible plants growing up from china planters all across the table. Depending on where you sat the table and china would inform you what theme you were looking at, such as plants used in fizzy drinks. The beautifully crafted china then labelled the plants and hinted at how the plants were applied to food and beverages.

One of the artists was actually there as we were admiring the table, recoloring the text on the table. She fun to talk to and had a lot to offer about the production of the china. My only complaint would be that I couldn’t buy these for my own table.

Learn more about the incredible process of this creation here: http://incredibleteaparty.co.uk/

Day #4&7: The V&A

The Victoria & Albert Museum in London is one of my favorite museums I have ever been to. It’s the worlds largest design and decorative arts museum with a collection housing over 4.5 million objects. Oh and did I mention admission is free? Because it is. I love that most of the museum is not just pictures on a wall, instead there are whole galleries dedicated to iron works, mosaics, theater design, stained glass, jewelry and so much more. We had visited the V&A on our last trip to London and realized we hadn’t even scratched the surface of their collection and had to return. We spent most of our time in the Theater & Performance Gallery as well as in their Cast Courts. See more of our favorite pieces after the jump...

Day #1: Eel Pie Island

This time last week I was just getting home from my trip to London! My mother, sister and I went for a summer adventure and spent a little over a week exploring with an old friend of my mother's from grade school who lives there now. The following posts are going to be quite a bit about the things we did there...

In Twickenham, set in the middle of the River Thames is Eel Pie Island. The private island is accessible exclusively by footbridge and is only opened to non-residents on a few rare occasions. The island used to be home to the Eel Pie Island Hotel, which was once famous for performances from many infamous groups such as the Rolling Stones, The Who and David Bowie. The hotel mysteriously burned down in 1967, after which the island became known for being the largest hippie commune in the United Kingdom.

Now Eel Pie Island is mostly home to artists and their eccentric studios. The week we were in London happened to coincide with one of the island’s rare ‘Open Studios’ day and our gracious host took us down along the Thames to see this strange place. 

Read more about our Eel Pie Island adventure after the jump...

Finding Design in Brooklyn...

Like that's hard, pshaw! It seems like every other store in Brooklyn sells fantastically designed (if not slightly overpriced) knick-knacks, stationary, and kitchen products. But here's a round up of some of the cool things I purchased on trip to New York last weekend.

First, every time I am in New York, I always end up in used book stores. Do I need more books? No. Do we lack used book stores in Boston? No. Do I always end up buying more while I'm there? YES. One of our first stops on our walking trip of what felt like all of Brooklyn was P.S. Bookshop in Dumbo. I ended buying a cheap copy of The Road which should be my next read, and I also picked up a few of these:

Decomposition Notebooks - Pocket Sized by Michael Roger Press, made of 100% recycled post-consumer waste, printed with soy ink, etc. etc. And even without the green appeal, they have the best designs ever on their covers. I picked up the ones above, a honeycomb and typographic map. More of their products can be seen here: www.michaelroger.com

Second stop ended in a complete impulse buy of these great postcards I saw in the window of a baby store:

 I had seen these terrarium postcards by Quill & Fox online before and I thought they would be perfect to send to my mom, who loves postcards & terrariums (two birds-one stone). They had always lived on my online wish list till I picked them up in store. You can see more of their adorable stationary at: quillandfox.com

Then we went to Williamsburg,  where all of the quirky things live. We visited yet another used book store, Book Thug Nation, a tiny space with an excellent stack of old mysteries and noirs. I picked up an old copy of Agatha Christie's An Overdose of Murder for $4. I loved the skulls on the cover.

One of our final stops was the Brooklyn Art House, home of the Sketchbook Project, which if you have never heard of is the contribution of sketchbooks by artists all over the world, compiled into an incredible traveling show. I wanted to live in this room, surrounded by all these incredible books:

You can pick a theme and the library will randomly pull two or three sketchbooks meeting the criteria of your search which you can then sit and go through at your leisure. Learn more about the project and their Brooklyn Library here: www.sketchbookproject.com

Long Time, No See

It was a busy whirlwind of a summer. It felt like every weekend I was shipping off to some other event, family gathering or adventure. And I know, the blog got neglected. But I hope to be back with a vengeance. And I have quite a few things to post. But first, here is a quick glance into my summer in art & design:

1. Graphic Design—Now in Production 

Co-organized by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and the Walker Art Center. Held on Governor's Island off New York City.

Pages of exhibition catalog from the Cooper-Hewitt.

 Unfortunately while this exhibit is now over, it was a wonderful collection of all forms of design. The small building was packed with so much information, it was extraordinary. Not too mention you then get to spend the day on Governor's Island, which is such a wonderful place for a public park (and free!). While the group I was with did not quite have the patience to explore the whole exhibit (it was an overwhelming amount of content) we found a few choice pieces. I particularly enjoyed the collection by Anthony Burrill:

The piece on the bottom right, Oil & Water Do Not Mix is screen printed with oil from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster. For more information about the exhibit, look at the Cooper Hewitt Website: Graphic Design - Now in Production

2. Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations
Curated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in Manhattan, New York 

The success of the Met's Costume Institute has been on the rise in the past few years and the exhibits are becoming more and more popular. A fashion-savvy friend of mine chose this trip for us and while I'm what you would call the opposite of fashion-savvy it was still a fun exhibit. Regardless of your knowledge of fashion, it is fun for any designer to see the comparisons between the works of these two icons. Unfortunately this exhibition is also over, but you can see more on the Met's website: Costume Institute

3. The Allure of Japan
Curated from works housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts

The Modern Poster by William H. Bradley (1895)

Now for an exhibit a little bit closer to home. The Museum of Fine Arts, like most museums, has an extensive collection that you rarely even get to see. So they fill several of their smaller galleries with exhibits curated from their own collections. This is always fun as you get to see a broad array of work from many artists with nice simple themes. This year, the MFA's Allure of Japan explores the American fascination with Japanese art around 1900 and the impact it had on artists, particularly poster designers. While the exhibit only fills one room I found myself taking pictures of everything on my phone so I could look up the artist later. In short, I loved it.This exhibit is still running! Hooray! It will be open until the end of the year.

4. Summer Reading
Books acquired over the summer...

McSweeney's Issue 13 - This McSweeny's Issue is compiled solely of comics, even the dust jacket is a comic poster that is folded up and wrapped around the cover! This one was quite a find at the used bookstore basement at the Brooklyn Booksmith for only $15.




 

 The Illustrated Life:Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers by Danny Gregory - This awesome books is a collection of pages from various artists sketchbooks including R. Crumb, James Jean and many others.

Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton - I took a typography class over the summer and this was one of our required readings. It was a wonderful compilation of interesting reading and excellent graphics (including this one).

5. Poster Project 

Working at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (even in an Admin. Assistant position) exposes to me to some really great projects people are working on. I spent the summer working on the administrative side of a traveling gallery show of posters designed to raise awareness on a variety of issues, from natural disasters to social injustice. I got to see a whole lot of incredible work and artists I had never encountered. Here's a small sampling:

(Left to right) Lives in Danger by Hiroyuki Matsuishi, Susana Machicao, Weapons of Mass Creation by Angryblue

More posts (of my art!) to follow soon...