Spotlight: Cherri Wood

Newspaper cutout, hidden messages, and what Oliver Twist has to do with ink stains.

Cherri Wood is one of those rare nineteen-year-olds who manage to translate their mandatory teen angst into wonderful works of art. Her drawings combine that childish, messy quality of art with the intensity of adult reality.

Simple but rich like a haiku, Wood’s work reveals graphite kids standing in the watercolor dirt, daring you to fill in the wide white blanks of the world.

The Oliver Twists of her canvases, inspired by a lost fingernail or the freakish masks of her neighbors, speak volumes with their faceless melancholy.

The talented teenager can transform a newspaper cutout and a piece of duct tape into something much grander and more profound, into tiny pieces chipped away from on old soul.

Do check out Cherri Wood‘s extraordinary work. And if you happen to be in the San Francisco area, stop by Gallery 1988 by February 28th. Just be sure to look for the tiny messages buried between the ink stains — they make the whole experience that much more gratifying and personal.

Show & Tell: A Century of Illustrated Letters

120 years of handwriting so bad it necessitates visual aid, or why hipsters didn’t invent irreverence.

Remember pen and paper? And how they came together to produce… gasp… letters? The Smithsonian certainly does – in fact, they remember and celebrate those most memorable of letters that go beyond mere words.

Enter the Smithsonian’s archive of Illustrated Letters — a wonderful collection of tortured love letters, violently opinionated reports of current events, gloriously rich thank-you notes, a handful of far-fetched excuses, and various other forms of visually written self-expression from the early 19th century to the late 1980’s.

Although the collection is a shots-in-the-dark nightmare to navigate, with some patience and a bit of luck you may just uncover some real gems.

And perhaps a few delightful oddballs.

Then, of course, there’s the exercise of decoding the world’s most impossible handwriting. Which, actually, is why we half-seriously suspect a number of those folks resorted to illustrations.

The Illustrated Letters collection is pulled entirely from The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, hand-picked by Curator of Manuscripts Liza Kirwin. It’s truly a cultural treasure, but perhaps it is most valuable as a reminder to us know-it-all millennials that we didn’t in fact invent visual creativity, or irreverent wit, or sarcasm, or dark humor, or any of those “quintessentially hipster” qualities that ooze from the letters and set we so boldly like to credit ourselves with.

Plus, it reminds us of Dan Price‘s wonderful Moonlight Chronicles.

via Coudal

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Show & Tell: Mapping Obama’s Speech

Obama’s inauguration speech, graphically facilitated in (almost) real time.

Graphic facilitator Brandy Agerbeck has hit another home run with Obama’s inauguration speech, wonderfully illustrated in nearly-real time. And while the experience was a first for Brandy — she normally facilitates messier conversations between multiple people, not succinct monologues — it was a true exercise in illustrating history.

Graphic facilitation is the art-science of mapping a conversation as it occurs. It comes particularly handy during meetings and brainstorming sessions where ideas are being rapidly thrown around, bouncing off and copulating with each other to produce new, better ones — that’s when the graphic facilitator, madly drawing a huge real-time mural of what is being said, really… well… facilitates.

See more of Brandy’s phenomenal work over at Loosetooth and/or download a PDF of the Obama facilitation.

via Coudal

Vintage Russian Ads

What Dostoevsky has to do with sausage art and bicycles.

Today, we’re looking at that weird limbo of Russian heritage between the cultural zenith of the Dostoevsky era and the nadir of Russia’s current status as the Gas Grinch – namely, vintage Russian ads, the intersection of art and commerce.

From tobacco to tailoring, the collection speaks to a striking resemblance between the cultural valuables of Russian society and those of the Western world circa early 20th century, debunking the whole “us vs. them” notion of lack of cultural common ground.

And while much of the typography and illustration appear to… ahem… “borrow” from their Western brethren, we notice some surprisingly sophisticated techniques rarely seen in Western vintage ads — such as this perspective treatment of type:

Courtesy of English Russia. (Remember sausage art?)

But before we get too caught up in the cultural common tangents here, let’s not forget the other side of the whole Soviet-American relationship, clearly and stride-stoppingly revealed in the Soviet propaganda of the day.

We encourage you to play around with English Russia, the second most addictive source of relentless amusement we’ve discovered last year.

via Coudal

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