Take a look at our nifty new logo, designed by animator Sabina Hahn:

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The Letter O Collage....

Finally - a more complete collage for the letter O, with:
an oracle, oysters, Oregon, and Offices.
I think our Aye-Aye may have to eat 
those oysters.

If I don't steal them first.

Optometry & Oracles

I'm working towards a new world based on images for the letter O. 

I love the many images associated with optometry such as those above and below, especially the ghostly hand projection below.

Eye charts for measuring Astigmatism

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In addition, there are some beautiful images associated with opera.

Donizetti's Lucia di Lamermoor at the Met (2002-3 season)

Rosa Ponselle

However, so far ia m beginning to work with "Offices, 1945" and an "Oracle - The Pythia from Delphi." I'm thinking of adding some Oysters and an open window on Oregon...

Thanks to Forest for these Scans!

O, Abecedarian...

I'm writing this at the Mid-Manhattan Library, home to the Picture Collection, where I've been investigating the letter O today. Naturally, the hundreds of images I looked at today are still spinning around in my mind, refusing to take a concrete form, but some of my favorite folders contained within the letter O include Oysters, Offices, Opera, Oracles, and Optometry... (and that doesn't even include Oregon or Obelisks.) How will they form a world?

Oysters: 19th C. illus.

Offices - 1954, Color Dynamics, Pittsburgh, 1946

Operas - Bellini (Samuel Ramey in I Puritani, NYT Nov. 30, 1986)

Oracles - 7480, Pythia, female Oracle at Delphi

Optometry, The Record Mar 21, 1995 Adv First Opt. Health Plan.

Back in the Alphabet Soup Again

Thanks to my fantastic Saint Francis College intern, Alex James, I'm finally back in the alphabet soup again. As I jump back into A is for Aye-Aye: an Abecedarian Adventure, I'm pondering the transition between lettered worlds.

How will my Aye-aye

get from say...

 

Juggling Junks and Justice

to

 Knights knitting in Krygystan?

Trying to solve this has sent me back to my ABCs. I haven't reached a solution, yet, but researching other abecedarys (or alphabet books) is certainly a lot of fun. Just for starters, there are the following:

And that's just the tip of the alphabetical iceberg...

After a six month hiatus, I'm back at work on A is for Aye Aye.

For those of you who are new to the project... A is for Aye Aye: An Abecedarian Adventure is a celebration of the New York Public Library's amazing Picture Collection,  a repository for over one million images collected for over 90 years. The images are arranged alphabetically in Categories ranging from A & P Food Stores  to Zoological Gardens, pasted on large pieces of cardstock and labeled by hand. You can check out these images (60 each week!) in beautiful little green portfolios and take them home to scan or just stare at. 

In this short film, a young girl wanders into the collection and encounters the image of an Aye-Aye, a lemur from Madagascar which you can see an image of below.  The Aye-Aye leads the girl  through a series of alphabetical worlds created from images in the collection, and then finds herself outside in the real world being followed down Fifth Avenue by the Aye-Aye and a few of her other new-found friends from the Picture Collection.

The Aye-Aye looks like this:

The Aye-Aye, From ANIMALS: A-L

You can read more about my process by going back to the blog's beginning, but I just wanted to create a visual summary of the work I've done so far.

My very first sketch for a world drawn from the letter D, which I hope to elaborate on is here :

D is for Desert and Dirigible

The letter E has proved (not surprisingly) to be Elusive, but the letter F looks like this:

F is for Forest and Fortune-telling

The Letter G:

 

G is for Gauchos, Giants, and Gibraltar

The Letter H:

H is for Hypnotism, Hair, and Hawaii

The Letter I:

I is for Ivory, Incense & Ice

The Letter J:

J is for Justice, Junks, and Juggling

The Letter K:

K is for Knights Knitting in Krygystan

The Letter L:

L is for Lapps, Lunchboxes, Labyrinths and Lighthouses

The Letter M:

M is for Magic Carpets, Masks, Mermaids, and the Maya on May Day

The Letter N:

N is for Newsstands, Nurses and Nigeria in Niagara Falls

The Letter Z:

Z is for (Great) Zimbabwe and the Zodiac at the Zoological Gardens

So, eleven worlds from eleven letters have been sketched so far, and I plan to move on to complete the project in plenty of time for the collection's 100th birthday in 2015.

G is for Gauchos in the Garden of Forking Paths

Starting with a few images from my Picture Collection research for the letter G, including:

The Queen at the Rock of Gibraltar

An Athanasius Kircher Giant

I put them together adding some grass, creating a miniature Matto Grosso in the foreground replacing Queen Elizabeth...

That grass reminded me of Gauchos, and of Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths".  You can get a brief sense of his text from my own sampled cut-up version (another miniature):

    I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

    A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.

    Ts'ui Pen must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.


    In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.


    I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

And so,  in my Garden,  a fractured chorus line of 1940s gauchos joined the last renaissance man's seventeenth century giant to frolic on the grass in the shadow of Gibraltar...