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

Support our film via Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/299640613/a-is-for-aye-aye-an-abecedarian-adventure

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...

Satisfy Me, Baby

After a long period of radio silence while I was working on other projects, I'm back here blogging.

As the old song says, I'd like
A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me
Satisfy me baby

So, in the interest of more action and satisfactioning for me, I've made a couple new sketches.


One for the letter I (follow link and scroll down to see the materials I pulled the collage elements from):

And another for the letter K, "Knights tend their knitting in Krygystan":

Enjoy!

Nurse on the Run

This sketch for the letter N (incorporating a bird hunter from Nigeria, two images of Niagara Falls, Mike's Newsstand, and a Nurse on the run) reminds me an oft-quoted remark from a Sri Lankan monk who now lives in West Virginia:

"Somewhere in this process you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you just never noticed. "
-Henepola Gunaratana 

A nice thing to remember in this heat wave...

Nurse Nancy Beats the Heat, plus Nigeria and Niagara

I am afraid I've been enjoying summer too much to make may posts lately, and  now have a backlog of material from the letter N.

So, without further ado, I'm going to upload a few scans from the picture collection's wonderful treasure trove of images of nurses, starting with a historical potpourri:

13th Century Nursing Sister

16th Century nurse, pictured in a 1959-60 Abbott Labs publication

1910 graduating class of African American nurses

Gibson girl nurse from the  early 1900s

1950s nursing uniforms

1960s nursing uniforms

1981 nurse on strike

Some of my favorite images of nurses are from the covers of romance novels:

 You can tell by the size that I'm partial to Hootenanny Nurse. But not all nurses were looking for romance...

Thinking that perhaps the guy above needs to be rolled over Niagara Falls, I looked at images of that quintessential American landmark next.

As usual, I'm a sucker for the 19th Century images. In the heat wave oppressing most of the U.S., a dip in the falls sounds pretty appealing.

Once I started traveling, I wanted to go further afield, and a few images from Nigeria caught my eye.

Despite the objectifying gaze of this 1938 photo, the strength and beauty of its subject are palpable.

1938 image of bird hunter

The Oni of Ife, 1959

1996 celebration of Kwaghir by the Tiv in Gboko

2007 Photo by Pieter Hugo of A Hyena Master

These photos made me want to find out more about  Calabar, a city in South-Eastern Nigeria, which has been a center for trade since at least the 16th century. I also wanted to learn more about the Tiv, who celebrate Kwaghir with traditional puppet shows and storytelling in their capital, Gboko, which is in North Central Nigeria.  A long time ago, my dad had mentioned The Oni of Ife to me, he is the spiritual leader of Nigeria's Yoruba people and the current Oni, who prefers the spelling Ooni, has his own site.

How will Nurses, Nigeria, Niagara, Newstands and Noise come together? Tune in soon for a few ideas.