books

Winner’s Circle.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment

French illustrator and author Laëtitia Devernay recently won this year’s V&A Illustration Awards for her book, The Conductor. I have to confess, I had never heard of her before reading this roundup of winners, but I absolutely love her style. I’ve always been fascinated with children’s books, partially because I think it’s amazing how we present the world to kids, but also because the defining feature of children’s literature is mixing images and text. A truly great picture book is a piece of art. If you’re not on board with this statement, just take a trip to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (I went last summer for work and ADORED it) and you’ll see what I mean.

Or maybe you wont. Which, that’s fine, but we probably wouldn’t be friends.

More pictures after the jump…

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Childishness.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment


Grown-up

Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

 

 

 
I was once told, by a boy who had been pursuing me for some vague and nebulous purpose, that I resembled the writer Carson McCullers. I was suitably flattered and began to view Carson with the strange nepotism I afford all my suggested look-alikes (apparently, while I have a face people tend to see all the time on the street, there is no television equivalent. This once made me kind of sad, but that was before I realized how little that actually meant about me and my hundreds of common doppelgangers).

And though Carson is certainly a great person to be compared to in any capacity (and despite her infinitely less beautiful name and comparatively plain face), oh how I wish it had been Edna!

Two Nice Things.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment

Image
1. Canadian artist Erin Mcsavaney paints beautiful pictures of buildings in nature. Quoting Walter Benjamin, she calls architecture “the most binding part of communal rhythm,” a thing based on rules and parameters and angles and lines. Her paintings, which all seem hazy and water-logged, play with the sharp edges of buildings, the soft lines of trees. Pretty, pretty. (via)

2. “It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.”

In an amazing feat of pure adorableness, a three-year-old child recites Billy Collins’ “Litany.”

Cover Up.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

Here’s something funny for a Monday morning: Cover art from Low Commitment Projects. Losing an hour of sleep has left me a zombie, so I have little more to say, except that this is fantastically witty (oh, Roger Barker!) and very cute. Also, I might just need that one book…

Sew What?

~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

Nerdy crafters really are the best. The best what? The best at living, obviously. This craft, which is nothing short of beautiful, is a full-sized quilt made by Kate Findlay and was inspired by the Large Hadron Collider. She’s created a series of quilts that all use the massive physics experiment as the aesthetic guide for the patterns and prints. They’re pretty and strange and so very geeky.

“I’ve been living and dreaming and sleeping and eating hadron colliders,” she told Symmetry Magazine.  Bet she’s read this book (I hope she’s read it. It’s so good! And so weird).

Anyway, I like it. Even if the LHC can’t actually make particles travel faster than the speed of light. Oh well, maybe it’s for the best…

I Love Public Art.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ 2 Comments

Architect John Locke not only has an awesome name (okay, I wasn’t that into the philosopher, but I did just start re-watching Lost and I’m totally team Locke), he’s also a very cool dude. He must be, since he designed this amazing project: a communal lending library, tucked into obsolete phone booths. The plywood shelves can be installed in any phone booth, and are filled with books, which passersby can borrow, exchange, or take for keepsies. Operating on the honor principle, they not only look cool, but also help disseminate knowledge in a weird, slightly haphazard way.

I would love to see something like this in Boston or Cambridge. I feel like it would really thrive here! Can someone make that happen, please?

See more pictures at Design Bloom.

Words & Pictures.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ 1 Comment

“However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”

Always Joan.

And one of my favorite images by one of my favorite painters: “Wind from the Sea” by Andrew Wyeth.

Two Nice Things.

~ Katy Kelleher ~ Leave a comment

1. Amazing paper flowers by Thuss + Farrell. While paper flowers are always my favorite (anything made of paper, really), their entire website is really inspiring. I adore the still-lifes, especially the images of food (and the makeup, which almost looks good enough to eat!).

2. Photographs of famous photographers with their famous photographs. Really fascinating images from Tim Mantoani’s book Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends. While I honestly don’t know much about photojournalism, it’s still really cool to faces behind iconic images—like The Tank Man of Tienanmen Square or the portrait of the Afghan Girl from National Geographic. But my favorite one? Mary Ellen Mark.