The Ephemerist

If you happen to be in Montréal, and you go and visit this, please send some pictures !

Until april 6 the Honey Talks exhibition (with work byAnke Feuchtenberger, Jakob Klemencic, Milorad Krstic, Koco, Matthias Lehmann, Rutu Modan, Vladan Nikolic, Marcel Ruijters, Danijel Zezelj and Matej Lavrencic) is on show in Castellon de la Plana, Spain (coinciding witt the ComiCS08 festival). Honey Talks is a Stripburger project, and features comics inpsired by paointed beehive panels,.

As an appendix to yesterday’s post, I’ve selected a few (admittedly, very bad) pictures of doodles by Art Spiegelman and Charles Burns, from letters they sent to Ever Meulen. They were on display at the Meulen exhibition in Leuven, and I thought it rather nice to share them.

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Last week I visited the Ever Meulen exhibition again, this time with my mom (who got me hooked on Meulen in the first place). And this time I took some pictures. They’re not that good, as I used a cameraphone and all artwork was behind quite reflective glass. So you’ll see me lurking here and there. We started off, by the way, with a quite nice self-portrait à la Française from 1999.

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For thirty years now, Ever Meulen has provided the posters and imagery for Humo’s yearly rock concours, the Rock Rally. On the Rock Rally Website this is celebrated with an overview of (tiny) pictures, showing the most memorable of those thirty posters (scroll down on the page for the link). For larger versions, go to Brussels concert venue AB, where a selection of them are on display in the restaurant until march, 23.

For this year’s poster, Ever harkened back to his style of thirty years ago, and more particularly to his “Rocket Boys” illustration, as shown below. The car, by the way, really exists, and can be seen at the Ever retrospective in Leuven.

(artwork © Ever Meulen)

From march 3 until march 30, the Freud Gallery (198 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8JL) presents the artwork from the Inkspot Monologues by Keith Pointing. In this book a dysfunctional relationship therapist uses the Rorschach blot test to help people come to terms with their unsuccessful romantic relationships. Their stories are told through words and pictures, with people’s personalities and more particularly more unsavoury treats are masterfully depicted using elaborated ink blots.

Even though the art is totally different from his “The Man Who” cartoons, these pictures reminded me of the work by H.M. Bateman, thanks to the way sparce pictures and text work together to very accurately pinpoint man in all his smallness.

Later this year, the stories will be published by the Friday Project. Click on for more examples.

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Here’s two recent examples of the Smurf craze that’s sweeping across Europe (or, two examples of attempts to artificially create one). Above is a key chain that was handed out to visitors of the Schleich booth at the 2008 Nürnberg Spielwarenmesse. It’s one of a special series of figurines produced to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the little blue dwarves.

In the mean time, Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn tries to cash in as well, by awarding customers with a little plastic Smurf for every € 15 purchase. These figurines are smaller than the regular Schleich ones, but apart from that, they are quite good, actually.

“De Stiel” (”The Craft”), a retrospective Ever Meulen exhibition, from february 9 up until april 13. More info : beeldbeeld.be. This the next in a series of impressive shows, which in the past featured work by Dave McKean, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Hanco Kolk and others. Highly recommended.

This was the poster for an Ivan Brunetti exhibition in the Fantagraphics gallery, earlier this year. I dig the Van Gogh reference.

Tom “I Will Destroy You” Neely is taking part in an group show called Literartistry at the Cory Helford Gallery in Culver City, which opens today and focuses on art that’s inspired by literature.

Tom has done the five foot tall ink drawing of Moby Dick above (tilt your head to see it correctly, or check out his blog for a full size copy). I only hope this ever gets made into a print of sorts. I can’t wait to have five foot of whale on my wall…

And if you’re around Culver City, go and see this show. I think it’s amazing.