OSCARS livesketching

For another year, I've sketched The Oscars. A tremendously difficult thing to do, I assure you, as you need to doodle quickly, but are distracted by the awe, glamor, and sometimes ridiculousness of Hollywood. My biggest weakness comes from being unable to weep during the acceptance speeches. I draw through tears!

Anyway, with the exception of a couple ladies, I thought all the gowns and ensembles were beautiful. It seems most actors wanted to play it a little conservative and the only real faux pas came from tragic up-do's. My favorite, Marion Cotillard, looked stunning from head to toe in Jean Paul Gaultier.

Party for Peace

The peace symbol

...This forked symbol was designed for the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) and was adopted as its badge by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmamentanti-war movement, and was also adopted by the counterculture of the time. It was designed and completed February 21, 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and artist in Britain for the Easter march planned by DAC from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England. (CND) in Britain, and originally was used by the British nuclear disarmament movement. It was later generalised to become an international icon for the 1960s

The symbol itself is a combination of the semaphoric signals for the letters "N" and "D," standing for Nuclear Disarmament. In semaphore the letter "N" is formed by a person holding two flags in an upside-down "V," and the letter "D" is formed by holding one flag pointed straight up and the other pointed straight down. These two signals imposed over each other form the shape of the peace symbol. In the original design the lines widened at the edge of the circle.^[3]

A conscientious objector who had worked on a farm in Norfolk during the Second World War, Holtom later wrote to Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News, explaining the genesis of his idea in greater depth: "I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it."^[3]

The peace symbol flag first became known in the United States in 1958 when Albert Bigelow, a pacifist protester, sailed his small boat outfitted with the CND banner into the vicinity of a nuclear test. The peace symbol button was imported into the United States in 1960 by Philip Altbach, a freshman at the University of Chicago, who traveled to England to meet with British peace groups as a delegate from the Student Peace Union (SPU). Altbach purchased a bag of the "chickentrack" buttons while he was in England, and brought them back to Chicago, where he convinced SPU to reprint the button and adopt it as its symbol. Over the next four years, SPU reproduced and sold thousands of the buttons on college campuses.

In Unicode, the peace symbol is U+262E: ☮, and can thus be generated in HTML by typing ☮ or ☮. However, many browsers will not have a font that can display it.

Symbol Archive

The original drawing of the CND is housed in the Peace Museum, U.K.^[4] in Bradford, England, where a replica is on public display.

The Peace Symbol -- via wikipedia

The Science of Love

One of my absolute favorite TED Talks...

Happy Valentine's Day. xoxo!

Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies love: its evolution, its biochemical foundations and its vital importance to human society. She outlines the three stages of love (lust, infatuation and long-term attachment), shedding light on eternal questions like why we love, and why we cheat. She also discusses the natural talents of women, and their new significance in the modern world. She ends with a warning about the widespread use of antidepressants -- and a truly hilarious story of romantic pursuit.

Happy Valentine's Day

Frantic (1988)

Dr. Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) and Michelle (Emmanuelle Siegner)
6 x 9 sketch, blue pencil, grey marker, sumi brushpen on Cachet sketchpaper

It's not entirely surprising that a film like ''Frantic,'' which opens today at the Beekman and other theaters, eventually involves this guileless tourist with drug smugglers and international terrorists, with the more colorful fringes of Parisian nightlife, with a long-legged girl wearing black-leather motorcycle regalia. These, after all, can be almost standard ingredients for a story of intrigue. What's more unusual is the precise, understated way in which Mr. Polanski pieces the tale together, so that even the craziest development follows more or less sensibly from whatever precedes it.

NY Times Movie Review

By JANET MASLIN

Published: February 26, 1988

Jackson SuperForest

One of my most favorite collaborateurs, Jackson Nash, came to visit yesterday! We met last Spring on a developing project at the AZ/LNW Studio and I can't believe how fortuitous it's all turned out. Jackson embodies all the things that I like most in an artist: inventiveness, incredible human spirit, and being unafraid to present his ideas to the world.

Appropriately, we had lunch at Le Pain Quotidien and had much to catch up on. A typical conversation revolves around current events and how it may apply to positive thinking, our hopes and goals for children, personal fears, movies, books, gossip, and how to tackle the issue of teaching co-workers the bathroom philosophy of "if it's yellow, let it mellow". (I'm thinking we drop in eco-friendly blue drops and people won't be grossed out to leave green pee in the potty...)

And Jackson always bears presents and yesterday was no different. He gave me a gorgeous print of a recent illustration he'd done:

Please check out Jackson's amazing blog :

SUPERFOREST NYC
...a connection point for humanists,
a greenhouse for ideas, an oasis of hope.

Kitchen scene.

A scene in which several characters have an exchange over a period of a few pages. In order to make the environment as correct as possible, I sketched a little model on the back of my script and used it as a very hand reference tool.

This comic takes place in an average suburban home and I've used my memories of St. George Staten Island for it. Specifically, a stone cottage a friend of mine remodeled from 70s scary to gorgeous all stainless steel professional appliances and stone radiant-heat floor. And, of course, no type of home is complete without a nice cushy doggie bed in the corner...

I love NY