Jonathan Saunders heeft zijn uitgebreide portfolio online gezet. En dat mag gezien worden! Hij werkte voor veel bekende merken en heeft eigenlijk geen vaste stijl. Dat maakt hem ook zo sterk. Zijn site is zeker een bezoekje waard!

Met rapid prototyping is het afmaken van een eenmalig ontwerp toch een betaalbare manier om schoenen te maken. Een schoenmaker zet de losse onderdelen in elkaar. De nieuwe rol van een ontwerper wordt op deze manier meer dan het product zelf, namelijk het scheppen van een breed scala mogelijkheden rondom een product.

Mountain Dew heeft een aantal illustratoren/grafittiartists aan het werk gezet om een gelimiteerd aantal design flessen op de markt te brengen. Green Label Art heet het project. Een paar uiterst vette designs is het gevolg. Ze zijn beperkt verkrijgbaar en waarschijnlijk hier niet te krijgen ;-(

Geweldig illustratiewerk van Tyler Stout.

Waarom zijn auto's eigenlijk gewoon geverfd en niet voorzien van een rubbercoating? Waarom zijn de meeste buitenpanelen van metaal en niet van kunststof (zoals de Smart)? En waarom zou je je auto over laten spuiten als je een nieuw kleurtje wilt? En niet gewoon de grootste sticker ter wereld er overheen plakken? Dat dacht de eigenaar van deze BMW ook. Wit is immers het nieuwe zwart.

Bijkomend voordeel van de tape is dat het de auto beschermt tegen roest en steenslag en zeker 3-4 jaar zonder problemen blijft zitten. Tegen die tijd hoort je auto mosgroen te zijn. Dus dat komt mooi uit.

Reina van Dam is overleden. Reina stamt nog uit de tijd dat mensen trouwden en dan van naam veranderde. Ze was dus bekende Venlonaar onder het pseudoniem 'Mevrouw van Bommel van Dam'.

De familie van Bommel van Dam had veel geld. En na de oorlog kochten ze veel schilderijen, met name van de Amsterdamse Limburgers. Zo rond 1969 kwamen Reina en haar echtgenoot naar Venlo voor cultureel zendelingenwerk. Het is de vraag of ze hier in slaagden?

Wat rest is een museum en een zeer aardige verzameling oude schilderijen. Het museum kan nu eindelijk loskomen van haar stichters. Een aansluiting bij het hedendaagse mecenaat lijkt me een goede ambitie. En de verzmelaar? Tsja, de verzamelaar is dood, lang leve de verzamelaar.

Angst is per definitie irrationeel. Ontwerpen voor een persoon met een spinnenfobie was dan ook voor Design Academy student Jonny Wray geen gestructureerde opgave. Toch weet hij enge plekjes waar een spin zich kan verschuilen zodanig vorm te geven, dat de angst meer behapbaar wordt. Wray ontving met het project An anxious imagination een Masters diploma cum laude.

Wray ontwierp een raam met een nestje voor een spin, een wasbak met een laddertje naar het putje en een trap met extra veel schuilhoekjes waar een spin een lekker plekje vindt. 'Een spinnenhater is zijn angst niet de baas, maar kan de plek waar de spin verschijnt nu wel controleren', aldus Jonny Wray. 'Zo ver gaat de kracht van objecten.'

Weten waar de spin op je wacht maakt het al minder eng. Deze trap heeft heel veel plekjes die een spin prettig vindt.

I Love Dust is een designbureau uit Engeland met een site vol supermooi werk. De moeite waard om een kijkje te nemen, al zeggen wij het zelf.

Siggi Eggertsson maakt kunst uit heel veel kleine onderdeeltjes. Zowel in zijn schilderijen als in zijn andere uitingen bestaat het geheel uit veeeeel vlakjes. Erg kunstig! Hij maakte ook een speciale Athletes-serie met bekende sporters.

Deze jongens van Logan uit Los Angeles maken fantastische motion graphics. Ze zijn verantwoordelijk voor de bekende dansende iPod silhouettes. Daarnaast maken o.a. ze superwerk voor Nike, Volkswagen. En naast vele muziekvideo's viel mijn oog op het werk voor Metal Gear Solid! Echt checken dus!

Het model heeft een houten en stalen binnenframe en is 14 meter lang, 9 meter breed en 2 meter 70 hoog. Als je over een vrachtwagen beschikt, is de Joint Strike Fighter gratis af te halen.

Deze dame kan verdomd mooie plaatjes maken, met een zeer fijn oog voor detail! Bijzonder gave illustraties. Check http://www.grandarray.com

We gaan moeilijkheden niet uit de weg, moeten ze bij Honda gedacht hebben.

Prints & The Revolution is een online galerie die gespecialiseerd is in de straat-, graffiti-en hedendaagse kunst. Zij staan voor grote, nieuwe, leuke en betaalbare kunst door bekende en onbekende kunstenaars. Birgit Schuurmans – inderdaad de Birgit die ook zingt en acteert – en vriendlief Arne Toonen bieden veel verschillende kunstwerken: straat kunst, zeefdrukken, stencil kunst, graffiti art, potlood tekeningen en exclusieve schilderijen. Zij verkopen het echte werk, geen werk digitaal geprint op doek, maar alleen werken in die u voelt de nabijheid van de kunstenaar.

www.printsandtherevolution.com

ik heb het de laatste weken erg druk. érg druk. redenen te over, maar deze is nu even allesoverheersend geworden. vrijdag 25 mei speel ik samen met mijn podiumvriendin  het stuk 'nieuwe ogen' van bob selderslaghs, als een soort openbaar examen voor voordracht. het is eenmalig en helemaal niet officieel, maar onzen bob was aan het begin van het jaar nog maar eens de goedheid zelve en vond het wel leuk om ons zijn stuk te laten spelen.

zelf gingen we uiteraard kijken naar de voorstelling waarin anja daems en riet muylaert ons helemaal stil en ontroerd kregen (dat was een tijdje geleden) en nu... nu is't onze toer!

dus, wees welkom. ik zie u graag passeren. érg graag.

We met at the summer camp in upstate New York where I was working as the supervisor of the drama program. She was from a town just a little bit north of the camp, which she’d heard about from one of the two guys was seeing at the time: the one she thought she was going to marry and the one she was going out with to make sure that the first guy really was the one. The second one was the son of the couple who ran the camp’s kitchen, and he’d suggested that she let him find her a job there so they could spend more time together. I don’t know if he knew about his competition, but if he did, I can’t imagine that he wasn’t also thinking of her working at camp as a way of muscling the other guy out of the way.

Adrienne and I became friends one night talking after an evening program I can’t recall. We were leaning against the telephone poll at the corner where the camp road turned right and became the main path running through the part of the campgrounds where we worked. The sky was clear and the moon was full and we talked and talked and talked, and I remember looking down at our shadows in the moonlight and asking her if she wanted to go somewhere more comfortable—I had a car and there was a bar not too far away—but she said no and went off to her bunk to sleep. Well, we kept talking after that, almost every night found us huddled somewhere, but I knew about the other two guys, and I was not interested in turning her triangle into a square, and so all we did was share who we were and what we thought we wanted from our lives. Then, one night, while I was sitting OD—it means “on duty,” and there always needs to be one staff member on duty in the unit at night after the campers go to sleep—Adrienne came to sit with me. We were cross-legged under the large tree, the only spot from which you could see every tent in the unit, and there was a lull in our conversation. I looked up at the stars, which were spread across the sky like every cliché you’ve ever heard about clear moonless nights in the mountains, and then she was in my lap, not facing me, we did not look at each other for the rest of the time we sat there, and she was pulling my arms around her, and that’s how we stayed, almost silent until it was time for her to go.

We talked about it the next day, of course, and I still didn’t want anything more than a friendship, and neither did she, but she had fit so well in my lap and it had felt so good to have my arms around her, that we both agreed we wanted to be able to hold each other without it having to mean that we were a couple or that we were going to be what I understand they now call “friends with benefits.” And that’s what we did; and it was lovely; and everyone who knew us thought we were having sex, but we weren’t, not yet, not for another year at least—though it was fun watching the difficulty people had trying to slot our very public and very physical friendship into one of the relationship categories our society insists are the only appropriate ways for two people to connection.

I will not bore you with the details of how we finally became sexual partners, but when we did it was not a signal to her that she needed to break up with either the guy she thought was the one or the guy who was her comparison test, nor did I expect her to do that. If you were to ask me why, I’d have to tell you that I’m not really sure. Partially, there practical issues involved. We lived far apart and a long distance relationship just did not seem possible at the time. Also, I was Jewish and she was Catholic. I was convinced at the time that I would not marry a non-Jew, and while I don’t remember that she felt the same need to marry within her faith, or even to restrict herself to those who believed in Jesus, her parents certainly did, and she was in thrall to her parents. Even after we were pretty seriously in love with each other, after she’d broken up with both the other men in her life so she could be with me, it still took her five years to tell her parents that I was her boyfriend.

The end of my relationship with Adrienne was angry and bitter—but that is a story I will tell you if we become storytellers for each other. At the beginning, though, when everything about us was still fresh and who we could be for each other seemed an unlimited possibility, we tried to define that possibility and that unlimitedness by writing letters, long letters, like this one is becoming for you, and maybe what were doing was struggling to find a way of saying I love you, or maybe it was really I want you, without denying the love and desire we felt for the things that would have excluded us from each other’s lives, but we were also reaching for a way of saying our relationship was different from what convention told us it had to be, that we didn’t know what form it was going to take, that maybe it would never take on a fixed form, and the words we used to mean that were not concrete. Not concrete was what we insisted we wanted to be; it was what we said we wanted to commit ourselves to, though now I think a better word would have been fluid, because what I think we really wanted, what I think we hoped we’d be able to do, was let our desire for each other run through the spaces in our lives the way water finds its way down a mountain and across the land, except we forgot, or chose to forget, that water eventually changes the mountain’s shape and carves canyons and valleys into the land where there weren’t any before, and you have to be able to adapt to those changes if you want to survive in that landscape.

Those letters were our courtship, and a very old-fashioned kind of courtship they were, hearkening back to Victorian America, when letter writing was the primary way couples got to know each other, even if the Other they got to know was always an idealized version of the person they’d met in the flesh. After all, the written word allows you not only to revise yourself before you present it to an audience, but it also allows you to invent new selves, and I think one of the reasons Adrienne and I lasted as long as we did was that it took us seven years to work through the selves we’d developed so fully in our letters, and I don’t mean to suggest that those selves were false or that working through them was equivalent to uncovering some sort of deception on the other’s part. I mean that in the process of writing those letters we both revealed and discovered selves we helped each other grow into and that we eventually had to acknowledge we could not stop each other from growing out of. It’s only now that I am becoming aware, though, of how deeply writing and reading those letters shaped me, how much I am struggling still with my desire to be in my relationships with women not concrete, though what I mean by that term now is not what Adrienne and I meant back then. In fact, I guess you could say what I’m struggling with is how to define the difference.

The heat here has finally broken, and there is for the first time in five days a breeze blowing through this room, which was, when these apartments were first built in the 1920s, the maid’s room. I feel like I have already said more than I should, but somehow it also feels like I have said exactly what I needed to say. The question is whether you’re the right person to hear it.

My lips tingled afterward for hours. I’ve been living with those words for a year now, ever since I was sitting in the park thinking I would never see you again, and then there you were, standing in front of me, smiling as if the spot where I sat was exactly where you’d expected to find me—though of course there was no way you could’ve known that’s where I’d be since I’d told you in the museum the day before that I was planning to head for the beach. Do you remember you said, “I wish I could join you,” and then there was that awkward silence you broke with the joke about not knowing how to swim, and I said I could teach you, and the urgency that crept, unintended, into my voice rendered us silent again? I looked up at you from the park bench and I don’t know what you read in my eyes—I was so surprised to see you that my mind went blank—but your face hardened for a moment into a mask I couldn’t read behind. Is this something you do consciously? At the time, that’s how it looked to me. For a moment, I was afraid you were going to turn and walk away.

I wonder if you saw as  you walked up to where I was sitting that I was holding your business card. If you did, you would have seen me turning it in my hands—it is beautifully designed—so I could examine your logo from different angles, and I was thinking how nice it would’ve been if my wife hadn’t needed the car, and if your flight had been a day later, and I could’ve dialed your cell phone and invited you to continue our conversation, beer or wine in hand, beneath an umbrella planted firmly in the sand not more than six or seven yards from the Atlantic Ocean. And then there you were, your flight canceled, your stay extended by two days, walking the park to enjoy, you said, the country-in-the-city you wish you had where you live, which is all pasture and meadow and nothing but a few trees to break the monotony of the land. I didn’t ask you then, and so I guess I’ll ask now, did you mean that you wanted a city-in-the-country, or that you really don’t like where you live and would prefer to be in a city somewhere? If the latter, then why don’t you move? There are big enough cities pretty close to where you live—but maybe that’s none of my business.

Could you tell how happy I was to see you? You’d left the museum in such a rush after that mysterious call on your cell phone—and believe it or not this is what was running through my head the precise moment when I looked up and saw you—that our conversation had been left dangling in my imagination, and I was sorry I would never have a chance to tell you how nice it was to talk to you, and I hope you will understand what I mean when I say that the frustration and disappointment I felt at the way your leaving left everything we’d been saying hanging in the air between us was almost sexual, as if one of us had gotten up in the middle of lovemaking and without a word walked out of the other’s life forever. There. I’ve said it. Because even though I was not thinking when we were talking, at least not consciously, that I wanted us to fuck, I’d be lying if I said I felt nothing, and I think you would as well. Because when you were talking about how different a sculpture looks depending on the angle you view it from, and you led me around Rodin’s Cupid and Psyche so we were standing between the sculpture and the wall and all we could see was Cupid’s back, I saw the way you looked to make sure the guards’ eyes were elsewhere before running your finger quickly down his spine and into the cleft of his ass, and then you moved me so I could see in the space between the two marble bodies the way the back of Psyche’s right hand rests, almost like a lover’s, between her breasts. Indeed, if you don’t look closely you could easily mistake it for Cupid’s hand.

“If she were flesh and blood I imagine this would be very painful,” is what you said, nodding at the way Psyche’s arm, in her struggle to keep Cupid from flying away, had been bent sharply in at the elbow, and then you reached your hand in towards Psyche’s breasts, your fingers almost grazing the coldness of the marble nipple—is it my imagination or does it look almost erect?—but the guard noticed you and warned us away, so you guided me into the next room, where each of the paintings on each of the four walls was by Monet. You were about to finish what you were saying when your phone rang, and then you were gone, and, ah, speaking of phones, there is mine. Probably my wife telling me what time to pick her up at the train station. If you write back, and you remember, please tell me what it was you were going to say. I’ll write more later.