Multifarious: Praying in a See-Through Church

See Through Church
Adrian Tomine, The New Yorker
Adrian Tomine, The New Yorker

It’s Nice That has a rundown of why and how the New Yorker manages to consistently get such wonderful illustrated covers. From Chris Ware, to Adrian Tomine, those New Yorker covers are killing it, and it’s all thanks to art editor Francoise Mouly and contributor Mina Kaneko.

Work like this is important to cartoonists and illustrators: it’s high profile, pays decently well, and reaches a mass audience. Well, not a MASS mass audience, but the New Yorker circulates quite well, and personally, I can’t think of the last New Yorker cover that wasn’t all over my Twitter feed. It is a thing that gets shared and gets remembered.

Check out this Comics Reporter interview with Mouly from September. They talk comics, career, and comics for kids:

Reassuring and educating those adults… they are often unsure — even in this day and age — that comics are okay for kids. They’re afraid that kids will read comics instead of reading real books. They see kids’ eagerness for comics. We want to show them how rich the book is. How all of the visual parts… so many readers, critics and reviewers don’t realize how much information there is visually in a comic. This was one way to make this manifest so that everyone would realize that this is a book… it’s something that happens with comics that you read them more than once. And reading, making the story happen in your imagination, that happens on a lot of different levels. That’s not something always acknowledged in a textbook because it’s less common that after you read a prose book you immediately start reading it again — or that you read the same text book five times. It happens, but it’s not common. With comics that almost always happens, especially with a comic that you like.

Photo: 準建築人手札網站 Forgemind ArchiMedia/Creative Commons
Photo: 準建築人手札網站 Forgemind ArchiMedia/Creative Commons

Belgium has a  see-through church. Kind of sells itself, doesn’t it?

Located in a field in the Flemish province of Limburg, and accessible only by foot or bicycle, Reading Between the Lines is a church that appears either solid or half-dissolved, depending on the angle from which you view it. Installed in 2011, the structure, created by Belgian architectural duo Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, was inspired by the traditional churches of the region. Reading Between the Lines is 33 feet tall and consists of 100 layers of stacked steel plate, interspersed with short columns to create the see-through effect.

Read this interview with Isabel Greenberg. Go. Go now.

Much of your work orbits around the ideas of mythology and folk lore. What draws you to these forms of storytelling?

I guess the great thing about those sort of stories is that they really are timeless. That’s why I love them. I think that there are certain stories and themes that are fundamentally relevant to everyone; things that we can all relate to on some level, no matter where we come from or what time we were born in. Themes like parents, siblings, jealousy, rivalry and of course love, are just fundamentally human. Characters in folklore and mythology are easily relatable to because in a way they are just archetypes.

— Megan

Laura Snapes on supporting local indies vs the sustainability of saving up for famous international bands — transferable wisdom:

So you see this Foos-designated £214,000 (and rising) and imagine what else it could fund: sustainable community projects in poor towns like Redruth, which recently hosted the inaugural Inland Art Festival with a hard-won Arts Council grant. It could better equip Troubadour, a brilliant studio/venue in a Falmouth harbour warehouse frequented by the town’s great bands – The Black Tambourines, Red Cords and Lost Dawn among others. Penzance punks Crows-An-Wra could press a record. Knee Deep Festival could ensure its future.

 

Lana Del Rey, Born to Die, Polydore, 2012Having raved about the craft of Lana Del Rey’s art direction in November’s SeqSart, here’s a whole lot more on that score.

For those who came of age during the war on terror, for whom adolescence was announced by 9/11 and for whom failed wars, a massive recession, and a total surveillance apparatus were the paranoid gifts of our adulthood, Lana Del Rey gives us a patriotism we can act out. Hers isn’t a love song to America; it’s a how-to manual.

As in: how to avoid facing the country’s ongoing crimes, against its own and its others, which are only made more severe by its many declarations of goodness.

— Claire

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Megan Purdy

Megan Purdy

Publisher of all this. Megan was born in Toronto. She's still there. Philosopher, space vampire, heart of a killer.

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