1. Do you also have $58 million just sitting around the house? Sucks, right? Well now you could buy a medieval castle.
2. Or you could buy the house that Pablo Escobar was killed in.
3. Jenny Morgan’s portraits at Lifelounge. (Some NSFW.)
4. Ridiculous pasta tips and schadenfreude.
5. Video: new Matthew Dear EP is fire.
People ask us about our name all the time. Thumbtack Press*. What’s a Thumbtack Press? You press a thumbtack, sure, but a Thumbtack Press is more of a noun, like a printing press almost.
Thumbnail sketches are something else entirely, so we’ll ignore them, and likewise with thumbing one’s nose, thumbs up and thumbs down, or being under someone’s thumb.
But remember with us for a second that moment when you first put art on your wall**. Remember that piece of cardboard or memory board or your innocent bedroom plaster wall waiting to be abused. Remember that moment when you first cut out a magazine clipping or a love note? Remember tacking it to your wall?
We still – all of us – put art up. And it’s not just “right click + set as background.” It’s tactile. It’s physical. We hang art.
For us, the thumbtack is a reminder of those moments. Trying to cut out the face of some celebrity crush so neatly, or constantly adjusting a piece so that it looks centered from across the room.
At lunch with our friend Peter Mars, he said Thumbtack Press is a noun – it’s me, it’s you, it’s us – but it’s also a verb. Press. Press up art into your home. Into your life.
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* – The name “Thumbtack Press” is really only as old as the word “thumbtack,” coined in 1884, which just so happens to be the year Eleanor Roosevelt was born, in case you care. It comes from the combination of two old German words: “tack,” a 13th century word meaning clasp, and “thumb,” which comes from words for fatty or swollen thickness. “Press,” on the other hand, has at least three roots: an old French word for “crowd,” the Latin “pressåre” (like, “to press”), and, of course, full court press in basketball.
** – Ok, you could put it on your ceiling, too.
The Jealous Curator wrote some nice words about us this afternoon and put up some good shots of work by Kimiaki Yaegashi (as you can see above), Lilly Piri, Martha Rich, Kate Pugsley, and Gianluca Foli.
Go page through their stuff and check em out on Twitter and Facebook.
Yeah so they’re from a while ago, but they’re still amazing. Next level gifs = “experimental animation.”
Heiko’s TTP collection is here.
(As told to Megan Freeman.)
“Just staying busy drawing.”
“I like the ability to show my work alongside peers who I admire. I like that if somebody likes my work enough to hang it in their home, they can.”
“Hahahaha, I cite Rasta? Awesome. Well, in that case, Jah is a big influence.”
“I LOVE fantasy books and movies, but you’d never really know it from my work. I have stacks of old children’s books my dad used to read to me – visually my illustration style can be seen plain as day in these pages. bright colors, simple drawings, etc.”
“My process involves a lot of swearing and self loathing. I read the brief I’m given and try to sum up the article in one sentence. I’ll also make lists of words that seem to describe the article and hope those yield some fruit. Then I spend a lot of time in my sketchbook, looking for gold. It’s never ever an easy experience, but the pay off of a great idea keeps me coming back.”
“I use acrylic paint, a silk screen, and linoleum blocks. Photoshop helps pull things together, or polish an image off.”
“Conceptually I remember seeing David Hockney’s work in high school and being really blown away by his ability to tell a whole story in one image. There are many modern masters of this in the illustration community: Guy Billout, Brian Cronin, Dan Page, Jon Krause, Alex Nabaum, Nick Dewar RIP, Shout, Craig Frazier – I do my best to keep pace.”
“There is a glut of illustration talent [in Toronto] – some people i know well, others only their work, but it’s cool to live in a city full of so many well known illustrators.”
1. As TTP owner Barry emailed, with the link to the video above, “DAVE COOPER ANIMATION!”
2. “Make a contemporary version of a modern day classic.” The Fox is Black’s re-covered books contest. Go enter it.
3. Shots from Less and More: the Design Ethos of Dieter Rams at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art via Domus. Apple eat your heart out.
4. David Hockney and technology.
5. Vanity Fair did a long thing on Lucien Freud and psychology and stuff. RIP the legend.
When the TTP robots aren’t reconstructing Lego replicas of famous Roman wars or trying to draw perfect circles, they travel the world to find new artists. TTP is, after all, international through and through, and the robots do not like being told they are “parochial” or “limited in scope.” It makes them angry.
But just mention Kimiaki Yaegashi (above), Tatsuro Kiuchi (middle), and Masayoshi Mizuho (below), the Thumbtack Press artists from Japan, and watch the robots’ little teeth show through their grated smiles. They love the way they use color – never quite what you expect, always with some kind of pop or joke somewhere – but the robots especially love the harsh light in which humans come off in some of their work. Kimiaki’s work has that scathing sexual criticism; Tatsuro’s can feel like you’re spying on a distant, private human interaction. Best of all, Masayoshi’s work simply foregoes human subjects completely.
The TTP robots are particular in their taste. They throw a fit if anybody mentions weak willed or predictable art. And they have taken to Tatsuro, Kimiaki, and Masayoshi.
Hopefully now they’ll come back from Japan. The robots love Japan.
Thumbtack Press artist Penelope Dullaghan runs a robust illustration blog/community over at Illustration Friday. The weekly contest, interviews, forum, and pick of the week combine to make IF a good resource for illustrators, no matter if you’re emerging or established.
IF also has a whole page of useful resources for illustrators, from links to other sites to materials.
Go look!
First of all, thanks to everyone who responded to last week’s open edition prints blast. We thought it was important to be forward and open about our collection and why we sell open edition prints, and the responses I think showed that people appreciated it.
I want to follow up with one specific aspect that some people, including Justin Miller from Bound Staff Press, pointed out. With certain prints, namely those from woodcuts, linocuts, engravings, and similar mediums, every print that is painstakingly handmade – with the necessary tenderness towards ink and paper position, besides all the other factors – is original. Sometimes print runs have to be limited because running a lot of prints can affect the template. In that sense, there is a whole other category of prints that you could call “limited original editions.” As Justin said in his email, “archival copies are not the same as original printmaking.”
As always, we really appreciate you all responding to us with your thoughts. It’s what makes the TTP community special. Feel free to email us anytime at feedback@thumbtackpress.com or get at us on our Facebook or Twitter.
Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 artist edition by Fernando Chamarelli.
1. Haruki Murakami covers from around the world.
2. Issue 8 of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest is out. Something about “Grassroots Modernism.”
3. Thanks to Illustration Friday’s Penelope Dullaghan for her kind words this week. Go look at Penelope’s TTP collection.
4. Bookshelf porn.
5. (Above) The trailer for LCD Soundsystem’s swan song is out. Whoa.
Like the dismembered head of an unpopular king, the phrase “limited edition” is tossed around a lot these days. But what does it mean exactly? Limited edition of what? And are there unlimited editions? Can anything be unlimited? And as long as we’re into editions, what does “open edition” mean? Why does Thumbtack Press sell open editions?
Join us on this bullet train and we’ll explain:
Enter open editions. Open edition prints are prints that are not limited to a certain number. So there is a potentially unlimited amount of prints that an artist could allow to be reproduced as open edition prints. Read the rest of this entry »
(As told to Megan Freeman.)
“Most of the time the bright dots stand for positive emotions, the doodles for negative ones.”
“Deer Hunter (above) is based on Velázquez’s painting Prince Balthasar Charles as a Hunter. When looking for photos on which I can base my paintings I often find disturbing pictures of children posing proudly in front of their hunting trophies. I can’t understand that people think of hunting as a amusement. I wanted to express this incomprehension in the painting.”
“Principally I don’t like to think about categories. I paint things that I care about and I paint them the way I like it. It’s not important what kind of category this could fit into.”
“I’m trying to find a better approach with my paintings. The elements I add to the environments represent certain thoughts or feelings that are connected with my experience of nature. They can be pleasant as well as nasty.” Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes as we’re paging through the site we come across the Randomizer on the products page and find something surprising. Not surprising as in like we’ve never seen it, but surprising in any number of other ways, like hey look at all the monkeys! Or, my god that’s just beautiful.
Literally eight eleven minutes ago we had such a reaction with Vanessa Tam’s Obsidian (above). We love Vanessa’s work (I used Breakfast as an avatar for a while), and Obsidian is just so poised and textured and gorgeous.
Alex Varanese‘s The Imprint is a six part series that’s a little different from the two series we featured last week. It still has that sort of nostalgic appeal to the aesthetics of a previous generation like the Alt/1977 series, and it still has that focus on specific purveyors of culture and personality that you get from the roads in Pavement Loop.
But The Imprint is different because in his notes on the series, Alex talks about nature versus nurture and about how arbitrary, or random, or, at the very least, how out of our control so much of the nurture stuff is. And then it’s up to us to link nurture to The Imprint and Alex’s vision of the musical, cultural symbols in the series.
Think about the connection between the cultural influences, including music, that make up “nurture.” Or the word “imprint” and the idea of stamping someone’s personality out like a culture-nurture-personality assembly line. And what about the colors? They’re very flag-like, no? What about the ideas of nurture in being born (randomly?) into a specific country and culture? Or about the ways in which, like the older/vintage equipment featured, cultural indicators age and are replaced by new nurture inducing symbols?
As Jay-Z said, “I’m so far ahead of my time/I’m bout to start a new life.”
Speaking of which, to some people Imprint (Part 0) has a an uncomfortable amount in common with Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3 album cover, so Alex Varanese addresses that.
Yesterday we featured Alex Varanese in our weekly blast because his stuff is killing these days. It’s like he’s on creative speed or something. He keeps churning out good and well thought out series as well as the ridiculously well animated Danton Diphthong. (His personal tweets are hilarious too.)
Today we’re featuring his Pavement Loop series (above), and again, we’ll let him describe it himself:
…As fate would have it, the otherwise expansive distance between the dispassionate chaos of adult life and the reassuring resilience of youth has been reduced to a single line—Route 17—beginning at a point I pass on a daily basis. Read the rest of this entry »
Olaf Hajek, Welcome
1. Time‘s monster list of 2011 lists. Good lord that’s the last one, promise.
2. New works by TTP’s Olaf Hajek (above) in Illustrated Mundo this week.
3. In case you get snowed into your home and can’t get to the store, here’s how to make homemade marshmellow fluff.
4. Apparently the longest palindrome sentence is 17,826 words long. So now you know that.
5. Go look at the things we put up on our super rad dope insane new Tumblr thing!
We talk too much. Let’s let Alex Varanese - he of Danton Diphthong (video above) - describe his if-I-could-go-back-in-time Alt/1977 series himself. It’s new to the Thumbtack Press collection, and he’s a better writer than us anyway:
“I’ve explored that idea [of what I would do if I could go back in time] in this series by re-imagining four common products from 2010 as if they were designed in 1977: an mp3 player, a laptop, a mobile phone (below) and a handheld video game system (below). I then created a series of fictitious but stylistically accurate print ads to market them, as well as a handful of abstract posters (you know, just for funsies).
I’ve learned that there is no greater design element than the anachronism. I’ve learned that the strongest contrast isn’t spatial or tonal but historical. I’ve learned that there’s retro, and then there’s time travel.
The irony is that all post-modern, smugly self-referential retro porn aside, I’d gladly trade in my immaculately designed 21st century gadgets for these hideously clunky, faux-wood-paneled pieces of über-kitsch. Sorry, Apple.”
Very well. You can see the rest of Alex’s TTP collection, including some incredible highway prints, here.
