HiLoBrow, a cultural blog/zine/site whose motto is “Middlebrow is not the solution”, has asked 25 of their favorite writers to examine and write on individual comics panels by Jack “King” Kirby, one of the greats of late 20th Century comics art, in a feature called Kirb Your Enthusiasm. (I’ll write more on Jack Kirby, who is one of my favorites, in a future post.)

The panels are taken from a wide range comics selected from various phases of Kirby’s extensive and highly influential career. Every Kirby fan has their favorite Kirby “era” and titles (mine being early “Silver Age” Fantastic Four, Thor and Strange Tales).

The panels themselves are linked to larger versions, posted in high resolution in all of their process color dots on cheap newsprint glory.

There’s an introductory post that begins the series and contains a list of the comics from which the panels are taken and the writers who are commenting on them, including those few in the series not yet posted.

I can’t say that any of these panels are ones that I personally would have singled out, but I find the entire exercise fascinating, even if just for prompting me to think about a few of my own favorites — a terrific notion.

Though the commentary is a bit “insider”, aimed at those already familiar with American comic books in general and Kirby in particular, other readers may find the way these writers have found individual comic panels worthy of discourse different and interesting.

(Comic titles for Jack Kirby images above: Thor, Captain America, Kamandi, Mr. Miracle, Fantastic Four)

[Via MetaFilter]

I wrote about Polish painter Jacek Yerka back in 2006 and again in 2007. A recent visit to his website showed it to be updated with new paintings and worth another visit.

Yerka, who some might label Surrealist, but I think of as a magic realist, primarily creates landscapes — of a sort. They are landscapes in which Yerka has reached down the throat of reality an yanked it inside out, toes to head and back to front.

His playful and fantastic rearrangements of the physical world have the wonderful ability to rearrange our perception of the relationship between objects, the role of ground and sky, land and sea, animate and inanimate, causing that sublime shift that reveals the ordinary as new.

Unlike the early 20th Century Surrealists, whose paintings often pushed out at you, pugilistically inserting their dream state delerium into your conscious space, Yerka’s paintings invite you in, offering intriguing paths into the strange and wonderful.

In addition to Yerka’s primary website, there is a Russian site with larger versions of some of the images. You can also get an overview on the beinArt Surreal Art Collective and on Zuza Fun.

I think The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka: A Portfolio of 21 Paintings is out of print, but you can find copies from other sellers on Amazon.

Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka : The Fiction of Harlan Ellison, matching Yerks’a work with Ellison’s stories, is in print and available.

Yerka starts his pieces with a pencil sketch, develops the color ideas in crayons, sometimes carries them to a more developed state in pastels and works his finished paintings in acrylic, ideal for his sharply delineated and often highly detailed work.

Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer cuts into books, of which he which he has first sealed the edges, proceeding one page at a time, cutting around images and other areas of interest and exposing layers of pages beneath.

He does not remove or replace content, he works with the internal arrangement of each book, or grouping of books, as though it were his slab of marble, with wonders to be discovered within.

The resulting sculptures combine the found images, Dettmer’s choices about what to cut and what to feature, his arrangement of layers and depth and the overall arrangement of the books, sculptural forms in themselves, often with pages pulled into slanting waves of edges.

He is at once digging into and revealing history and rearranging its context, in a sense similar to Max Ernst’s collages, and creating something new, a form and relationship that didn’t exist in the original books.

On Dettmer’s website you can view the groupings of images by choosing a year from the top navigation.

There is a post on My Modern Metropolis with a quick overview of several works.

[Via Connie Handscomb by way of Escape Into Life on Twitter: @peepsqueak @escapeintolife]

Though the physical exhibition for which it was created is in the past (having ended in January of 2010), the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design has maintained online an interactive called The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver 1480-1650.

The interactive features 8 Renaissance and Baroque engravings, drawn from those in the exhibition as examples; and allows you to examine them in more detail, along with some background information on the artist and the work.

Unfortunately the interface for viewing the engravings’ details is poorly implemented, limited to a virtual loupe (with your cursor stuck in the center — hello?).

However, the “Analyze Lines” feature, accessed from a button above the images, is worth visiting. It allows you to interactively view layers of lines that have been extracted from the image and isolated by using a set of sliders that can display the layers in various combinations. It’s a fascinating way to look at how the artists have arranged their outlines, hatching and cross hatching in creating the forms and textures of the engraved image.

They have chosen fine examples of engravings for the feature, including Durer’s Madonna with the Pear (images above, top five).

Also of interest is a video, accessed from the upper right of the interface. Introduced by Emily Peters, Curator of the exhibit, in which Andrew Stein Raferty, Consulting Curator for the exhibit and Associate Professor of Printmaking at RISD, steps through the process of making an engraving, in this case based on a drawing he made after a drawing by Primaticcio (images above, bottom five).

[Via Bibliodyssey, via Bearded Roman]

Drawing Inspiration (Vimeo Link) is animated short from the UK, directed by Tim McCourt and Wesley Louis, aided by a group listed on the Vimeo page and on the Drawing Inspiration blog.

A park denizen’s routine of sitting on his regular bench and drinking is interrupted by the discovery of a mysterious drawing of him, left taped to the bench by persons unknown. This sets off a series of events that lead him out of his narrow routine.

The animation makes wonderful use of simple watercolor backgrounds, out of focus planes and cinematic camera angles and scene compositions.

The accompanying blog chronicles the process of creating the piece and could serve as a textbook walkthrough of what’s involved in planning, designing and creating a short animation (there’s more to it than those who haven’t been involved might think). There’s also a “Making Of” video and more on the websites of the creators.

[Via Escape Into Life ( http://api.twitter.com/#!/escapeintolife ) ]