technique

“There is this print, which is the central theme of the collection, that I spent more than six months working on. It took lot of research and trial and error. The end result is something I am very proud of. There is this jacket in this print, and from afar it looks like any other blazer. But if you look at it closely every seam, every print matches to a T. I never thought it was humanly possible for me to achieve this—and call me dramatic if you will—but when I saw it finished I was in tears.”

-Fashion designer Prabal Gurung, whose print-heavy spring 2012 collection was inspired in part by Nobuyoshi Araki‘s 1997 “Sensual Flowers” series of photographs

One of Theo Jansen’s self-propelling Strandbeests (beach animals) beside a drawing by the artist depicting the creature’s “stomach” of recycled plastic bottles containing air that can be pumped up to a high pressure by the wind and “muscles” of plastic tubing.

“Theo showed me around his small on-site workshop [near Delft, The Netherlands]. It was filled with tools like vises, saws, clamps, and heat guns for softening the plastic tubes. On perforated wallboards, tools hung neatly inside their black magic-marker outlines. From a workbench Theo picked up a piece of three-quarter-inch PVC tube about two feet long. He said this was the basic element in the Strandbeests’ construction, like protein in living things. ‘I have known about these tubes all my life,’ he told me. (He speaks good English.) ‘Building codes in Holland require that electrical wiring in buildings go through conduit tubes like these. There are millions of miles of these tubes in Holland. You see they are a cheese yellow when they are new—a good color for Holland. The tubes’ brand name used to be Polyvolt, now it is Pipelife. When we were little, we used to do this with them.’

He took a student notebook, tore out a sheet of graph paper, rolled it into a tight cone, wet the point of the cone with his tongue, tore off the base of the cone so it fit snugly into the tube, raised the tube to his lips, blew, and sent the paper dart smack into the wall, fifteen feet away. He is the unusual kind of adult who can do something he used to do when he was nine and not have it seem at all out of place. ‘I believe it is now illegal for children in Dutch schools to have these tubes,’ he said.”

-Ian Frazier in his article on Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen that appears in the September 5 issue of The New Yorker
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“Photomontage has always existed. It was more painstaking to do, but it always existed. Changing a little gesture in a photograph or changing the order of how people are standing. Avedon did that. He did a lot of doctoring of photographs, but he never told anybody. He didn’t have to. I tell everybody because I want to be noticed. I’m like a magician showing how I do the tricks.

Artifice is artifice. If you are photographing a group and someone is in the back and you put them on a little platform, that artifice doesn’t show. It’s the same thing. Whether it’s done before the shot or after, who cares? It’s all about the emotion you have when you see the picture. I love the picture of Naomi in Africa fighting with the crocodile. We found an unbelievably beautiful rubber crocodile, and we put it in the middle of a swamp, and hundreds of people gathered around, and the police arrived. They thought a crocodile had escaped from the zoo. It was a big deal in the papers. But it was a way of doing an interesting anecdotal image.”

-Graphic designer, illustrator, photographer and director Jean-Paul Goude in an interview with Glenn O’Brien that appears in the September issue of Harper’s Bazaar

Although we don’t knit, we onced harbored an obsession with embroidery floss that still makes us go all tingly when in proximity to a Jo-Ann Fabrics, so when the knit-tastic Mary Beth Klatt told us that she had created an app about yarn, we said “Tell us more!” Designed for both the iPhone and the iPad, Yarn U is “an on-the-go reference guide to more than 170 yarns,” says Klatt, who has taught sewing at Chicago’s famed Vogue Fabrics and rarely leaves the house without knitting needles or crochet hooks. “It tells you on-the-spot, essential information about the yarn—such as yardage, fiber content, and stitch gauge—as well as pros and cons for the yarn.” Amateur knitters and seasoned experts alike can use the app to select the perfect yarn for a project and avoid all manner of yarn-related disappointments. The $2.99 iTunes download also includes plenty of examples to admire. Adds Klatt, “There are tons of pictures of completed projects that could be inspiring for future hats, sweaters, blankets, and more.” Put on your future hat and enroll in Yarn U today.

Got an app we should know about? Spin us a yarn at unbeige@mediabistro.com

Musician Moby‘s first book of photography, Destroyed, was released at the end of May, accompanying the launch of his latest album of the same name. Upon its launch, the British Journal of Photography‘s Olivier Laurent sat down with Moby to discuss his work, the new book and photobooks in general. Here’s the first video, with the second part (the portion about the business and purpose of photobooks) after the jump:

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“People keep coming at me with the question, is it a painting or is it a photograph? Technically it’s a photograph. It’s a photograph because it’s photographic paper. But obviously I think about them as paintings, because they refer to the history of painting, right? I also have to think about them as sculptures, because every part of the process is part of the project. They’re sculptures because they play on the idea of what should be hanging in a gallery. In that sense they’re also kind of ready-mades….They’re uniques. I advertise them as being really easy to make, but the truth is, nothing is really easy to make. I make hundreds and hundreds of them, and then I edit down to the four that seem to work well together. But, of course, I try to play it up. Like, ‘Oh, they’re so easy. It’s nothing.’”

—Cory Arcangel, in an interview with fellow artist Mary Heilmann published in the April issue of Interview. An exhibition of new work by Arcangel opens May 26 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Today’s big news in the tastefully appointed, farm-fresh land of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO) is the reorganization of its media business, as Wenda Harris Millard steps down as president of media and co-CEO of MSLO to become president of brand consulting firm Media Link. The shakeup puts Charles Koppelman at the helm of the media division while Stewart herself will “oversee all editorial and creative functions.” But the colorful happenings don’t end there. The May issue of Martha Stewart Living is all about color. In her editor’s letter, Gael Towey, the magazine’s acting editor-in-chief (and MSLO’s chief creative officer), reminisces about the earliest days of the magazine, back in 1990, which can only mean one thing: misty egg-colored memories!

For us, COLOR has always been a touchstone. It all started with some unassuming chicken eggs. While on a photo at Martha’s house in Westport, she gave me a dozen eggs freshly laid by her Araucana chickens. That Saturday morning, my husband, Stephen, and I were cooking the eggs for our children…when Martha called. We had just put the eggshells on the windowsill in the sunlight to admire the gorgeous colors: soft blue greens, gentle browns, and warm creams. It took Martha and me about five minutes to cook up a plan for our first how-to painting story, inspired by the Araucana eggs, followed by our launch into the paint business. Soon Stephen and I were painting our kitchen ceiling Araucuna Turquoise, our dining room Drabware, and the hallway Americana Buff. For us at Martha Stewart Living, the egg definitely came first.

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(Photo: UnBeige)

Last night at the White Rabbit lounge in New York City, the School of Visual Arts’ MFA in Interaction Design program hosted the second event in its “Dot Dot Dot” lecture series. Among the four speakers that addressed the standing-room-only crowd in mini-lectures on this month’s topic—”the interviewers“—was documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit. The director of Helvetica (catch it at a free screening tomorrow evening in Denver, Miami, San Diego, or Evansville, Indiana), Hustwit is now working to wrap up production on Objectified, his hotly anticipated documentary about industrial design that will debut early next year.

Hustwit’s decision to address the crowd without PowerPoint slides was indicative of his approach to interviewing, or perhaps the lack thereof. “My process of interviewing people is I do not interview people,” said the cheerful Hustwit. “I’m trying to get them to forget that they’re being interviewed.” He accomplishes this by avoiding the word “interview” in his communications with subjects (preferring “talk” or “discussion”) and going into a meeting with a set of conversation topics but never a list of prepared questions.

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Self-taught artist Phil Hansen is all about the process. He has used a tricycle to paint a giant portrait of Lance Armstrong and parted with a quart of his own blood to depict the grinning visage of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il on a canvas of 6,000 plywood-backed Band-Aids. Last summer, he painstakingly rendered the likeness of Jimi Hendrix in matchsticks, before lighting the piece on fire in a nod to Hendrix’s fondness for guitar burning. And so when the Grammys came calling, Hansen was ready. Using tools such as microphones and guitar picks as paintbrushes, he created the official artwork for February’s 51st annual Grammy Awards program book, telecast tickets, and promotional poster. And in keeping with Hansen’s focus on process, he also created this time-lapse video to document the making of the twelve-foot-tall 3-D poster (pictured at left):

Click “continued…” for a video of the making of “A Moment,” a 2007 work for which Hansen posted his phone number online and asked people to call and tell him a moment that changed their lives. Over the course of 136 consecutive hours, he wrote the responses on a giant circular canvas. Click to see the sum of those pivotal moments.

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This is freelance writer Mary Beth Klatt, filling in for Steve Delahoyde, as he gets ready for his nuptials. We found pictures of this tiled house in Santa Monica, California by way of the Craftzine blog. You’ll see the entire residence is covered with broken crockery. That’s a whole lot of broken dishes or picassiette, a type of mosaic that incorporates shards of broken dishes, cups, and tiles. It was a nickname too, given to Raymond Isadore, who famously created La Maison Picassiette in Chartres, France. Now as much as we favor recycling and reuse, we’re not sure how this type of exterior decoration would stand up in cold-weather climates in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois. But in Arizona, California, and Florida, have at it.