Artist of the day

Thursday, March 2, 2023

Artist of the Day, March 2, 2023: Shaun Tan, an Australian artist, writer and film maker (#1792)

Shaun Tan (1973) is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Other books he has written and illustrated include The Red Tree and The Arrival.

Tan was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth. In 2006, his wordless graphic novel The Arrival won the Book of the Year prize as part of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. The same book won the Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year award in 2007, and the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Premier's Prize in 2006.

Tan's work has been described as an "Australian vernacular" that is "at once banal and uncanny, familiar and strange, local and universal, reassuring and scary, intimate and remote, guttersnipe and sprezzatura. No rhetoric, no straining for effect. Never other than itself."

For his career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" Tan won the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council, the biggest prize in children's literature.

As a boy, Tan spent time illustrating poems and stories and drawing dinosaurs, robots and spaceships. At school he was known as a talented artist. At the age of eleven, he became a fan of The Twilight Zone television series as well as books that bore similar themes. Tan cites Ray Bradbury as a favorite at this time. These stories led to Tan writing his own short stories. Of his effort at writing as a youth, Tan tells, "I have a small pile of rejection letters as testament to this ambition!" At the age of sixteen, Tan's first illustration appeared in the Australian magazine Aurealis in 1990.

Tan almost studied to become a geneticist, and enjoyed chemistry, physics, history and English while in high school as well as art and claimed that he did not really know what he wanted to do. During his university studies, Tan decided to move from academic studies to working as an artist.

Tan continued his education at the University of Western Australia where he studied Fine Arts, English Literature and History. While this was of interest to him, there was little practical work involved. In 1995, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts.

Tan describes himself as a slow worker who revises his work many times along the way. He is interested in loss and alienation, and believes that children in particular react well to issues of natural justice. He feels he is "like a translator" of ideas, and is happy and flattered to see his work adapted and interpreted in film and music (such as by the Australian Chamber Orchestra).

The Shaun Tan Award for Young Artists is sponsored by the City of Subiaco and open to all Perth school children between 5 and 17 years. The award is aimed at encouraging creativity in two-dimensional works. It is held annually with award winners announced in May and finalists' works exhibited at the Subiaco Library throughout June.

© 2023. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Shaun Tan or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Shaun Tan

All we ever wanted

City

Fox, Tales from inner city

Moonfish

On my way to paradise

Tiger

Catman

Darkness

Hello

Nature

Pigeon

The call of the mother

Creature cover

Dog

Kingdom

Never be late for a parade

Reading group

A bear and her lawyer

City limits

Life goat

Never leave a red sock on the clothesline

Red tree

The water buffalo

Alert but not alarmed

City of birds

Fate

Members of the board

Nobody understands

Rules of summer

They came by water

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

Artist of the Day, March 1, 2023: Erika Verzutti, a Brazilian sculptor (#1791)

Erika Verzutti (1971) was born in São Paulo, Brazil. She studied industrial design at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, São Paulo (1991), and continued her postgraduate studies in art at Goldsmiths College, London (1999–2000). Verzutti’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures represent the denizens of alternative worlds located somewhere between the real and the fantastic. Her work is characterized by the use of vernacular materials and the incorporation of “accidents”—scratches, breaks, and stains—that result in disturbing yet familiar effects.

Verzutti’s sculptures hover between abstraction and figuration but often take sensuous forms suggestive of animals or vegetation. Tropical plants occupy an especially privileged position in the artist’s iconography, as exemplified by the series Forms of Jaca (2008–11), an exhaustive exploration of the visual qualities of the jackfruit, a tree common to Brazil. Verzutti’s 2011 sculpture Porn Star references Constantin Brancusi’s iconic column structures of the early twentieth century by piling multiple bronze casts of the star fruit into a towering phallic stack. The value of the material employed is at once highlighted and undermined by the drips of white acrylic paint that dribble from the top of the work.

In 2010 Verzutti worked with a group of Brazilian artists that included Jac Leirner, Ernesto Neto, and Adriana Varejão to develop the sculpture Seven-Headed Monster (Bicho de 7 Cabeças); each participant was invited to create one head of the titular beast. The diversity of the creators’ styles combine to form a strange amalgamation of the various contemporary legacies of Brazilian modernism. Pet Cemetery (2008) is a set of expressive sculptures that alludes to animal burial. Each component work is displayed on a precarious structure or a conventional pedestal. These are grouped in a graveyard-like installation, an arrangement that casts doubt on any sentimental association of art with deathless beauty.

© 2023. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Erika Verzutti or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only