The summer has brought a whole bunch of art related events my way. One of which included an American style "holiday" (a week) to Vancouver, British Colombia; gateway to the Pacific. Beyond being a great town for bicycling, hanging out at the beach, and mountain climbing, the Vancity, is also a hotbed of art. Some of the art related shenanigans I partook in included a visit to the KRAZY comics/animation exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery, creating freestyle comics with the fine folks of the Vancouver Sketch Jam, a pit stop at the Elfsar comics store in Yaletown, and finally a visit to Clack Clack Empire to see the fantastic illustrations of Marianne Goldin at her show LOLCats!..and I hiked up a tiny mountain, the Grouse Grind.



So the highlights..the large downtown museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s current exhibit KRAZY , is a survey of graphic art from both American and Japanese traditions of comics, graphic novels, animation, game design, and pop art.

Standout works for me were George Herriman’s original Krazy Kat pages, Jerry Moriarty’s Jack Survives comic pages(amazing), Art Spiegelman’s MAUS originals, artwork from Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, and production art from UPA’s animated short Gerald McBoing Boing.
Most mindblowing was Windsor McKay’s original(!!!) Gertie the Dinosaur animation drawings. From 1914. On rice paper. Hand registered. That was drawn with a dip pen. With the backgrounds drawn on..every…single..page..Animators, can you feel me?!!


(flickr jacked from 'lil)

..oh yeah and the cut out silhouette characters from Lotte Reineger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed(released in 1926, arguably the first feature length animated film). More current work was concept and production art from a host of studios including Pixar’s Toy Story, DreamWorks Over the Hedge

On the Eastern side of things standouts include Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkonkincreet manga pages, anime clips of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, Mamoru Oshii’s Patlabor ,
Katsuhiro Otomo’s seminal Akira, Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days, and the mind blowing Mind Game from Masaaki Yuasa. I highly recommend finding Mind Game, production by Studio 4C.



Studio 4C also did the production work on Mike Arias’s film adaptation of Tekkonkincreet. Great behind the scenes article here. Genius at the highest level of intoxication.


Other notable works at the KRAZY exhibit include a sneak peek at Will Wright’s upcoming, groundbreaking game Spore and a bunch of amazing visual/fine art pieces inspired by pop culture. Here is a PDF file list of all the work in the show.

If you make it up to Vancouver, check out the show it runs until Sep. 7.

Also while in the Vancity, I also popped in to check out the Vancouver Comics Jam, a group of indie comix stalwarts who meet regularly to turn out freestyle improv comics. We met in the upstairs room of an out of the way Japanese restaurant near the waterfront like furtive comics criminals. Someone started a panel and the page got passed around till a story emerged from the panels of many contributors. You can see some of the results here along with the roll call! Thanks to Ed Brisson for extending the welcome..What up VCJ folks!

Went to the Elfsar Comics shop in the Yaletown section of the city. Good shop, lot’s of selection. Store owner Ethan is a pretty cool guy and really knowledgeable and helpful. When asked about Canadian comics artists he reeled off about a dozen names and pointed out several books. I picked up The Art of Robin Mitchell Vol 1, lots of strong character design work by this Canadian character designer who I got to meet a week later at the San Diego Comic-Con.

Another interesting place to stop off at is the Clack-Clack Empire in the Chinatown area.

The fashion boutique was hosting an exhibit called CAN’T BELIEVE WE BOTH GOT CATS:LOLCats!. The Vincent Parker curated show featured the fantastic illustrations of artist Marianne Goldin. The refreshments included a brand of beer named DUDE. Seriously. There is a Canadian beer called DUDE.



While there my paparazzi fans snapped a pic of me and Clack-Clack proprietor Erin M. Edwards. This mysteriously ended up in local paper and on the Vancouver events site UrbanMixer.com. Here is Marianne Goldin's artist statement and show listing at UrbanMixer.com.
Pic in the local weekly 24 Hours Vancouver below. I owe you a DUDE beer Raj!

and last but not least the character mascots for the 2010 winter Olympics which will be held in Vancouver! They go by the names of Sumi, Quatchi, and Miga and are so disgustingly cute I couldn’t resist taking a few pictures of them at the airport store.

Great design! Here’s their site..and wikipedia entry.