Dblog is the interwebositry for all things creative, inspirational and elegant from D's world of art, design, cinema, T.V., comics, toys and pop culture. Drop me line or an interesting link any time...

24.5.12

D's A-Z of Heroes

In 2007 I was part of an exhibition called Homage (including fellow Melbourne artists Tim Burke, Maya Graham, Trevor Molloy, Amanda Toniolo  and Antoine Toniolo); a group show and tribute to the comic masters and those they influenced. We mostly worked in isolation and I think were all pleased when we saw each others work together, all very different but working in harmony.

One of my works was the piece below called Icon, which was a kind of nod to the singular iconography of the superhero. I wanted to bring as diverse a group of superhero icons as possible into a single abstract pattern; to see if the strength in design cold remain after abstraction and displacement. I chose based on familiarity, obscurity and pure personal favouritism.
I rendered each symbol whole then placed and cropped until I felt I had created a kind of neutral mosaic. In retrospect I probably should have pushed the abstraction further but I think it finished up as a nice piece.


More recently we wanted to make a meaningful and memorable gift for our newly arrived nephew Cameron. I went back to the drawing board with Icon and decided to reinvent it as an A-Z of superheroes for the nursery! It was damned hard finding superheroes for every letter (I began with about half) that had both a definable symbol (not all do) and were well known enough to be worthy of inclusion (thanks to those who I asked for advice!)! I then rendered the remaining symbols and set about repositioning them with a slightly less abstraction than the original.


My hope is that Cameron will look and wonder at these mysterious icons and seek out the comics. I'm not a fan (or even knowledgeable) of all, but some of my favourite titles are there in the alphabet above and I hope that he gets as much enjoyment from them as I do.
Do you know all the symbols? 

You can now buy the print here on my Artflakes account.

No comments:

Post a Comment