I’m thinking again about the Colour-in Canberra traffic control box designs, as entries are due by the 23rd. The idea is based on a similar project, Artforce, an initiative of Brisbane City Council managed by Queensland Urban Ecology. They have a gallery of their images, and you can see which are regarded as most popular.
Among my favourites is this one by Annique Goldenberg:
‘On the way to the waterfront at Manly – a traditional turtle migration area’.
Updated links 2015
Mosman Art Gallery is hosting an
exhibition titled Mr Squiggle – Who’s
pulling the strings: The Art and Life of Norman
Hetherington from Sept 3rd to
October 9th.
‘This exhibition explores the career of Norman Hetherington, the originator, creator and puppeteer of the popular children’s ABC program, ‘Mr Squiggle’. Norman Hetherington has lived in Mosman for over 40 years and made a significant contribution to Australian television history and culture. The exhibition presents a variety of original puppets, drawings, cartoons,
promotional material and memorabilia, and ABC television program segments.’
Associated with the exhibition there will also be performances at the gallery on Sunday 25 September, 11am & 2pm. These will be a short and rare performance by Norman with Mr Squiggle followed by A Package for Granny by Sydney Puppet Theatre and Puppetease by Ross Browning. Bookings: 02 9978 4178
Norman was recently interviewed on ABC Radio National’s The World Today. You can read the interview here, or listen to it by following whichever format you prefer linked at the top of that page. It’s refreshing to hear someone recommending fun so much! At the Puppetry Summit a few years ago Norman was kind enough to do an upside down squiggle (Mr Squiggle’s particular thing) for me and others. I come across it in my notebook every now and then and it makes me smile.
Updated 2015: broken links
I heard a lovely Gaelic blessing at yoga tonight:
Deep peace of the running wave to you
Deep peace of the flowing air to you
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you
Deep peace of the shining stars to you
Deep peace of the gentle night to you
Moon and stars pour their healing light on you
Deep peace to you, deep peace to you.
Boing Boing points to Kathi Zung, a NYC maker of foam latex puppets used in animated videos and films, and in particular to her Do-it-yourself Foam Latex Puppetmaking 101 tutorial on DVD. I’d like to try something like that sometime.
This is the same technique that was used to make the Leunig Animated series that brought Michael Leunig’s cartoons to life on SBS TV a few years ago. An exhibition showing how it had been made followed, and I loved being able to see in detail how it had been done. Strangely, while the animations themselves were really good, I felt some tension to do with the whole production of animating them weighing down the original whimsy of the cartoons.
Updated links 2015.
I was flipping around the channels on the TV a few minutes ago trying to find CNN. (This sounds nonchalant, but it really means beating the living daylights out of the remote to make it work). Instead, I landed up on the Information Channel – I have no idea what this usually shows, I will have to ask the kids – and much to my surprise it was showing tumblegum.com, a pilot show that I helped make puppets for in 1999. My puppet was Spike, the larrikin goanna, played beautifully by Peter Wilson, Australia’s most outstanding puppeteer. Here’s Spike on location at Googong Dam:
He was about 6 feet long, and had huge claws made from chopping board plastic (which incidentally is a very useful material, being relatively strong and soft to work). I have pictures of him lolling immodestly on our trampoline in the sun while his paint dried.
As far as I know the show never made it beyond the one-off pilot, though it was marketed with great optimism overseas at Cannes and in China, so it was unexpected and good to see it at least getting a showing. As a puppet maker, you have to get used to the reality that the time it takes to create a puppet is usually quite out of proportion to the time it’s actually on stage or screen. So it’s a nice feeling when their lives are extended into another season, or the show tours here or overseas for some years to come.
So much interesting material from library and museum collections is becoming available online. It must be intensive work to get it up there, and it seems now as if the technology has been learned and the labour put in, and now we are getting the results. The latest example that caught my attention was the Sydney Powerhouse Museum’s Electronic Swatchbook which displays fabric designs from the 1830s to the 1920s.
Out of curiosity just then I went to check on the Victoria and Albert Museum of Decorative Arts. I visited there many years ago, and loved their collection of textiles, embroidery, laces and so on. They also now have an online image database.
I feel like I have been away, and in a way I have. I’ve been playing around with Dave Winer’s OPML editor and outliner which also has a blogging tool. I only have a hazy idea of the technical side of it, but it’s addictive.
I’ve been busy making two of those poseable wooden manikins that artists use to draw from into small puppet versions of two actors, a man and a woman. Its been fiddly, since to make the proportions right, I had change the shapes of the bodies, and the length of the limbs, which in turn means undoing the joints and shortening some of the springs that tension them . Really, the manikins are quite odd around the hips. I read that these deluxe guys have a lot more movement than the wooden ones, but they just make me laugh! And the woman is frightening!
Its a strange range of other poseable figures you can get supposedly to draw from. Horses, dinosaurs and giraffes are carried by our local art store. I know people buy them just because they are cool, but I like to imagine instead that there is a thriving subculture of ‘giraffe artists’ for instance.
I’m not participating in the Month of Softies this time. Partly I’ve been short on time, but I also wasn’t inspired. And while I think moving it to Flickr was more than understandable, I find that I feel differently about it over there. I’m not sure why.
