Hello, hello. How’s your summer going? That question particularly aimed at all the home-working parents, who’ve suddenly had their routines and silences utterly obliterated. Concentration is completely out the window … as is my constant background of very loud profanity-laced music. Seriously how am I supposed to work without my Lizzo? Still, can’t complain, I’ve now got a good excuse to fit a couple of Bluey breaks into my day. Anyway … LINKS!
1 — Fantastic opportunity for budding image-detectives: can you help identify everything on pop artist Pauline Boty's wall? The photo of it isn’t massive, which just makes the challenge even more fun! Some cuttings are pretty obvious, others entirely obscure, but it’s the damn I’ve seen that somewhere ones that are the real killers.
2 — A different version of Boty’s ever-changing wall appears in the opening of Pop Goes the Easel, Ken Russell's 1962 film on the Young British Artists of the Pop Art movement, currently on iPlayer.
3 — A fantastic find from Present&Correct: a book of French shop signage from 1914. I know it’a pretty reductive to say anything is Wes Andersonian, but by heck this is Wes Andersonian.
4 — Loving this Randall Munroe thread on the evolution of Pokémon cards through history, as generated by DALL·E 2. Wherever you stand on the whole AI-generated art thing, it’s interesting to see how it synthesises art history through pop culture iconography.
5 — Jack Smyth on how he designed the cover for The Premonitions Bureau, Sam Knight's tale of ‘astonishing adventures in precognition’. As with all Smyth’s work, this always jumps out at me when I’m doing my weekly bookshop trawl, so it’s fascinating to get a peek into his creative process.
6 — Social history and art combined: why you should visit the Centre of Ceramic Art. From Lucie Rie’s buttons to WA Ismay’s unique hoard, the peerless pottery collection in York Art Gallery is one of my happiest, calmest places.
7 — Big fan of Nick Parker’s Journal of Messy Thinking, a weekly newsletter about ideas, writing, creating, finding your voice, and the jumbled interconnectedness of all things. There’s always at least one thing that lingers in my head days later – this week an article about how electric vehicle designers are dealing with tone of voice concerns. What should a nine-thousand-pound car sound like?