Happy Easter to all - Buona Pasqua a tutti

As a young chiid my only concern at Easter was exactly HOW MANY chocolate eggs I would receive from friends and relatives... and it was always lots and lots.

Nowadays I find myself wishing that chocolate eggs could grow on trees and then I would plant an orchard!

Happy Easter and happy harvesting!
Buona Pasqua e buona raccolta!

Winter Landscape Tea Towel by Sarajo Frieden

You could begin to think that I have a thing about tea towels. But I can assure you I would never dry my pots with this lovely tea towel by Sarajo Frieden it is just soooo sumptuous! It is available to buy at Third Drawer Down, is in 100% Linen, Limited Edition 1000 and costs $40.00. This work has just won it's place in the highly prized American Illustration book 30. 

A little bit about the artist - "Sarajo Frieden works and lives in Los Angeles in a studio bordering Thai Town, Little Armenia and Koreatown. Here she finds inspiration in the simple hand-painted signs and variety of cultures and languages which surround her. Fine, folk and decorative art, Persian miniatures, Shaker trance drawings, Japanese ukiyo-e, and Hungarian embroidery can be found wandering through her images.

Her work is daily reminder that the ordinary is often extraordinary and nothing is what it seems. Sarajo Friedned uses open ended narratives, folk tales, abstraction and the juxtaposition of discordant images to give form to the human experience. Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles, San Diego, North Carolina, Minnesota, New York, Rome, Venice, Naples and Australia."

I also had a look at her Web Site, lots of lovely stuff there to see.

REBUS is the word

"Rebus - a representation of a word or phrase by pictures, symbols etc, that suggest that word or phrase or its syllables,"

In my previous post I could'nt remember the word to describe the idea behind my T t'owl tea-towel. Of course it was easy but at that very moment my brain was in overload, doing 10 things at once as usual and maybe in two lanuages... thats my excuse anyway.

Just to demonstrate that I've understood the concept heres another one. Its quite good fun to play around with letters and images to create words.

T t'owl

I have been working on a Tea Towel design for the To Dry For competition. My final entry is the first of the three photographs above. As I only found out about the competition by chance a few days ago, it was all "rush rush" to develop my idea and design my T t'owl. The idea combines phonetic spelling and a visual icon to create the word Tea Towel (there is probably a name for it but it has'nt come to me yet), but basically if you don't get it straight away then I suppose it has failed as a communication medium.

 

I also had a great idea to use Illustrator owing to the lack of time to draw and scan and colour etc.. Owls are quite easy to "construct" so I thought it might save time, I also imagined the finished result to be a clean graphic image suitable to screen print. As I enjoyed myself so much I designed not one Owl but lots so as tradition has it I will be incorporating them in other designs.

So pleased with the results, I even experimented with a "Cup a T", and I could'nt resist the "plural version of T t'owls". 

If I came across my T t'owl in a shop I would certainly buy it!

Hope you like them.