This is a continuation of a post I made on the seventeenth of May. Also included are some minor deities on my artistic Mt. Olympus.
Brad Bird – This is the man responsible for the Incredibles. He has other notable accomplishments, but this movie blew me away. We just covered Post-modernism in Philosophy, and now I appreciate all the intertexuality even more.
Here you can see all the clever references and see how Brad Bird wrote them in to make the movie accessible to both little kids and adults familiar with comics, movies, and literature. It truly is an incredible movie, and Bird’s other work on the Simpsons and the Iron Giant is great as well. But his work on this movie is sure to cement his deserved position as an esteemed animator.
Allen Ginsberg – A gay beat/hippy poet associated with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg slept with everyone and did whatever drug he could for multiple decades. I find his work intriguing and extremely visceral. He sought Eastern influences before few had already done so, and was greatly influenced by visions that came to him. But even more interesting than his poetry are some of his interviews, where you get a real sense of what kind of man he was more than any other interview I’ve ever read. He died in 1997.
Lee Conklin – I first discovered Conklin after I noticed that the cover to my Dad’s self-titled Santana
record was more than just a lion, it was a fully drawn African woman, subtly hidden in the facial features of the lion. When I began noticing the other faces, I figured it would be a good idea to check out what else this guy had done. Turns out he practically invented the psychedelic art that came of San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury by creating concert posters for the Fillmore-East. He is clearly a Freudian thinker, mixing in breast and penis shapes in much of his art and creating pieces that evoke intense reactions from the viewer. Much of his work can be seen at his
website.
Sidekicks to the heroes:
Michel Gondry – He’s a kooky little director who makes music videos for a lot of bands I like and cool movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Dale Chihuly – A glass sculptor with a scary eye-patch over one eye, I’ve always thought he was kinda scary, but recently I’ve been able to accept his pirate like sensibilities because of his amazing glass creations.
Alex Ross – This man is an amazing painter who does work all over the comics industry and is widely considered the best. And with work like
this, how could he not be?
