Another World: 1.

Photos taken a couple days ago. Beginning of a longer series, which I'll post as I edit. No Photoshop, but a reflection into another world.

Levels

page by Hansjörg Mayer

here's a page from Hansjörg Mayer's series alphabetenquadratbuch 1 (1964-5), scanned from An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Something Else Press, 1967). Mayer was a typographic designer & book publisher, as well as a visual poet.

Ismail
24"x36"
Acrylic

As the Paint Brush whispers his name the walls scream for his attention. The Love affair the three of them shared was starting to becoming a distant memory. The thing that they have yet to discover is that he has been carrying on an affair. The endless nights they use to make magic together are the memories that decorate his past. He tells himself all the time that this affair he's carrying on has brought him joy and wealth of the pocket. It makes him smile from the face and not the heart like his previous lovers. He misses them and dreams all the time of holding that beautiful tall slender brush and the rush his body gets when colours collide... He must make a date with his old lovers tonight and bring himself back to life.. Hoping that they missed him and longed for him in the same manner.
His lovers eagerly accept the invitation and promise he wont be sorry. No words are exchanged as the wall anticipates the combined touch of the soft silky brush. Jerome's heart hasn't beated this fast in months. The wall lets out a cry and the brush moans..Tonight they have again made a love child...Hopefully this one makes it to see the light of day so his beauty can be shared with the masses......

Written by: Ayana Ismail

Chaotic sequences

From the illustrations to James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987.

There are two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga), or beauty which is merely dependent (pulchritudo adhaerens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object should be; the second does presuppose such a concept and, with it, an answering perfection of the object. Those of the first kind are said to be (self-subsisting) beauties of this thing or that thing; the other kind of beauty, being attached to a concept (conditioned beauty), is ascribed to objects which come under the concept of a particular end.

Flowers are free beauties of nature. Hardly anyone but a botanist knows the true nature of a flower, and even he, while recognizing in the flower the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no attention to this natural end when using his taste to judge of its beauty. Hence no perfection of any kind — no internal purposiveness, as something to which the arrangement of the manifold is related — underlies this judgment. Many birds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise), and a number of crustaceans, are self-subsisting beauties which are not appurtenant to any object defined with respect to its end, but please freely and on their own account. So designs à la grecque, foliage for framework or on wallpapers, etc., have no intrinsic meaning; they represent nothing — no object under a definite concept — and are free beauties. We may also rank in the same class what in music are called fantasias (without a theme), and, indeed, all music that is not set to words.

--Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, paragraph 16.

Interconnected Curves with Expanding Distances

click to enlarge

Tremors Too Fine to be Seen

(untitled)

pages

work in process

"went"

larger "conversations" for Andrei

Dirty Rabbit

Are you a published cartoonist or a comics industry professional?

Then please vote for "Abstract Comics" for best anthology at the Eisner awards:

http://www.eisnervote.com/

And, yes, if you have been published in an anthology from a recognized publisher such as Fantagraphics, you are eligible to vote.

comics by Jodorowsky

not quite abstract, but nearly.

this is one of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Fabulas Panicas (Panic Fables), published in Mexico in the 1960s. more at *. the others look different.

he is better known for his movies El Topo & The Holy Mountain, & his collaborations with bandes dessinées artistes such as Moebius.

sidewalk strip

Lizard Lick Creek

Night of the World Navigator

My computer briefly froze, or hiccuped, a few minutes ago while trying to download too many things at once, with Photoshop open. Here is a portion of the screen it froze on--cropped but otherwise unedited:

Conversation for Four Voices

click the image to view the scribd version

Typographical ab cmx by L. Nichols

From here.

Lettriste comics by Roberto Altmann

a page from the sequence
Zr + 4HCl → ZrCl4 + 2H2
U + 3F2 → UF6
by Roberto Altmann, a Cuban-born Lettriste, published in Cuban revista Signos #3 (1970).

more information: (1) & (2), courtesy of Domingos Isabelinho's blog,
& a slide-show put up by The Modesto Kid.

thanks, Mike Jacobson, for showing me this.

Four strips

untitled story in parts

Some links

to my recent pieces:

               

sequence of spalted wood

An imbroglio

Edit: here is the original version, see explanation in the comments: