My latest acquisition is the original front page of the comic Cazador y presa by Arturo Del Castillo. I am quite pleased to get this one because I already have this comic's third and last pages. You can see them here and here.
What is beautiful about Arturo's drawing is how gentle and seemingly easily drawn it is. He doesn't even bother to erase the pencil drawing, which, by the way, is very minimal.
Most of the time, the only corrections he had, as in this case, were when he changed his mind and whitened out the frames around the images. And because he used fabric dipped in ink to make textures, which was hard to control, he corrected that with white gouache.
You can see other Arturo Del Castillo's comic page in my collection here.
Monday, April 21, 2025
The Front Page of "Cazador y presa" by Arturo Del Castillo
Monday, March 31, 2025
Eldorado in the name of western democracy
Monday, March 17, 2025
The Puppets of Zlatko Bourek
On March 6th, the exhibition "Uglies: The Puppets of Zlatko Bourek" opened at Galerija Kresija in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The exhibition was curated by Tjaša Juhart of the Puppet Museum of the Ljubljana Puppet Theatre.
Zlatko Bourek mostly created for an adult audience. The exhibition also presents his cult play Hamlet, which was the biggest hit in the field of puppet performances for adults in his oeuvre. In this, he first staged his own derivative of the Japanese technique of cart puppets, which the animators hold in their laps and lend them their legs. The play was a turning point for both Croatian puppetry and puppetry in the former commonwealth. It is inscribed in the canon of world puppetry, and it has traveled practically the entire world.
Zlatko was a true Renaissance man. He was a painter, sculptor, costume designer, scenographer, and illustrator. He directed theatre plays, feature films, and animated movies.
I was pleased to see that the curator of the exhibition, Tjaša Juhart, decided to include my poster for his play Hamlet in the exhibition.
I met Zlatko for the first time when I was seventeen years old and I had a summer job working at Zagreb Film. In 1981 I was fortunate to design a poster for his puppet show of Hamlet by Tom Stoppard.
He was one of the most generous, soft-spoken people I have ever met. That's probably why we became friends, and that's probably why he painted me in one of his paintings.
Saturday, March 8, 2025
Tattooed Part 2
Friday, March 7, 2025
My New Poster Design for JDP-Yugoslav Drama Theater
I am pleased to share my new poster design and illustration for the play "Eldorado" by Marius von Mayenburg for JDP-Yugoslav Drama Theater in Belgrade, Serbia.
The play starts, as the smoke rises from another city saved by coalition bombs, with a graphic account of a city where the government quarter is in ruins, refugees are confined to the sports stadium and animals have fled the bombed-out zoo. But although devastation for the majority becomes an investment opportunity for the minority, the play deals with the mental disintegration that accompanies urban disaster. Anton, an estate agent seeking to sell a surviving complex to his rich mother-in-law, becomes progressively more unhinged.
Behind the play lies an implicit question: how do we go on living when unspeakable crimes are being committed in the name of Western democracy?
Here below, you can see my poster designs from the last eight seasons for JDP-Yugoslav Drama Theater. Some of the seasons had fewer shows due to Covid. For every season of JDP, I create a slightly different look.
This season, designing the posters, I try to emphasize diagonal composition and dark, realistic illustrations. It seems it's not only appropriate for the subjects of the plays, but also appropriate for the times we are currently living in.
More about my JDP's posters and my other work can be seen here.
Thursday, March 6, 2025
"Design Activism" Lecture at the University of Ljubljana
On Tuesday, March 4th, at 12 PM, I gave a lecture titled "Design Activism" at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.
The lecture was organized by Maja Budec Stanicic and Aljosa Puzar.