The Art of Illustration

There was a time in my life - about a year ago - when I fancied becoming an illustrator. Sitting at home drawing and not having to speak to people for days seemed like a perfect job for me. Sadly, I had to abandon this project when I realised I can't really draw. Of course, there are plenty of illustrators who can't really draw or paint and it doesn't stop them but I believe that if you want to be an illustrator you need to be as good as Norman Rockwell.
I was just about to ramble about the dying art of illustration and how no one cares anymore but it is not all true. People still care and people still make great art.

Yesterday I went to see a great exhibition of Norman Rockwell's work in Dulwich Picture Gallery. If you live in London, do yourself a favour and go see it. Norman Rockwell was an illustrator who was more of a photo journalist before photos became what they are now. He is an author of a few iconic illustrations like my favourite one:

















called "A problem we all live with" - it's a portrait of Ruby Bridges walking to school on the first day of racial school integration. She is guarded by marshalls. You can totally see it winning Wordpress Photo (provided it wasn't painted).
This is the stuff that Rockwell really wanted to draw and paint but, as we all, he needed to make a living, so he will also be remembered for tons of idealised scenes of American life so beloved in the 50s.

























He still managed to insert some humour and keen social observation.

Another favourite:
















While we are on illustration, I would like to mention the New Yorker whose covers have been examples of great illustration for a hundred years almost.
You can view almost all of them here (up to 2007). The remaining ones are available at the New Yorker's website. It is good to see one magazine still doing it. I would like to subscribe to it and then have it lying about at my flat so I can come across as classy and sophisticated.

Two more things I would like to mention while I have your attention.

Illustration Friday - this is a project anyone can participate in, professionals as well as amateurs. Every Friday a new theme is announced and for a week everybody can post their own interpretations of the theme. It's a sea of creativity. An ocean even. And great fun too.

Polska Ilustracja dla dzieci - is a Polish website (but it's all about the pictures, so it doesn't matter) about Polish children's books illustration.

Modern Art

Of all the things modern, modern art makes least sense to me.

I grew up believing that art is something beautiful and something that not everyone could create. And then of course I was exposed to 'modern art' which could be anything. A piece of soap on a hook, for example. Or dog poo in a box. It doesn't matter that it is certainly not beautiful and that just about any human being could create it (with some help from a dog). What matters is the 'back story'. You need a back story - a full explanation of what your art is supposed to symbolise. Basically the main goal of modern art (and by that I mean mostly conceptual art) is to symbolise something. It could be anything but themes related to the state of society in 21st century are of course preferred, so if you can find something to symbolise loneliness of people in big cities, isolation, consumptionism, McDonald's, you have a winner.

Here is a perfect example of modern art:
A few months ago, a Chinese artist Ai Weiwei created an installation in Tate Modern that consisted of one hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds. Now, of course, this is 21st century and things are done differently these days, so he (like everybody else) outsourced his artmaking and had 1,600 Chinese artisans hand paint the sunflower seeds.
People were invited to roll around in Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds while contemplating "the essence of his comment on mass consumption, Chinese industry, famine and collective work" (courtesy of Wikipedia).
It looked like this:

So yes, " mass consumption, Chinese industry, famine and collective work". However, in true spirit of postmodernism, I shall give it my own meaning. And what I think about this installation is this: "Oh my God, is this cool or what?" I don't know about you, but I am one of those people who like to stick their hands in that sort of thing, be it a bag or rice, lentils, beans or one hundred million hand painted porcelain sunflower seeds. By the powers granted to me by postmodernism I proclaim that the purpose of this installation is to allow me to give in to my fetishes. I suppose it means that it symbolises temptation.

Curiously, the visitors were soon banned from rolling around in sunflower seeds due to health hazards, which is in line with my 'temptation' interpretation.

The reason I remembered Ai Weiwei is that I read that his studio in Shanghai was demolished . Apparently, he didn't have all necessary construction permits, but we all know what that means. He should have stuck to making 'pretty things'.

Now, if you are interested in China and you'd rather read something serious and informative written by people who know what they are talking about, read this.

Also, if you think this whole post made little sense, I assure you it is nothing compared to some examples modern art.

Please list your favourite works of modern art in the comments section.

UPDATE:
I completely forgot cross-blog self promotion. Now, if you want to see some hideous modern art made by yours truly go to Now I will be an artist

Do You Think It's Funny

After my introductory post a certain ex-fling of mine said: "Sexy? Yes, that you are. But funny? I never really associated you with funny!" - a remark not only obviously rude, but also blatantly untrue. Of course, I am funny. I have been told by many people I am funny! I believe some even used the word 'hilarious' which, I admit, might have been a slight exaggeration. Don't take this away from me! Funny has always been my thing, before sexy was my thing. Yes, I am not an American slapstick comedy kind of funny. I'd like to believe my sense of humour is more subtle. In fact, as it turns out, it might sometimes be so subtle, that it goes entirely undetected.

This whole episode made me decide to investigate the whole matter more thoroughly. I have asked a whole bunch of people what they find funny and made a shocking discovery that different people find different things funny. As a matter of fact, some people laugh at things that to me are not funny at all! So here is a list of different funny things in the order of how funny I find them, starting with the least funny (i.e. not funny at all) to the most funny:

1) Little Britain - OK. I just don't get it. It's just men dressed up as women. And if they are not dressed up as women, they pretend to be gay... That's kind of... juvenile? And  Come Fly With Me is just the same, only also racist. I am sorry about the quality of the second video but if you live in UK you can watch this gem of a show in full on iplayer.

2) A couple of days a colleague of mine emailed me a video of a baby orangutan:

It made her "L O L", "absolutely hilarious". I admit it is a very cute orangutan (PS. for more cute baby animals of various species go to - http://www.zooborns.com ) but it is not really that funny, is it?
And it is not that I don't find animals funny. This dude is just hysterical:

3) Ben Elton - I have just finished reading 'Popcorn' (full review here) and even though it was a very interesting book I found myself laughing once in 330 pages which is just simply not good enough. Writers like him try very hard to be funny in every sentence, they can't write anything normally. Every sentence has to be a joke and no one has got that many jokes. I feel similarly about Jenny Eclair. I read two of her books and her constant attempts at humour made me feel really uncomfortable. Especially that her jokes were mostly about farting and other bodily functions, which would have been fine if I was a 13 year old boy.

4) Cyanide and Happines - we are slowly getting there. Cyanide and Happiness has its moments of brilliance, like here:

But sadly the brilliance sinks in the sea of mediocre.

Keep reading beacuse it gets funnier!

Books and Statistics

I spent countless hours thinking what my first post should be about. I was tempted to write about the capital punishment or human rights in China but certain people advised me to keep it light and entertaining. Thus I decided to write about books and statistics, because what's more entertaining than books and statistics, right?

If you are like me and like to read your books in an organised fashion, there is no better place for you to go than www.goodreads.com. Goodreads allows you to catalogue all the books you have read, you are reading and you intend to read. You can rate and review them as well. Once you provide goodreads with all the necessary data you can clearly see when you read your books, how long it took you and even how long it was between the time you decided upon reading a book and the moment you actually read it. If you log in religiously for a year, goodreads will reward you with yearly statistics. Now you will know just how many books or pages (if this seems more relevant to you) you have read over the year and how many of them you rated with 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 stars. Do that for a few consecutive years and you can compare them and draw conclusions (ex. I shall be 125 years old when I finish 1001 Books to Read Before You Die). You can set yourself a yearly reading challenge (that usually is somewhere down the list of New Year's resolutions) and Goodreads will kindly keep track of it for you.

If this all sounds like heaven to you, you probably have some sort obsessive-compulsive disorder and you might want to see somebody about it. However, before you do, please log in to goodreads and become my friend here .

Now I meant to write about MY book statistics for 2010 but certain people told me to keep it short because people have a very short attention span these days. Also, I fear that many readers might not find it as fascinating as I do.

If you checked this post in hope to find some real statistics about books here they are:

1) 89.5% of people prefer to watching TV to reading books
2) On any given day 1 out of 5 people reading a book on public transport is reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy.
3) 115% teenage girls have read Twilight
4) Only one person in the world has read this book. Me.

Welcome to the Kinga Show

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Kinga Show!

The Kinga Show is a project to restore the good name of my name in UK and create a world wide phenomenon (because I like a challenge).

Quite frequently when I say my name is Kinga, I hear "Oh, like that girl from Big Brother who stuck a wine bottle down her...".

Not everyone says it, some people are too polite to bring it up and others simply too embarrassed to admit they watched the sixth series of Big Brother and remember the names of contestants five years later. However, the sad fact remains that when you type 'Kinga' into google, it immediately prompts you to type 'wine bottle'.

I have taken it upon myself to make sure that from here on in Kinga will be associated with intelligent, sassy, funny and an entirely different kind of sexy.

I would like to thank all the five people that have read this. I know who you are. Literally.

Stay tuned.