Glacier National Park, Montana

Oreamnos americanus (Mountain Goat) stemming it out precariously for a tasty mineral lick… photo found here.

(from friend Chaz Maviyane-Davies)

Washington, D.C.

In today’s New York Times, op-ed columnist Frank Rich provides an insightful portrait of “Forgotten but Not Gone” George W. Bush, reminding us of Dubya’s “seemingly bottomless capacity for self-pity” over the past eight years, even as he “drove his country off a cliff,” stubbornly stayed his disastrous course abroad, and created a wake of monumental chaos and tragedy.

Image: ‘The First 1000’ illustration by Mark Bryan; 11 x 14 inches, oil on panel, 2004. Below: cover of the just-released ‘Highlights of Accomplishments and Results (of the) Administration of President George W. Bush, 2001-2009.

Kolkata, India

I’ve been reading works by Rabindranath Tagore of late—and I can’t think of a more inspiring luminary to champion at the outset of this new year. Tagore was a Bengali mystic, Brahmo poet, artist, playwright, novelist, and composer whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1913 he became Asia’s first Nobel laureate when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

There’s a fine selection of Rabindranath Tagore quotations (my weakness) here. Check out transcripts (from recordings) of remarkable conversations Tagore had with Albert Einstein (Berlin) and H. G. Wells (Geneva) in 1930. Here’s a short sampling of sage sayings and quotable quotes by Tagore to inspire and whet your appetite…

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God finds himself by creating.

The best does not come alone. It comes with the company of the all.

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

Do not blame your food because you have no appetite.

He has made his weapons his gods.

When his weapons win he is defeated himself.

The stars are not afraid to appear like fireflies.

Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.

He who wants to do good knocks at the gate;
he who loves finds the gate open.

Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

The newer people, of this modern age, are more eager to amass than to realize.

The tendency in modern civilization is to make the world uniform…
Let the mind be universal. The individual should not be sacrificed.

The bird thinks it is an act of kindness to give the fish a lift in the air.

If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.

Silence will carry your voice like the nest that holds the sleeping birds.

The canal loves to think that rivers exist solely to supply it with water.

The sun greets me with a smile.
The rain, his sad sister, talks to my heart.

Men are cruel, but Man is kind.

Kicks only raise dust and not crops from the earth.

Let him only see the thorns who has eyes to see the rose.

Set the bird’s wings with gold and it will never again soar in the sky.

The stream of truth flows through its channels of mistakes.

Havana, Cuba

My thoughts today are with Cuban designer friends—it’s 50 years to the day since dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Havana as revolutionary forces led by Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Fidel Castro advanced on the city… in the following days the exuberance of change overtook the capital. I feel privileged to have made many trips to Cuba in recent years, and am thankful of the sincere friendships forged with professional colleagues there (in 2006 I wrote a feature article on Cuban graphic design for Communication Arts magazine; PDF here).

Images: Postcards commemorating the events of 1959; some of the posters that appear in my article.

A great Flickr set of classic Penguin & Pelican book covers… enjoy. (Also check out Joe Kral’s impressive archive of over 700 book covers from his personal library, as well as over 500 magazine images).

Boston, Massachusetts

Check out this remarkable collection of images (120 in total) compiled by Alan Taylor of The Boston Globe, here, here, and here. Certainly an eventful year…

the Gaza Strip | قطاع غزة‎ | רצועת עזה

…and sadly, bloody little “goodwill towards man” either, it seems.

(poster image: Chaz Maviyane-Davies)

Repressed Hostility

Indecision

 Schizophrenia

Inferiority

I just stumbled across these remarkable illustrations by Russian-born Boris Artzybasheff, a master of anthropomorphism, on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive (a great resource for illustrators) here. Artzybasheff had a long career as an illustrator, beginning in the late 1920s with art deco style illustrations and extending all the way through the 1950s. Samples shown above are from the first section of Artzybasheff’s book As I See—titled ‘Neurotica’ it’s a visual depiction of extreme states of mind.