Budget-girl blues

 Jessica Hische, Daily Drop Cap 1st Edition 

image credit: Lamington Drive

 
 
flatmates and I have just signed the lease to a new house, and while I am endlessly excited about the big move, new house = new expenses = one rather battered and bruised wallet. As such I have made a few resolutions for the next few months. No more buying magazines to get me through my wait for the train. No buying clothes, unless they are ten dollars or less (ahoy, Savers!). No more going out for dinner - daytime coffee will suffice. And last but not least, no mroe buying arty things, especially seeing as I have a backlog of prints which need to be framed. It is in this spirit that I post this amazing prints by American graphic designer Jessica Hische. Jessica recently had a show at my favourite Melbourne gallery, Lamington Drive (home of my very first art-purchase). Largely based around Jessica's Daily Drop Cap project*, the show featured an entire alphabet of intrically designed letters, and additional text-based work. But my favourite things of all, the ones tempting me to break my resolution just days after it was made, were her charts of her drop-cap series, featuring the entire alphabet on one print. For now, I will post one and pretend that this is in fact the same as buying. Then in a few months, maybe, just maybe there will be a few left. Fingers crossed and i's dotted!

images from Daily Drop Cap 1st Edition from Jessica's website

*Go check it out! Jessica is offering a new drop cap a day to bloggers to use to beautify their posts. 

The M &  Y at the beginning of this post are, of course, from Daily Dropcap

Because art is good for you

Dear reader,

Are you there, or am I talking to myself? If you are, is your 'there' Melbourne? If so, get yourself to Lamington Drive gallery, pronto. Opened last Thursday, their current exhibition, Risographica! features over thirty bright and beautful two-colour risographic prints. The artists all come from the stable of the Jacky Winter Group, a Melbourne-based agency set up to represent and promote Australian illustration. As JW states it on their website, their aim is to "...connect a diverse range of Australia's finest contemporary illustrators with a broad international and local client base." With prints running to an edition of only ten, and selling for the super cheap price of $50, to say the show is sure to sell out is the understatement of the month. I particularly like that Lamington Drive is making art assessible to a wider audience rather than just trying to profit of high end pieces. It is art, done democratically, with many a good vibe to boot -- part of the proceeds from the sales of the prints go to Medecins Sans Frontiers. As if I needed any further encouragement to buy one! The difficulties on the night were a) navigating the clinging Mebourne humidity through the heaving opening night crowd, and b) trying to whittle down the "I-want" list. I managed to finally get it down to one (though I was sorely tempted by Matt Huynh's Matador): Stolon by Dylan Martorell, as seen above. Technically, it's my first ever real-art purchase, and all I can say is its making me wicked excited for the collecting journey ahead.

My shortlist can be seen below:

1. Matt Huynh, Matador

2. Beco Orpin, Follows Night

3. Clements Habicht, Hens

4. Rik Lee, Whoop Arse

All images from Lamington Drive's Risographica! catalogue, which is available for download here.