Recent art: King, Madonna, Sokoloff

A quick pointer to some illustration and photography I’ve seen recently. Apologies for the crops…

Andrew King

I delicious-ed the work of Andrew King the other day. He’s well worth a look. Annoyingly, in updating his gallery, he seems to delete some older works. Keep ’em there, fella! So these links may break, but current favourites include companion pieces Winston Flies to Tangiers for Martini Olives and ‘Teddy Thrills His Dinner Party After Cocktails’, as well as ‘Ol Ziggy Ruins The Zeppelin Party’ and Cuban Missile Crisis’ . It’s a strange world of 40s airplanes flying over lonesome, windswept plains and further things flying out of windows of modernist buildings. Curiously appealing.

Paul Madonna

Having posted about King, Teddy Jamieson emailed to point me at Paul Madonna’s ‘All Over Coffee’ series, a quietly gorgeous series of cartoons based in San Fransciso and published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s a particularly lovely example. There’s a rather difficult to navigate archive here, and interview here, in which Madonna suggests that while the human protagonists are never actually seen, the main character is San Francisco itself – and that’s all so visible, in beautifully detailed pen-and-ink. Similar feel to the brilliant Ben Katchor, though a little more detailed. (I note Katchor has some newly updated weekly strips.)

Marshall Sokoloff

Leaving illustration aside for the moment, The Morning News carried the photographs of Marshall Sokoloff a while ago, but it’s still quite the loveliest thing I’ve seen since. Jim Coudal, of Coudal fame, introduced the work for TMN:

“It seems fitting somehow that the hulls of ships carrying raw sugar from the tropics, north through the Atlantic to the Jarvis Quay in Toronto, should be bright and cheerful. That, like those products that will be produced from their cargo, they should be the color of jawbreakers and soda cans, candy wrappers, and the sprinkles that dress the top of cupcakes. It’s also appropriate that they show signs of decay.”

They’re simply stunning, the corrosion and paint producing great fields of curving abstraction that would put Rothko to shame – and where crisply-painted numbers, letters or other symbols appear on the hulls, it’s nothing short of thrilling. Sokoloff’s website is at blurbism.com, and The Morning News feature index is here.