Tara Mcpherson

I have been looking at the art of Tara Mcpherson over the holidays, initially drawn to it by a book cover I saw on Amazon, (which I bought based on the cover and the inside previews) I loved the artwork inside, it reminded me of Mark Ryden works, I love how the images are sweet, colorful and have that sort of icing texture that reminds you of cakes and sweets! but at the same time they depict somewhat gory ideals, for example Mark Ryden draws giant cuddly teddy bears that upon first glance seem cute and friendly but upon further inspection have a cold evil kind of look, it's hard to explain. He also paints little girls being eaten by trees, which I think is just F*****g awesome! and Tara's work is similar in that way, for example one of her pictures is off a happy smiling girl in a swimsuit but then you notice the rubber toy float she has is actually going through a whole in her body, she also has a fascination with hearts and most of her female portrayals have heart shaped holes in their chests which is clearly rather symbolic and alot of people will be able to relate to it, (I'm actually getting one of her artworks as a tattoo in a few weeks!) there is something odd about looking at such gory content, but minus the dark colors, slime and guts to go with it, instead you are greeted with sugary colors and almost edible textures that draw you in almost like the window display of the most scrumptious fairytale cake shop you could imagine, only when you get inside you realize your actually in Sweeney Todds barber shop! and yet you still stay because you are getting to view these things that we are all morbidly curious about in one way or the other, yet in an addictive childlike way.

This sort of stuff also makes me think of Tim Burton, I love his work too and I can't wait to go and see his new film: "Coroline" I have both "The nightmare before christmas" and "the corpse bride" and most of his films, I love his dark sense of comic horror and will be drawing inspiration from it and Tara Mcpherson's work for my next video project!

Sword of the stranger

Excellent film I've just watched having missed it at the leeds film festival 2008, fab animation, the fight scenes are also spot on and it actually has a very good solid plotline! at times i forgot i was watching a cartoon as it plays out like an epical samurai flick. I highly recommend this to any anime or samurai movie fan, it's very good and yes i'm very tired so my vocab is also asleep, i can't think of the right words to describe the film, but I thought I'd stick it up on the good old blog as everything watch is usually where i get my inspiration from, i rarely look at the real world!

Oh I forgot to say what it's about! well i don't want to give too much away but basically it's about a little boy and his dog who have been sent away by a monk to seek refuge in a temple in another city as his home village was burnt to the ground by imperialist soldiers. It turns out the entire army is after the boy believing he is the key to immortality. the boy meets a lone samurai warrior and they team up, (well the boy hires him to get him to the temple in one piece after his dog has taken a liking to the stranger) the characters are all very solid and well-rounded out and the plot elements fall in line with the ming dynasty and the intrusion of the white man and their weapons vs the honour of the samurai. I'm too tired to say anymore i can't think straight!