memoir

nine cool things on a tuesday

~ jama ~ 12 Comments

1. Happy March! What better way to bid farewell to winter and anticipate spring than with Aiko Fukawa’s sweet, whimsical art!

I’m a longtime fan of her hug-me-adorable anthropomorphized animals; the innocence and gentleness in her pictures help restore my belief in the goodness of the world.

A 2005 graduate of Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Design, Aiko works as an illustrator and designer for the Japanese paper brand AI, creating advertisements, book covers, stationery, magazines, picture books and more on a global scale.

Though she considers cats her spirit animal, I especially love her rabbits. With Easter coming up at the end of the month, I simply can’t get enough of them! In addition to animals, Aiko is inspired by everyday life, plants, and music.

She’s been drawing since childhood, and her favorite memory is the Christmas morning she woke to find all her stuffed animals lined up in her room.

Her secret to success? “Wake up early.”

She hopes future generations will accept and respect diversity. She’s also an advocate of animal rescue centers and firmly believes people should never buy fur.

Drink of choice: coffee. Favorite food: CAKE!!

See more of Aiko’s work at her Website and Instagram. Items featuring her designs (stationery, framed prints, notebooks, stickers, washi tape, coin purses, etc.), can be purchased via online sites such as Acorn Toys & Goods, Moth Chicago, and Nico Neco Zakkaya.

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love me some Joe Brainard

~ jama ~ 37 Comments

“If I’m as normal as I think I am, we’re all a bunch of weirdos.” ~ Joe Brainard

I love it when one good thing leads to another.

Kenneth Koch’s poem “Permanently” (which I shared last June), sparked my interest in New York School artist, writer and set designer Joe Brainard (1942-1994).

Joe in Calais, Vermont, about two years before he died of AIDS-induced pneumonia (photo by Pat Padgett).

Both his visual art and writings were new to me; unlike his more famous contemporaries Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Andy Warhol, Fairfield Porter, and Koch himself, Brainard had somehow slipped under my radar.

Brainard’s “Chewing Gum Wrappers” (1971)

If you’ve been a Brainard fan all along, then you know he was a prolific creator who left behind an impressive oeuvre of innovative, pop culture inspired collages, assemblages, paintings, drawings, and comic book collaborations, as well as multiple collections of mostly autobiographical poetry and prose. 

C Comics No. 2 (Boke Press, 1965)
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♥️ love me some Cake by Maira Kalman and Barbara Scott-Goodman (+ a giveaway!)♥️

~ jama ~ 33 Comments

“Bring on the Cake. We really want to Live.” ~ Maira Kalman

Help yourself to some lemon pound cake.

When a cake shows up, it’s party time.

Cakes enjoy stealing the show at our most important celebrations: birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, holidays, graduations. Fancy and festive, they know how to have fun.

But cakes don’t have to be luscious, layered, and laden with buttercream to make a lasting impression. As Maira Kalman and Barbara Scott-Goodman suggest in Cake (Penguin Press, 2018), it’s more about whom we share our cakes with and why.

The true deliciousness of cake? Baked-in love. For celebrations, yes, but even sweeter for life’s everyday travails.

With warmth, wisdom and her signature panache, Maira serves up a series of short, delectable illustrated vignettes, most culled from cherished family memories. These are interspersed with 17 of Barbara’s scrumptious recipes, each with a delightful headnote, some with Maira’s gouache paintings alongside.

Maira begins with “The First Cake” she remembers, a chocolate cake with a side of grapes, an after beach treat she enjoyed on the “cool stone tiles” of Aunt Shoshana’s terrace in Tel Aviv.

There’s her “Ninth Birthday” cake, part of a stellar celebration where “all the girls wore fancy dresses” and she was easily “the happiest one there,” and “The Broken Heart Cake,” which Shoshana baked to soothe Maira’s teenage soul.

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