Last spring I was suddenly involved in a poetry book illustration project… and here is the result:I am proud to announce today the publication of this book, called

“The Unreasonable Man”

and written by the Australian poet

Tariq Segal.

In his own words

“Well…  I’m thrilled to announce, the release of my book, my thoughts about life, through the years that this took.
Glad that it’s finished, and glad that I spent, time penning my thoughts, letting emotions vent…”

The book is designed as a coffee table poetry book. It contains 60 of Tariq’s favourite poems with each poem accompanied by either an illustration or photograph.

Tariq says:

“.. I think the artwork alone is worth owning a copy, and being able to review my thoughts as well can only but confirm your own sanity…”

Well I must confess, most of these illustrations, about 50 I guess, are my paintings.

And here is what I have written in the preface of the book:

“Having myself been an „unreasonable“ person from the very beginning of my life, my encounter with The Unreasonable Man could not fail. As I started reading his poetry, I felt at once a deep connection to his wild world of thoughts, passion and revolt, and agreed at once to become with my art, a part of it.

I was amazed to see how many of my paintings seemed to have been created exactly for his poems,  illustrating in vibrant colours, lines, forms and structures what the poet is saying in words and the empty spaces in between.

But not each of his poems found its rightful painting.. We both collaborated in a weird process of  re-creation, by which  the characters featured in some of my paintings started to assume a life of their own, moving and wandering around, invading Tariq’s universe of poetry, in search of their own particular place among his words. Sometimes they even ended up taking possession of other paintings, either chasing the original occupants away or, more peacefully, finding their place at their side. You will understand what I mean when you look at the original works through my websites!

Anyway, to work on the illustration of „The Unreasonable Man“ was a totally new and very exciting experience in dealing with my own art, seeing me naturally „forcing“ them to interact and fit to the words.

I want to thank Tariq for this wonderful experience and his wise and creative advice in the choice of the paintings.“

For those of you interested in the musings of this troubled mind the book can be purchased online from the US  at:
1.       Amazon.com : http://www.amazon.com/dp/098052380X
2.       Createspace.com : https://www.createspace.com/3354416

The books are also available through Tariq Segal himself, above all for those of you who are in Australia. If you are interested please contact Tariq at

tariq@segal.com.au

by Miki

I’ve been working on a slideshow of my digital art to enter in an art show. It might get disqualified, because the digital frame I loaded it on needs electricity. I’m sitting on pins and needles until I find out if either this or my other two pieces got into the show.

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally found some time to put the finishing touches to the third instalment of the Strange Costumes ‘Altered Book’ project that I’m working on in conjunction with Atlanta-based artist and writer Shelley M House. There will be a video version of it later.

As with the previous two, the rhythms are very African influenced. To create the rhythm track, I recorded four or five ‘live’ drum parts using a multiple drum pad module that you play just like a normal kit. for each track, I altered the parameters so the pads triggered different drums and percussion effects. The final, multiple drum track is quite insistent and chaotic, so I opted to overlay a vocal in a sixties, psychedelic ‘lazy’ style, to balance the speed of the piece.  The lyric is dictated very strictly by the words Shelley gave me, in her meter and order, and this, above all else, gives these musical pieces their unusual structure and form. I cannot escape into a chorus, and I have to find ways to fit words in that may conflict with the rhythm. It’s a lot of fun!  You will notice that some of the lyrics are hard to understand. That is because I have gone for an overall feel for the track, and to clearly enunciate them may have compromised that. The music is designed to be listened to in conjunction with reading the lyrics within Shelley’s art pieces. I’ve reproduced the lyrics below, with the small changes I made highlighted in blue:

Fantastic information we find in the field.
Tasty instrument, hear it play, food he likes. (Tasty instrument, hear it play)
Searching shallow ends for frogs and fish, we get too close and find that edges have snapped.
In scenery sharp and strange we play;
very vivid, very thin, and very fond of fruit.
I hope the tree-top toucan can support all the weight.
See the colorful two, overlap and sway,
planting the seeds of the future.
Penknife and pine, the hungry fulcrum faintly tips.
Our friends are prying and peculiar. Stories are told. Perfectly attractive, bold and yellow, red and blue.
We pick out our decorations so carefully.
We find seeds and weeds for large appetites, all of them eating out of habit.
Muddy mouthfuls make it difficult to speak.
Entire worlds are reduced to hums and beats.
Hands and arms, legs and feet, tiny twitters, a deep low beat. (tiny twitters in a deep low beat)
Graceful games turn frantic in a storm.
Run and frisk, high and low, coming in and out of sight. Quick and urgent, they cry, they cry.they cry, they cry…cry…

Words by Shelley M House, Music by Kev Moore

The breakdown in the middle begins with the gradual layering of sampled African choral vocals, mixed with tribal drumming and nature samples steadily building in intensity to re-introduce the main theme.  As the track fades, it departs a little from the trance-like single chord structure and I introduce some changes in the synth chords underneath, so that the lead guitar can be more expressive. The bass line remains the same however, and its always a nice effect, to keep the bass the same and change the underlying chords.

So there it is……enjoy!

You can listen to the first two parts of the series by clicking on the links below:

Strange Costumes

Draped in Strange Feathers

Kev Moore

I just finished the art for Chapter 3 of my altered book project. The text is small…here it is so you can read it:

Chapter 3: Playing the Field

          Fantastic information we find in the field. Tasty instrument, hear it play, food he likes. Searching shallow ends for frogs and fish, we get too close and find edges have snapped.

          In scenery sharp and strange we play; very vivid, very thin, and very fond of fruit. I hope the tree-top toucan can support all the weight.

          See the colorful two, overlap and sway, planting the seeds of the future. Penknife and pine, the hungry fulcrum faintly tips.

          Our friends are prying and peculiar. Stories are told. Perfectly attractive, bold and yellow, red and blue. We pick out our decorations so carefully.

          We find seeds and weeds for large appetites, all of them eating out of habit. Muddy mouthfuls make it difficult to speak. Entire worlds are reduced to hums and beats.
          Hands and arms, legs and feet, tiny twitters, a deep low beat. Graceful games turn frantic in a storm. Run and frisk, high and low, coming in and out of sight. Quick and urgent, they cry, they cry.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~In other news~~~~

Five feet of separation

I was 5 feet away from Jane Fonda the other night! I donated art to a fundraising auction she was hosting for G-CAPP (Georgia Coalition for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention). It was an inspiring evening, and I got a nice pic of Jane when the guy behind me had the winning bid on her clock:

The theme was “It’s About Time.” IKEA donated clocks to the artists to use in their creations. Here is my piece, “Dear Mr. Time”:

This is what the art looked like before I put it into the clock:

I have no idea why, although I am a physicist too, but our place is covered with rainbows, the walls, the roofs, the floors… and this with increasing tendency!

Perhaps a hint of God to me as a painter?

Everywhere these wonderful things appear, and I can’t help but be amazed, over and over. Nature is simply amazing…The following photos haven’t be retouched, this is how they came out of the camera. Why the background of the first one is so dark brown is a mystery to me, as the wall, or in this case it was the ceiling, is white… but the rainbow, yes, this is exactly how it looked like, so vibrant.

Especially funny was the light above the rainbow in the second photo, which really looks like a question mark, asking, kind of:

“What the hell is this rainbow doing above the Rock-n-Roll Alley?”

Well, when one knows Rocker Kev Moore, one does not wonder anymore…

by Miki

I am working right now -and for 2 months- on my travel sketches from our last trip through Portugal (3 weeks in June/July 2009). Today I stumbled upon this one, which I did quite at the end of the trip, and I thought it was the perfect one to exhibit in Cafe Crem.

There is a little, funny story connected to this drawing. As always we were in the town, Kevin sitting at Cafes reading, patiently waiting for me while I was sketching around. And like always, after 1 or 2 hours work, I joined him in a Cafe to have a well-deserved coffee. That day, as every day, I ordered in my not-so-accurate, but kind of working Portuguese language

“Um  cafe com leite, en um gran vaso, com muito leite por favor”

which means something like

“A coffee with milk, in a big glass, with much milk, please!”

This was the way I normally ordered our coffee, and normally it worked quite well, although I needed quite a long time to find the adequate words since our first trip through Portugal last year. Before I came to this final version, I must admit that I had quite a lot of trials with quite a lot of funny results. Anyway… Today the man who served us here looked a little bit weird, after he heard my order… I had the feeling he wanted to say something but either he couldn’t find the right words (to tell the truth he looked a little bit “thick”… in fact this little bar stood  next door to a psychiatric institute…) or he thought there was no chance of a real communication between us (I guess I  looked quite thick myself when I ordered our coffees in my insecure language…). The guy went inside, and after a long long time, which made me think he needed a long time to prepare an enormous coffee, he came out with that coffee cup and a big smile for me. Without exaggerating, the cup was about 3 centimetres high (1.2 inches), it was half empty, totally black… and cold! I must have looked quite shocked as the guy replaced his former smile with a desolate look! He succeeded in asking me if it was “ok”, and I really could see how much he hoped it was  right. I had not the heart to tell the truth, I just put a big smile on my face… and tons of sugar into the cup, which at least made it look full. I hadn’t the heart either not to drink the stuff, I thought it could be offending, but it was simply awful and I have felt sick for many hours after.

But at least the cup was cute and is a wonderful subject for a Cafe Crem post…

by Miki

My butterfly has been quite reluctant to emerge. This is what she looks like this morning. Murky.

The expression “On the shelf”  usually has sad or negative connotations – but not in this instance – Eventually we got a place where we can display our mugs! I had been wanting such a unit for a long time, as, you surely have noticed, I love our mugs, and I do find pleasure in looking at them (and using them of course!) . Much better than having them hidden inside a cupboard! Kevin spent some time thinking how he could ‘adapt’ the back of some of our new kitchen units in order to show our mugs off, and this is the result.

Some of you will surely recognise “their mugs”… Susan, Shelley, Comtessine, Rainer… thanks again to all of you for sharing our love for mugs or/and the lovely gifts which are now proudly standing in our new unit!

I thought I would also show you what our new kitchen looks like… it is not finished yet, there is a lot of little jobs to do for the kitchen chef Kev Moore, but we are slowly getting there… Where Kevin is sitting- you can’t really see it on the photo- , the breakfast bar has the shape of a Gibson Explorer guitar … Kevin (who else!) made the pattern in cardboard, our carpenter – who already did such great works for us and whose son Macauley has exhibited some of his art work in The Minibar) cut the wood. and now we are waiting for some black and white mosaic tiles to cover it… We’ll show the result when it is finished!

… and on this side of the mugs unit, is our office, with our desks and computers, on which we write to you all, dear Cafe Cremers!

by Miki & Kev

“….and so the B•Fly tour took the excited holidaymakers deep into the sea of blue slippers, searching for Sea-anenomes…”

Following Shelley’s recent post, inspired by what I saw as undersea creatures in her art, her mention of a butterfly and present of blue slippers, not to mention the Yellow Submarine poster in our kitchen, I came up with this comic book art Butterfly craft carrying intrepid holidaymakers into a comfy sea!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHELLEY!!!

Kev

we were very glad to see you here today, and we wish you a great day with your family, and of course some great food tonight at the restaurant!

Big hugs

by Miki & Kev Moore