Antoine Revoy

Year of the Snake, 2013

Nishikigoi

by Natasha Sharpe 17 FAV

A friend of mine in the Illustration department encouraged me to enter this year’s Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Competition. As a Film/Animation/Video major, I was psyched to learn that moving images qualified. I was even more excited when I found out that the animated film I submitted, Lawn Fox Lawn (about a gardening, croquet-loving fox), won the First Place Award in Animation. In addition to being pleased with the recognition, I was happy to collect the $500 award.

On Friday, May 12, a group of 14 RISD illustrators and animators traveled to NYC for the SOI awards ceremony and opening reception for the exhibition, which is on view through June 3. A charming and cozy three-story museum, the Society of Illustrators headquarters offers a gallery on each floor featuring contemporary and historical illustration. 

When we got to the exhibition space on the third floor, it was buzzing with students from Parsons, Art Center, OCAD, SVA and other art schools. The walls were covered from top to bottom in colorful 8.5 x 11" prints of all the pieces selected for the annual show – in an impressive variety of mediums and styles, from traditional paint and ink to 3D work and digital graphics.

“It was a wonderful experience to see everyone’s framed work on the walls,” says Illustration senior Alexandra Alemany 17 IL. “All of the work was so strong, and each piece was incredibly original.” Alemany was recognized for her stop-motion animation The Mountie (above), featuring a hand-fabricated puppet who struggles to keep his long legs out of the way of passing traffic.

Earlier this semester, the Illustration department hosted a visit by Canadian illustrator Jody Hewgill (that’s a self-portrait above), one of the first women in North America to earn a high level of recognition in the field. 

During her two-day visit in late April, she met with seniors in a portfolio class taught by Critic Kelly Murphy 99 IL and offered a public talk, followed by a workshop for Illustration majors.

Speaking in the Tap Room, the Toronto-based illustrator presented an overview of her artistic evolution over the decades and talked about diverse influences on her work, including such thematic inspirations as literature, poetry, music and theater, and formal influences like the murals of Diego Rivera, Picasso, Ingrès, Modigliani and others. 

Hewgill offered a workshop in which she shared original works that show her process – from sketches to finished pieces – and invited students to experiment with her techniques using her own palettes and painting supplies.

Hewgill lives in Toronto and teaches illustration at Ontario Collage of Art and Design.

Illustrator Sonny Liew 01 IL is coming to RISD this Tuesday (April 5) as part of a whirlwind bit of “book tourism” in the US in conjunction with the release of The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2016, Pantheon Books).

A fictional biography of “the greatest comic book artist you’ve probably never heard of,” Liew’s latest also reads as a retelling of the history of Singapore, the city state where he lives. 

Since the government felt that the story might undermine its authority, Singapore’s National Arts Council rescinded a grant it had awarded Liew to work on the book. But that didn’t prevent The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye from selling out its first print run in Singapore.

Liew has produced a spate of great work for DC Comics, DC Vertigo, Marvel, First Second Books, SLG and Disney. The Shadow Hero, his 2014 book about the Green Turtle, received a warm welcome worldwide.

Major Arcana, an exhibition of tarot cards reinterpreted by sophomores in Illustration, is on view through March 8 in the ISB Paper Gallery – a sweet new sliver of an exhibition space on the 4th floor of the Illustration Studies Building.

The work on view emanated from a six-week project Illustration Critic Antoine Revoy 99 FAV assigned to the 15 students in his fall Concepts II studio. 

The idea was for each student to bring his or her own preferences and personalities to bear on illustrating the 22 cards in the major arcana suit – the “trumps” such as the Fool, the Devil, the Magician, the Sun, the Moon, etc. 

While some students created cards based on childhood memories of summer, others focused on personal fascinations – with Egyptian mythology, wildlife, ballet and more, Revoy says. 

An accomplished illustrator himself, he also had fun illustrating the typography used to publicized the exhibition.