Posts Tagged ‘banksy’
An Hour With(out) Banksy
Thursday, July 5th, 2012ABC Meets: Street artists Slinkachu and Vhils
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
Street artists Slinkachu and Vhils will be at our Amsterdam store next Friday to launch their new books. Details are still being finalised and this post will be updated when we know more!
Date: Friday October 1st
Place: American Book Center, Spui 12, Amsterdam
Time: 5:30 pm
Slinkachu
Slinkachu is not immediately recognisable as an Urban artist. His work is much more subtle than that of, say, Banksy or Shepard Fairey. And tinier. So tiny in fact that you may trample upon one of his pieces before you realize that you are stomping on a work of art. Slinkachu makes very, very small minature installations of miniscule people, which he then photographs in urban settings as though he has caught them unawares, going about their daily business.
To see examples of his work, watch the book trailer of Big Bad City, see his blog, or watch him talk about his work in an interview on gestalten.com.
Mixing sharp humour with a delicious edge of melancholy, Big Bad City is a new (Dutch) edition of Slinkachu’s book Little People in the City. It is a painstaking selection of photographs that appeared in the original edition, but also added work Slink has made since the publication of Little People in the City and some photographs he made in Amsterdam and Rotterdam especially for this Dutch edition.
Vhils
Vhils is the name of a prolific Portuguese street artist whose portraits are drilled into walls, or made using ink, bleach and found materials. His work became famous when on of his pieces appeared alongside a piece by Banksy at the Cans Festival in London in 2008, and made it to the front page of The Times.
To find out more, read an interview with him about his early grafitti in Portugal, see more work on his website, and watch the trailer for his new book, or this beautiful short film showing him at work.
His first book is a collection of his work from the last seven years, showing an intuitive and dynamic artist who doesn’t stand still. His constant explorations of materials, mark making and techniques day by day lead to yet more ideas and to beautiful and unexpected results.
Bookbits for July 19th, 2008
Saturday, July 19th, 2008No bookbits for the next three/four weeks as I’ll be awaaaaaaay (unless Hayley of course finds some urgent piece of news somewhere)(and the time to post it). These are a little brief at times, but then, it’s late. 
- Is this Banksy? Betting starts in the comments.
On the rather more macabre front, children’s author Harry Horse (of Little Rabbit… fame), stabbed his wife 30 times before killing himself.
- Age-branding on children’s books is a hot topic at the moment. A majority of children’s authors is against it. I think it would be handy for those customers coming in to buy a gift, but perhaps children/youngsters might find it deterring rather than helpful. A twelve year-old might ignore a book that has 9+ stamped on its side whereas now they might just go for it on the basis of the story. What do you think?
- Frances Fyfield has won the CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger for Blood From Stone. Staying with crime, Stef Penney won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award for The Tenderness of Wolves (added simply because of the delicious title of the award)(the link also has interviews with various other crime writers)(and a Bookbits without an award in it just wouldn’t be the same, would it).
- Happily, I have another one for you, just for good measure: the BBC Short Story Prize was won by Clare Wigfall for “The Numbers”.
And another one: Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, recently so well-reviewed in the NRC, has won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Happy holiday everyone!
Bookbits for March 1st, 2008
Saturday, March 1st, 2008
I read his blog every day, but it didn’t occur to me until Hayley pointed it out to list this here: in honor of Neil Gaiman’s blog’s seventh birthday, American Gods has been made available to read online (in its entirety) for free. A poll was held on his website to decide which book his fans wanted te have access to for free, and this won the vote with 28 %. He also has some thoughts ‘the nature of free‘.
- Video! In 2001 the Swiss Ambassador to the U.K. had the luminous idea to invite Banksy to redo the Embassy’s underground garage. See a clip here (the buffering on my computer was a bit horrendous but still worth the view).
- A graphic novel depiction of the Holocaust is now used in classrooms in Germany.
A day late and a dollar short, but here’s a glowing review of Nina Siegal’s A Little Trouble with the Facts, which she read from and talked about yesterday at the ABC Treehouse in Amsterdam.
