Showing posts sorted by relevance for query life of pi. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query life of pi. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, April 17, 2006

Life of Pi :: loosing Richard Parker

tomer :: about Life of Pi from Amazon: "The precocious son of a zookeeper, 16-year-old Pi Patel is raised in Pondicherry, India, where he tries on various faiths for size, attracting "religions the way a dog attracts fleas." Planning a move to Canada, his father packs up the family and their menagerie and they hitch a ride on an enormous freighter. After a harrowing shipwreck, Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific Ocean, trapped on a 26-foot lifeboat with a wounded zebra, a spotted hyena, a seasick orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker "
these drawings were done based on scenes from the book. the local (English) publisher was looking to reprint an illustrated version of the book and a competition was in place to choose an illustrator.
I enjoyed the book and was inspired by the simple structure of the story that somehow managed to capture a deep universal truth. that said, my tendencies to overly visualize horror while Disneyfiying the shit out of everything might have worked against me.
as I was working on these I consciously restricted myself to flat surfaces, I tried to keep it as un-painterly as possible so it doesn't become too heavy when seen as a series. the second self inflicted rule was to flatten down the perspective to an extant. this approach was based on some phenomenal Indian art I saw at the V&A. these Indian artists stayed away from faking a 'real' perspective (you know-- vanishing points and all that) and the resulting space seemed very natural for a two dimensional medium.
the winning artist is Tomislav Torjanac who is very painterly and had a great classic pitch. my vote however will go to this stunning series by Andrea Offermann who seemed to capture the unique lyrical aura of the story.