Hecho a Mano

Book Arts of Latin America

Title: Conjuros y ebriedades : cantos de mujeres mayas, 1997
Author/Artist: Ambar Past
Publisher: Taller Ditoria, Mexico
Subjects: Embossed papers; Tzotzil poetry; Tzotzil women; shamans; Chiapas




Title: Manual de inexpertos, titulo provisional, 2008
Author: Anton Arrufat
Artist: Rolando Estévez Jordán
Publisher: Ediciones Vigía, Matanzas, Cuba
Series: Colección del Estero.





Title: IMDINB, 2006
Author: Gerardo Deniz
Artist: Roberto Rébora
Publisher: Taller Ditoria, Mexico




Title: Sonetos blancos, 2005
Author: Dmitro Pavlichko
Artist: Rolando Estévez Jordán
Publisher: Ediciones Vigía, Matanzas, Cuba




Title: Poemas de mayo y junio, 1990
Author: Cintio Vitier
Artist: Rolando Estévez Jordán
Publisher: Ediciones Vigía, Matanzas, Cuba





Title: Máximas mínimas para la supervivencia de los argentinos, 1999
Artist/Author: A. Benavidez Bedoya
Publisher: La Marca Editora, Argentina
Subject: Argentina (Moral & social conditions)





Title: 8 poemas, 2005
Author: Fabio Morabito
Publisher: Taller Ditoria, Mexico









Title: Escena cubana actual: Oscilaciones.
Author: Omar Valiño
Artist: Rolando Estévez Jordán
Publisher: Ediciones Vigía, Matanzas, Cuba
Subject: Cuba Matanzas; 21st century Theater




Title: Neoclasico, 2003
Author: Laura Ruiz
Artist: Rolando Estévez Jordán
Publisher: Ediciones Vigía, Matanzas, Cuba




Title: Pasos, paseos, pasadizos, 2008
Author: Cesar López
Artist: Rolando Estévez Jordán, Rolando
Publisher Ediciones Vigía, Matanzas, Cuba


All images are © the respective artist, author and/or publisher

Thanks to the University of North Carolina Library for allowing these images to be posted here.

You should definitely check out their Hecho a Mano: Book Arts of Latin America collection for more similar goodness.

Previously: Bookart

Ancient Designs - Mexico + Peru

"The beautiful designs in this book come from a variety of sources. The Maya and Aztec from ancient Mexico once used them in hieroglyphs and pictograms. They survived as wall paintings, and on excavated pots, figurines and clothes from mummies. The Inca adorned their pottery with geometric decorations or abstract depictions from everyday objects. The much older Nazca were known for their fine textiles and colourful pottery with motifs that appear to depict their pantheon, including a variety of creatures, some hybrid and some fanciful. The Moche on the other hand made beautiful objects from gold, silver, copper and other metals."

Mexico - Teotihuatecan Knight-Eagle

Mexico - Maya Death God

Mexico - Toltec Eagle

Mexico Maya Kukulcán

Mexico - Quetzalcoatl as Wind God

Mexico - Aztec Day Signs

Peru - Moche Crabman

Peru - Moche Boat

Peru - Moche Eagle Warrior

Peru - Moche Dragon

Peru - Mohica God of the Foxes

The images were scanned from 'Native Designs from Ancient Mexico & Peru', 2006 and are posted here with permission.

These images & rendering are © Maarten Hesselt van Dinter / Mundurucu. But the actual designs, being ancient and traditional Maya, Aztec and Inca cultural and mythological pictograms, are in the public domain. Many of these designs can be seen in book and manuscript scans among previous related posts: Mesoamerica.

Also previously: Native North American Designs; Celtic Designs; Indian Designs.

The Toy Box Ballet

"The toy is the child's earliest initiation into art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same feelings of warmth, or the same enthusiasms, or the same sense of conviction."
{Charles Baudelaire in his essay, 'A Philosophy of Toys'}

"[Toy-boxes are] really just like towns in which toys live like people - or
maybe towns are really just toy-boxes in which people live like toys."
{André Hellé, illustrator of 'La Boîte à Joujoux'}

At first blush, one might suppose that the 1913 ballet music Claude Debussy's composed for his daughter Emma - 'La Boîte à Joujoux' (The Toy Box) - would be a fairly benign conceptual piece. But the last great masterpiece from the French composer is said to resonate beyond evoking the imagination of a child in a simple four act story of character conflict where toys come to life.

"..the music and the ballet that emerged from it is a revelation. The Toy-Box offers a corrective to the grinding dissonance and ideological heaviness that characterized artistic trends outside of France. It was, in short, a riposte to German Expressionism and Soviet avant-gardism, an effort to define modernism in a positive rather than a negative way.

"For one thing, the characters in the original conception derived from the Italian tradition of commedia dell'arte; for another, there were various visual and narrative allusions to silent film, circus, and vaudeville."

The score was charmingly sketched in watercolours by the French children's book author and illustrator, André Hellé, who shared Debussy's fascination for toys and his desire that the ballet be performed by children. Alas, the war intervened and the first production of the ballet (by adults) did not occur until the year after Debussy's death in 1918.

• The Debussy/Hellé 'La Boîte à Joujoux: Ballet pour Enfants' libretto is online among Princeton University Library Digital Collections. {link updated April 2012}
• The Mendel Music Blog provides an overview of the ballet's concepts as a prelude to its performance at Princeton earlier this year.
• Further production commentary from Princeton News including some photographs of the April 2010 performance.
• Claude Debussy at Wikipedia.
• A small selection of Hellé illustrations from Will's photostream plus more from an image search et en Français.
• Fulltable has selected Hellé images from both a book of fables and this Toy Box work.
  

The Nun's Scrum

Jørn's Folly

"Utzon made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology, and he persevered through extraordinary malicious publicity and negative criticism to build a building that changed the image of an entire country. It is the first time in our lifetime that an epic piece of architecture has gained such universal presence."
[Frank Gehry, when Utzon was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2003]

Concept designs, architectural specification drawings and layout plans for a random backyard shed, scanned from a selection of books published in the semi-recent past.