Born and raised in New York, Jeffrey Lewis leads a double-life, as both an illustrator and a singer songwriter. Both his music and comics are permeated by earnest storytelling and often self-depreciating confessions of his many adventures in the world, from heartbreaks to homeless nights on tour. In his self-published comic book series “Fuff” he constantly tries to fall backwards to see if the world will catch him. And so far it did. With a small but devoted audience, he’s been making a profitable career with his music and art by managing most of his business himself, from booking tours to making his own merchandise.

With a shy smile and a shaky voice, he welcomed me to his apartment in the East Village, a little palace of musical and literary treasures where you can glimpse the intriguing puzzle of his creative mind. His work is so self-explanatory that it seemed pointless to ask him about his songs or comics. So we talked about adventures, how art can change the world, the occupy movement and finally dug into some of his personal gems. Meet Jeffrey, the “cult boyfriend” – “lonely or worshipped for a lady in the know”.

Written, filmed. edited and sound by Barbara Anastacio

Watermelon Mouse was created by Oliver Clark and is a product of his complex, insightful, inspired brain. Tune in regularly for more installments.

Jess Rotter is an illustrator who lives in Brooklyn. Not only does she run a successful t-shirt line, producing shirts with her own illustrations based on vintage record covers, but she is also the head of publicity at the music label Mexican Summer. Through her job, she travels to shows and music festivals around the world, and it’s on the road where she frequently finds inspiration for her personal work. She has contributed to Dossier and worked on projects with brands such as The Gap and Pamela Love, among others. But her biggest contribution yet – in scale and meaning – may be the mural in room 1122 of The Ace Hotel in New York. One in a series of artist collaborations commissioned by the hotel, it combines her love for music, illustration and travel, housing it under one roof. I was lucky to be invited to watch part of the process and ask Jess a few questions.

Stephanie Tran: How long did the mural take you, from start to finish and what did you listen to while painting?

Jess Rotter: The total time was 10 hours, evening to morning. I listened to a lot of mixes from friends during the ride (Turquoise Wisdom, Dublab, and Doodcast!). There was definitely a rad 2 am champagned Thin Lizzy moment, which is always the best.

Stephanie: How did you choose the image for the mural?

Jess: I based the painting on an image I shot in Marfa, Texas a couple of years ago. The landscape was originally made to be included in a comic book I am currently working on called Paradise, which is about trying to experience true moments as a whole, whether nasty or gorgeous – a feat not easy in the age of our lives being filtered by emails, phones, and Campbell soup cans. It’s kind of fun to have all this heavy plain trippin’ taking place in a little New York City hotel room.

Stephanie:You mentioned listening to a certain song a lot while traveling, which must have a special meaning here, as a soundtrack to your mural, in a hotel room where your work will be seen by many others in a similar state of transience.

Jess: The country-folk-blues song Never Make a Dollar That Way by David Wiffen, from 1971, is a really special personal totem, as it’s been a go-to reflective jam for years throughout my travels. One of the finest times I’ve had with the tune was solo escape of a crazy party in the desert, and being truly dazed staring at cartoon stars within completely pitch-black air. There were tears, there were smiles- it was awesome, it was… paradise. The song can be found here.

Marfa, Texas in New York City? Paradise indeed.

Photographs by Jeaneen Lund

Dossier‘s most recent issue features T. Cole Rachel in conversation with the legendary Stevie Nicks. In the interview, among other things, Stevie talks about the long-running NYC event Night of a 1000 Stevies, a costume ball full of ethereal Stevie Nicks gypsies. To accompany the feature, Brooklyn-based illustrator Jess Rotter has collaborated with Dossier through Rotter and Friends to offer 50 limited-edition “Stevie” t-shirts, printed on a super soft, 100% power-washed cotton dyed a lush grey/purple hue. We can’t tell you how much we love these babies right here.

Dossier x Rotter & Friends Limited Edition Stevie Nicks T-shirt: $35 (plus $5 US shipping or $13 International shipping)

US (select size)

X-Small Small Medium

International (select size)

X-Small Small Medium

Photo by David Black

How would you draw something you’ve never seen before? The Unseen Bestiary is an online, collaborative project created by Lindsey Carr in which she solicits descriptions of creatures, insects, and plants from participants and creates a series of etchings and paintings based solely off of the explanations. Carr explains on her website, “Bestiaries (a compendium of beasts) were incredibly popular during the Middle Ages. Documenting animals, birds, reptiles and all manner of exotic fauna. What made these bestiaries very unusual is that in many cases the artist had never seen the animals they depicted and so had to build up a picture through written descriptions, copying other people’s work and exercising their imagination.”

In order to submit a beast to Carr’s Bestiary project, the creature must be something that Carr has never seen. Carr will then use the description (in addition to references to other animals) to create her drawings. To submit a description, fill out this form on her website. Check out all the submissions thus far here.

Image from The Bestiary of Anne Walshe

The University of California, Berkeley’s School of Journalism is currently working on a project to redesign the nutrition facts food label affixed to prepackaged foods across the country. The competition is informal, but the visual concepts presented may make their way into the US Food and Drug Administration’s current revamping of the label and its presentation of information.

What’s so intriguing about these submissions is the way in which it asks the viewer (who is also the consumer) to rethink the way they see and think about a label that they view on a daily basis. What do we actually look for when we look at a nutrition facts label? What pops out at us? How does changing our perspective literally change the way we look at the food we’re contemplating purchasing or eating? How does viewing the nutrition label as a visual and educational object change our view of it?

Renee Walker’s winning entry, below, relies on colored boxes to illustrate the composition of ingredients in a given food item. How would seeing the visual breakdown of, say, a Twix bar change ideas about consumption? Judge Michael Pollan remarked, “I wonder how her design would work with more complicated products, like Lucky Charms, say, or a PowerBar. Even so, it’s a step in the right direction. What I’d like to see next is some sort of color coding for the food groups and some attempt to show the degree of processing of various foods. Eating doesn’t have to be complicated; figuring out what’s in your food shouldn’t be either.”

The other labels are on display on UC Berkeley’s Rethink the Food Label website, and on the NYTimes Well blog.

Top image by Dylan Brown, bottom image by Renee Walker.

After his very impressive stop-motion film “Muto“ and after releasing several teasers over the last weeks and months, everybody’s favorite Italian Blu is back with his new film “Big Bang Big Boom.” This time he takes on the theory of evolution and shows you where life might have come from, what steps it has gone through and how it might end. And as always Blu’s universe consist of 1.000.000 liters of paint, trash and creepy creatures. Enjoy.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Entry by Saunders Architecture

Contemplating the Void, Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum, opening today at Frank Lloyd Wright’s swirly conch shell up town is an absolutely delightful thought experiment.  Simply put, what would you do to the great cavity within the museum if money were no object?  The answers to that question, submitted by some 189 architects, in the form of sketches, outlines, blueprints and computer renderings, are a hodgepodge of whimsy, anarchy and botany.  Many of the design minds would fill all or most of the cavity with liquid (most of them using water, one with the addition of sharks), even coffee or chocolate.  A few have gone with shimmery metallic coatings or installations to juxtapose the iconic plaster canvas-like interior. Others would run laundry lines across the gap, vent “thought bubbles,” hoist a Brancusi, erect giant people, host a farmer’s market, pile up trash, relocate a prison, a bouncy castle or a tenement courtyard to the central rotunda.  Several would pop the top of the thing all together and more than one seem to propose God’s rescuing the elect via UFO-like tractor beam aimed through the skylight.  None, however, was as violent-minded as Tom Twyker’s uzi-speckled vision in the Clive Owen vehicle The International, thanksgod.

Coincidentally, the meta moment here is not so hard to reach: Prattling about a museum with hushed footfalls one cannot help but notice that the entries in this show–which will be auctioned off March 4th as part of the 50 year anniversary fundraiser–are themselves works of art begging to be evaluated as they hang.  And maybe it is because it’s winter–and the show was so thoughtfully placed on the fourth floor veranda overlooking the park, i.e. Manhattan’s snow-caked cavity–but this Californian preferred the entries with the warmth of organic life.  And top of them all Saunders Architecture’s Lucasian Endorscape complete with a white-suited Wright walking about his creation, like a computer generated character out of lesser Spielberg, ageless and serene.

Through April 28th.

Detail of a collage by participating artist Derek Gores

Operating on a template similar to their wildly successful grass roots get-out-the-vote campaign during the run up to the ’08 election, ManifestEquality is a progressive public art project aimed at raising awareness about the discrepancy in social rights for the LGBT community in America.  A call for entries centered on the themes of Love, Equality, Justice, Civil Rights, Unity and Respect, has gone out across the land, and in two weeks a panel of judges including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Vogue editor Lisa Love, Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin and artists Ed Ruscha and Shepard Fairey will convene in Los Angeles to choose 30 winners to be on display for the event which runs from March 3rd to 7th.

Be a part of this incredible event.  Manifest Equality for all.