Jeremy [Retro] Hawkins, JMH Digital Art Book Tour - Celebrity Adventure

Today is my day to host Jeremy Hawkins, AKA [Retro] the brilliant graphic designer behind all the art for the April A to Z blogging challenge. He's got some art and design books out now, so he's touring the blogosphere to spread the word. I've asked him to share one of his awesome celebrity adventure stories with us, so I'll let him take it away:

Another day, another adventure or my encounter with a celebrity… not that there was any trouble more or less something weird happens. This is my meeting and interview of Darth Vader no not the evil Lord Vader, no the man beneath the mask David Prowse. First I wanted to thank Matt for letting me host and share some of my art/design books with you all. All those details and how to enter the “GIVEAWAY” will be at the bottom, so make sure to enter.

So I was saying that it was at one of those conventions that bring some of the top celebrities and this year was no different with a hand full of characters from Star Wars. Skipping along in enter this 6.6 man with crutches in hand barely able to make it to where we had set up our set for our shoot and interview. I am only 5’11’’ and Mr. Prowse is towers over me and the crew of the show I worked on. He informs us he needs to stretch his foot/leg out due to recent surgery he had done, we say no problem.

Problem, yes… problem. We have to find a chair fit his height and make it less uncomfortable for him and we didn’t find anything, so we used our heads. Giving him several stackable chairs he became within the perfect spectrum to be at ease with the injury. What we didn’t plan on my reach, my ability to hold the microphone in frame for the entire 15 to 20 minutes. You can learn how strong you are by holding this microphone extended for long periods of time [epic fail]. I asked my questions like a pro, answers returned as the interview went in full throttle. I started to shake and sweat the director noticed this and came up out of frame and helped by holding my arm until the end. The end came we make sure we give thanks to the celebrities for their time, Mr. Prowse leans over and said “I thought you were going to drop it, now that would have made for a interesting segue.

Please follow the tour as I will soon be sharing my brush with greatness and shift from Star Wars to Star Trek again… I am one with William Shatner. Also I am sorry to keep forgetting to tell my “Question to George Takei”, I honestly forgot… stay tuned and keep following the tour!

It's a four book series 40 pages each and it is the art/design from things I had designed over the years. It's a mish-mash of things that I had seen in my head... and some are future designs that will become shirts. Places I wanted to go artistically as you travel from where I was to where I am now. Is it great journey! Titles came from the idea of time "12:34, 35, 36 and 37” seems that is when my best ideas came to me... day or night. It's funny I never considered myself a "writer" just a man who likes to paint a canvas if it be words or my art/design.

Giveaways: Some great prizes being given away please stop over at my main page “BEING RETRO” and look just below the header for the “It’s Time” Tour Giveaway link and enter today.

Thank You, for letting me play host and to all who took the “time” to read this… you are all the best.

Jeremy Hawkins
Being Retro
beingretro.com

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Happy Birthday, Richard Wagner

Today is Richard (pronounced Rick-ard) Wagner's (pronounced Vaag-ner) 200th Birthday. Wagner, sort of the classic rogue-as-brilliant-artist, was an anti-semite, a misogynist, and an all around bad guy, but he was also a musical and artistic genius, and I think a perfect example of how sometimes it is a worthwhile endeavor to separate works of art from their creator.

Wagner is best known for his operas. Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, which being also partly based on the Old Norse Poetic Edda, shares some similarities to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings), Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, Lohengrin, and others. He was an absolute master of what is known as Gesamtkunstwerk (one of those funky compound German words, which means "total work of art"), so said because he composed the music, the lyrics, the set, the blocking, the lighting, and essentially every creative or dramatic element that went into his productions.

My father was the stage manager of the Seattle Opera in the 80s. I had the immense pleasure to play both a Nibelung (an underground slave-dwarf type creature) and young Siegfried in a production of The Ring Cycle (it's four operas) when I was a boy. I could go on about the beauty of Wagner's stories for a while (themes included Buddhist concepts of reincarnation, in Parsifal, Arthurian legend, in Tristan und Isolde, and human ambition pitted against divine power, in The Ring).

Wagner is known for creating some of history's most memorable works of music. I'll leave you with two of them:

The Bridal Chorus, from Lohengrin, often butchered at weddings in modern times and sometimes referred to as Here Comes the Bride:



And The Ride of the Valkyries, probably the most famous movement in the history of opera: