Latest Goodies From Threadless.com

I have to work on something for Threadless.com soon! In the meantime here are a few new arrivals at the Grandaddy of all T-Shirt Voting Sites.

Bedrest by Yoshi Andrian evokes all kinds of WW2 references for me, old posters with slogans like “Walls Have Ears” and “CarelessTalk Costs Lives”. Authentic antique colouring and line immediately draws me to the wonderful inset of the patient’s speech bubble depicting the cause of the injury, a hammer. A perfect iconographic rendition of a bygone world, an everyday event imbued with narrative and drama. I love its functionalism, its practicality of design, a great work

Lemon-Aid by Jeff Battocletti continues the medical theme, a whimsical play on words with a simple yet succinct resolution, I particularly appreciate the sense of movement in this work, and the attention to detail including the wounded lemon. Again we have an example of elevating the mundane to a new and surrealist reality, something we almost all attempt to forget as we grow older and wiser.

Afternoon Delight by Chris Bishop is simply hilarious, giving a serious nod (and a cheeky wink) to the 1970s, the graphics are reminiscent of numerous well meaning new age posters of my childhood, sometimes they’d be gently Christian, I mean Sunday School stuff, but with more pixies and fairies added for good measure. There was a resurgence of this design style in the 1980’s, although the colours were far more glossy, like a custom Hot-Rod might have had, deep red sunsets and lovers on a beach, but depicting the same old 1970s tripe. Unicorns, pixies, wizards, you couldn’t move through a shopping mall in the 80s without coming out with some incense or smelly candles or a dream catcher. Thank god that’s all taken a back seat now. Although I have a friend who’ll kill me if she reads this, she absolutely adores unicorns, I sent her a link to this t-shirt and she wasn’t impressed. Job Done!

Technology Ruins Nature by Leon Ryan has chosen a wonderful palette for this design, cute yet sombre, almost “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” in its intonation but contrasted with a subtext of loss of innocence. The fact that recently yet another “uncontacted tribe” was photographed (from the air) in the Amazon Jungle make’s me wonder how many innocent cultures are left. Besides what on earth do they think about us anyway? When you consider the amount of alien conspiracies out there for a so-called modern civilisation to rake over, what on earth must a tribe isolated from the Industrial and Information Revolutions think of us? Are we the greys? Are we the extra-terrestrials? Seems rather like a tease to me, look but don’t touch, touch but don’t talk, talk but don’t teach, teach but don’t trade. I don’t know, I think the only reason we protect such tribes is from a deep-seated guilt and foreknowledge that anything man learns he uses to destroy his enemies, his territory and eventually himself.

Anyway, cheer up, they’re only t-shirts… have a great weekend and keep an eye out for more new additions soon!