BLOOM 2016 – 2020: Halvveis i folkefinansieringen!

Yup godtfolk. I dag er vi midt mellom begynnelsen og slutten av vår kampanje for å få realisert en skikkelig bok med bildene til Christian Bloom. Og det ser bra ut! Så langt er vi knappe 80% i mål med dekning av produksjonskostnadene. Når vi helt hjem med det er dette en suksess. Hvis vi flytter målstengene lenger vekk, helt til punktet hvor alle får betalt for jobben (Christian får royalties fra starten, heldiggrisen) er dekningsgraden 51%. Man kan jo drømme.

Tusen takk til alle som har bestilt! Dere er med på (og snart eiere av) noe helt spesielt.

Det vil si at det er to uker igjen av kampanjen, og at det fremdeles er fullt mulig å bli medprodusent av boka ved å forhåndsbestille den. Det gjør man i nettbutikken, hvor du kan gjøre lekre tilvalg i form av Bloom-prints i ekstremt lite opplag. Lurt å ikke vente lenge – printet “True Love” ble solgt ut før helgen.

Du finner bok og prints her

Professor i grafisk satire og karikaturhistorie ved universitetet i Montréal, Dominic Hardy, har skrevet et glitrende essay om Bloom som vi har trykket i boka. Her er en forsmak:

“I began by researching as best I could this Christian Bloom whose one image I had gotten to know. As this book demonstrates superbly, his achievement as a graphic artist is without question. He commands the drawing of human form and the creation of coloured, atmospheric space in such a way as to make us long for the animated film that would find his many women and men disporting themselves across the screen. (Al Hirschfeld was so commemorated in Disney’s Fantasia 2000, the best part of the film for one addicted to finding his Ninas). So many of us are there in Bloom’s imagery, much of it created as illustrations for the Norwegian publication VG in its print and online editions. I would willingly turn back time, become a student of Norwegian language and society, to feel the joy of turning to the articles graced by his illustrations. I would be bemused, like many of his personifications, at the follies of my society (and my own) faced with social media and its technologies (o those iPhones lighting us through our self-inflicted darkness), with climate change, with national and international politics. I would be taken to task, quite rightly, for my consumerist complicity in the systems of living that prop up those politics, that delay the reckoning with the distortions of social media and the catastrophe unfolding before us every day as our climate’s changes inexorably hasten. As a parent of two daughters, as a father who was first a single boy child of a working mother, I’ve experienced women’s struggles for equal rights as a privileged ally, I become ever more thoughtful thanks to Christian Bloom’s take on the deep traps of gender roles and expectations, many of which play out in and are often reinforced by those same social media. But, as he reminds us, we are doing it to ourselves. We have met the social media and it is us…”