The many faces of Noma Bar, all illustrated with an intelligence and a beautifully crafted stye he has made his own. Today, I will present a selection of highlights from his new book “negative space”, in which the negative space is expertly used to provide the illustration second meaning.
Noma Bar tackles some of the most hotly debated issues of our time–including oil politics, global warming, and corporate greed. His strategy: Using the negative space of an illustration, to drive home the stickiest points of a conflict.
Some of the images are difficult for me to figure out its second meaning. I will give my guess under the image and feel free to express your thought.
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first glance: It is a tank; second glance: two people sat oppositely, using laptop
first glance: It is a gun;
second glance: there is a person whose mouse is bleeding
first glance: it is a VW van;
second glance: two doves meet at the head of van, crying.
first glance: It is a wolf with red nose and mouth open
second glance: an innocent Red Riding Hood is trapped by a wolf
first glance: some one is smoking;
second glance: ???
Name from author : Fat Cat. (I didn’t see any cat in the picture. But I saw a Euro dollar sign on the face……..)
I only saw two hands, but the author actually named it as “bomb”. Who can help me with that? Does that try to depict the scenes of bomb exploding?
Like the work, you can buy the book from amazon.
Nice post. Ad the last picture – I also see the hands on the first glance. The author has named it a bomb, because when you focus hard, you will see the mushroom cloud from atom bomb explosion. It doesn’t work well though, because the orange wrinkles on the fingers go outwards from the explosion, while there should rather be ‘black wrinkles going’ towards the explosion epicenter. Wrong usage of negative space, I guess!
Thanks holyj! nice explanation….I am focusing..focusing……….
I can see it’s a tree .. not atomic bomb explosion
The smoker either has a ribbon in the negative space, or there are letters. I was looking for LSMFT (I can see the “L” and the “F” by looking at the “smoker’s” lips, but you have to turn your head all around to make out the rest, and all the other ones are very obvious and simple when yousee them, so I doubt I’m right about that one…
Sorry…they are letters – LC (Lung Cancer…and, the ell is meant to be a cancer ribbon…). The last one is definitely hands. Once you see it, it smacks you in the face.