Oprah Hates Chewing Gum ( + Other Pop Trivia in the Form of Art)
Hey, you. Yeah, you who spends your Tuesday nights at the nearest British pub showing all the kids a thing or two about trivia. If you’re a regular Ken Jennings, the art we’re about to show you is going to get you all fired up. It’s full of visual trivia for 50 fascinating famous folks, spanning from Coco Chanel and Ernest Hemingway to Martin Luther King Jr.!
A new pictorial book illustrated by Australian-born, Brooklyn-based artist James Gulliver Hancock, Artists, Writers, Thinkers Dreamers: Portraits of 50 Famous Folks + All Their Weird Stuff, is being called a “pop culture who’s who” and acts as a sort of fun-facts visual cheat sheet.
Who you’ll find under the cover are the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Napoleon Bonaparte, surrounded by some facts and objects that you knew were connected to them and some facts and objects that you didn’t know were connected to them. Yes, even if you’re a trivia champion, some of these finds will surprise you. And they’re in illustrated form, so there’s that too.
One of our favorite insider pieces of info is that Andy Warhol did crafts with his mom. And did you know that he actually had to wear sunglasses due to light sensitivity? And that Chupa Chups Lollipop logo was designed by Salvador Dali? And that Frida Kahlo’s last painting was of sliced melon?
Artist James Gulliver Hancock started the project on a more personal level. When he moved to New York, he was fascinated and often surprised by what objects people owned that he never would have expected. He started creating similar little personal road maps of his friends and a visual inventory of objects that held meaning for them.
Besides inventory friends and their things, another of Hancock’s personal goals is to illustrate all the architecture in all five boroughs of NYC, which has materialized into a book called All the Buildings in New York: That’ I’ve Drawn So Far. So you could say that the guy has a sense of humor.
If you ask Hancock what his personal favorite facts from his book are, he’ll point out that Amelia Earhart loved cheesecake and that Leonardo da Vinci loved naps… so see, you aren’t that much different from a genius.
We’re big fans of the pared down color schemes and playful illustrations and will be picking up our personal copies from one of our favorite publishes, Chronicle Books, for $10. You can download the Kindle version from Amazon for a mere $10, too.
Know any off-the-wall facts about a famous figure? School us in the comments below!
