 |
Burton Silver (born 1945) is a New Zealand cartoonist, parodist, and writer, known for his comic strip Bogor and the best-selling book Why Paint Cats . He lives in South Wairarapa, New Zealand.
|
Burton Silver (born 1945) is a New Zealand cartoonist, parodist, and writer, known for his comic strip Bogor and the best-selling book Why Paint Cats . He lives in South Wairarapa, New Zealand.
Silver was born in 1945 and attended Wellington College, later completing a B.A. at Victoria University of Wellington in psychology and sociology and Asian Studies. [1] He worked initially as a boilermaker's assistant on Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory, Australia and later as safari guide based in Darwin. Returning to NZ he developed and sold short skis, the Fiessen Resin 120 before travelling in Asia where he worked briefly as an advisor to the Indian High Altitude Warfare school in Gulmarg. At London’s Tulse Hill School in the UK he taught English as a second language.
His best-known cartoon series, Bogor, was written for the Listener Magazine and featured a lone woodsman and the forest animals that were his only companions (especially a hedgehog). An earlier cartoon, OB (written under the pseudonym "Roux"), had as its main characters a bird, a snake, and a rock, and was initially inspired by Silver's time spent in the Australian outback. Bogor first appeared in the Listener in 1973, and was New Zealand's longest-running published cartoon series. [2]
He is well known in New Zealand for his spoof Country Calendar television programs like The Radio Controlled Sheep Dog, Rural Music, Non Stress Farming and Rural Fashions.
He is known internationally for his humorous cat art books (created in collaboration with painter and photographer Heather Busch: Why Cats Paint , Why Paint Cats , and Dancing with Cats, and the Museum of Non Primate Art, (monpa.com), as well as his spoofs Kokigami: The Intimate Art of the Little Paper Costume (Japanese paper decoration for the tumescent male genitalia, also in collaboration with Heather Busch), and The Naughty Victorian Hand Book: The Rediscovered Art of Erotic Hand Manipulation (with illustrator Jeremy Bennett). Other books include What Bird Did That? A Driver's Guide to Some Common Birds of North America (co-authored with Peter Hansard), The Kama Sutra for Cats (illustrated by Margaret Woodhouse) and Versability, a poetry game similar to Dictionary , where players create new lines for poems rather than new meanings for words (co-authored by his wife Melissa da Souza). His most successful book to date is Why Cats Paint that has sold over 750,000 copies worldwide. He has over one million books in print and been interviewed about them on television in the USA, Germany, and the UK. (The Daily Show, Jon Stewart, "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.")
One of his inventions is the sport of GolfCross, played on a golf course with aerial goal-nets and a golf ball in the shape of a rugby ball. There are Golfcross courses in France, Germany, Argentina, Scotland, England, Ireland, and New Zealand.
Silver's last project (co-authored with Martin O'Connor) was a relationship book titled "Everything He Hasn't Told You Yet: A New Way to Get Men talking About Stuff That Matters". The book uses the Scenario Method that works by putting a man at the center of hypothetical situations thus allowing him to share what he really thinks and feels. Everything He Hasn't Told You Yet was released in the United States in October 2007. The book received a starred review in the Library Journal (US). [3]
Silver has also developed "The Fringe Games" (Fringe Games-Christchurch, New Zealand) which is an international festival of new and experimental sports designed to run in conjunction with the Olympic Games.
He lives with his wife near Martinborough in New Zealand and is currently working on a novel.
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest student to enter the Royal Academy Schools. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at his family home in London, at 83 Gower Street. Millais became the most famous exponent of the style, his painting Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) generating considerable controversy, and he produced a picture that could serve as the embodiment of the historical and naturalist focus of the group, Ophelia, in 1851–52.
Footrot Flats, a comic strip by New Zealand cartoonist Murray Ball, ran from 1976 to 1994 in newspapers. Altogether there are 27 numbered books, a further 8 books collecting the Sunday newspaper strips, and 5 smaller "pocket" books of original material, plus various related publications. The strips inspired a stage musical, an animated feature film called Footrot Flats: the Dog's Tail Tale, and the Footrot Flats Fun Park in Auckland, New Zealand. The strip reached its peak of popularity in the mid-1980s, with the books selling millions of copies in Australasia.
Louis William Wain was an English artist best known for his drawings of anthropomorphised cats and kittens.
Margaret D. H. Keane was an American artist known for her paintings of subjects with big eyes. She mainly painted women, children, or animals in oil or mixed media. The work achieved commercial success through inexpensive reproductions on prints, plates, and cups. It has been critically acclaimed but also criticized as formulaic and clichéd. The artwork was originally attributed to Keane's then-husband, Walter Keane. Soon after their divorce in the 1960s, Margaret claimed credit, which was established after a courtroom "paint-off" in Hawaii, in which Walter refused to participate.
Dylan Horrocks is a New Zealand cartoonist best known for his graphic novel Hicksville and his scripts for the Batgirl comic book series.
Raymond Ching, also known as Raymond Harris-Ching and Ray Ching, is a New Zealand painter. Ching is known for his contemporary bird and wildlife paintings. His ornithological illustrations have appeared in books such as The Reader's Digest Book of British Birds.
Tim Skelly was a video game designer and game programmer who developed arcade games for Cinematronics from 1978 until 1981. He designed a series of pure action games using black and white vector graphics. One of his early games, Rip Off, was the first arcade game with two-player cooperative play. Star Hawk, Rip Off, Armor Attack, and Star Castle were all later ported to the Vectrex home system.
Why Paint Cats is a humorous book written by New Zealand author Burton Silver and illustrator Heather Busch. It is one of three cat art books, including Why Cats Paint and Dancing with Cats. The book purports to describe the practice of "cat painting", the decorating of cats with paint. Some readers were concerned at the dangers of applying paint to cats, but the book's depictions are digitally manipulated.
George Worsley Adamson, RE, MCSD was a book illustrator, writer, and cartoonist, who held American and British dual citizenship from 1931.
Simon's Cat is a British animated web and book series written by Simon Tofield. It features a fat, hungry white cat who uses various tactics to get his owner to feed him.
Why Cats Paint is a comedy book written by New Zealand author Burton Silver and illustrator Heather Busch.
An exotic pet is a pet which is relatively rare or unusual to keep, or is generally thought of as a wild species rather than as a domesticated pet. The definition varies by culture, location, and over time—as animals become firmly enough established in the world of animal fancy, they may no longer be considered exotic.
Milton Knight Jr. is an American cartoonist, animator, comic book artist, writer, painter, and storyboard/layout artist. He directed animation for a variety of cartoon series, including Cool World, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. He is known for his Golden Age (1930s) cartooning style.
The European hedgehog was brought to New Zealand by British colonists in the 1870s as a way to deal with insect pests that had hitched a ride on crops the colonists had brought from their homeland for farming. Long regarded as a gardener’s helper in Britain, the introduction of Hedgehogs seemed a good solution to the lack of natural predators for these pests in New Zealand. They have since spread throughout the country, being absent only in inhospitable environments. The general public has a benign attitude to them in urban environments, but conservationists and regional councils regard them as pests, as they prey on native animals and compete with them for food.
ROA is a graffiti and street artist from Ghent, Belgium. He has created works on the streets of cities across Europe, the United States, Australia, Asia, New Zealand and Africa. ROA generally paints wild or urban animals and birds that are native to the area being painted. ROA usually uses a minimal color palette, such as black and white, but also creates works using vibrant colours depicting the flesh or internal systems within the animals and birds.
"ROA treats each surface he paints like a space to investigate, play with, and fit his creatures into. The technical perfection of his painting belies an underlying resourcefulness with simple tools,” “The animals are matched to their location, with rats in New York City and elephants in Bangkok. There are dark and funny messages, the beauty of both life and death, universal metaphors, inside jokes, and occasional violence, but always in ways that honor the animals and the spaces where they are painted."
Jacqueline Mary Fahey is a New Zealand painter and writer.
The Graham Children is an oil painting completed by William Hogarth in 1742. It is a group portrait depicting the four children of Daniel Graham, apothecary to King George II. The youngest child had died by the time the painting was completed.
Harry Hargreaves was an English cartoonist, best remembered for The Bird, which he produced for Punch, and for Hayseeds in the London Evening News.
Sharon Murdoch is a cartoonist born in 1960 in Invercargill, New Zealand. She is the first woman to regularly produce political cartoons for New Zealand mainstream media, and draws the cartoon cat Munro who accompanies the daily crossword in Fairfax newspapers. Murdoch has won New Zealand Cartoonist of the Year three times: 2016, 2017 and 2018.
Bogor is a newspaper cartoon strip that ran from 1973 to 1995. It was created by New Zealand cartoonist and author Burton Silver (1945–present). Its characters include Bogor, a lone "woodsman poet" who lives in the forest by himself, and hedgehogs and snails who often get stoned on marijuana. Bogor regularly talks to the trees, and can also be seen writing books about the environment he lives in or laboring over 'annual examinations'. The hedgehogs' diet consists of snails, and since both species understands each other, make for some interesting dialogue. Bogor's attire predominantly consists of the classic New Zealand black singlet, short pants, or Stubbies, and boots. He is often seen wielding an axe or a chainsaw which he uses to cut down trees. Running jokes include how Bogor hates marijuana and condemns the animals he catches using it, and looking at the stars at night often brings out a philosophical side. There are also strips that focus on the animals and their interaction with each other. Predominantly focused on snails and hedgehogs, the jokes often include the ways in which snails try to hide from the hedgehogs and the ways in which the hedgehogs consume the snails, complete with dialogue between the two species.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
