I am now clanking around with rusty stuff, drinking beer.
—Judy Pfaff
To motivate my freelance work today, I have been watching and listening to Art: 21 tv on Hulu. Full episodes of Play and Romance have influenced my labor in creating playful logos for a thoughtful nonprofit and peaceful Minnesota resort. I've found today that my process demands making with my hands to ignite the best workings. Judy Pfaff offers the insight that she perhaps received too much romance, love, emotion and affection throughout her life and has shifted to now create almost macabre installations that destruct a notion of what is decorative. As I have transitioned into working in a studio based in my childhood bedroom, I too reflect on my sometimes saccahrine upbringing. In escape, I take joy in building with paper, slicing cardboard, rolling on the adhesive wax and combining crude brush strokes to command that a chaos of disparate items do become whole afterall.
Showing posts with label artist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label artist. Show all posts
Animaterese
Talking Deer, at "The Ol' Farm", courtesy of David Elhard.
Kevin Wade Shaw and Rob Matthews at Mass. MOCA.
Anton Pearson and Michael Aberman, Slanguage; A Portmanshow at MCAD.
BOOK HANDS
Art of McSweenys by Chronicle Books
Don't you wish there were a video like this for every book design you enjoyed? I'm always fascinated by the stories and hands involved in art, design, film, politics, marketing, crafting, sailing, yoga, farming, etc. Looking out for video tutorials of all!
IN FILM
A weekend with MCAD friends in North Adams, MassachusettsI love how my new camera provides image stills for each video I capture. It makes my friends look like famous actors in an indie film. And makes me feel like a professional documentary videographer! Dreams!
AGAINST THE GRAIN. AGAINST THE STIGMA.
They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.Excerpt from the Newsweek article The Creativity Crisis.
DAMN.
Scotty Wittlake, by Jake Stangel 2009
A photographer based in Portland recently did a project about the snowboarders of the Legendary Mt. Baker (Washington) Banked Slalom, which was held a few months ago in its 24th year. Please visit his project page to get a sense of how a few professional snowboarders in action complete the landscapes to his beautiful photography, as well as hear how escapist the banked slalom has become for its competitors in an otherwise media-saturated world.
Unfortunately, not included in the project are some of the underdog competitors, including my friend Danielle Davis, a Mt. Baker local, who won the amateur women's division!!
SEEN AND SKUNK'D
TDR ©1964
I have had a curious morning of browsing admired design websites that have presented publications in a variety of ways.
SKUNK ©2005
Today as I work in my studio at school, I aim to document my work from the last year. So far the documentation styles of my books are not consistent in any way, and after my findings I am still not so confident about any one strategy.
At the Walker Art Center, Mylinh Trieu Nguyen reports on a beautiful fluxus book with clean, flatbed scans, on black background, that I recognize from Chad Kleopfer's documentation method. I notice in the bookshelf section of the Walker design blog, Emmet Byrne had a more dynamic approach that includes a photo of a levitating book (I couldnt help but wonder how involved Greg Beckel was at mastering that drop shadow in photoshop), and variously angled macro photos including the humane effect of the hand-browsing element, that really puts a book in to context.
By some twist of fate, I then looked at a new website featuring my friend's old-ish skateboarding magazine, in all of its 4 issues. Luke Hunt recently set up this SKUNK blog that exhibits their magazines with an interactive feature that allows the viewer to flip/click through each issue that is programmed to represent a glossy sheen on fluidly flipping pages. It is uniquely satisfying to me, regardless if I have all 4 printed magazines in my library 5 feet away...
I wonder what the future of book documentation is. Could I invent it today? Could I ever accept all of my craft to be represented on flash-animated pages like my Rad Dude Dicky article in Issue #2 of SKUNK mag? (I will now introduce the beginning to my new documentation process, which includes screenshots of my work as seen on isuu.com)
SKUNK ©2005
I received this book this week (the green one) as a self-birthday-present. Thank you, Miranda July for never letting me put it down.
Reading this makes me feel at odds about having so much energy to listen, rather than tell. Yesterday, It wasn't working out for me very well...
Mike Perry week at MCAD, here.
COUPLE PIGEONS
by Malcolm Clarke. His typography is made of pigeons in the formation of "Please Feed Us"
I envy this so much!
ASSEMBLING APPETITE
This is the first book I turn to for all of my projects. I often wonder when or if dazzling designs like this will ever materialize in my work.
"There is joy in the intense, harmonic, ragged, mysterious, teetering messiness of all things that stop and start, merge and part, clash and concede. That is what gives us appetite. And that is what people want....Sometimes — a great many times — good design defies strategy. Sometimes greatness comes from the combined exuberance & thoughtful conversation between client and designer: you and us!!!"— excerpt from Martin Venezky's manifesto for his studio Appetite Engineers
This last year in Minneapolis, I am dedicating my time to getting serious about the design world, by focusing on more design play.
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