Welcome to Dracula Vs. Eisenstein.
If you like what you see, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks!
I want to share a multi-part series on design practice that I recently read in Voice: AIGA Journal of Design. Author David Barringer’s humorous and insightful writing begins to cover “the fallacies and truths of design practice in the 21st century” in Myths of the Self-Taught Designer: The First Conversation between Ego and the Devil.
The three-part series conjures a conversation between the professional designer (Ego) and the amateur designer (the Devil). Both characters represent and argue the extremes of their positions as educated or self-taught. It raises some good questions as to what skills are necessary for design and at what level of design.
While this conversation does address the feelings that many educated designers have about amateur design, it does not address the larger-picture concern that graphic design as an institution is adjusting far too slowly to the business demands of our internet culture. Our formal training has been stuck in the rut of previous decades. This has allowed amateur design to creep its way into the professional realm of graphic design.
Barringer’s imaginative writing is certainly worth a read and will at least make you consider both sides of the “educated vs. self-taught” argument.
Myths of the Self-Taught Designer:
The First Conversation between Ego and the Devil
The Second Conversation between Ego and the Devil
The Third Conversation between Ego and the Devil
Buy his art! IVoteForArt.com is a new site that allows you to buy and sell art at a reasonable price. The online gallery features user-submitted artwork that you can vote on and buy through PayPal. If you’re an artist you can put your artwork up for sale fairly easily.
“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck and a head full of questions, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon’s “bed-in” phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to promote peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it.”
Intrigued? “I Met The Walrus” is a fantastic short film that uses motion graphics to translate the aforementioned audio interview with John Lennon. It showcases a great combination of illustration and photographic elements and even better philosophy. Check out some more screen grabs below.
You can currently go watch the short film in its entirety in The YouTube Screening Room and it is available for purchase on iTunes.
The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897
Oil on canvas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York
I have been lucky enough to have seen some of Henri Rousseau’s work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and can say that most of the criticism of his work is fueled bigotry and jealousy. Rousseau was rarely taken seriously as a painter because of his working class background, his dream-like painting subjects, and his simple painting techniques until artists such as Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky came to express their appreciation for his work. If Rousseau is unknown to you, below is some background information on the painter.
Henri Julien Rousseau (1844-1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter who helped to develop the ideas behind the surrealist movement. However, Rousseau was much different than avant-garde artists of the time as he was self-taught and from the working class. Because of his class and initial status as a hobbyist, many ridiculed and still do ridicule him. Rousseau retired from plumbing at the age of 49 to try his hand at painting. He was extremely naive, had had no academic art training and his painting technique was considered extremely simple, but he developed his own painting style that was different fromt the avant-garde art surrounding him at the time.
The Dream, 1910
Oil on canvas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Despite starting out as a hobby painter, Rousseau deserves to be recognized as a true forerunner of Surrealism.
