Marie O'Connor has sent me this, of an astonishing garment by Arthur Bispo do Rosário. From 1938, in Rio's psychiatric hospital Pedro II, he created a 'minature universe' of works to be presented at Judgement Day. The thread used was unpicked from his inmate uniform.
There is an unintentional visual tally, on the top left of the garment as seen, with the Admiral logo so chunkily applied to c.1975 football kits. Most spectacularly, Coventry City, Wales, Leeds United.
Also reminiscent of Scouting/Guiding 'camp blankets' (via Earth Water Fire Ice), traditionally a record of camping, 'jamboree', hike.
I've started up another blog for a project called 'Fact', set to my Camberwell Illustration group. It's thinking about the imaging of scientific ideas. Trying to move beyond the literal. Here's my favourite thing so far, showing eye discolouration (as seen on the amazing BibliOdyssey) by Majimaganryonozu, from a collection of C18th and C19th Japanese medical books archived online by Kyushu University.
Dermatological conditions by Hosonozu. See more here and note the intertwined image, calligraphic text and the use of flatness and abstraction for organ-forms.
This poster is one from a series I'm exhibiting in an upcoming show at Melbourne Museum. The exhibition, 'New Views', is an open conversation about graphic design today. This poster is talking about the possible connection between a wilfully local-limited-language of available materials, idiosyncratic stories and a universal vocabulary allied to hand craft skills as taught by the Bauhaus. Something about a Local Universe. Everything within your walking distance and arms-reach-periphery.
I was citing this Max Bill poster (via Walker Art Center), with an RGB version of the primary triangle circle square. For me he struck an amazing balance, mentioned in an earlier post, of a machine-aesthetic and hand-craft-method.
The other source was this late Ming dynasty (c.1600) work by Ni Yuanlu, 'Cloud Water Stone'. It is describing the essence of qi, the active energy force that runs through and binds animate and inanimate things. I like the idea of something nebulous being 'konkrete'. Reminiscent too of Alexander Cozen's studies of clouds, which in turn influenced John Constable.
24/10/2008
Created this logotype for a new blog launched today, with postings by Tim Parsons, myself and soon by other tutors on the design undergrad. courses at Camberwell College of Arts spanning 3D, Graphic Design and Illustration. The content is feeding monthly symposia, each on a Design 'Key Idea'. The first event discusses Process.
A chair recently completed, a marker for further projects with Sally. Source a chair (or other), source a fabric, source some content, establish a treatment. In this case the text was a lyric-poem written a while ago by one of our girls, Sadie.
I drew the text by hand then re-worked but not over-worked some components on-screen and transferred for Sally to stitch. She then applied the panels having already taken the chair back to the frame for a full re-upholstery with correct materials.
Furniture carries a narrative always. In this case it's tattooed onto the surface. In Bright Ideas, Beautiful Minds, Jürgen Bey says,'The language of products is a language that we give them so that they can communicate with users. Sometimes they have an interpreter in the form of a written set of instructions, sometimes through tattoos on their body. It is a functional language that tells us what they can do, where they come from and what they are for'.
Been working on type that functions as an extension of my hand. I draw on-and-off-screen and there is always a kind of basic geometry either way so this is a way of trying to formalise something that is a natural inclination. It's heavily limited by a 2.5mm grid and by monospacing which fosters glitches and inconsistencies in the optical spaces between characters.
Howard Kettler's Courier (in which this text is set) has beautiful innovation in the way the slab-serif-lengths vary. My grid forces something dumber to happen in the attempt to achieve even greyness. Some characters have no serif, some serifs invert; sometimes counterforms are filled. Also, through hand-drawing, wanted to allow each character to exponentially grow variants, so the form develops 'growths' that take them towards C19th ornament, late 1960s OCR, etc. But always retaining geo-awkwardness.
This is Herbert Bayer's 1959 'fonetik alfabet' a development of the 1925 Universal. Been etched on the retina since discovering it in Herbert Spencer's 1968 book, The Visible Word, a product of his RCA-based Legibility Unit. The ligatures are beautiful, especially when linked to phonemes.So the Make-Do-Modernism (virtues of constraint) of my type grew from some interest here in Bayer's slightly awkward geometries (see letter 's') and the use of just one case (although I use upper- and lower-).
There are generic solutions using a limited radius and grid and I'm conscious of many people coming to the same results on this route but maybe the idiosyncrasy comes in the mixing and mutation of variants that pull it somewhere more vernacular. These forms were lasercut from acrylic sheet last week so I could play with them. The aim is to cut them at double-size and mount to type-height (+/- 23mm) for use on letterpress.
Another inspiration is Max Bill. This is, amazingly, a lino-cut poster from 1944. I've seen one of this series in the flesh and the cut lino impression gives enriched surface-object-quality.
Pine hand-made cobbler's bench, as seen on Just Folk. Been thinking a lot about custom working spaces with a kind of shed ergonomic. Evolving by use, with the trace of use.
Reminiscent of Andrea Zittel's 'Living Units' (via Kettle's Yard), (first seen at the no-longer-Anthony D'Offay Gallery). Also the crate houses of an all-time-hero Allan Wexler. More on him another time.
Feel a little guilty for looking at flying-killing-machines but hard not to when it's the Fokker DVII (seen at RAF Hendon). The quasi-harlequin pattern is perhaps inspired by exfoliating Sycamore bark. The beautiful white stencilling is early DIN type I think, although will have to check. It has the DIN formalism but also has an ornamental attitude to the mix of small caps, pictographic arrows, curved baselines.
But I liked especially this cover of 'Das Ist Norm'. Just read through H's entry and it appears DIN for the transport system, etc. was designed in 1932; so post-Fokker DVII. OSP are re-drawing DIN using open-source software, for the public domain (for whom it was intended).
Here's another stencilling example from the under-wing-wheel-well of a Messerschmidt Bf109. Rounded stems/terminals, nice open 'c', very nice Eszett.
First encountered Umetaro Azechi's woodcuts at the British Museum. Stopped me in my tracks. His themes were consistent; mountain men and animals, landscapes. But within this, in a way like Giorgio Morandi, he found everything he needed to say. Then it's just about the language and economy; especially the way he solves the junction between forehead and nose or the abstraction of the body.
This image is distilled to a greater degree, with no doubt that the figure is one and the same as his habitat. The landscapes hold more variety and invention in their composition, even though some are very small.
Happened upon these boots by William Lennon of Derbyshire. Quite hard to find boot-shaped-boots and shoe-shaped-shoes. They are for 'tug-of-war' apparently.
Following on from the Modulex Men posted below, here's more men at work. This, of course, features the UNIVAC Type 1540 Command Magnetic Tape Unit circa. 1966. This comes from a memoir-site of Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, which was involved in the Apollo space programme.
Thoughts turn to 'Sleeper'. There is a scene I tried to find where Woody is working with a tape-spool-super-computer. He is distraced by an attractive girl, leans coquettishly on the machine and it runs out of control. Cue flashing lights, unravelling tape. Anyway, couldn't find it but this clip is very funny. The thread for me here is people outscaled by big lumps of technology, or something like that. But the technology looks like it doesn't know what it's for. And a mid-C20th conception of the future. Been drawing a MIR space station simulator for similar reasons.
Isamu Noguchi's proposal from 1952 for a playground in the UN's New York headquarters. Didn't pass for vintage health & safety reasons. Posting it because thinking a lot about simple vocabulary and shift, nuance in quite primary forms.
First conscious of his work from the exhibition at, on recall, the Design Museum. Most memorable were the sets and props for Martha Graham.
Which in turns reminds me of Claire Barclay; her recent installation at Camden Arts Centre had amazing craft-presence and composition.
Sally and I have been talking about the next chair. Will post something about the one just completed soon. She's sourced a striped linen-silk mix and we want to do something abstract that works off and improvises on the rhythm already there. Remembered seeing this in the book Bauhaus Textiles created by Gunta Stölzl in 1928. A weave in cotton, wool, rayon and silk.
Modulex was a smaller-scale-Lego-for-grown-ups, manufactured by Lego from something like 1963 and intended for use by architects and planners.
It was commercially unsuccessful but now, it seems, much-sought-after on ebay. I like the glitches brought about by the non-monospace type applied to modular blocks.
Here's some grown-ups planning something big. And the colour palette: putties, mustardy yellows, orange-reds, powder-blues. The grey with this reminds me of Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx's pH-neutral Kodak Grey tables.
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