This section of the site is dedicated to occassional posts about inspirational artwork.
I will post short articles on art and design related work that inspires me.
Keep coming back to to see what’s new.
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON
6/23/2010
I first learned of John James Audubon (April 26, 1785 - January 27, 1851) in high school when learning about western expansion in American history. He was one of the earliest artists to go to America and record images of the wildlife found there. Although there were a number of others to have done so before him, none had captured such a wide breadth of animals, nor had any done so in such a beautiful and detailed manner. Audubon's work concentrated mostly on avians and his most well known work, The Birds of America - a collection of illustrated prints of a variety of American birds - is an example of that. He often depicted them within their natural habitats, but my favorites are the ones where the ground of the image is more sparsely filled with an elegant arrangement of foliage. The plants that accompanied the birds in Audubon's illustrations are the same that one may find the animals nesting in or eating from. Such elegance and detail was caught in these illustrations that I never forgot his work
after learning about it.
It is Audubon's great imagery that I drew from to create a Chanel No. 5 add in my design portfolio. That piece has won me a couple of awards, and I can't help but feel highly in debtet to Audubon. Keeping in mind his elegant composition, as well as his complicated and detailed inner-workings, Audubon's aesthetics definitely affected the piece beyond just using his collaged imagery. Thank goodness his illustrations are copyright free!
PIERRE BONNARD
7/31/2010
I eventually discovered the work of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) when browsing through a used bookstore. The book had a beautiful illustration of a fashionably dressed woman’s face on the cover, which drew me in to inspect the rest of the book, revealing an elegant, sensitive, gestural, and seemingly spontaneous approach to illustration, composition, and hand lettering.
Bonnard was an impressionist painter as well as a skilled illustrator, poster designer, and printmaker. A contemporary of Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secessionists, his work was also influenced by Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. He was said to have inspired Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec through his work in color litho-graphy. Working in Paris, he collaborated with many performers, artists, and writers by creating illustrations, announcements, and other prints.
Bonnard’s work has inspired me in my illustration and influenced my aesthetic. His illustrated type caries a certain naïveté, yet sophistication that I completely admire. The influence of his impressionist painting style can be easily observed in many of his prints. They can sometimes look messy and scrambled, delaying the readability of the image and text, but always in a way that satisfies the viewer. I highly admire this quality of his work as well as his intuitive compositions.
I didn’t have enough money to buy the book when I first saw it, but I remember revisiting the book-store
many times, always hoping the book had not been sold yet. Finally, one day I purchased it! And I am very thankful that I was able to snatch up such a wonderful collection of work.
WOLFGANG WEINGART
8/29/2010
“It seemed as if everything that made me curious was forbidden: to question established typographic practice, change the rules, and to reevaluate its potential. I was motivated to provoke this stodgy profession and to stretch the typeshop’s capabilities to the breaking point, and finally, to prove once again that typography is an art” (Wolfgang Weingart, My Way to Typography, 112).
Wolfgang Weingart (b. 1941) is a German graphic designer who was highly influenced by the Swiss style, or the international typographic style, of design and typography. This movement is characterized by asymmetrical composition, objective photography, sans-serif type, and the use of mathematical grids. Its ideology is to create a modern, objective, and universal approach to design, which allows the content to be clear and legible while keeping the design process invisible. However, while learning about type setting at the Basel School of Design by Emil Ruder and Armin Hoffmann, Weingart became frustrated with the constraints placed on how good typography was defined.
Weingart has always been highly inventive and explorative in his approach to design and while respecting the Swiss style that he was so influenced by, he also broke the mold by sacrificing a bit of legibility for expression. Weingart also embraced and experimented with all forms of typographic media from metal, to wood cut, to photographic, to digital. He also eventually incorporated lush organic collages into his compositions.
I'm in love with Weingarts work and am intrigued by his placement in graphic design history, between modernism and postmodernism. Both movements are antithetical to each other, yet Weingart seems to be able to find an elegant bridge between them.
