Studio Journal: Public Service Announcement

My latest design project is to create a series of three PSAs that relate to our thesis focus. I immediately recalled PSAs that I thought were most effective and tried to determine in what ways they had made me remember their message. I concluded that many successful PSAs were very blunt in their language, using a dry humor to quickly and forcefully connect with their viewer. My series is titled, "Hire A Designer." I though of it as an ad campaign for AIGA in support of designers. The images I created for the 3 posters are all a "badly designed" object placed into a space that one might expect to see a "higher" level of design. The objects I chose are all real products that I found online. I included the tag line "Design surrounds us every minute of everyday. Let's make it good," because it is sort of a dry response to the classic what is "good" design argument. Also, the posters are meant to spark conversation between viewers as to whether the designs of the objects are in fact bad, and who can really make that call. After all, some one at some point thought they were good.

Studio Journal: A New Cliche

This next project for Design III was called "A New Cliche." My class was assigned to refine a cliche that exists in our world. We then also had to find some way to distribute our "new cliche" to the public. To quote the assignment sheet, "This project is about the possibilities that lie in referencing shared knowledge; in altering meaning through repetition; and in knowing and
involving your audience." I wanted to create a piece that was not distributed but rather a performance piece in which when others interacted with myself, I create my "new cliche." I finally arrived at a graphic that I believe has much more gravity than people realize these days, and a graphic that is actually quite beautiful in itself. In illustrator I recreated the infamous Macintosh "Pinwheel of Death." For non-mac users, this is a little colorful pinwheel that your mouse morphs into during periods of computer overload and/or processing. I rigged an arm attachment to my constructed pinwheel, in a shield like fashion and bolted the wheel onto another piece of cardboard. The nut and bolt attachment enabled the pinwheel to really spin, which in turn enabled me to mimic the motion and aesthetic of the "Pinwheel of Death" in a large public setting. My idea was to appear in situations like a city street corner during rush hour, a place filled with congested people who are barely moving anywhere. When they see my wheel in action it triggers many emotions, but most likely gives them flash backs of a time when their computer was in a slow process like they are currently in. I felt the project was a success and the feedback I have gotten on and off the street was overwhelmingly positive. I have included a picture that I have taken on George Street during rush hour.

Studio Journal: Information Graphic

My next project in Design III, was a data set. For this assignment, we had to create an info graphic that represented a set or sets of data that related to our personal life. Similar to our first assignment, the data set project required us to examine our personal lives and extract information that we normally may not ever analyze or quantify. After much thought, I decided to examine my cigarette smoking, confident that it would provide substantial and provocative data that I could use to create an info graphic. I began by counting the average cigarettes I have smoked per day starting in 2005. I surprisingly have a good memory for this kind of stuff, so my numbers turned out pretty accurate. My first set of graphs were divided up by year and represented the average number of cigarettes I smoked per day by monthly. The bar graphs were created by burning cigarettes, therefore giving varying heights to the "bars." I then put a color overlay over the cigarettes to color code them by brand. Next, I employed a line graph to show the steep hike in cigarette prices since I have been smoking over the last 5 years. I then tallied up all the cigarettes I had smoked and divided them by 20 to get the total amount of packs. This too was shown in bar graph format. Then using the data of the average pricing over the past five years I was able to calculate approximately how much money I had spent on cigarettes during my lifetime. The totals are 25,360 cigarettes smoked, 1,268 packs smoked, and 7,652.90 dollars spent. I titled the graphic The Tobacco Tally, and the included image is a detail from the title. For this part of the piece, I found about 10 photos of smoke. Like putting a puzzle together, I cut out pieces of the images that I could use to create a single smoke wisp that had the illusion of flowing through the letters and reacting to their structures. This technique was a part of the basis for my thesis proposal.

Studio Journal: 24-Hour Narrative

Our first project in Design III was a 24 hour narrative. The goal of the project was to represent some aspect of our life over a span of 24 hours. After much contemplation, I arrived at a solution that satisfied the criteria for the assignment. During a day of design work, I took screen shots of my computer window at specific times that I thought would give an honest representation of the different projects I was working on. I started at 9 in the morning and ended at 9 the next day. At first, I was not going to include breaks or nighttime, but then realized that these variables would actually provide for a much more interesting image. After I had all my screenshots in chronological order, I began to figure out a way to compile them together. There is nothing more linear in the world than time, so I figured a long piece that resembled a timeline seemed like the obvious direction to go. Then I realized I had to take the project a step further and decided not only to depict the projects I was working on during that time, but also to represent my creative flow as I was working on them. In Photoshop I compiled all the screenshots together then began to warp them in a way that I would describe as a heart monitor print-out of my creative flow. During times of high creativity the screenshots bulge out and during times of low creativity they implode. Also, during break time or sleep, my flow is represented by the black form as seen in the included image. The final piece was 200 inches long. For the included image, I chopped it up into 3 sections so that I could fit it onto the blog.

These images further support my thesis focus. The artists have employed different techniques to combine images in a way that seems natural and believable, even if impossible. For example, in the first work by Rambow, he has added the color of the environment to the floating structure he has created to make it appear to be in the environment. My focus also is bringing surrealist art like the painting from Dali into the conversation.

Annotated Images

The first image by Kennard, supports a part of my thesis focus because the artist has seamlessly incorporated foreign elements together to create an very provocative image. The next piece by Runge is one of my all time favorite works. Here he has painted different images together, however this still supports my thesis because I am interested in the way he smoothly and creatively transitions between elements. The work by the AES Group of a veiled Statue of Liberty add to my interest in the idea of image manipulation and the idea of illusion. With the miracle of Photoshop, I can create images like this that convey very bold ideas and would otherwise be impossible to create without the use of a computer program. The next image by Charles Wilson Peale is a groundbreaking painting he created that explores further the idea of illusion and how the viewer can be tricked by exploiting simple graphic techniques.

Design III - Revised Thesis Statement

Recently I did a close analysis of my work and tried to extract the aspects that I believe are the most important, that I am the strongest at, and that I simply love to do the most. One main theme I identified was the concept of combining foreign elements in a seamless way that creates a final product in which the viewers gets the feeling that the elements are in a natural space. Many jobs and assignments I have done require combining numerous images into a product where the final image shows almost no characteristics of the original pictures. I want to dig deeper into the possibilities of image adaption and metamorphosis. Furthermore, I want to explore how a designer sometimes collects very alienated objects and creates a hybrid image that can stand as a single, original work.

WLCM BCK Show Review

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to view the WLCMKCB show at Mason Gross galleries. This show included work from Mason Gross undergraduate and graduate students along with faculty and staff. Also exhibited was work by Lyda Craig, a Mason Gross alumnus who recently passed away. Also shown was a room devoted Jim Toia's work that is part of the Water exhibit at the Zimmerli.
The first work I am going to discuss is the painting by Stephen Westfall, a painting professor at Mason Gross. I had the pleasure of having Professor Westfall as a teacher, and being familiar with his work, I can say that this piece has the classic characteristics of a Westfall painting. Westfall employs many structural techniques to his paintings, and is famous for making work in which all the elements follow a set of rules. In this particular one he has utilized the grid. The diagonal lines all converge at right angles forming a simple grid of four quadrants to the viewer. Furthermore, the viewer's eye hits the yellow diamond located in the center of the work and is then immediately forced to follow one of the lines from the grid away from the center. The eye then proceeds to trace the line of the grid in all four directions. Westfall has again proved to be a master of controlling the viewer's eye by employing simple structural techniques. The work is titled "Cosmadin" and is rendered in oil on canvas. Also the size of the work, at 36" by 30," allows a lot of accessibility for the viewer. You are able to rest your eyes at the height of the yellow diamond in the center and really get the full effect of the optical trick. The painting's carefully selected palette of tinted primary colors and tinted green also matches a figure's boxer underwear in a much bigger painting to the right of the work. This painting is titled "On the Grass," and also makes the eye do a lot of work in a different way. Here we see a haphazard group of young adults positioned at different directions laying on each other. The whole group is placed on the grass. The painting is also a vertical composition. The painter has essentially provided an image that feels like it was a photograph taken from ground level of figures laying on the ground and pushed our point of reference, the ground, up into the sky. Also by using atmospheric perspective to make the grass recede at the top of the work the viewer eye's are also forced to the top of the image. Again, this painter has succeeded in controlling the viewer's eye.
Next, is a work by Raphael Ortiz, another professor at Mason Gross. This is a very large work placed higher on the wall than all the other midpoints of the other work. The first thing you notice in this bold work is the digital image of the Statue Liberty wielding two tea bags. Then you immediately notice that this piece is comprised of many 8 and 1/2 inch pieces of paper fastened to a piece of pink styrofoam with black pins to create a much larger image. The top of the piece is a poem conveying a message about the oppression and recent crackdown on illegal immigrants in the south of the United States. This is obviously a personal issue to Professor Ortiz, being a latin-american. The work depicts a dramatic scene under the poem of figures in harsh water trying to reach an embellished Ellis Island. Being a former student of Professor Ortiz, I remember a phrase he repeated often. Good art at some level always has "Narrative, content, and meaning." I think this work exemplifies that idea. The viewer can see many very specific decisions by Ortiz to convey his message. From the pixelated, almost sloppy photoshop work to the styrofoam "canvas," all the elements in the work were strategic choices by Ortiz. One can make allusions to the size of the foam to a makeshift raft.
Furthermore, is a work by Lyda Craig that was located on the right wall of the gallery room devoted to a collection of her work titled "Intimate Observations." This work is a medium sized painting of a very unique scene. Pictured is a man who appears to be watching another series of figures, all the same as him, who are shown in many positions of an impossible leap that ends on the ground. The image references stop-motion photography as the figures appear to be in sequential stages of a superhuman plunge onto a sunny coastal scene. The movement in this piece is also great and forms a loop for our eye to follow. We start at the top of the leap and arrive the bottom. Then our eye rests on the figure that is standing firmly on the ground, until they are again picked back up to the leaping top figure.

First Artist Statement and Annotated Image Gallery

STATEMENT: When a designer can thrive off the the provided constraints they have fully embodied the title of "Designer."
The first image is a poster that Milton Glaser made for a show of his work. It is his textual logo overlaid onto some other elements. I really like this piece because he has extracted the rhythm of his name, MIL-TON-GLA-SER , and created an extremely balanced and cohesive work. I also noticed that the poster that is hung up around the building for visiting artist Martha Rosler employs this same technique
I also chose this logo for New York designed by Milton Glaser. After I heard his description of how the three elements in the logo work together to make a lasting impression in the viewer's brain. First, he states the word "I" is also just one letter and therefore a symbol. The heart shape is a symbol that is universally recognized as love, and the letters "NY" is an abbreviation that has become the symbol for New York. These three tools used by Glaser make the logo an ingenious creation that has an everlasting effect on the viewer.
This third work is a poster of Bob Dylan that Glaser created for CBS records. This work is extremely famous. Many people from the 60's will say that this single image embodies the era of great talent and the inspired youth. Glaser was older at the, but was able to perfectly capture the pulse of the generation. For me, this is one the biggest aspects that makes a designer successful. Being able to walk in someone else's shoes and relate to things that may be alienated from you are essential in being a successful designer.

An Interview with Bridgette Errante (Part 1)

BE: I am painting and print-making concentration. I mostly have prints here. All this stuff here was probably done within the past year because paint and print working, the first couple times you do somehting you just learn the technique.
DR: Right, focus on the process.
BE: So, I didn't want to bring out still life pieces, because it's not relavent to what I was really doing. What is here i thought was important because it was kind of more autonomous work. So I'll start off with this. This is a really large painting. It's like 4 feet by 6 feet and it's based on a Photoshop image that i made in Photoshop and painted. Its a building merged with a plant underneath it, we had to mix an architectural piece,and a natural piece, but we make it totally unrecognizable. First everyone in class lost their shit becuase it was a 4x6 painting, but this was actually a starting off point for a lot of things for me. I never thought to use Photoshop before to make a painting. You're always taught to paint from life, so to have someone tell you that you're going to paint a picture and it's actually so much harder because when you have a picture you can't make a mistake. The comparison is so obvious, you know?
DR: Exactly, if this angle is here it has to go there.
BE: Right, so I was working off an image that was this big and i have to convert it to a 4x6 so it was really challenging but super rewarding. This is still one of my favorite paintings because it was a lot of assingment work, but what i learned from this painting and kind of where it brought me was an invaluable learning experience. I learned a lot about what I am good at, like these little areas i think are the most successful, like these little tiny variations, and i mean those areas are probably like that big and they are like 50 colors. So I learned that I am a really good tight painter and I'm really good with lines. I mean I thought I sucked, and I don't apparently. So painting from a photo was a big thing we learned in that class.
DR: Right here you can tell you really understand color theory. This red part look like a red overlay applied in Photoshop and it looks like how the colors would change would that effect.
BE: Great, yeah and that's another challenging thing, thank you. So this was like a big jumping point for me because I think it informed the rest of what I make in painting at least. So we learned about why you normally should not paint from a photograph if you don't want it to look like a photograph. We learned how photos have glare, they have blur that youre eyes don't. You're eyes view everything in focus, you know, nothing is out of focus, and those are the things you don't really think about. People are like " oh, pictures are exactly what it is." No, it's not there's a huge difference. In photography the colors are more muted. most of the times when you print out a photo its not as brilliant as it is on the screen.
DR: Absolutely, I remember Westfall told us that, especially in black and white paintings, the shadows that fall on a person's face especially around the mouth will all be the same kind of black. That really stuck with me because as I think of ways to render things I realized that it was very true in work I had done.
BE: Yeah, this class, painting II, it just really propelled the way i felt about photography. We did that assignment and then for our final we could do whatever we wanted. So, i guess a lot of my work up until last year it dealt a lot with my family. My parents are from Italy, so I'm a first generation American, so a lot of my work dealt with that whole culture. As I dealt with the culture, some times it was humorous and other times it was more serious like these little zines i made for print. Its silk screen covers.
DR: You used photo-stencil?
BE: No, this is handdrawn. these are both hand drawn.
DR: Oh, you cut it out of paper?
BE: Well, you take mylar and then you just draw with a sharpie. You expose it and then print it out.
DR:Oh, yeah photostencil
BE: Yeah and you can just draw with a sharpie or like an ink and pen and ink and then when you expose it you can print it out. The only difference is its hand drawn versus printed out of the computer. So you had to make these two little zines and all of the stuff too that I was doing when i was referring like being italian, it's funny because they use alot of these gaudy like flowers and theres a lot of excess and everything's flashy and over the top. So that ascthetic was kind of what i was doing for a while. These two you can obviously tell they are like super flamboyant like especially that one. This one is a little more serious zine..
DR: Is this the translation of what's written at the top.
BE: No the bottom is the hail mary in Italian. It's the real important, being Roman Catholic and being Italian are like one in the same and its always a really important part of my parents cultures you know the Virgin Mary. So the bottom is the hail mary and the top is actually a quote from this guy. He was talking about Mexican immigrants in the U.S. and he was saying we need to kill them, they need to get out of our country. They have no problem killing you and taking your money and like selling drugs. Then I contrasted that with the Hail Mary and inside here these are all family photos and also this is like the table cloth that my parents have, this is another, like a lace. These are all textiles from my house, my real house and these are all real family. These are my grandfathers. These are all family photographs and some of this is funny like the cheetah print. It's not always really sophisticated stuff. It's normally like low class. So with that i was making a political statement about immigration
DR: The paper was actually gold that you used?
BE: Yeah this is gold paper. I contrast it with really crappy computer paper. Again, I guess this book was like mostly about contrast in that way like this ones really geometric and you know the lace is very like...
DR: Yeah, I mean that's what I see throughout all your work. I see a lot of texture and a lot of contrast between organic forms and regular ones.
BE: Yeah, yeah, and I think in a lot of ways, subconsciously I was kind of contrasting like their life back in their home country to life here which is so much more advanced in terms of technology. This was a more serious approach and these bells and little pompom are also a reference to Italy. In sicily they have a lot of these donkey carts and they're decorated with bells and pom poms. Then this one was more funny. This is a cover says, "pray for us," thats what it means and it's a prayer book but its all existentialist phliosophers that don't believe in god.
DR: Oh, I see.
BE: And these words are like a dada poem. You put them in a bag and you have to take them out and however the words come out is how the poem is. That was part of the assignment we had to do a dada poem so i thought that was appropriate because these are all like their writings like Kafka wrote "The Metamorphesis," and you know Beauvoir wrote the "Ethics of Ambiguity." The text doesnt make any sense and I thought it was kinda like tounge and cheek. Oh, it's a prayer book but you know it's about atheists. I'm always kind of going back to that like tacky astetic and it was well understood and to me. It was like funny. I made these little borders out of cloth and then Xeroxed them and I drew these little things and I Xeroxed them on so you know it was funny and they're cool to have to give to people. You can prob have one if you want to take one.
DR Okay, great, see there's some design.
BE: Yeah, I mean there's design everywhere, you need to think about that. Sicily's the shape of a triangle. Then those were things I probably did the in the beginning of print class and these two prints were at the end of that same class. This is, again I'm still sticking with that kind of funny over the top asthetic and it's actually a play off of like a cropped portion of my parents wedding photo. They got married in this hall in Brooklyn and they had this horrible Pasley carpet, and my mom had this crazy lace dress. So there's a lot behind this and I thought it was funny nobody. Nobody else thinks it's funny but I thought it was funny. This is a photo etching. This was actually a plastic table cloth I bought at C.H. Martin and then I dipped it in paper making pulp so it kind of hardened and became its own pattern, but the lace pattern still held through so I took photographs of this table cloth and made a photo etching and I think these all kind of relate to each other because they all really have that floral pattern, like almost a domstic feel too. I feel like I was referencing a lot of feminine imagery.
DR: Absolutely, and I don't know if nostalgic is the right word, but this work definitely takes you to a place.
BE: Yeah, it's definitely referencing the past for sure. Then I started to move on. This is my painting final for Painting 2 and what I did was I took a swatch of fabric that I found on Joann Fabrics.com and in Photoshop I took them and broke them up into like little squares. I changed every single square with value and stuff.
DR: So this whole thing was the pattern on the fabric and you chopped it up.
BE: Yeah, and the two were different patterns. They were both floar patterns obviously, so what I was trying to do here was take something that was really old really old fashioned and then kinda of reference digital photography with pixilation and how like everything gets grided up. The problem was it became really decorative and I still feel like in a way these failed in that sense. They are just really decorative, they're something you can put on your wall or you can buy this at a TJMAXX, or something. They are just really pretty but I don't think they got across what I wanted to get across. I felt as if I was stilll really holding back in terms of my painting application. It was painted really controlled, some parts were really washy and some parts were opaque.
DR: I really like it and I really like the color handling, and that was something for me when I came here that skyrocketed my work, was understanding color theory.
BE: Yeah definitely, I think it's also really important to paint with a full palette. This is how I start painting. I lay out every color paint that I have if I don't mind up using it for that painting. It's just a dot so you're not wasting it. Like now know i have all my reds and I have all my greens. Julie taught me that nobody has a memory for color, we don't, it's just not in our brains, so you're never going to remember, like I'm going to forget that I have that one green. You know what I mean? So at this point, in this juncture, I was still trying to combine images and I was using Photoshop as a tool and I still am. I think it is so important because painting has gone so far, like people said like Jackson Pollock was like the death of painting because what do you do after him you know?
DR: Of course, my brother's actually named after him.
BE: Jackson? Thats awesome. i wish i had a cool name like that. So like a lot of people were saying like what do you do after Jackson Pollock. You know and its true, in a lot of ways like what do you do after Jackson Pollock. But to me the advent and the accessibility of digital imagery and photoshop is the new frontier for painting and I feel like if you're going to be a painter today you have to reference digital imagery and you have to reference technology because it's the only things that seperates you from somebody that worked two hundred years ago. Like why are you relevant if you're not using it you know, it's a waste. A lot of painters have a prejudice against digital images. Oh its not real, its from a computer its not real art. Fuck that, it's like the opposite of what i think. I think you need to use the computer to make images. It's also important to reference digital imagery.
DR: Exactly, what's the next step. I'm using the same tools they used 200 years ago.
BE Whats the next step! Oil and canvas so what the fuck are you going to do thats different. Totoally. That was my whole thing for a while and it still is.