Arteliance

Drawing is the point of contact in which idea begins to approximate form. There is a kind of transcendent energy in the sketchbook, or the tissue, or even the napkin upon which the simplest of doodles begins its long, twisted road to realization. It’s all grist for the mill, and the studio is its incubation chamber: not the studio with the white board and the IT guy and the phones ringing and the incessant emails, but the studio in which the ideas seek, and ultimately start to find, their burgeoning, fledgling form. Cezanne once wrote that the painter must enclose himself within his work, and it is true that such investment — physical, spiritual, and deeply intentional — is, in fact, what making work is all about. But as the public’s media appetite moves further away from the dreamy landscape of imagination (think Reality TV and confessional memoirs) the danger for design, I think, is imminent. Sure, design serves a pragmatic need, but that doesn’t mean its point of departure needs to position itself so firmly in the realm of logic, does it? Drawing, as the primary gesture of making, reopens the doors of the imagination and recasts the process as something completely different. Scary, because you don’t always know where you’re going. But somehow, you know when you get there.

There’s time, later for logic, for editing, for justifying all that type, for putting up those responsible roadblocks that we all must, on some level, choose to embrace. The studio, at least a little piece of it, is not the place for such duty-bound thinking. Somewhere, somehow, it must be the place for thinking through making.

But don’t take my word for it: the only way you’ll know for sure is if you turn off your phone, pick up a pencil and try it yourself.

Design Observer: The Art of Thinking Through Making Jessica Helfand

I’ve known of Miraz since she ran a mailing list for eudora-mac back in about 1995/6 and more recently on the Wise-Women list. Her book WordPress 2 : Visual QuickStart Guide should be out at the end of May. I am so happy for her.

I am asked to talk about my art sometimes. I sense that hunger for understanding within the audience. I used to feel pressurised to come up with answers to satisfy that hunger. I have learned that it can lead to me coming up with hurried and spurious interpretations of my own work.

Such is the status that meaning can have over feeling that I bow to the pressure and engage what Steven Pinker calls the “Baloney Generator.” This is our rational self that is so uncomfortable with the potential ambiguity of an emotional motivation that it will try to pin things down with desperately formulated rationales. The cleverer we are the better we are at making up more convincing meanings and reasons.

Nowadays I employ a more open strategy and talk about the things I was looking at and thinking about when I was making a particular piece and leave it up to the audience to make their own direct connections. This feels more satisfying and true than any nailed-down explanation.

Trust your own reactions, don’t seek enlightenment Grayson Perry

via ArtsJournal

: : Speak Up > Computer = Fart, or Digital Immersion Is Not Design : :

Still, nothing changes the fact that the computer ≠ design.

ideasonideas » Blog Archive » Designers must write

Even that early on, I knew that design was about more than getting funky glasses and flipping through type magazines–It had everything to do with the idea. How could you effectively explore or begin to develop an idea without first scratching down some thumbnails and messing about?

:: ( CRIT ) :: DESIGN BLOG ::: Cookie Cutter Creativity

Creativity on the computer has become a philosophical question for me. I have a background in fine art and I’ve been around long enough to know the difference between drawing with a conte crayon and finessing a bezier curve with a mouse. There is something lost between the artist working late into the night with paintbrush and furious passion, to the ‘group mind’ connect the computer provides. It all becomes just a little homogenized when individual passion is watered down in the endless ocean of surfing. More than enough phish in the sea.

I remember when art was actually a required part of public school curriculum. Not that it was great in all cases, but it was there. Now teaching technique supersedes teaching critical thinking in American education. I teach symbolism as visual literacy for designers, which you might think would be of interest to many aspiring designers, but my classes are small compared to the newest software bells-and-buzzer offerings enough of the time to know the priorities have shifted. Even with consistently high student evaluations for what they learned in my class over many consecutive years, enrollment is not what it should be and schools promote computer training well over design philosophy instruction. And my own training? Finding available classes or workshops in esoteric studies such as semiotics or sacred geometry are virtually non-existent in this country. Do a search on Google, you’ll see what I mean. So I read and conjecture a lot. And I use, God forbid, intuition and my own experience as teaching tools.

Today is my one year blog-versary! I haven’t written as much as I had hoped but neither did I get caught in endless redesigns as happened with my previous blog starts.