His unique style has been called illegible. Rules of design are constantly and consistantly broken in Carson’s work. He would let typed lines run into each other, cross gutters, or be upside-down. He would layer type and image until neither was distinguishable on the page and even continued an article on the front cover of a magazine. Carson has never believed that one must first know the rules in order to break them. With only a single class as training, he became art director for Transworld Skateboarding. He immediately found praise and a sort of cult following; however, some advertisers were not willing to support his radical approach. Carson is most well known for his work art directing the magazine Ray Gun. His design ideas were incorporated completely with the magazine. The publication had no consistant typefaces or layouts; even the masthead was recreated for each issue. The result was a magazine that was strikingly fresh looking with every issue. To Carson, image and type are the medium of expression. His designs do not start out with the intention of being illegible or hard to read. The design begins as an expression to communicate the feeling or message of the article to the reader upon contact. It is because of this priority that the actual words of the article may be obscured, illegible, or just non-existant. During his early work with Ray Gun, authors would complain that their work had been destroyed. After 5-6 issues, authors were complaining that their articles looked plain next to others. Carson’s experimental typography had taken hold of the 90′s.

This is what I would LOVE to do after college. I want to make designs that the world will see as different, daring, and at sometimes, odd. He took a risk that most people wouldn’t dare to do for the sake of losing their job. But look how it turned out for him; Carson became a phenomenon in the 90′s. I think to get closer to where he is at, I would have to let go of wanting to make everything simple and perfect. His designs are complex and, at times, hard to look at. But they are wonderful. he has done a lot with his life, and is an designer that I will remember and look towards to getting to where I want to be as an artist.

“David Carson Bio.” A R T S P A C E. Web. 21 Oct. 2009. http://artspace.sfa.uconn.edu/267/2005-spring/oliver/designer_site_may4/bio.html.

“We want to make the viewer feel the photography, as a painter makes you feel the paint, with drips and brushstrokes.” The Starns endow their familiar subjects—stairs, horses, “masterpieces” of art, even themselves—with further meaning by combining various portions of an image to form a new piece. Their composite photographs integrate the aesthetics of nineteenth-century Romanticism into a contemporary awareness of the world. They take an art form where traditionally the materials of the work are inconsequential to the image and, much like Expressionism, make the physicality of the materials central to the work, bringing the human touch back to an increasingly mechanical and digital process.

Once again, we find artists working together to create an outcome. I love the concept of taking something technological and bringing it down to a man-made thing. By taking an image and producing it in many parts, it gives the piece a whole new look and feeling. A lot of their work I don’t necessarily understand, but that’s the beauty of it. The cartoon prints are definitely my favorite pieces. They have so much character just by how they are presented.

“Mike Starn and Doug Starn.” The National Portrait Gallery. Web. 21 Oct. 2009. http://www.npg.si.edu/cexh/artnews/starn.htm.

P.S. I’m using the first one for our final projects.

In self-reflexive photographs and films, Cindy Sherman invents myriad guises, metamorphosing from Hollywood starlet to clown to society matron. Often with the simplest of means—a camera, a wig, makeup, an outfit—Sherman fashions ambiguous but memorable characters that suggest complex lives lived out of frame. Leaving her works untitled, Sherman refuses to impose descriptive language on her images, relying instead on the viewer’s ability to develop narratives as an essential component of appreciating the work. While rarely revealing her private intentions, Sherman’s investigations have a compelling relationship to public images, from kitsch (film stills and centerfolds) to art history (Old Masters and Surrealism) to green-screen technology and the latest advances in digital photography. Sherman’s exhaustive study of portraiture and self-portraiture—often a playful mixture of camp and horror, heightened by gritty realism—provides a new lens through which to examine societal assumptions surrounding gender and the valuation of concept over style.

I find her work to be very inspirational, given our new project. It’s amazing that she can be such a wonderful photographer. And not only that but she uses herself as the subject! She doesn’t even have the arm coming down the side of the frame, like most myspace poses. I love the idea that she takes scenes from movies and creates it herself, using herself as the character. She portrays so many things by tellings stories through her frames.

“Art:21 . Cindy Sherman . Biography . Documentary Film |.” PBS. Web. 14 Oct. 2009. http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/cindy-sherman/.

Andy Goldsworthy is a brilliant British artist who collaborates with nature to make his creations. He regards all his creations as transient, or ephemeral. He photographs each piece once right after he makes it. His goal is to understand nature by directly participating in nature as intimately as he can. He generally works with whatever comes to hand: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns. “I think it’s incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.” Goldsworthy is generally considered the founder of modern rock balancing, whose title explains the nature of the designs.

“I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.”

I think Goldsworthy is an incredible artist. It takes a lot of talent and hard work to handle the materials that he uses in his designs. His use of vibrant colors intertwined with the neutral colors of the earth and nature is so beautiful. It brings a new respect to using things that we already have available to us and making it into art.

“Artist/Naturalist Andy Goldsworthy.” Morning Earth Connects & Celebrates Arts & Ecology. Web. 11 Oct. 2009. http://www.morning-earth.org/ARTISTNATURALISTS/AN_Goldsworthy.html.

The Art Guys, Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing, have experimented with a wide range of materials and activities in their attempt to expand the dialog and boundaries of art. Sculpture, drawing, performances, installations and video are among the many forms The Art Guys have employed, with food, drugs, pencils, baseball bats, car lot flags, toothbrushes and matches as just a small sampling of the unconventional materials they have utilized. Using an open and offbeat “direct-to-the public” methodology, they have presented their work in grocery stores, movie theaters, airports, restaurants, sports arenas and many other non-traditional venues for experiencing art while also
exploiting mass media and entertainment to explore contemporary society and issues. They are perhaps most well known for their numerous staged performances, public spectacles, and “behavioral” interventions in a wide array of situations that have blurred the divisions between art and life.

For more than a quarter of a century, The Art Guys have intrigued, entertained, puzzled and moved those who have come into contact with their art. Theirs is a world where the everyday becomes monumental, where humor is serious, and the ridiculous meets the sublime.

These guys are the most unique duo in art that I personally have seen. Their art scares, intrigues, and inspires me. I think the idea of using drugs in their art is totally taboo and daring. The idea that they work together instead of being separate artists really shows the success in working as a team.

The Art Guys Official Website. The Art Guys. Web. 6 Oct. 2009. http://www.theartguys.com/Bio_ArtGuys.pdf .

Once I turned in my project for grading, I realized I had a lot of things I would like to have changed.
Ten things I would change:
1. Add two additional 4″ x 4″ pieces to front and back for correct folding for title page and blank back page.
2. Touch up the taping from connecting the two pieces.
3. Make the black in “Figure-Ground” design more solid.
4. Make the black in “Closure” design more solid.
5. Folds should be cleaner.
6. Make cleaner cuts on the top and bottom of my taping.
7. Erase pencil marks from the border completely.
8. Erase pencil marks from some of the designs completely.
9. Clean up the edges of the composition with an emery board.
10. Re-evaluate all of the measurements.

8 Solutions:

Then I also saw a lot of things I liked about my accordion book.
Ten things I liked:
1. I had an overall neat craft.
2. The medium I used didn’t bleed through.
3. I researched and was familiar with the concepts of all the elements.
4. My designs were well-centered on the layout of the pages.
5. I had clean, straight cuts on the overall composition.
6. I managed my time well when completing the project.
7. I did a good job of keeping everything clean. No fingerprints.
8. I took the creation of the design on the final copies VERY seriously.
9. My name was written neatly on the front of the composition.
10. I had fun doing it!

Jean-Michel Basquiat created paintings and drawings filled with imagery that describes his ideas about life and the world around him. He became active as an artist while still a teenager and was world-famous by the age of twenty-three. He was considered an exceptional creative talent by any standard, and at a young age gained great fame and became a cultural hero to younger artists. Who was Basquiat? Tragically, his career spanned only eight years. He died of a drug overdose at age twenty-seven. The answers are in his life and work. Basquiat first gained notoriety as a teenage graffiti poet and musician. By 1981, at the age of twenty, he had turned from spraying graffiti on the walls of buildings in Lower Manhattan to selling paintings in SoHo galleries, rapidly becoming one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. Astute collectors began buying his art, and his gallery shows sold out. Critics noted the originality of his work, its emotional depth, unique iconography, and formal strengths in color, composition, and drawing.

His art is not nearly as interesting as his life. I know that he used heroin, but reading about his whereabouts it seemed like he was high all the time. Nothing made sense, except for his love for art. His pieces are unique and crazy. The picture I posted above is Andy Worhol as a banana. What?!

Exhibition: Basquiat. Brooklyn Museum. Web. 23 Sept. 2009. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/basquiat/.

Street to Studio: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Brooklyn Museum. Web. 23 Sept. 2009.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/basquiat/street-to-studio/.

The subject matter of his paintings, installations, and public projects is often drawn from African-American popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go,” says Marshall. In his “Souvenir” series of paintings and sculptures, he pays tribute to the Civil Rights movement with mammoth printing stamps featuring bold slogans of the era—Black Power!—and paintings of middle-class living rooms where ordinary African-American citizens have become angels tending to a domestic order populated by the ghosts of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and other heroes of the 1960s. In “RYTHM MASTR,” Marshall creates a comic book for the twenty-first century, pitting ancient African sculptures come to life against a cyberspace elite that risks losing touch with traditional culture. Marshall’s work is based on a broad range of art-historical references, from Renaissance painting to black folk art, from El Greco to Charles White. A striking aspect of his paintings is the emphatically black skin tone of his figures, a development the artist says emerged from an investigation into the invisibility of blacks in America and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness. Marshall believes “you still have to earn your audience’s attention every time you make something.” The sheer beauty of his work speaks to an art that is simultaneously formally rigorous and socially engaged.

I love the idea and inspiration for his work. Everyone should have experiences and things that are important to their lives that makes their art come to life, and Kerry James Marshall does just that. The unique thing about his pieces are that he portrays the subjects as the deepest of black, really sealing the ideas of African American roots. In a way his art is abstract, but it clearly states his vision and idea for each story he tells.

Art:21. PBS. Web. 23 Sept. 2009. http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/marshall/.