Douglas Coupland OC OBC is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist who was born on December 30, (1961) in CFB Baden–Solingen, Germany. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob.
Digital Orca, in the lovely Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Nevertheless, his creations are seen all around Vancouver. Artworks such as a Golden Tree which was made in 2016 at the Marine Drive and Cambie Street and Bow Tie which was made in 2015 at the Park Royal, West Vancouver, or a Terry Fox Memorial which was made in 2011 at the Terry Fox Plaza, BC Place Stadium, etc.
Charm Bracelet, all the same Vancouver.
When I first arrived in Canada, I saw the works of this amazing artist in Toronto, Ontario, and back then I was impressed and interested in the works of this creator. When I arrived in Vancouver, BC, my love for such art pieces got even stronger. Bold, unique ideas are mixed with physical materials that create architecturally pleasing installations. For sure I like this combination!
Susan Kare is an American artist and graphic designer who was born on February 5, (1954) in New York. She is best known for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the first Apple Macintosh from 1983 to 1986. She worked in Apple and after was a Creative Director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985.
You should have, even once in your life interact with her design creations (especially if you are reading this now). Because all those icons where initially born by the hands of this unprecedented designer. “Woman who gave the Macintosh a smile” and a distinct characteristic. She gave not only the smile to it, but also the quality of a something more humane and living because her designs reflect just that.
“Bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo-digital art forms, all of which I had practiced before going to Apple,” recalled Kare. “I didn’t have any computer experience, but I had experience in graphic design.”
Barbara “Bobbie” Stauffacher Solomon is an American landscape architect and graphic designer, who was born in 1928 in California. She is well known for her large-scale interior Supergraphics that were highly influential in the 1960s and 70s, same as the exterior signage at Sea Ranch in Sonoma County, California (which you will see down below).
The influential Sea Ranch Tennis Club.
Her signature is bold and impressive shapes which she combines into magnificent and massive forms that easily and as if freely blend, and at the same time stand out in the architectural solutions and overall designs she creates. The way she plays with the colours is interesting too because it never looks too much. It emphasizes the idea of movement, the energy that elegantly and a little bit rebelliously looks, and feels.
Her expressiveness reflects through the feeling of motion that she develops in her visual compositions that catch the eye (and the breath). Movement, I think that it is her second signature.
Milton Glaser is an American graphic designer who was born on June 26, (1929) in New York and died on June 26, (2020) in the same New York. His most notable designs include the I Love New York logo, a 1966 poster for Bob Dylan, and the logos for DC Comics, Stony Brook University and Brooklyn Brewery.
He, to claim, is a legend in the graphic design industry, and I, as a graphic designer myself understand why is that when I am looking at his works.
“Logic is not as powerful as intuition”, this artist once said, and I think that this quote is important because it reflects the intuitive side of the treatment of the ideas and the professional experience which then pours out into the success, worldwide recognition.
One of my favourite details I found about the approach of Milton Glazer is that all the time he tried to come up differently with ideas for different situations. As for the artworks above and below. They share similar colour palettes and imitations of the person, but the way they look is totally different. I will not state that it is because of the different design principles in the first place, but more about the feel, the style of the drastically different ideas and works in conclusion.
Paul Rand is an American art director, who was born on August 15, (1914) in New York and died on November 26, (1996) in Connecticut. He is a legendary graphic designer, best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, ABC, etc. He was one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practise the Swiss Style of graphic design and one of the earliest pioneers of the New York School of design.
His works are truly unique, especially in the way how this artist picked up the colours and combined them into the interesting art choices with the use of design principles and rules, which include contrast, shape, material, type, font and imagery.
Vol. 9, No. 1, July/August 1938
Even though this artist is more about the “Swiss” approach, it did not bother him to dive into the expressiveness and new lands of the creative world of his imagination. And, in my opinion, it made him stand out from the rest of the designers of his time, because our unique ideas, same as many of Paul Rand’s ones, are the key to the success and a truly interesting life which, by the way, can inspire others…
“Vassiliev’s principal themes, which were born while he was in Russia and continue to the present day, are his memories of home and houses, roads, forests, fields, friends, and family. Vassiliev always starts his creative process from very personal memory, from his sacred space, the safeguarded inner center, and connects it with the visual image. Vassiliev masterfully incorporates elements from different times and spaces and arranges them throughout his paintings according to the logic and ‘energetic’ space of the painting”, 2004: Ye. Petrova, N. Kolodzei, et al., Oleg Vassiliev: Memory Speaks: Themes and Variations, St Petersburg: Palace Editions, Moscow, Russia.
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Oleg Vasiliev was born on November 4, 1931, in Moscow. Since childhood, he loved to draw, initially – to sketch from postcards. Having entered the Tretyakov Gallery (Russia) for the first time, the future artist became its regular visitor. In 1952-1958 he studied at the graphic (although he dreamed of getting into the painting) faculty of the Moscow State Art Institute named after V. I. Surikov. But in the academic school of painting, Vasiliev did not find ways of artistic expressiveness, consonant with his own inner vision of the world. After graduating from the institute, he continues his creative search and turned to the experience of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s.
In the early 1990s, a strong interest in the art of Soviet nonconformist artists arose in the West, and Vasiliev, as a brilliant representative of this art, flew to the United States, where his personal exhibition was successfully held, and since then, the artist has emigrated to the United States (died on January 26, 2013, in New York, USA).
House on Island Anzer.
“For the first time, I saw in nature reflections of the light and understood the laws of energy in the white canvas during our trip, together with Eric Bulatov, to the North of Russia on island Anzer in the White See. A House of the Island Anzer, 1965, is the first painting that I decided to sign as my own. I consciously put aside everything and began to work on the interactions of the surface space in the canvas. That was the beginning of my so-called “abstractionist period,” – Oleg Vassiliev.
“By the early 1960s, Favorsky’s theories about physics for color and the movement of color through space had led Vassiliev to a series of experiments that culminated with the House on the Island Anzer in 1965. With the House on the Island Anzer, Vassiliev found his voice. “It was the first time I realized that this was mine. These were not Falk’s ideas, not Favorsky’s. This was mine.” The quote is from Amei Walach (OlegVassiliev: The Treachery of Memory, the Space of Light in “Oleg Vassiliev Memory Speaks”), and I personally think that it in its deepest way reflect the importance of this piece to the artist and his background, because it reflects the beginning of his creative and truly unique path as a person who found the important knowledge and experience.
As for me, it reflects so much at one moment, even though it is ably made in its minimalistic transitions and forms. The spectrum of the colors in it is so active and intense that they translate what the artist felt at that moment yourself because colors in the most masterful way give us the idea and feeling of the atmosphere of what the artist wanted us to see.
Illumination.
“The work of Oleg Vasiliev resembles a road, a path where each step opens another dimension of reality. By its storyline, it is really connected with the theme of the road that an artist, a person must walk along in order to discover himself and his future possibilities. Steppe or forest, highway or path – this road determines human destiny, full of uncertainty and expectations” was meditating about the works he infused Vitaly Patsyukov. And again, this is an accurate interpretation of the experience and knowledge which the artist wanted to explore and in the end give to humanity because this is exactly what he wanted to evoke in people’s minds. He certainly did a great job with that!
Alexander Liberman was an artist with a huge past and unique view and way of thinking, which was full of artistic passion and which made people remember him throughout history. To understand more about this artist in the first lines of this blog, this quote from the Artnet, “known for his signature red steel sculptures and geometric paintings, in addition to his 30-year tenure at the helm of Condé Nast as its editorial director”, suits the best.
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Alexander Liberman was born on September 4, 1912, in Kyiv, Ukraine. In 1921 he left his home country which was part of the Soviet Union and settled in Paris, where he was studying and gaining precious experience and knowledge at the Sorbonne and the École des Beaux-Arts, focusing on philosophy and architecture. In New York he arrives in 1941, bringing in it a modern, protean approach, ideas, and feel of true beauty, combined with European delicacy and Soviet’s futuristic Constructivism. All that was a beautiful and unique mix of taste, which then was translated into the Vogue magazine, as this man was an art director in it too.
One of his works.
He was a graphic designer, but it did not stop him from being a sculptor, painter, architect. His artworks on the same scale made him recognizable in the world of art. “His minimalist paintings are often comprised of circular forms in primary colors and display his [experience and] knowledge of graphic design. Liberman’s industrial-sized sculptures are almost all in the same cherry-red color and intertwined geometric and organic forms.”, Kelly Koester in Galerie magazine.
“The repetition and interweaving of shapes and lines in Liberman’s 1952 Beat give the enamel-on-aluminum work a dynamic energy”, Galerie magazine.
I can state that I am deeply inspired by this man, but I think it also important to include the opinion of a former Design Director at Vogue and Vanity Fair, who had the same aftertaste of pure emotion and respect, “by [offering] graphic proof of the consistency of his vision, which married the iconoclasm of Russian Constructivism with old-world savoir-faire and American know-how. It is also a disciple’s affectionate tribute to an elusive master”, Vogue magazine.
For this assignment I came up with a simple design which was meant to not distract from the typefaces and their “biography”. I included complementary colours with a slight gradient, which in my opinion worked out just fine. The small detail with the white lines under the examples of each typeface are meant to focus and divide from each other. In general, I am pleased with the final work and its minimalistic approach which reflects assigned epoch, so I will mark myself just excellent. The time spent was around three hours and for this work I used gouache.
“[In the process of continuous research], a team of scientists led by Christian Körner [found out] that trees of different species exchange huge amounts of carbon via the fungal internet, [the wood-wide web], that connects their roots”, states the Yong, Ed. in the beginning of the “The Wood Wide Web” article. According to the author, scientists that appear in the article used special equipment to organize it on the five wild spruces by making on their tubes “a series of tiny holes, which pumped out carbon dioxide”. The “end results” of that research were fascinating, and so it made scientists abroad continue it all around the world. Eventually, with the development and new understanding they came up with the conclusion that this process happens due to the existence of fungi Mycorrhiza which inhabits roots of the plants and it “provides phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon-based sugars” of the plants. It is truly fascinating research which proves the fact that our planet is unique in all sorts of ways, from the living organisms that exist on it, to the particular, strange and interesting way they communicate, exchange and deliver.
Is a fascinating French artist who was innovative in explorations of color and form while participating in the development of abstract art in the early 20th century.
But, to be honest, I choose this artist not only because of the vivid colors and interesting shapes of her works but also because she intrigued me with her biography and the place where she was born. To be precise, she was born in the small village, Hradyz’k, Poltava Oblast in Ukraine on November 13, 1885 (some sources argue that she was born in Odesa, Ukraine). And well, this is the place where my grandfather resided, so I was highly excited to learn about herself as well as moments of life that motivated, inspired, and led her into the expressionism movement.
Sonia Delaunay.
“Sonia Delaunay was a multi-disciplinary abstract artist and a key figure in the Parisian avant-garde. Alongside her husband, Robert Delaunay, she pioneered the movement of Simultanism. Her exploration of the interaction between colors has created a sense of depth and movement throughout her oeuvre”, Tate.
At the age of seven, she started to live with her “middle class” uncle, Henri Terk, and his wife, Anna, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Because of the rich culture and wealthy city she was living in at a time, Sonia was infused with a special inspiration and knowledge, experience in it, which greatly influenced her life and future decisions (especially in art). “Nevertheless, her childhood memories of Ukraine remained with her and she often referred back to the ‘pure’ color and bright costumes of the Ukrainian peasant weddings”, Tate.
Artist was truly creative and unique at the work she was doing, so it is no surprise that her talent and ideas expanded beyond painting, and, as such one of the many works that reflect the idea of it is an illustration for the cover of Vogue in 1926…
“As well as a major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bielefeld in 1958, Delaunay was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964. She has also had her work shown at Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Musée National d’Art Moderne and Tate Modern”, Tate.
Prismes électriques.
The painting above is one of the most popular ones Sonia has created in 1914, and it displays Delaunay’s trademark – concentric circles at their best. Interpreted as an ode to modernity, she paints the lights and the rush of Boulevard Saint Michel into an almost complete abstraction of colors and texture, except two figures, which remain “discernible” in the lower center of the painting. The name of the piece, translated in English will be Electric Prisms, as for me, hints into the symbolic meaning of the living organism, or I better write person, who caught the attention of the artist with the way they were, and so, redistributing into the abstract manner they became prisms, with the electricity instead of the zest they had in the artist’s eyes and unique world view.
Portuguese Market.
This piece caught my attention to the same extent as the previous one not only because of the colors the artist masterly choose but also because of the “silhouettes” of the fruits I can clearly recognize. The interesting part for me was that if you will not concentrate on the “products in the market” only, but on the whole painting, you will see the face with the colored eye on the left and the big nose at the center…
Pajamas for Tristan Tzara.
To conclude (even though I do not want to finish yet), I will quote some of the thoughts that were remarkable and that impressed me, as such:
I always changed everything around me… I made my first white walls so our paintings would look better. I designed my furniture; I have done everything. I have lived my art.
Colour is the skin of the world.
Colour was the hue of number.
One who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of one color on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised infinitely diverse imagery.
