9 posts tagged “design”
And now for something completely different....I got tired of circles and organic shapes, so here are some right angles.
I've got more flowery shapes today...more rose than anything, but not even too much like a rose. (A rose by any other shape, maybe?) I've been interested in how the shapes can look so different depending on what is emphasized by filling with color, or what is reversed to white, etc.
I'm planning to go back into the past patterns and post little notes about each of the versions, and which I feel are the most (and least) successful. I also want to revisit the colors, proportions and repeats of some of my past patterns. That's the trouble with doing a pattern a day --- I'm not giving much time to each design, so some turn out better than others. But I'm considering this blog more about the process of creating the work, and when I get a batch of patterns that feel "finished," I'll post those elsewhere. I'm thinking maybe I should set up verityfreebern.com for the pattern design, rather than putting the patterns under the Grow umbrella, but I haven't decided yet. I still have to set up the Honeysuckle website for the nursing pillow and I'm not sure I want to be responsible for maintaining three websites and a blog. Not to mention the three boys....
On to the rose patterns.
Back to fish. In my post on 12/8, I was discussing my inexplicable affinity for drawing fish. As I mentioned, my friend Kelton Osborn has also been drawn to fish. (Hmmm....draw, drawn. Just looked it up, and "draw" is from the Latin root duco, ducere meaning lead or draw. Draw has many, many meanings. But I digress.)
My sister thoughtfully sent me an entry from an online symbolism dictionary, in the hopes of clarifying the fish attraction. Here are some of the highlights:
"The symbolic nature of fish is as inseparable from that of WATER as the two are connected in life. In psychology, water symbolizes the depths of the unconscious, and fish are the "live material from the depths of the personality, relating to fertility and the life-giving powers of the maternal realms within us" (Biederman, 131). Yet fish are also cold-blooded, not driven by passion, and often represent such emotionless entities.
So that's helpful. Depending on my mood, I can be concerned that I might be an emotionless entity, or be comforted by the knowledge that I'm not in danger of drowning in the ocean of sufferings.
Kelton, my very talented architect/designer/artist friend, was kind enough to send me the darkly beautiful fish lithographs included in this post. Obviously, the smiley pen-and-ink fish is mine.
I've found a few pattern designer blogs, now that I know that pattern designers exist. One in particular that I just discovered through Design*Sponge is amazing...Julia Rothman. Maybe I'm irrationally swayed because her work reminds me of what I would like my work to be like, if I were a fully actualized pattern designer. Here are a few of my favorite patterns of Julia's:
I've always loved patterns, and have been drawing them since I was a tiny kid. I have a plaster-headed, faux-fur bodied puppet that I made when I was in kindergarten, and it's head is covered with circles filled with abstract patterns. If I can find it in the basement I'll put up a pic of it.
So it seems very comfortable to be designing patterns again, and I love it. I've continued to do a few pen-and-ink drawings through the years, mostly as charity auction donations, and they've all been fish filled with patterns. Why fish? I don't know, but I recently discovered that my friend Kelton had also been drawn to fish throughout his artistic life.
I didn't ever consider that I could design patterns commercially, until just recently. They always just seemed like a fun artistic distraction that could be made into fine art when needed, but I knew I wasn't going to be a fine artist. I've always been more interested in large scale production for my work, maybe because I began as a graphic designer. Just recently I've discovered that there are people who are "pattern designers." I know that seems like it should be really obvious, especially for someone like me who has been in the kids' products and textile industry for such a long time. But I always felt like I had to produce something that used the patterns that I designed myself -- bedding, or placemats, or stationary. And that's what I've been doing with Grow ever since.
There was an article in the New York Times a couple of days ago that got me thinking about the evolutionary and genetic aspects of art. It was in the science section, and was titled The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start. The premise is that the creative drive, rather than being frivolous, is actually an evolutionary adaptation of its own. The making of art has drawn people together across cultures and times, and so has value in its ability to bring individuals and communities together. As the article says,
"Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what [neurobiologist Ellen] Dissanayake calls “artifying,” people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of art, the relative weakness of the individual can be traded up for the strength of the hive, cohered into a social unit ready to take on the world."
This idea of social coherence is also a currently trendy marketing idea: consumer products help people feel like they belong to a "tribe," and therefore define who they are. "What tribe are you part of?" is a question that design, style and marketing is supposed to help one answer.
The NYT article continues, "As David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at Binghamton University, said, the only social elixir of comparable strength is religion, another impulse that spans cultures and time."
Interesting.
Makes me wonder whether this aesthetic/conceptual separation between
people, or "tribes," will become more distinct and divisive, or if we
could somehow work toward a return to more community-oriented art. Art
as unifier, rather than divider.
I took Henry with me to Cherry Creek to deliver my tree/lamp donation to One Home for the Bough House project. I knew he would enjoy seeing the trees that were created by architects and designers, and also he likes modern furniture and design. As I suspected, he looked closely at everything and noticed connections between the art displayed at One Home and his own work on Line Rider. He has a natural tendency to use repeating patterns that are very graphic and tightly composed. He also has a really good grasp of positive/negative space. Here's a logo that he designed for himself in the Line Rider program, and that he uses as his signature when he posts on Line Rider blogs and message boards.
The lamp/tree has been delivered. It was harder than I anticipated to put it all together. I had some mishaps with the Liquid Nails and also the printing process. Here are a couple of pics:
