Vook Bebiew X

As we rebel against beauty, the issue of "design" comes in: not design as composition, but design as - I'm sorry! - a judgement call.
My senior art project in college was my hand-built coil ceramics that were totally non-functional, but meangingful - like a sculpture - and completely unique, but the only hint of beauty I could ascribe to them was an earthy but sparkly glaze that a fellow student-gal kindly lent me. I applied it in a couple different hues, to all the pieces. "Rule-wise" there was no glaze required, but something within judged the whole design as insignificant, if it didn't have at least an attempt at beauty.
That's a judgement call, and that's where the Da-Da ists made their departure. They moved into left brain. They made left-brain choices that became so extreme that they could declare that "extremity" is art, that contrast is art, that anything displayed could be art. But I say:
No design. No beauty.
No standards.
Little art.

Vook Rebiew IX

MEANINGFUL AND UNIQUE, BUT NOT BEAUTIFUL.
In his book Whole New Mind (WNM) Dan Pink says (and I'm paraphrasing) that Right-Brain is "meaningful, unique and beautiful". I like this premise, and he elaborates upon it throughout WNM. To me this is the most pure definition of visual art, whether it's 2- or 3-dimensional, and of music, dance, theatre, authorship, calligraphy, flower-arrangement, singing, public speaking, performances, even stand-up comedy. (I heard it said - as a side-bar - that Jerry Seinfeld says "if you work CLEAN, you can work ANYWHERE," and that to me is where "beauty" comes in, added to "unique" and "funny"!)
But back to Right-Brain as a definition. D. Pink, in WNM, says that "intellectual" is not considered Right-Brain, but Left-Brain. And there's obviously a place for "intellectual". However in art, for example in DaDa-ism, which for many is extremely MEANINGFUL, and of course UNIQUE, (that's a given!), I feel they were clearly rebelling against BEAUTY.

To me, it's a question of DESIGN.
Stay tuned.

Illustration

Another form of 2-dimensional art is illustration. Illustration comes in many forms, including books (and children's books in particular), posters, murals (again), decoration, advertising, poetry, and even mapwork.

Comes to mind the memorable illustrations from my childhood, in Mother Goose: so many poems, and most of them had a skillful and charming line-illustration in accompaniment. There were long, puffy skirts, ruffly, broad-brimmed bonnets, excellent animals, some of whom who talked, pretty English-style trees on the horizon, and of course to top it all off, Mother, with her ringlets, riding on the bridled Goose.

Illustrations can also come in novels, to mark the onset of certain chapters, and can be simple but well-designed graphics in a woodcut style print, in black and white only. This spring I've enjoyed reading the novel "Cross Creek," from the '30's if I remember right, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, (she was the author of "The Yearling"). This book contained a lovely bunch of these black-and-white illustrations, picturing the "swamp" country in Florida, and which additionally kept me enthralled the whole time!

This is about a little quail with checkerboard wings who is wearing red high-top sneakers.

Actually it is my rendition of plagiarized art from two different magazine pictures......and yes, it is 2-dimensional: a 2-dimensional quail in two-dimensional high-top sneakers.....

(Oh, the fun you can have applying art to a square ceramic tile!)

This tile was rendered by myself, with colored glazes, and then placed in an "06" cone kiln, to be fired to perfection.

For my next 6-inch tile I am going to apply three borders in a row, as is often done on a woven Indian rug (Native American). These borders will stretch right across the middle of the tile instead of being found only at the edges of the square. Thus one can think in only two dimensions, and turn out a nice little piece of glazed art!

Juxtapose!

There's a simple combo I've been turning out lately with my 6-inch tiles. A tile of course, is once again, a two-dimensional concept.......

Because I've moved down here to the American Southwest, I've discovered that the huge tall saguaro cactus (pron. sah-wah-ro) is a visual concept that is very easy to draw, or represent in two dimensions (I'll get to the tile in a minute). And this is proved by all the hundreds of published photographs of same: picturesque saguaros throughout the media-realms, in so many magazines and newspapers and ads and TV shows, and paintings and decorative themes!

And in the ceramics studio, there are some glazes that you might call "randomly explosive"glazes: there's one that turns out to look exactly like the Milky Way galaxy, and it's a perfect background for my doodled saguaro cactus in the foreground! Point is, a person can juxtapose one simple shape in the center, or foreground of, say, a 6" tile, with a crazy pattern in the background, and it works!

Gridlock!

Let's take a piece of graph paper. Now, graph paper is not what we normally think of as paper on which we render art, but I want to show you something, and you guessed it, it's regarding two dimensions. (Granted, graph paper particularly screams "two dimensions!")

Think about a repeating pattern of your own choice. It will wind up looking like a repeating pattern on a surface design, or on a piece of fabric. Connecting-tiles comes to mind, or even the lowly linoleum patterns. Design one pattern, or simply pick a very basic design like a music staff, or a simple logo that you are familiar with, or a triangle within a circle, or vice versa, etc.

Now decide how big a rectangle or square you want to use on your graph paper for this repeating design. For example a one-inch square, or a two-inch square, or a rectangle 1"by 2".

Soon you will see, with repeating your "design-logo" throughout the squares or the rectangles you have chosen, what your two-dimensional grid looks like, or your "linoleum," or your surface design on your fabric.

Design Collage

Pick a design, or an art-theme for your collage. This is for the deeper thinker. Think "color", as in shades of one color-tone, or one or more color-tones, or, think "consistency", and that would be one that expresses a particular message, be it intellectual property, or certain types of pictures, say, cartoons, or Postage Stamps, or scraps of fabric, or names, or alphabets, or flowers, or animals, or landscapes, or family pix, etc. or any combination thereof.

One time I made a postage stamp "design collage" on a tray. I applied many coates of Mod Podge afterwards, to give it a finished surface.

Another time I collected pix of pretty angels' wings from all different sources, put them all in their own folder (we're talkin hard copy, of course) and when the time was right I assembled them all into one "design collage"; I believe it was on a decoupage plaque I picked up at a thrift store.