Artists often work intuitively, myself included, and great works can’t be summed up in words.  Design, on the other hand, deals with aspects of image making that can be talked about and examined.  In a phrase, design deals with how images work. If you understand something about why your favorite artworks are so powerful, you’ve got a much better chance of making something great. In some ways, learning design is a process of becoming aware of the obvious. That’s because much of it is based on consistent threads and tendencies in human perception, and we’re all the same species here, so far.

Design is a way of looking at problems (the “design process”), a vocabulary of “design principles” that enables one to speak intelligently about images, and, for this class, a basic grounding in some tools and materials.

We’ll find our material in old art, new art, commercial design, cinema, random chance, and the world around us. Projects will range from laborious charts to wild splatters, from pen and ink to paint, to printmaking, to animation. Increasingly, the world relies on images to convey information, rather than words, for better or worse. Commercially oriented design and advertising puts much of its energy into manipulating viewers’ emotions and taking advantage of perceptual blind spots that are (apparently) built into the underlying mechanics of the nervous system. If you don’t understand how images are constructed, you’re at the mercy of the various media and advertising industries. Boundaries between art & design are less clear than ever, and as the culture becomes predominantly visually oriented, ignorance about the basic strategies of design becomes, simply, ignorance.  We’ll fix that, don’t you worry. You’ll still have your intuition, and you’ll hopefully get some insight into the workings of your own mind.

Rising always
borders on falling,
as steam inevitably condenses.

Rian Kerrane‘s piece, Velvet Letters, covers two walls with an evolving tangle of letters/words that wrestles with red-flocked circles and leafy shapes. Visitors add their own significant words and phrases to a rolling list, and the new thoughts and sounds get composed and installed as the run of the show continues. Labor intensive interactive installation. If all of Letterkenny gets a word or two in, the wall will be a highly-figured near-black with the texture of text and its intersections. There’s still some space, so bring your words.

My short movie looks great on a framed monitor lent by the Letterkenny Arts Centre. (See this previous post for an even-more-abstracted variant of what’s being shown.)  The show is open to view right now. A wide range of people have come through and are amazed, puzzled, charmed, or caught off guard by Letterkenny’s most peculiar currently-showing movie. Everyone I run into seems to have something to say, which can’t be bad, and most seem to be productively befuddled, which is perhaps how the human mind evolves. It’s how mine does. I like this writhing flick. Hope you do. Stop by the opening and talk to us, and to the exhibition’s adventurous curator, Seamus Quinn (pictured).

Primordial Soup Cartoon from Eric Waldemar on Vimeo.

Several notable curiosities came out of last fall’s “Time and Attention” show, and not everything got included in the gallery exhibition. Here’s a sort of image poem that tells of the emergence of life and form on Earth. Interpretive dance, perhaps. This should give you a decent sense of what it was like back then for those ambitious little critters. Millions of years are compressed into a couple of minutes, so bear with me if I missed anything important.

Grabbing odd moments in a busy life as a daddy/lecturer/artist, I’ve been working on a series of tiny prints, some of which will appear in an intricate array at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design’s Rude Gallery this September. There’ll be movies, too, old and new. You’ll find a few select images above, but you can also look to the image archive tab above for a sprawling, unedited view of recent excreta. Well, or you can just click here. Some of them duplicate images from other recent “slideshows” below. Be patient as the page loads. Lots of pictures. Hope you like ‘em.

Several people asked me about relationships between the ink drawings in Time and Attention and the prints. Many of the drawings were made during a period when I was working on images for Richard Loranger’s book Poems for Teeth.  Working with black ink and a brush, a drawing either coalesces or goes wrong. No reworking is really possible, and many are destroyed. One commits to a mark, uncertain of why, and with luck and grace, something emerges, vivid and surprising. Monotype, on the other hand (which makes up much of the exhibition) allows endless reworking, and an image can change into another image and yet another over the course of several hours. Still, though, there’s a moment where one has to commit, and run the plate through the press, and, like a gestural ink drawing, the image either coalesces or fails to work, irrevocably. The best images are often transformed by the press and come as a surprise, just as my favorite ink drawings startle me and make me feel like a fortunate spectator in a process I direct, but don’t really comprehend.