#for one ads for a while were an art form combining humor and creativity and plays for emotions | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rockmiyabideusexmachina · 5 years ago

Text

2020 Megaman Valentine’s Day Contest - Cat. 1 (Talent) Results!

Thank you to everyone again for your patience! This is getting posted way later than I wanted to. As much as I try to keep it short and sweet, I never do, so bear with my walls of text.

For the talent category this year, the theme was about killing Mega Man with kindness. More specifically, entrants had to create their own original love/Valentine’s-themed Robot Master or equivalent boss character that was created to defeat Mega Man with the power of love! Even though the theme title and concept alluded more to the classic Robot Master character contests, designs for any series were acceptable. But other than one Navi and one Reploid entry, everyone stuck to a Classic-series themed creation. So you were all pretty consistent!

There were a total of 16 entries for this category this year. Thank you all for your participation! It was extremely hard to choose winners for this category, because you all had really clever and creative concepts based off of this theme. So thank you for thinking up such clever and cool characters!!

Also thanks to Reploid 21XX for the coloring book prizes and for some additional insight.

Again, raffle prize winners will be contained in both posts, so keep an eye out between your name and your art. Not all raffle prize winners are contained in this post. I’ll be contacting all winners soon enough, so sit tight! Might be late after work tonight, so don’t panic if you don’t hear from me right after this is posted.

Your category winners and full gallery of entries are right here, after the break:

Category 1 (Talent) - Dr. Wily’s Greatest Creation: Killing Mega Man With Kindness

[Full Talent Gallery]

1.) @mo-sketchbook:

*For coming in 1st, mo-sketchbook has won $100 via Paypal, or a prize of their choice up to that value AND a Rockman 7 Coloring Book.*

First and foremost, I appreciate all the effort you put into covering so many aspects of your creation, from the various design viewpoints, weapon get form for Mega Man, and showing the weapon in action. I really loved all the things you integrated into the design to give off the feeling that it is a love-based character. The “love bug” form, cherub-like Heat/Plug-type facial features, and how you utilized hearts in different ways for his design and powers.

I’m no Keiji Inafune, but I feel like this is a concept he would greenlight, in terms of it following his Robot Master design formula. It doesn’t need to be super detailed or flashy, but still fits the mold very well! The thought of the hearts missing their target and love energy then getting weaker is actually pretty clever, too. Cute, and I wuv it.

2.) @peachycircuits:

*For coming in 2nd, peachy has won $50 via Paypal, or a prize of their choice up to that value AND a Rockman 7 Coloring Book*

As usual, on the technical side of things, your art is one of the more polished and clean entries of the bunch. Combining a couple different aspects - swans as a creature known as a symbol of love, bonded for life like in marriage, and turning that into an inseparable pair of Robot Masters, was a clever way to think about your design, in terms of the theme of this category.

And then echoing that with the iconic Swan Lake, making them ballet dancers, is like taking Tundra Man and Gemini Man’s concept up another notch. Plus, not gonna lie, amused seeing Mega Man getting equipped with a tutu. LOL So even if it’s not as heart-themed as most of the other entries, I totally liked how you thought outside the box a little bit for this.

3.) Komito Amae:

*For coming in 3rd, Komito has won $25 via Paypal, or a prize of their choice up to that value*

I figured a cupid-styled arrow theme would pop up in a bunch of entries, but your Reploid, Beta, here caught my eye. Both in terms of the hearts, arrows and wings incorporated into her armor, and the pretty sweet looking buster that she and X both have equipped.

While I’m not sure how it would play out in the game, I think it would be interesting to suddenly take control of random enemies in a stage, and be able to change perspective as them for a short time, after you have shot them. Whether it would be to take out an enemy horde, or perform a task X can’t that the enemy could, it would be different! Can’t see it quite having the same powerful effect on a Maverick boss, but it’s certainly neat to think about how that could work!

And the rest of the wonderful entries, in alphabetical order by alias:

@autobot-bumblebee:

*Raffle Prize Winner* Dreamwave Comics: Issue 4 Page 15

I’m sorry you didn’t win a cash prize this time! Please don’t take me hostage! I totally loved the creative vintage chocolate factory mascot backstory, along with making your entry like an Ariga-styled character sheet page. Certainly get that retro feel with her clothing design. Her rose blade kinda reminds me of other hand-turned-blade-like-weapon characters, such as Alan Gabriel in the Big O or Ed transmuting one in FMA. Which is always a snazzy transformation for a robot!

@drewblossom:

In all honesty, if I hadn’t placed you in the humor category, I think this would have very likely been somewhere in the top 3 for this category. A cuddly teddy bear with a massive Ariga-Quick Man-sized heart for a chest, extending flailing tube arms, who just wants to hug Mega Man to death is so amusing and awesome of a design. Hugs for everyone!

FluffyFrostyFury:

Your take of heat-seeking arrows and the added high jump powers were certainly a different take compared to the other cupid-styled creations. Definitely would be nice gameplay bonuses when equipped. I like how Mega Man also has the wings sprout out of his head, to mimic Cherub Woman’s pigtails, rather than the usual spot you would assume, on his back.

HealerCharm:

Hahaha, I love how your creation has caused Mega Man to wave the white flag after falling in love...wait, it isn’t White Day, and he should be giving her a gift if it was! XD Her hair tied up into a heart was a creative touch, much like how her dress flows into all those heart shapes. Adorable!

@inanehipsterslang:

Um, can...can I count on you to vote for Bernie this election year?

Remember kids, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, looks don’t matter. Everyone deserves love, even those you consider ‘vermin.’ This was certainly an unexpected take on the theme, and gave me a good laugh, too. ‘Boiling-hot water...with a hint of citrus!’ It burns, but it smells so lemony-fresh!! XD But the two different moves fit together well, to protect and attack.

I like how you still incorporated a heart shape into Rodent Woman’s design with, both in her chest shape and the “nostril” area which is echoed in the Rodent Rover. And also props for giving her the non-armor form, unique compared to other entries.

Mattasaurs:

On the one hand, your design feels so different for a Robot Master, and maybe more Navi-like. But then I get the Astro/Galaxy-type eye vibe, and sort of a Plant Man~ish body with Devil hands feel, and see how it’d fit into Classic. It’s a unique look, and I liked it the more I inspected it. I really do love the idea of the heart bubble entrapping more and more enemies, and the big ol’ group hug ending up bursting their love bubble. It’s a different concept that stood out!

Minnie:

Our Navi of the bunch combined the love bug and cupid design, but your concept changed up the attack to suck out the energy of it’s target. Which almost made me think she should have an arrow-like mosquito nose, to feast on her target that way. XD I liked your wing shield concept and RiCO-styled skirt of hearts. Rock gets some cool shades in his Love Soul/Cross form, and I get the ProtoSoul vibe, with the shield transferring to his arm as well.

@pstart:

Another Heat/Plug-type design Share Man looks cute and sleepy, but is also “clumsy and weak.” His ability is to share body parts, so “the danger is in him sharing his less than ideal parts with his opponents.” It’s a totally neat concept, to see Mega Man lose his buster almost by accident, and now be powerless to stop Share Man. His split color scheme drives home the concept that his parts might not all be his own, and sort of a Frankenstein bot at times. Props to that idea!

While his weapon gives Mega Man the power to make enemies docile and sleepy, I really almost want to see Mega Man get dumb parts of enemies, too! Helmet switched to a Met helmet, Batton wings, a big Suzy eye! It’s now I’ve got your power...but...but what am I supposed to do with it? XD

RetroNinjin:

Unlike most others, your entry pushed the heart theme heavily in her armor design around the entire head and shoulder parts, so I definitely felt the love vibe. The color scheme fits well. Just would have liked to have had seen a little more information about her attack and concept.

RoninApprentice:

Mega Man having a “Wing Man” to set him up is a hilarious and clever idea! I give you kudos for thinking outside the box a bit on your concept and theme here. The shipping chart certainly drives the idea home, too. You still give him a classy/formal look, and keep the wing man aviation origin apparent in his attack style. Certainly a different idea having the heart bowtie transfer to Rock’s helmet in the form change, but it really doesn’t look that bad there, opposed to around his neck like it would be normally.

@star-crossed-swords:

Different from the other cupid concepts, Eros Woman utilizes a Search-Man like targeting system to hit her targets. I like the heart scope addition over her and Rock’s eye when they go into firing mode. You took a different approach to the wing concept compared to others, echoing Cinnamon’s hairstyle in many respects. But it certainly fits with the rest of her design nicely, and looks good for Mega Man’s equipped form.

@star-shaped-soul:

Love that you were able to both include a drawing and your own sprite, to mix in with the weapon equip ones. That is one powerful crush Mega Man has on his enemies now! I feel bad for Crush Man with how big and heavy those snare trap hands of his are. This seems like a Robot Master too cute for Wily to design; more like he stole him and added horrible, cruel hands onto him! This is taking a crush on someone to a whole different level! XD

Yuri Kadry:

When equipped with Cupid Man’s power, I like the visor Mega Man gets. I think this is also a clever use of the weapon, having enemies shot attracted to one another, causing them to collide into each other. Well thought out! Love the original sprite art, and he stands out nicely against the pinks and purples in the background.

#Rockman #Megaman #Mega Man #Rock Miyabi's 2020 Megaman Valentine's Day Contest

20 notes · View notes

laceydelapaz · 5 years ago

Text

Dive Into The World Of Kelly Dabbah Studios

Originally from the beautiful land of Switzerland, Kelly Dabbah now resides in the equally beautiful city of New York City. We discuss her upbringing, dreams, the difference between Miami art and New York art and SO much more. Kelly has a unique and authentic perspective on life and art. Her art will make you realize things you may have never thought of before. Kelly opens the door to creativity and expressive art to everyone.

Give us a glimpse into your childhood. What were you like as a kid?

I was born and raised in Geneva, Switzerland. My parents are from the Middle East and I have three sisters. Growing up with three sisters taught me a lot about girls but it also made me want to hang out with the boys more. I loved dressing like a girl but I felt more comfortable hanging out with boys. And that never changed.

As a child I was always sketching clothes, painting on silk and flipping through interior design magazines. It fulfilled and inspired me. Clothes always represented a way to express myself, a symbol against authority.

Have you always wanted to be an artist, or did you dream of something else?

I always defined myself as “outside the box.” I lived in my own world full of paint, crayons and odd clothing. My two passions have always been Fine Art and Fashion. I always knew that I wanted to be a creator, designer, and artist one day, but didn’t embrace it until my mid-20s. Now, I’m 28 and like feel I’m getting closer and closer to fully expressing myself as an artist.

I was always obsessed with the way clothes would embellish the woman’s body. Most of my drawings were and still are inspired by the curves of women. There was always a desire to combine Fashion and Art but I never felt the confidence to go for it until now.

My family put so much emphasis on having a conservative business education, rather than following your passions. I convinced myself that entering the fashion and art industry was a mere dream. So I put my passions to the side and aimed for a business education in Switzerland. I attended l’Ecole Hotelière de Lausanne and graduated with a Bachelors in Business Management and Hospitality. Even though my time in business school taught me invaluable business and life skills, I always felt incomplete as my creativity was sidelined.

Getting Into Fashion

My only creative outlet at this time was selecting what I wore every day. At this point, it was only a matter of finding the right opportunity to express my vision. It all happened in May 2014.

As a requirement of my undergrad, I had to work for a company of choice. In 2014, I applied to Chanel in New York. I was offered the job, and I excitedly packed my bags for New York. Throughout the experience, I was infatuated and inspired by everything surrounding me. I actually started to draw again. My ideas were flowing and I felt energized. I promised myself that from now on, I would only do what excites my soul.

While in NYC, I went to a Parsons information session and had an urge to enroll. After returning to Switzerland, I began taking technical and sketching lessons again. I knew I needed to build a portfolio if I wanted to return to Parsons. A year later there I was. Attending the school of my dreams, where I was taught everything about design.

Take us through your creative process

I believe the creative process is part of your unconscious. It’s not something you can control or decide. It’s about being sensitive and aware of things that surround you. Like staring at people in the subway, seeing them talking, fighting, dancing, crying, etc. It’s very easy to get inspiration in NYC. All the city’s architecture, art, music, and design are very rich and influential. That’s the main reason why people come to NYC.

Personally, I try to surround myself with creative and positive people. For me, it’s something I try to maintain in my life. You can’t go further in life if you’re surrounded by close-minded people. Most of my friends are musicians and they have big dreams. When we hang, whether in a studio or at shows, it always gives me a lot of encouragement to chase my dreams. My friends have a huge impact on my creative process.

A lot of people get their inspiration from social media. It’s is a great platform where people can exchange ideas and get inspired. I follow lots of art magazines and interior design accounts that give me ideas and inspiration daily. I like to save them and stare at them a few days later and create a mood board.

It’s not about stealing ideas, it is about finding a starting point. I can get inspiration from a flower I saw in the deli or a picture of a flower on Pinterest. This same flower will give me the inspiration to create floral prints that are completely different from the flower I saw.

Is there a difference between Miami art and New York art?

They are very different. New York City is definitely richer in terms of museums, art galleries, artists, curators, etc. It’s a more saturated market. This can make it harder as an artist to get in touch with people because there’s so much talent.

Miami is very interesting for people like me who are just starting. It’s easier to get in touch with people in the art world and have projects going on. I think it’s a great place to get started since people are very open to collaboration and hearing your story. The Miami art scene is growing so fast, there are a lot of new opportunities and great projects to consider. There is a huge potential.

Do you prefer to work on large scale projects with a team or on smaller ones where it’s just you?

I love both. It’s important for me to have my own moment but it’s also important to have a team to work with on large scale projects. It’s like Ying and Yang. Having people helping me on my last large scale installation was amazing. They physically helped me with the whole set up and they gave me so much courage to continue when I felt low.

I love hearing other people’s opinions as long as I stay true to my own. Sometimes you have to take a step back and hear what other people think. We can get caught up in our world and need people to tell us what they think we should do. The creative process can make me feel lonely at times, having people around is essential for me.

Do you bring camp into your everyday life, or does it reside only in your art?

I always felt like my art is more kitsch than glamorous necessarily. There is no better way to process times of chaos and instability than through extreme art or fashion. It’s a fun form of escapism. I try to bring humor, colors, laughter, and extravagance into each aspect of my life. Humor is the answer, to everything, it helps you to move on.

Ironically, I don’t wear anything kitsch. Typically I just black clothes but I love to bring colorful furniture into my home. I love clothes and I always try my best to look good. So, in that sense, I’m bringing camp into my everyday life. My art reflects what is in my mind. I’m just a witness of a society where woman are becoming more powerful and more exuberant. Today it’s like sexuality has become almost ironic. Camp captures that spirit.

If you could switch lives with any artist, past or present, who would you choose?

Virgil Abloh for sure. He’s an artist but more than that a visionary and avant-garde, I love that. Abloh is someone who wears many hats. It’s awesome to have a vision and then apply it to different types of media. Doesn’t matter if it’s clothes, home decor, music or a lifestyle.

This guy doesn’t limit himself to one thing, he always pushes the boundaries. I admire him and look up to him in so many ways. There’s no doubt, he’s the king of collaborations. Abloh understands that he has an opportunity to change the scope of fashion.

One of my favorite quotes is:

“Fashion is art to me–I’m involved with all facets of art. My work in architecture, music, fashion, and my art exhibitions all work hand in hand and serve as an inspiration to one another. I see fashion and art as one great entity.”

Where do you think art will be in 50 years?

It’s hard to answer that question. I hope that art won’t be much different from what it is today. At the rate technology is changing, it will for sure have an influence on art. We might see more works with 3D projections on the wall or elaborate moving canvases that are already coming into play. I’m the first one to use digital software but I hope to still see authentic work on canvas that a lot of artists take months or years to create.

Is there anything you’re currently working on that you’d like to promote?

I recently added my work to Showfields in New York City and The Artpark in the Miami Design District. This summer, I’ll be releasing my skateboard art collection on kellydabbah.com, and collaborating with a few artists on an installation at the Delano Hotel in Miami. Soon, I’ll be launching my bathing suit line on my website, so be sure to watch for that.

Originally published on ARTRPRNR MGZN

#artist interviews #multi media #artist studio

0 notes

scrawnydutchman · 8 years ago

Text

Why Craig McCracken is a Genius

Anybody who follows my work as well as my most frequent postings and discussions knows that I LOVE animation. I sincerely and confidently say it is the greatest art form in the world, simply because in one way or another it’s every art form combined. It’s drawing, painting, acting, film making, special effects, literature and music all at the same time, and while cartoons get the unfortunate shove as being nothing more then non-intellectual “kid’s stuff”, the field has produced some of the finest achievements in art of the 20th century as well as the 21st so far. But much like any art form, the field is only as great as it’s artists and what they bring to the table. There are many great animators and animation directors that any enthusiast can point to for inspiration like Rebecca Sugar, Lauren Faust, Genndy Tartakovsky, Don Bluth, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Hayao Miyazaki, Sitoshi Kun, and of course the most obvious answer Walt Disney. While I have great admiration and nothing but respect for the artists above, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the genius of the man behind the shows I bring with me throughout my childhood and even adult life. The creator of such shows as Powerpuff Girls (which incidentally he collaborated with Faust and Tartakovsky on), Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and Wander Over Yonder, Craig McCracken.

Make no mistake; there is a reason this man is so heavily respected and regarded in the current landscape of western animation, and you know a McCracken cartoon when you see them. But what exactly makes his work stand out? What is it about the cartoons McCracken has produced and directed that makes it so accessible to such a wide audience of kids and to an extent adults? How is it that whenever I put on an episode of Fosters or Wander Over Yonder I’m immediately put in a good mood and am enthusiastic about life? Well, after watching and studying his work I think I can boil it down to a few elements which, incidentally I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts before.

1. Beautifully Simple Character Design

Aesthetically speaking, what do the Powerpuff Girls, Bloo from Fosters Home and Wander all have in common? The answer of course is that they are deceptively simple designs that all take a very minimalist approach. So many household names from cartoons are memorable but their designs can often be so complex that if one were to try and draw them from memory, even as a skilled cartoonist, they’d have just enough trouble that they may forget a few key aspects of the design. With McCracken’s designs you can draw them likely in less then 2 minutes, especially ol’ Bloo from Fosters Home. You just draw a little pac man ghost with little flipper arms, circular eyes, a grin and a straight line at the bottom and you’re done. One might think these designs are very limited because of how minimalist they are with how you can express them, and if you’re feeling particularly like a snobby Jackass you might call it lazy. But in truth these design choices are the most practical you can get as they give you all the essentials of the character with nothing superfluous. First, because of how quickly you can draw them by that very nature they are also SEVERAL times easier to animate, and with the added aid of glorious modern day technology (when it’s not crashing that is) producing high quality entertainment quickly has never been easier. Second, all the essential parts of the character are there. Each character in a show is a distinctive shape not replicated by any other character, meaning that if you were to put them in a silhouette you could easily recognize who is who. Also, the whole art of animation is expressing character and personality through motion, which is where the acting part of the field comes in. Just by mannerisms, typical distinctive poses and even the very nature of their walk cycles we know exactly what kind of person each character from these shows is. We know the Powerpuff Girls are only innocent on the surface level and in truth are actually quite violent and gruesome (unless you’re watching the new horrendous show that completely misses the point of what makes the original so great), we know Bloo from Foster’s Home is a mischievous egotistical little trickster who is always causing trouble and we know Wander is a happy go lucky optimist who only seeks to bring happiness to all. Sometimes the best way to go is to not think too hard about it and let the main points of the character come through with no additions holding them down or distracting from the point.

2. Creative Yet Broad Show Premises

*This is my new favorite Gif*

I have to imagine each one of these shows had beautifully smooth pitches to get them funded (except maybe Powerpuff Girls because of the violence) because they have such imaginative and original premises that can be summed up so quickly to anyone who wants to watch and they leave themselves open to so many different types of stories.

*A boy visits his Imaginary Friend at a Foster Home where he and many other Imaginary Friends go on all sorts of hijinx or adventures, along the way saying goodbye to imaginary friends who find a new home*

*a superhero parody where a bunch of seemingly innocent and adorable little girls are actually quite violent and aggressive, and the show plays off of superhero stereotypes while also challenging typical gender roles*

Done. Great simple premise with unique concept not explored before. Take my money.

I’ve said before that it’s important for a show to have an easy to grasp premise, especially for children, because the easier it is to understand the more accessible it is to a larger audience. Plus because of the broad nature of the summary you can tell any kind of story you want between episodes. Premises like these have story ideas that just write themselves; it’s why the family sitcom of middle class family with idiot father and hot overcompensating wife exist, because everyone can relate to having a family and the dichotomy of a couple where one is the straight man putting up with the ceaseless antics of the other. Wander Over Yonder is a particularly good example of this because quite honestly all you need to know is “A couple of do-gooders wander the galaxy making new friends and incidentally run into an incompetent arch enemy a lot”. It’s basically just Road Runner but it takes place on a new planet every episode.

3. Color!!!!

Craig McCracken KNOWS how to use color. It gives all of his shows such a warm inviting feeling because it’s all so bright and either blends nicely or makes decent contrast. This may seem like a minor point, but You’d be amazed how quickly a bad color palette can ruin a show for an audience. the color choices of these shows immediately attract the attention of the viewer with it’s positive vibes and satisfying placement. Plus each character has a color scheme appropriate to their personality (or more accurately they contrast, appropriating a common theme in McCracken’s work; polar opposites hanging out with each other). The goodhearted reasonable and well behaved Mac is red, but his mischievous trouble making fun loving imaginary friend Bloo is, well . . . . blue. The happy-go-lucky Wander is orange, but his logical and pragmatic best friend and steed Sylvia is blue. The leader Blossom is pink, the innocent Bubbles is baby blue and the tough tomboy Buttercup is green. They remain consistent with these choices and much like the contrast of these characters physical appearance it makes it all the more apparent that the characters themselves contrast too.I don’t know what else to say about it, but just TELL me you don’t watch the intro to Fosters Home and get all hyped up in the process!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZiB_S9VpiU

4. Surrealist Humor

One thing you’ll notice about these shows is that they aren’t afraid to be weird, Fosters especially. They take every chance they can get to have something surreal happen only to play it off moments later like it never happened. I think that’s always been a great strength of McCracken’s shows. A huge part of comedy is playing with expectations: nobody ever gets a laugh out of something predictable. But another great and common aspect of comedy is stark, jarring contrast. I once read a WONDERFUL book called The Humor Code by Joel Warner and Peter McGraw, that was all about studying what makes people laugh, and they brought up a theory in the book that comedy is all about violation + benign. Something is jarring to our senses but we quickly find out it’s actually nothing to be afraid of. Hence why being tickled by someone we love makes us laugh: it’s a violation of our personal space, but we know our loved one wouldn’t actually hurt us. But it wouldn’t be funny if we tickled ourselves because it’s not a violation, and it isn’t funny with someone you don’t trust tickles you because the violation isn’t benign. This can also happen in reverse: something that initially lowers our defences turns out to actually be harmful or annoying or bother us in some way. I’m not necessarily saying this is the be all and end all of comedy as it’s only a theory, but I think you could apply it to McCracken’s work. His cartoons are littered with moments where a character does something strange or random or out of the ordinary and nobody bats an eye, or maybe it’ll shift in perspective about how large the situation at hand is. An immediate example that comes to my mind is the episode of Wander where a planet is attacked on a huge scale by a destroyer of planets called “Buster” . . .which actually when you zoom out it turns out it’s an adorable little puppy just playing with a ball. Humor is largely subjective, but if you ask me . . that shit is funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ5QRrAosQo

Conclusion

McCracken

has been making numerous contributions to the field of animation throughout his career and has gained notoriety for the shows under his belt . . and rightfully so. He understands pure and simple what cartoons are all about: simple, down to earth, easy to access entertainment that’s fun and leaves you in a good mood. Some television can be considered junk food like reality tv shows (cheap to produce, quick to make, advertised well but loaded with garbage), and others can be considered fruits and veggies like Breaking Bad or The Simpsons (they make you a better person and challenge your sensibilities), but sometimes all you really need is a light simple snack. One that’s colorful, sweet, and maybe even a little nutritious. McCracken delivers in his work with original premises, accessible characters, bright inviting colors and a delightfully weird sense of humor. God bless ya, Mr. McCracken!

#animation #Cartoon network #Disney #Cartoons #craig mccracken #powerpuff girls #fosters home for imaginary friends #wander over yonder #genius #animators #animators on tumblr #art #cartoon

215 notes · View notes

mikemortgage · 6 years ago

Text

ecobee Turns Up the Heat On Climate Change Skeptics in Audacious Earth Day Prank

https://mms.businesswire.com/media/20190418005210/en/716989/19/3816238_0417_Ecobee_ADWEEK_short_MP4.mp4

</p

Smart thermostat company goes to extremes to warm skeptics to the idea of climate change in social experiment by DCX

LOS ANGELES — For Earth Day, ecobee, the company responsible for inventing the smart thermostat, today unveiled #HeatedDiscussions, a social experiment to see if humor might prove a useful tool to engage climate change skeptics in serious conversations about climate change. And it worked.

ecobee and agency DCX Growth Accelerator invited 20 climate change skeptics to a focus group. As the skeptics discussed their views, the facilitators began to turn up the heat, literally. The temperature in the room rose through the 90s, and hidden cameras caught participants in various states of discomfort– sweating profusely, fanning themselves, and even struggling to remain coherent as the room reached over 100 degrees. In addition to heat, the groups experienced other extreme simulations synonymous with real-life weather conditions, including smog and hurricane-force winds. Footage reveals participants discussing climate change while wearing gas masks.

Ultimately participants laughed out loud, and the tenor of the conversation shifted. Participants who had earlier in the discussion dismissed climate change as “preaching” by elite celebrities and politicians began to more earnestly discuss its potential dangers. Some citing that they recycle regularly and leverage public transportation as ways of practicing eco-friendly actions in their everyday lives.

The hypothesis behind the social experiment was that humor might be a useful tool to engage skeptics in the climate change discussion, where more emotional and didactic pleas of green advocates have failed. “The discussion around climate change is one of the most important issues we face, and yet we’re at a point where millions dismiss it outright as a political issue,” said Jackie Poriadjian-Asch, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Revenue Officer at ecobee. “This is not a political issue, it’s a planet issue. Our approach may have been excessive, but we were willing to go to extremes to spark a much-needed discussion. Confronting the realities of climate change can feel overwhelming, but we firmly believe that each of us has the power to make a significant impact.”

“In our research, we found that many climate skeptics were rejecting sustainability messaging as either preachy or highly political.” explains Doug Cameron, Chief Creative Officer of DCX. “So, we wondered if a fresh approach might be needed.”

“ecobee was founded 12 years ago with the goal of helping people reduce their energy consumption,” said ecobee President and CEO Stuart Lombard. “Today, we continue to help people make a difference by offering them a simple way to conserve energy and save money. But it is not enough to just talk to those who share our perspective. On Earth Day, we are hoping to foster an open dialogue and ultimately, continuing to raise awareness on a global scale.”

#HeatedDiscussions underscores ecobee’s unwavering commitment to the planet on Earth Day – and every day. Whether it’s donating time, data, or technology, ecobee is committed to protecting the planet and helping communities. Since inventing the smart thermostat ecobee has helped its customers save 6.7 TWh of energy and prevented half-a-million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Together ecobee and its customers are fighting climate change and building stronger greener communities.

The campaign launches with a 1:45 spot, as well as a 3:30 long-form and various cut-downs. Video will air nationally across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Visit www.ecobee.com/heated to get involved and join the conversation. Heated discussions can be uncomfortable. But they can also create room for change.

About ecobee

ecobee inc. empowers people to transform their lives, homes, communities and planet through innovative technologies that are accessible and affordable. The company introduced the world’s first smart Wi-Fi thermostat in 2007 to help millions of people save energy and money without compromising on comfort. ecobee has since continued to expand its suite of technologies and services to deliver a state-of-the-art connected home experience to customers across North America. ecobee products combine the company’s pioneering sensor technology with the power of voice, machine learning and artificial intelligence to help customers control their home’s comfort and energy consumption while effortlessly connecting them to the online streaming and service platforms they love. For more information, visit www.ecobee.com.

About DCX

Founded in 2015, Brooklyn-based agency DCX Growth Accelerator (DCX) aims to grow brands and businesses by inserting them into the cultural dialogue. Founder Doug Cameron is the co-author of “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands.” Clients include Beech-Nut, The Rockefeller Foundation, Indeed, L’Oréal Group, and Danone Waters. DCX’s most recent “Palessi” ad for Payless ShoeSource was Adweek’s most read story of 2018. In 2017, DCX was named to Adweek’s Agency 3.0 list. DCX devotes a portion of its profits to driving social change through situationist art stunts, such as its #JessesPricedOut and airBnBodega.com campaigns to save Jesse’s Deli, threatened by rent increase; its “Trump Hut,” a luxury protest hut in the shape of Donald Trump’s hair, which received national and international media attention; its Bulletproof Schools gun violence protest, which received national media attention for sending Brooklyn students to school wearing bulletproof vests.

Credits

Agency: DCX Growth Accelerator

Concept: Doug Cameron and Tommy Noonan

CCO/CW: Doug Cameron

ECD/Art Director: Tommy Noonan

Account Director: Patrick McCormick

Designer: Mo Ku

VP Strategy: Laurent Bouaziz

COO: Tom Sewell

Production Company: DCX Cultural Production Studios

Director/Executive Producer: David Logan

Assistant Directors: Doug Cameron, Tommy Noonan

Line Producer: Kelly Scott

Production Manager: Jerry terHorst

Director of Photography: Shane Collins

Editorial: Versus NYC

Sr. Editor 1: Michael Equi

Executive Producer: Rob Meyers

After Effects: Justin Barnes

Colorist: Matthew Rosenblum @ Versus

Audio Mix: Plush NYC

Online Conform: Michael Equi @ Versus

Contacts

Andie Weissman, (908) 956-2807 [email protected]

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2KNGgQW via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

#IFTTT #Financial Post

0 notes

writeforsoreeyes · 6 years ago

Text

This Month’s Reads - March

March got away from me, but I didn’t forget! Here’s this month’s reads.

highlights: We Were Eight Years in Power, Tash Hearts Tolstoy, Kase-san and Cherry Blossoms, Emergency Contact

[image description: the covers for the books listed below]

10 Dance vol 1 & 2 (Inouesatoh, translator: Karhys)

The sad truth is that most BL that makes it stateside is about students -- usually high school, sometimes college. So it’s always refreshing when something about Adults With Jobs gets translated. And as someone who is a passionate fan of sports/competition anime, I was especially excited to dig into this series about the world of ballroom dancing.

These two volumes are a strong start, although not exactly what I expected. It’s interesting to watch Sugiki and Suzuki dance around each other-- literally and figuratively. With their clashing personalities and styles, they definitely create a lot of friction and sparks with each other. Something about the pacing feels off to me though; I’ll be patient and keep reading to see how it develops.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Coates has been doing some of the most important writing of the last decade. I’d read a few of the articles collected in this book before, so some of the material was already familiar to me. However, his notes preceding each essay added an additional dimension to the contents. It was fascinating to see how his feelings had changed on the articles he’d written, as well as the subjects.

The Obama administration ran from age 16 to 24 for me, so a lot of how I perceive politics was shaped indirectly or directly by it. It was moving to read Coates’ thoughts both on the presidency and some of the biggest issues of modern times. In particular, “The Case for Reparations” should be required reading.

[image description: the covers for the books listed below]

Tash Hearts Tolstoy (Kathryn Ormsbee)

Tash is passionate about two things: Leo Tolstoy and directing. She’s combined her two interests into a single project, a low-budget web series adaptation of Anna Karenina. Suddenly it becomes hugely popular-- and that, of course, is when her troubles begin.

I picked up this book expecting to only relate to Tash’s asexuality. However, I surprised to see a lot of my teenage self in Tash’s struggles to continue her creative project as its audience swelled. What if people are disappointed with the next update? How do you handle having so many eyes on your work? I went through a similar experience in high school, though on a smaller scale. (For the record though, her asexuality was handled really well.)

What Makes You Beautiful (Bridget Liang)

This month’s transreading!

Total Eclipse of the Eternal Heart (Syundei, translator: Amber Tamosaitis)

Terumichi witnesses Yamada (the boy he’s crushing on) get brutally murdered. That’s bad enough, but then Yamada rises and walks away from the scene of the crime. It turns out that Yamada is the reincarnation of a murderer, cursed to be killed by the reincarnations of the nine boys he killed -- and Terumichi is one of them.

Total Eclipse has an intriguing premise, but the real horror of the story is the genuine love Terumichi/his past avatar had for Yamada/his past avatar. It’s grim, twisted tale about the terrible depths love can reach and how we can -- or can’t -- reconcile ourselves with those depths. I really wished the story had been at least 3 volumes instead of 1.

[image description: the covers for the books listed below]

Kase-san and Cherry Blossoms (Hiromi Takashima, translator: Jocelyne Allen)

Pleased to say that Kase-san and… continues to be one of the best yuri series currently coming out in the States. I was concerned that this would be the final volume, but it seems the series is ongoing? We might be in for a long wait until volume 6 though.

Yamada worries about getting into the university she’s aiming for. She wants to go to school in Tokyo, like Kase. Fortunately, Yamada does get into her chosen university and the couple continues their happy relationship in the big city. Since so much of yuri is confined to the high school years (with the implied “you’ll grow out of liking girls”), it’s an utter delight to see the couple taking this step forward together.

Emergency Contact (Mary H.K. Choi)

I checked this book out primarily because the cover design was so good and it paid me back well. With a strong sense of both character voice and setting, Emergency Contact rises above your typical “first semester of college” YA book. Penny and Sam both leap from page one as fully formed people, fleshed out with numerous quirks, flaws, and anxieties.

I related to both of the main character’s twisted relationships with their parents, as well as to the frustration that came with trying to work on their art while their life spiraled around them. Also, I really want to visit Austin now. Definitely worth reading if you’re into contemporary romances with a bit of bite to them.

Roadqueen: Eternal Roadtrip to Love (Mira Ong Chua)

Fake dating. Motorcycles. Lesbians. An absolutely ridiculous plot. I wasn’t expecting Roadqueen to be as silly as it was, but I’m glad it surprised me. While there is some genuine heart to the story and a few sad moments, this comic is primarily a campy romp.

Leo is popular with the girls, but more concerned with her motorcycle Bethany than committing to a relationship. Then the mysterious Vega shows up, steals Bethany, and tells Leo that she’ll return the bike if Leo can prove she is a “decent lesbian” within a week. I never really bought that Leo wanted a serious relationship with anyone, but it seems beside the point to question of the plot of something that’s clearly more about humor than logic.

[image description: the covers for the books listed below]

Shout Out Loud! 1 - 5 (Satosumi Takaguchi, translator: unlisted)

This month’s BL LookBack!

#this month's reads

1 note · View note

caveartfair · 6 years ago

Text

8 Artists Using Silicone to Create Strange, Radical Artworks

I am a woman and I cast no shadow, #17, 2016. Ilona Szwarc AA|LA

Silicone has a meandering, illustrious history. British chemist Frederic Stanley Kipping pioneered some of the first major investigations into the compound (which is made up of silicon and oxygen atoms) in 1927. Since then, its shape-shifting potential has inspired everyone from astronauts to plastic surgeons: Neil Armstrong wore silicone-tipped gloves during the first-ever moonwalk; cosmetic surgery has long relied on the material for breast implants; and it’s a favorite of both sex-toy and cookware companies.

Given its potency in popular culture, as well as its malleability, it’s no wonder that silicone has inspired artists, too. In its solid, rubbery form, it easily conjures distinctions between the natural and the man-made. It evokes a consumer society obsessed with performance, innovation, and the pliability of self-presentation—metaphor is, indeed, embedded in its chemical make-up.

Many sculptors who work with the material are also intrigued by its connection to the uncanny and grotesque. “I like silicone because of its flesh-like consistency and the way it holds light,” artist Hannah Levy explained. “There’s a kind of luminosity to it if you add just the right amount of pigment that makes it look like it has some kind of life of its own.” She’s used the medium to construct works that approximate objects as varied as a pink swing, a massive asparagus stalk, and deck chairs. Below, we examine Levy’s work and that of seven other contemporary artists who use silicone to unique, radical ends.

Jes Fan

Disposed to Add, 2017. Jes Fan Team Gallery

Testo-Candle , 2017. Jes Fan Team Gallery

Jes Fan, Soft Goods, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Jes Fan, Systems II, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Jes Fan, Systems II (detail), 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

For Jes Fan, silicone evokes early memories. He discovered the material through his father, who worked as a mold-maker for toys. Early on, then, Fan already associated it with both play and consumer products.

Silicone has appeared in the Brooklyn-based artist’s work as platforms for soap and a candle (both made with sex hormones), slippers, and ropy flesh-toned sculptures—smooth in the middle, with screw-like texture on the ends. More recent creations, Systems II, Systems III, and Visible Woman (all 2018), resemble intricate jungle gyms. While lively, the pieces also engage serious perspectives on gender, race, and sexuality.

“Silicone is almost like a liquid skin, an abject net-flesh packed with erotic and queer connotations,” Fan said. “I generally gravitate towards materials that display characteristics of transformation, like liquid caught in a state of solidifying. Silicone is a great material to highlight that.” Yet his inspirations also range far beyond the body: Fan is fascinated by laboratories, factories, East Asian diasporic politics “by way of Chinese bakeries on Canal Street,” and more.

The artist’s oeuvre suggests an extended network of identities, philosophical ideas, and art-historical references (like the use of the everyday object, or “ready-made”)—and a creative mind more inclined to connect such disparate elements than to divide them.

Hannah Levy

Hannah Levy, Untitled, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Performance featuring Hannah Levy's work at MoMA PS1, New York, 2018. Choreography by Phoebe Berglund. Courtesy of the artist.

Hannah Levy, Untitled, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Hannah Levy, Untitled (detail), 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

For a 2017 performance at MoMA PS1, Levy dressed three dancers in silicone and latex costumes. They all appeared to be wearing transparent rain boots, and two donned what looked like ivory-hued, bubble-textured hoodies with extra-long sleeves. If the outfits were out of the ordinary, they weren’t all that different from what one might see on a high-fashion runway. Levy, who is now represented by New York gallery Casey Kaplan, often riffs on design through creating her own approximations of clothing, furniture, and even objects entirely unexpected in an art gallery setting. For a recent group exhibition at Company Gallery, she created giant orthodontic retainers from alabaster and nickel-plated steel.

Humor pervades much of Levy’s practice, and stretchy, unserious silicone aids her to that end. It lacks the gravity of marble, the gentleness of wood, and the fragility of glass. Levy described the texture of silicone as “relatable to the experience of having a body.” Pinching it inspires a similar feeling of pressure in the viewer. “There’s also a delightful stickiness to the material,” she said. “It’s ultra-clean, ultra-slick, and completely filthy in its propensity to attract nearly all particles to its surface. Everything leaves a trace, but nothing permeates its slick exterior. It’s the material of prosthetics, medical equipment, Hollywood horror films, and non-stick baking sheets.”

Donna Huanca

Performance of Donna Huanca, Scar Cymbals, at Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Peres Projects, Berlin and Zabludowicz Collection, London.

Performance of Donna Huanca, Epithelial Echo, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Performance of Donna Huanca, Cell Echo, at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, 2018. Courtesy of the artist, Peres Projects, Berlin and Yuz Museum, Shanghai.

Performance of Donna Huanca, Surrogate Painteen, at Peres Projects, Berlin, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Peres Projects, Berlin.

When asked what she finds most interesting about silicone, artist Donna Huanca offered an equally intriguing answer: “the ephemerality of it, the smell.” The material does, indeed, produce a synthetic reek. Embedded in artwork, it produces olfactory sensations that can intensify a viewer’s visual experience.

Huanca (who shows with Berlin gallery Peres Projects) has long been known for her performances that situate paint-covered models in the gallery setting among her multimedia sculptures, and she’s recently added silicone to her repertoire to heighten the drama. She gives her performers glass vials filled with liquid silicone and their choreography invites them to paint it, intuitively, onto plexiglass. “These silicone paintings are temporary, as they peel the silicone once dried,” Huanca said. “I love the idea of creating ephemeral paintings.” The fleeting nature of the artworks encourages the audience to enjoy the moment.

Huanca said she’s particularly interested in Andean futurism and meditative practices. Her art often suggests an alternate realm, decades from now, where nude women aren’t watched for titillating purposes, but for their own creative potential.

Ilona Szwarc

I am a woman and I cast no shadow, #21, 2016. Ilona Szwarc AA|LA

I am a woman and I cast no shadow, #14, 2016. Ilona Szwarc AA|LA

I am a woman and I cast no shadow, #17, 2016. Ilona Szwarc AA|LA

She was born without a mouth, 2016. Ilona Szwarc AA|LA

She lives without a future, 2016. Ilona Szwarc AA|LA

For a 2016 photography series entitled “I am a woman and I cast no shadow,” Los Angeles–based artist Ilona Szwarc cast a silicone mask from the contours of her body double’s head. The artist regularly employs women who look like her to participate in her projects; she takes on the role of “casting” director, in two senses of the term. Szwarc often paints her doppelgangers’ faces in grotesque new ways for the sake of compelling pictures. A Hollywood element prevails throughout her oeuvre—where else but a Tinseltown stage can we adopt new identities and personas so quickly?

“To make this work in Los Angeles is to dissect the everyday work of makeup artists working on film sets,” said Szwarc. “It’s to slow down and really look at every step of the processes that so many women and actresses go through daily, quickly, fully normalizing the experience.”

The artist is interested in what happens when she photographs the silicone molds themselves, while experimenting with lighting. According to her, “there is a moment of optical illusion in which the mold, although protruding away from the camera, registers in a photograph as if it were facing the lens.” Szwarc’s photographs are haunting intermediaries between fact and fiction, self and other, natural and contrived. They evoke that famous Andy Warhol adage—“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”

Troy Makaza

Dislocation of Content, Part 1, 2017. Troy Makaza Depart Foundation

Dislocation of Content, Part 3, 2017. Troy Makaza Ever Gold [Projects]

Silicone’s versatility is a major draw for 24-year-old Zimbabwean artist Troy Makaza. “It does not confine me to a particular discipline,” he said. “I can paint or sculpt with it. I can create a wide spectrum of colors and textures, which are permanently flexible. It is a very playful medium, and play is key to my approach to making work.”

At first, Makaza’s works appear to be colorful, wall-mounted tapestries—twists, tangles, and droops of bright yellow, gray, and red threads. Upon closer examination, however, the “threads” reveal themselves to be squiggles of silicone-infused paint. The compositions, then, combine elements of painting, sculpture, and traditional craftwork. Their sheen and slick texture make them distinctly contemporary, even as they reference age-old art forms.

Yet Makaza’s ideas extend far beyond material innovations. “The flexibility, adaptability, and resilience of the medium also speak very strongly to how I see our lives here in Zimbabwe, navigating changing circumstances and balancing traditional modes and contemporary realities,” he said. Geopolitical concerns are especially evident in Dislocation of Content, Part 1 (2017), which resembles a tattered, misshapen red flag, and its sister piece, Dislocation of Content, Part 3 (2017), which looks—with its fields of different hues bumping against each other—like a fractured topography.

Hayden Dunham

Hayden Dunham, Tor, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery.

Hayden Dunham, Ract Ress, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery.

Hayden Dunham, Welt, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery.

Hayden Dunham, Lail, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery.

Hayden Dunham, Flex, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery.

While some artists believe that their materials are talking to them, Hayden Dunham describes a more significant give-and-take with silicone. She spoke of the material as a personified being with its own agency. “I love how sensitive it is,” she said. “If it is raining out, it won’t cure. It responds to touch. It is a material that is listening.”

Dunham uses silicone in her sculptures, which often resemble solid puddles supporting a variety of other sculptural forms (a block, a pillowy roll) and even gases emanating from tubes: Walk into a gallery exhibiting her work, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into a mad (color-fixated) scientist’s laboratory.

While Dunham has used bright blues and yellows throughout her work, she’s particularly fond of jet black—the color of ash and carbon. She’s interested in activated charcoal and its potential to clear out the human body by absorbing toxins and releasing them back into the universe. “Human bodies are large-scale filters,” she said. “They hold material dialogs we come in contact with everyday. When bentonite clay comes in contact with skin, it leaches heavy metals through pores. This process can’t be seen, but is present. So many of these interactions are not visible.” Dunham’s work argues that there’s enough fodder in the human body to inspire an entire artistic practice.

Ivana Bašić

Ivana Bašić, I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #1, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Contemporary.

Fantasy vanishes in flesh, 2015. Ivana Bašić Michael Valinsky + Gabrielle Jensen

Sew my eyelids shut from others, 2016. Ivana Bašić Nina Johnson

Ivana Bašić, I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #1 (detail), 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Contemporary.

Ivana Bašić’s 2016 sculpture Sew my eyelids shut from others resembles a slab of slick, pink raw meat draped over a thin metal spit. The artist lists her materials as “wax, silicone, oil paint, stainless steel, weight, [and] pressure,” suggesting that invisible physical forces such as gravity are as much a part of the work as tangible media.

It’s no surprise that Bašić discusses silicone in scientific terms. She’s intrigued by the fact that it “has no specific innate state and characteristics, except for its capacity to perfectly simulate reality, which is why it’s used in special effects so much.” For her, it’s “a blank canvas with an endless amount of possibilities.”

Bašić has a background in digital scanning, 3D-scanning, and 3D-printing—which she’s explicitly decided not to employ in her sculpting practice. Instead, her pink or white sculptures often evoke bone or her own skin: They relate more to the human body than to any machine. She even titled a 2015 sculptural series “Fantasy vanishes in flesh.” Comprised of “feathers, pressure, cotton, silicone, [and] stainless steel,” the works look like pillowy bodies, torquing and bowing on the floor.

Amy Brener

Amy Brener, Flexi-shield (earth mother) (detail), 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Flexi-Shield (earth mother), 2017. Amy Brener REYES | FINN

Amy Brener, Flexi-Shield (bumper), 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Amy Brener, Drifter II, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Suspended from the ceiling, Amy Brener’s colorful silicone “Flexishields” (2015–present) resemble newfangled, feminized chainmail. Many take the shape of evening gowns, with protuberances at the bellies and breasts. Brener (who shows with Jack Barrett gallery in New York) encases found objects such as flowers, leaves, combs, and nails in the material, turning them into repositories for organic and man-made artifacts. She also embeds casts of her deceased father’s face, enhancing ideas about memory and time. “These imagined garments are protective barriers—shields—that are also delicate and translucent, addressing our ability to gain strength through vulnerability,” Brener explained.

While many of the artists on this list gravitate towards silicone’s slickness, Brener favors rough, worked-over surfaces. “Silicone is an amazing replicator of fine detail,” she said. “It has the potential to resemble anything from human skin to computer screens. I’m especially excited by its ability to imitate textures of cat-eye and fresnel lenses to create optical effects.”

For her 2018 “Drifter” series, Brener created silicone sculptures that sit on the floor like tombs or caskets, and filled them with light. Death and preservation still prevail as dominant themes, albeit with a very literal glow. For artwork that addresses morbidity, Brener’s approach is remarkably hopeful.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

0 notes

talhaghafoor2019-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Optimisation is the enemy of creativity in marketing and music

No, you are not becoming crankier as you approach middle age – music is indeed getting worse every year. And the marketing industry’s obsession with optimisation is to blame.

In late 2017, the YouTube channel Thoughty2 published a video exploring how music has changed over the decades. After starting with The Beatles, the narrator continues with an example of classic British understatement: “Fast forward to 2010, when Justin Bieber released his hit single Baby. This is generally considered to be a bad move.”

According to the research in the video, lyrical intelligence, harmonic complexity, and timbral diversity have decreased while dynamic range compression has been used to make music louder and louder. In short, songs are becoming stupider – especially since every hit now includes the “millennial whoop” as well.

“Instead of experimenting with different musical techniques and instruments, the vast majority of pop music today is built using the exact same combination of keyboard, drum machine, sampler, and computer software,” Thoughty2’s narrator states. “This might be considered as progressive by some people, but it truth it sucks the creativity and originality out of music – making everything sound somewhat similar.”

As a rule, businesses do not like risk. The video states that record companies today must spend anywhere from $500,000 to $3m to sign and market a new artist. That is a lot of money to spend on a band without being fully confident of success.

To minimise the risk and maximise the potential return, these companies optimise the music to do whatever seems to have worked in the past. Same set of instruments? Check. Simple lyrics? Check. Is it loud? Check. Simple melody? Check. Can you dance to it? Check. Millennial whoop? Check check.

But that optimisation process is a downward spiral that will result only in songs that will make Rebecca Black’s Friday sound as brilliant as Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. It is creating music by paint-by-numbers. It is ticking boxes rather than being creative. And the same thing is occurring in the marketing industry today.

The rise of optimisation

After my first career in journalism years ago, I went into marketing and at one point met with a recruiter who was looking for a digital marketer. “I need an expert in SEO, ASO, and SMO,” she told me, further rattling off a lengthier list of random acronyms.

“Optimisation” became all the rage after companies discovered in the 2000s how much traffic websites could attract from search engines. After the birth of search engine optimisation (SEO), marketers tacked on the latter word to create “app store optimisation” and “social media optimisation” as well as countless other uses where the term also made little sense.

App store optimisation (ASO) looks for hacks to increase a mobile application’s ranking and findability in places such as the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store – rather than, you know, creating and promoting a real, useful app that people will like. Social media optimisation (SMO) is a useless term because social media is simply a set of channels and tools that can be used for any specific promotion tactic.

Now, businesses have always discussed general best practices. My last job in journalism in the 2000s was serving as the editor-in-chief and executive director of the Boston non-profit newspaper Spare Change News. (It is one of the newspapers in the United States that are modeled on The Big Issue in the UK.)

In that role, I once attended an annual convention of the North American Street Newspaper Association that was held in Halifax, Canada. There, the assembled staffers discussed the best practices in terms of pricing, circulation, and countless other topics. Today, marketers talk about optimisation, which often means the best practices in line with someone else’s algorithms or what has purportedly worked for others.

Buffer has published studies on the ideal lengths of everything from blog posts to tweets to headlines to Facebook updates. HubSpot has reported the best times to post on social media. But in the end, both best practices and optimisation come down to the same thing: doing what everyone else is doing.

The perils of optimisation

Once, I was in a meeting where people were discussing how to get more traffic from blog posts spread on Facebook. The ideas focused on using psychology and gaming the social network’s algorithm: “Let’s ask people to comment on posts to increase engagement!” and “Let’s change the posts so that they are lists whose headlines start with numbers!”

“Make a funny, creative video advertisement instead,” I suggested, noting the reach that humorous videos receive on Facebook. But no one listened. Everyone cared so much about optimising the form of the creative that no one thought about the creativity of the creative. They prioritised the form over the function.

The perfect example of this is when marketers see studies on which headlines get the most “engagement.” In June 2017, Buzzsumo analysed 100m headlines and found this information on which headlines receive the most clicks, “likes,” and shares on Facebook:

Too many digital marketers use such information and focus on producing whatever marcom is cheapest and then optimising it. Here is a sample of recent blog posts on Medium from a certain prolific marketing writer:

5 Strange But True Habits of the World’s Richest People

5 Smart Reasons to Create Content Outside Your Niche

5 Simple Hacks to Sharpen Your Emotional Intelligence

10 Insanely Good Reasons You Should Publish On Medium

3 Unusual Hacks to Completely Up Your LinkedIn Game

Bored now.

Too many marketers go overboard and focus on optimisation to produce rubbish marketing such as clickbait blog posts with the same headline format such as this: [number] [unnecessarily strong adjective] [noun] to [achieve some goal].

The internet will continue to be flooded with boring, optimised posts that all have the same title formats in an effort to get clicks or satisfy other short-term metrics. But optimisation is the enemy of creativity and leads to worst long-term results. (Just look at how many reboots of successful TV shows from the 80s and 90s have failed today. The studios likely thought that copying what was done before would guarantee another success.)

Redundant optimisation quickly becomes cliched, hurts the brand, and is obvious to consumers. If Oxford Academic were to title journal articles in the above manner, the Oxford brand would become laughable. The only way for BuzzFeed News to be taken seriously – and the publication is indeed doing excellent journalism – has been to decouple its brand from the notoriously clickbait parent company.

Optimised reflects only short-term thinking. Using clickbait to get people to a website is the same as knocking people over the head and dragging them into your store. They may be there, but they will not buy anything because they will hate your brand.

When everyone optimises for everything, it is no longer a competitive advantage. The only true competitive advantage that people will have is what rests in their brains – creativity. Without that, you will only be as good as everyone else.

The benefits of creativity

According to an updated study in Admap magazine by Data2Decisions founder Paul Dyson, creativity is – by far – the second-best profit multiplier after market size:

Optimisation and best practices aim to do what someone else defines or the best of what everyone else does – but nothing more than that.

"Best practice is like training wheels – it keeps you safe whilst you're learning how to excel in your industry,” Helen Pollitt, head of SEO at the British digital marketing agency Reflect Digital, said. “To really differentiate yourself from the competition you need to be open to experimentation and growth, true optimisation requires facing failure. The issue with sticking to the safe zone of best practice is it stifles creativity."

The best depiction of the benefit of being different that I have seen comes from this BBH ad:

People notice what is different. And if your marketing does not get noticed in the first place, nothing else you do matters. As BBH London strategy director Lucian Trestler recently put it:

“‘Difference’ isn’t just a two bob philosophy or a frivolous creative penchant. It is the most powerful communications tool there is to deliver commercial results. We have a vast amount of data to support that. Evidence from neuroscience, marketing science and creative effectiveness data all agree on this point; difference is commercially safer than ‘safety.’”

Optimising based on data or algorithms is easier than being creative – but it is not always better, according to Wistia co-founder and chief executive Chris Savage.

“Today, everyone scores their leads with Marketo and A/B tests thirty different varieties of their landing page. You can’t get a competitive advantage doing that stuff anymore. You could say that as the percentage of marketers with a certain tech stack or using a certain tool approaches 100%, the competitive advantage you reap from it approaches zero,” he once wrote. "Using data to scale your marketing is critical. But when we all have access to the same types of data, it won’t be the data that differentiates us — it’ll be the art.”

Tom Goodwin recently said something similar: “A/B testing seems to be getting out of hand. Seems to be a way to offload decision making, not have a strategy, or gut or courage. What great art/music/products would ever be made this way?”

But tell that to those digital marketers who think only in terms of optimisation. Tell that to high-tech chief executives who want to mimic the marketing of competitors and think that they need only a differentiated product to be successful. (Just like record companies, startups are risk-averse because they do not want to lose the millions of investor dollars.)

In a quote attributed to John Ward from B&B Dorland in England, “advertising is a craft executed by people who aspire to be artists but is assessed by those who aspire to be scientists. I cannot imagine any human relationship more perfectly designed to produce total mayhem.”

At Digital Annexe University in 2015, Dave Trott gave a classic speech on creativity. Effective communications, he said, needs to have an impact, needs to communicate, and needs to be persuasive. “Impact” is the most important part.

“Impact will get you on the radar,” he said. “Without impact, there’s nothing there. There might be a bloke outside on the street right now telling us the secret of all life, and we’ll never know because we can’t hear him. Without impact, nothing happens.”

Now, take the desire of so many marketers to optimise all collateral to match some alleged universal standard. How will their work be different from that of everyone else? How will their work stand out? How will their work have an impact?

“Optimisation might work for certain businesses for a certain amount of time,” Steve Daniels, an independent graphic designer in the UK, said. “This course of action may feel safer, but it only remains safe if there are no competitors who disrupt the market or start playing the brand game in a strong way. As soon as that happens, focusing on creativity is a great a way to play the long game – and to invest in your future success.”

If your business wants to remain safe, no one will notice you. Taking creative risks is how you become memorable.

A quick recommendation

So, if you want to listen to an album where the musicians wrote their own material, played dozens of instruments, and created songs that are lyrically intelligent, harmonically complex, and timbrally diverse, I have an assignment for you.

Listen to records or remastered CDs of the Moody Blues album In Search of the Lost Chord (1968) and The Smiths’ song How Soon Is Now? (1985) with a good pair of noise-cancelling headphones and some refreshment of your choice. Maybe it will kickstart some creative inspiration.

After all, the Beatles will be remembered forever. Justin Bieber will not.

The Promotion Fix is an exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by global marketing and technology keynote speaker Samuel Scott, a former journalist, consultant and director of marketing in the high-tech industry. Follow him on Twitter. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

This content was originally published here.

0 notes

jamiekturner · 7 years ago

Text

Illustration styles: definition and examples of this art

So, what is an illustration? And what are the illustration styles available?

Illustrations mean an artist interprets a text, or even social meaning, turning it into a drawing or painting.

This often means incorporating personality or humor.

An illustration is used to create emotion or give a message. It is expressive in style and doesn’t demand attention. Illustrations are used in books, magazines, advertisements, comic books, cartooning, fashion design, storyboards and video games. There is no single way of illustrating, and there are many illustration styles.

Illustration styles

Although there are many different styles of illustration, these may be categorized into the following groups:

Literal Illustrations

A literal illustration style depicts reality in a similar manner to non – fictional books. The picture depicts a credible scene, even while using fantasy or drama. Some examples of literal illustration include:

Photorealism – creating a photographic image

With photorealism, the artist uses a photograph as his source and creates a realistic replica in exquisite detail.

In photorealism, the artwork is often mistaken for a photograph. Drawing, perspective and color choice are crucial to this form of artwork. The artist often uses airbrushing, or hand-painting with acrylics or oils to achieve the final results.

Illustrations showing history or culture

This type of illustration is used to depict historical or cultural events. Often used by a culture to depict scenes or circumstances, this form of illustration can also be used even within an era of photography in order to depict mood or add a sense of drama.

Although sometimes used to flatter or degrade a culture or figure, these illustrations are realistic enough to be seen as literal images.

Hyperrealism – as close to reality as possible

This form of illustration tries to erase the line between art and reality and is seen to be an advancement on photorealism.

Sometimes extra features are added to a representation or an artist may work with monochrome pencils to create a social message. However, the goal is to create an image that is as close to reality as possible.

Conceptual Illustrations

Conceptual illustrations are metaphorical, with thought or imagery taking the place of realism. Although this work might contain elements of reality, the goal is to convey mood, metaphor, and subjectivity. This form of illustration By could be compared to fictional writing, where anything goes. Examples include:

Images in sequence

Images in sequence tell a story and can be used for cartoons, graphic novels, and even to plan movie scenes. Styles may differ, from quick sketches, to fineliner drawings with airbrushed detail. Depending on the message, an image may use crisp, clean colour, or may use ink, jagged lines, and a chaotic layout in order to depict the messy business of politics.

Information graphics

These are graphic representations of knowledge. They are often used to assist with understanding complex information.

While they show the audience what they are looking at, this is often represented in a way which contains additional insights. Some may look like literal illustration.

Abstract or distorted designs

An expressive form of illustration, removed from reality, where representations emerge from imagination. As it is so subjective, two abstract artworks will look very different to one another.

Freehand digital drawings or illustrations

In this type of illustration, the artist draws on a digital pad, allowing for smooth transitions between light and shadow. An artist can use layers of imagery to create complex backgrounds and add fine detail. Many of these images use raster (or dot) format, limiting the size they can be blown up to before losing quality.

Vector graphics and illustrations

With vector graphics, mathematical equations are used to produce designs. As vector diagrams don’t use strokes in the way freehand digital drawing does, the images are not as smooth as freehand designs. They can, however, be blown up without losing quality. These images have clear shapes and outlines and are very popular for web illustrations.

Children’s illustrations

Children’s illustrations tell a story or give a visual representation of a tale or even an imaginary being. The style of illustration depends on the age of the child. Some may be complex and realistic, while others may be naïve. Many children’s illustrations are colourful, and contain a lot of movement or activity. Characters are often bright, colourful and friendly.

Illustrations for commic books and graphic novels

Comic books or superheroes often involve characters in action. Styles are often complex and range from line drawings to airbrushed images. However, cartooning is often one of the most frequently used styles in comics.

Comic images often come in panels and often involve speech bubbles, or narratives. There may be words which combine with actions, such as POW! The size of panels, as well as how often they feature helps to set the pace of the story.

Book covers and publications

In many old books, such as those which focused on geography or natural history, illustrations were designed by hand and then reprinted. Now, however, book illustrations are designed in many different ways and then printed.

Illustrators are often used to design covers of books, in order to make them stand out in a bookshop. A cover often hints at what is inside the book and gives the idea of humor, seriousness, culture or movement.

Book illustrations range from cartoon style drawings to historical or cultural images. Although the saying ‘never judge a book by its cover’ is often repeated, it is actually the cover which will sell a book, and will assist the book with appealing to the correct audience.

Designs for logos or branding

Logos are a very specific style of illustration. Very often their goal is to give information about a product, using colour, font or imagery. Popular and easily recognizable logos include the Nike Swoosh or the Apple associated with Macintosh. Logos are often simple, but grab attention to a product, defining it as belonging to a particular brand.

Often this brand is associated with imagined qualities, such as speed, power or creativity, and the logo helps to conjure up this emotional message. Sometimes, businesses use more than simply a logo to assist with branding.

Many use mascots or images of their employees, in order to convey a message. This helps to transcend a product such as a shoe, and give it a deeper meaning in the minds of customers.

Tips to develop your illustration style

Using the internet, we are frequently introduced to illustrations in online news articles, the music we can download, comic books, adverts and even emails. This exposes us to a wide range of styles and is a good thing because it creates a wide range of examples to draw upon.

However, if you are bombarded with many good quality illustrations on a constant basis, how do you develop your own style? You Here are some tips:

Understand the underlying principles

While it is possible to learn illustration through practice, this often means imitating the styles of other illustrators who have already developed a style of their own. Unleashing your own creative potential is considerably more important so that you can build and grow, developing your own talents and sharing your own messages.

Without copying, you may be asking “What is an illustrator?” A formal education will teach you the underlying principles, motivations, and techniques of illustration so that you can use these building blocks to create your own designs.

As well as learning from those already within the field, you’ll learn the philosophies which will enable you to join in, expressing your own style as you do so.

Explore new illustration styles

If you feel stuck in a style rut, reproducing work you’ve been doing for a long time, you might want to pick up some new illustration styles or techniques, to develop your own work further.

However, remember that there is no reason to force yourself into uncomfortable spaces. If you feel stuck, or don’t enjoy the work you are trying out, remember that no artist is capable of doing everything, and if something doesn’t feel right, be prepared to move on.

Try new mediums

If you’re recognized for your pen drawings, how about giving acrylics a try? Switching the medium you use may give a new dimension to your work, focusing on a new atmosphere, colour or flare. If you already use multiple mediums, you could try textures, etching, stencils or even metallics.

You could change your format from small drawings to large canvases, or from large-scale paintings to comic books sized imagery. Even though your results may not be exceptional at first, exploring new mediums will bring you out of your style rut by taking you out of your comfort zone. Your experimentation will be worth it.

Be true to yourself

When defining your illustration style, don’t work on designing it around what is currently selling on the marketplace at the moment. Your first commission is a big achievement, and making money from art is rewarding.

However, share your own style in the marketplace so that you are able to develop your own artistic identity. As the market moves constantly, trying to copy or imitate current trends will leave you one step behind.

By developing your own style, you’ll be consistently working on your own techniques, improving and developing them, instead of remaining a second-rate version of illustrators you admire. Developing your own style means sharing your own meanings and bringing your own imagination into the foreground.

Without this, you won’t have the creative energy which will help to both define your work and keep you motivated. Without this, you risk losing your love of illustration.

Ending thoughts on illustration styles

There are many different illustration styles or techniques.

Some of them overlap.

However, understanding the different styles and the techniques they use gives you access to the principles behind each different design, enabling you to explore and expand on your illustration practice.

If you liked this article about illustration styles, you should check out these articles as well:

Face Cards: The Intricate Playing Card Designs

T-Shirt Design Ideas That Will Inspire You to Design a T-Shirt

Poster Printing: How To Print A Poster Flawlessly

The post Illustration styles: definition and examples of this art appeared first on Design your way.

from Web Development & Designing http://www.designyourway.net/blog/graphic-design/illustration-styles/

0 notes

opalmothnightingale · 7 years ago

Text

What’s Helping with My Depression Today?

9- 12- 17 -

One of my favorite ways to deal with depression, sometimes, is by treating it with love,.. The love of a lover, the love of deep, close friends,.. The love of animals, and the love of family. Childlike humor, lots of affection, oxytocin, the brain chemical of bonding and affection.

Lots of intensive time, nurturing and being cared for. Self love and self-hugs, self-holding (like the self-holding exercises of Peter Levine, which also look kind of similar to the self-reiki stuff you can do, and I just began doing these things without realizing they were the same kind of gestures as these exercises, and then I saw a picture and was like, hey! That’s what I’ve been doing. I don’t know,... Maybe I saw them before, and stored them in my subconscious and that’s where it came from, though I consciously had forgotten).

Getting good sleep. Also, a regular schedule and lots of sleep, like 7 or 8 hours or sometimes more, following my intuitive body feelings. Laying snuggled up with pillows, heavy blankets, weighted blankets, or other things that “hug” your body (such as therapeutic tools for autism and sensory processing disorder, like hammocks, things that squeeze, pressure and surround oneself, etc), because again, I think it must be about oxytocin and how to release it, and maybe it has something to do with my own sensory processing issues, in this case, too, sometimes. ...And, of course, eating well (this in particular deserves its own post, later), sleeping well.

Listening to music, all day. Maybe love songs, especially if there’s someone I’m feeling very fond of and in love with who I feel connected to, somehow (as happens often with me, and my astral lovers/spirit lovers,.. *sigh* Lol)... Music is supposed to release dopamine. So is talking to other people, and the feeling of that hit of attention when you are able to tell other people about what’s going on with you and get some feeling of recognition. I like to spend literally all day with people I feel really deeply care and love me, and with my daughter to watch all the time, I get to do that...

But I also like to spend time alone, with silence, and rest. Depending on how tired I am, that might be more important than music, or it goes through phases. The kind of music I listen to makes a big impact on my mood, and however I like modern music, I find that the best for lifting my mood often is the music of the 60s and 70s, like rock and soul is what I listen to. Sometimes reggae. Other kinds of music can help, too, like certain world drum music, for one. Gypsy music from Rajasthan and from Romania, Poland, and other places.

Cold showers, if I have the energy, which are said to release oxytocin and energize and stimulate the immune system, and help counter depression.

Along the lines of using speaking (and typing, sharing online too) to stimulate oxytocin, reading things that are interesting to me makes a big difference. I surf the web and certain favorite sites over and over, on depressive days, often, and it makes a big difference. Uplifting stuff, fascinating stuff, my favorite interests type of sites and such. But also imagery, that makes a big difference. I like the combination of imagery and words, which seem to give a double-effect, which complement each other, stimulating different parts of my mood and mind, perhaps. And I like to spend a bit of time reading, novels, particularly..

Not too much time,.. not too much focused mental activity and concentration, or that can worsen my depression, .. Maybe 20 to 30 minutes or maybe an hour or so of reading, usually works for me, per day. Something about words and creative thinking really seems to just spark me into a better state of mind, quite significantly, even though, as with most things I do, it’s small in itself.

But added with other things, it’s big. I have to have a whole diet of day long things, just like I do with the food and exercise and sunlight and other wellness things I do for my health.

Speaking of not overworking my mind and not overthinking, I find it really important to use my hands and body and give my mind a rest. Often this can make a big difference between recovering quickly or not. I find the things that make my hands feel this delicious kind of satisfied feeling. Crafts and just things to give my hands to do, something like anxiety or stress relieving stuff to do with my hands, and that gives them something to feel and this makes a big difference and I didn’t realize how much a difference it made, but then after reading a book about it, (’The Creativity Cure’, by Carrie and Alton Barron), a book I felt guided towards in the library, quite vividly, I tried it and realized, that, yes, this is really important and helpful. Also movement, moving the body, that helps.

Anything to quiet the mind, and have time to just let the mind wander or be still while you’re too busy with other things to really concentrate the mind. The use of the hands and the body and the quieting of the focused thought,.. These things let your mind rest and your subconscious be facilitated to come up with new perspectives and feel better about things and find solutions for what might have seemed overwhelming problems, oftentimes. It is totally vital and a big part of my day for me, now,..

But often, especially when I feel depressed, when I’ll often spend hours just not using my mind and just using my hands and body instead. If it can be creative that is often better, like crafts and art, because creativity is yet another way that the subconscious can tap into other solutions and work things out without you consciously realizing that you’re even doing that. But meditative motion, like dancing, works for this, too,.. Not just art and tactile productive crafts.

When I am depressed I don’t always feel most creative and so things that aren’t even that creative can often still help,... And I find that when my own mind and creativity take the back seat, I can sometimes let spirit channel creativity for me, instead, and come up with some amazing things by letting my intuition guide instead of my own creative taste and feelings and impulses. Where does this intuition come from? I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. Maybe I’ll elaborate on it more, later.

Then speaking of not using the mind too much, of course, meditativeness and meditation works wonders for me too.

But if I’m not in the meditative state of mind, because, say, it will bring up too much painful noise and agitation with no solution and no calm to be found in trying to meditate... When depressed I am not up to dealing with that and so,...

Then, contemplation,... asking problems or questions, to the universe, to my higher self, untangling it and untangling it till I find an answer, or even just laying it out there and then letting it go, turning to a new direction,... And, or divination, often alongside the contemplation.

These make a big impact on me. Or listening to music and contemplating the lyrics of the songs, like a form of meditative divination, but not taking it too seriously.. And this again employs the verbal brain and the benefits from listening to music.

And, just resting,.. Resting, resting.. No thought, no movement,.. Often that is best, just laying there, meditatively, in the dark, at night,.. Or in the day. Often that resets me best, but it depends because of course, too much rest is not good for too long, either. Movement and mental movement keep one feeling alive.

Affection, joy and interaction and purpose and so on, they can keep one feeling alive in heart. But so often I find that depression, for me, has something to do with being really worn out, at some level of my being, and a few hours here and there of just laying around, doing nothing, peacefully, can make a big difference in how I feel. Maybe even a whole day of that, sometimes can push me over the hurdle to the other side,.. But especially if I can spend that day of rest doing other things that make me well, even while resting.. Such as some of the other things I mentioned here.

Sunlight and exercise are necessary elements of my daily life too, and nature, too.. Not just sunlight. It makes such a really tremendous impact on me, and I wonder if that alone is one of the primary reasons that I’m so much less depressed than I used to be, before we moved where we live now. Before, we didn’t get out every day and I didn’t get sunlight every day, and I get way more exercise now, even though it’s only walking, but walking 30 minutes to a few hours most days.

And the nature, I can’t describe how it somehow puts my mind and senses and perspectives and understanding in order. It somehow drains away my stress and upset and infuses me with answers and well being, calm and happiness, and a sense of “what was I so upset about, anyway”, somehow... Even though, of course, it doesn’t always work that dramatically, and I still have problems left over on my worst days, and still feel down, but it’s again, one of those small things that’s far bigger than it seems, and, so when combined with the other things, it’s really so.

Allergies really worsen my depression, nasal allergies and food allergies. Even though I can’t always control those things, it helps me to realize what is happening to me, because then I can see that no, it’s not like I have a reason to feel distressed, this is just my body fooling me into thinking maybe things are far worse than they really are, so that gives me a little more ability to let it go and stay more detached from it all.

And, that’s just a beginning. Some of what’s helping me, today.

I’d like to list all the things, organized by category, elaborated with specific tools and steps and resources, ranked by what helps most, and maybe for some, what helps most with certain kinds of depression and other symptoms and other mental health conditions that can respond to the same kind of practices.

I’d like to share more of what helps me, too, but I think it’s good to break it up a little, and I have written a fair chunk here.

Maybe I’ll come back and write more later. Tonight or tomorrow.

My cat woke me up and wouldn’t leave me alone so I decided to post some midnight rambles when I actually can hear myself think tonight. My cat, my familiar, I think of him, and he often guides me and helps me, even through annoying means like not letting me sleep... Maybe it was the right time to write all this, as it really does seem to be flowing more than it usually does, so cool that is!

#depression #core practices for coping with depression #little things that help with depression #posts to elaborate on

0 notes

irinache · 7 years ago

Text

Paul Klee

Paul Klee (German: [paʊ̯l ˈkleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism.

Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance.[1][2][3] He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Early life and training

First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.

Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, as the second child of German music teacher Hans Wilhelm Klee (1849–1940) and Swiss singer Ida Marie Klee, née Frick (1855–1921).[a] His sister Mathilde (died 6 December 1953) was born on 28 January 1876 in Walzenhausen. Their father came from Tann and studied at the Stuttgart Conservatory singing, piano, organ and violin, meeting there his future wife Ida Frick. Hans Wilhelm Klee was active as a music teacher at the Bern State Seminary in Hofwil near Bern until 1931. Klee was able to develop his music skills as his parents encouraged and inspired him until his death.[5] In 1880, his family moved to Bern, where they moved 17 years later after numerous changes of residence into a house at the Kirchenfeld district.[6] From 1886 to 1890, Klee visited primary school and received, at the age of 7, violin classes at the Municipal Music School. He was so talented on violin that, aged 11, he received an invitation to play as an extraordinary member of the Bern Music Association.[7]

My Room

(German: Meine Bude), 1896. Pen and ink wash, 120 by 190 mm (4

In the collection of the Klee Foundation,

Bern, Switzerland

In his early years, following his parents’ wishes, Klee focused on becoming a musician; but he decided on the visual artsduring his teen years, partly out of rebellion and partly because of a belief that modern music lacked meaning for him. He stated, "I didn't find the idea of going in for music creatively particularly attractive in view of the decline in the history of musical achievement."[8] As a musician, he played and felt emotionally bound to traditional works of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but as an artist he craved the freedom to explore radical ideas and styles.[8] At sixteen, Klee’s landscape drawings already show considerable skill.[9]

Around 1897, Klee started his diary, which he kept until 1918, and which has provided scholars with valuable insight into his life and thinking.[10] During his school years, he avidly drew in his school books, in particular drawing caricatures, and already demonstrating skill with line and volume.[11] He barely passed his final exams at the "Gymnasium" of Bern, where he qualified in the Humanities. With his characteristic dry wit, he wrote, "After all, it’s rather difficult to achieve the exactminimum, and it involves risks."[12] On his own time, in addition to his deep interests in music and art, Klee was a great reader of literature, and later a writer on art theory and aesthetics.[13]

With his parents' reluctant permission, in 1898 Klee began studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck. He excelled at drawing but seemed to lack any natural color sense. He later recalled, "During the third winter I even realized that I probably would never learn to paint."[12]During these times of youthful adventure, Klee spent much time in pubs and had affairs with lower class women and artists' models. He had an illegitimate son in 1900 who died several weeks after birth.[14]

After receiving his Fine Arts degree, Klee went to Italy from October 1901 to May 1902[15] with friend Hermann Haller. They stayed in Rome, Florence, and Naples, and studied the master painters of past centuries.[14] He exclaimed, "The Forum and the Vatican have spoken to me. Humanism wants to suffocate me."[16] He responded to the colors of Italy, but sadly noted, "that a long struggle lies in store for me in this field of color."[17] For Klee, color represented the optimism and nobility in art, and a hope for relief from the pessimistic nature he expressed in his black-and-white grotesques and satires.[17] Returning to Bern, he lived with his parents for several years, and took occasional art classes. By 1905, he was developing some experimental techniques, including drawing with a needle on a blackened pane of glass, resulting in fifty-seven works including his Portrait of My Father (1906).[11] In the years 1903-5 he also completed a cycle of eleven zinc-plate etchings called Inventions, his first exhibited works, in which he illustrated several grotesque characters.[14][18] He commented, "though I'm fairly satisfied with my etchings I can't go on like this. I’m not a specialist."[19] Klee was still dividing his time with music, playing the violin in an orchestra and writing concert and theater reviews.[20]

Marriage and early years

Flower Myth(Blumenmythos) 1918, watercolor on pastel foundation on fabric and newsprint mounted on board, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany

Klee married Bavarian pianist Lily Stumpf in 1906 and they had one son named Felix Paul in the following year. They lived in a suburb of Munich, and while she gave piano lessons and occasional performances, he kept house and tended to his art work. His attempt to be a magazine illustrator failed.[20] Klee's art work progressed slowly for the next five years, partly from having to divide his time with domestic matters, and partly as he tried to find a new approach to his art. In 1910, he had his first solo exhibition in Bern, which then traveled to three Swiss cities.

Affiliation to the "Blaue Reiter", 1911

In January 1911 Alfred Kubin met Klee in Munich and encouraged him to illustrate Voltaire's Candide. Around this time, Klee's graphic work increased. His early inclination towards the absurd and the sarcastic was well received by Kubin, who befriended Klee and became one of his first significant collectors.[21] Klee met, through Kubin, the art critic Wilhelm Hausenstein in 1911. Klee was a foundation member and manager of the Munich artists' union Sema that summer.[22] In autumn he made an acquaintance with August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky, and in winter he joined the editorial team of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter, founded by Franz Marc and Kandinsky. On meeting Kandinsky, Klee recorded, "I came to feel a deep trust in him. He is somebody, and has an exceptionally beautiful and lucid mind."[23] Other members included Macke, Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin. Klee became in a few months one of the most important and independent members of the Blaue Reiter, but he was not yet fully integrated.[24]

The release of the almanac was delayed for the benefit of an exhibition. The first Blaue Reiter exhibition took place from 18 December 1911 to 1 January 1912 in the Moderne Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich. Klee did not attend it, but in the second exhibition, which occurred from 12 February to 18 March 1912 in the Galerie Goltz, 17 of his graphic works were shown. The name of this art exhibition was Schwarz-Weiß, as it only regarded graphic painting.[25] Initially planned to be released in 1911, the release date of the Der Blau Reiter almanac by Kandinsky and Marc was delayed in May 1912, including the reproduced ink drawing Steinhauer by Klee. At the same time, Kandinsky published his art history writing Über das Geistige in der Kunst.[26]

Participation in art exhibitions, 1912/1913[

The association opened Klee's mind to modern theories of color. His travels to Paris in 1912 also exposed him to the ferment of Cubism and the pioneering examples of "pure painting", an early term for abstract art. The use of bold color by Robert Delaunay and Maurice de Vlaminck also inspired him.[27] Rather than copy these artists, Klee began working out his own color experiments in pale watercolors and did some primitive landscapes, including In the Quarry (1913) and Houses near the Gravel Pit (1913), using blocks of color with limited overlap.[28] Klee acknowledged that "a long struggle lies in store for me in this field of color" in order to reach his "distant noble aim." Soon, he discovered "the style which connects drawing and the realm of color."[17]

Trip to Tunis, 1914

Klee's artistic breakthrough came in 1914 when he briefly visited Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet and was impressed by the quality of the light there. He wrote, "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever... Color and I are one. I am a painter."[29]With that realization, faithfulness to nature faded in importance. Instead, Klee began to delve into the "cool romanticism of abstraction".[29] In gaining a second artistic vocabulary, Klee added color to his abilities in draftsmanship, and in many works combined them successfully, as he did in one series he called "operatic paintings".[30][31] One of the most literal examples of this new synthesis is The Bavarian Don Giovanni (1919).[32]

After returning home, Klee painted his first pure abstract, In the Style of Kairouan (1914), composed of colored rectangles and a few circles.[33] The colored rectangle became his basic building block, what some scholars associate with a musical note, which Klee combined with other colored blocks to create a color harmony analogous to a musical composition. His selection of a particular color palette emulates a musical key. Sometimes he uses complementary pairs of colors, and other times "dissonant" colors, again reflecting his connection with musicality.[34]

Military career

A few weeks later, World War I began. At first, Klee was somewhat detached from it, as he wrote ironically, "I have long had this war in me. That is why, inwardly, it is none of my concern."[35] Klee was conscripted as a Landsturmsoldat (soldier of the reserve forces in Prussia or Imperial Germany) on 5 March 1916. The deaths of his friends August Macke and Franz Marc in battle began to affect him. Venting his distress, he created several pen and ink lithographs on war themes including Death for the Idea (1915).[36] After finishing the military training course, which began on 11 March 1916, he was committed as a soldier behind the front. Klee moved on 20 August to the aircraft maintenance company[b] in Oberschleissheim, executing skilled manual work, such as restoring aircraft camouflage, and accompanying aircraft transports. On 17 January 1917, he was transferred to the Royal Bavarian flying school in Gersthofen (which 54 years later became the USASA Field Station Augsburg) to work as a clerk for the treasurer until the end of the war. This allowed him to stay in a small room outside of the barrack block and continue painting.[37][38]

He continued to paint during the entire war and managed to exhibit in several shows. By 1917, Klee's work was selling well and art critics acclaimed him as the best of the new German artists.[39] His Ab ovo (1917) is particularly noteworthy for its sophisticated technique. It employs watercolor on gauze and paper with a chalk ground, which produces a rich texture of triangular, circular, and crescent patterns.[29] Demonstrating his range of exploration, mixing color and line, his Warning of the Ships (1918) is a colored drawing filled with symbolic images on a field of suppressed color.

MATURE CAREER

In 1919, Klee applied for a teaching post at the Academy of Art in Stuttgart.[41] This attempt failed but he had a major success in securing a three-year contract (with a minimum annual income) with dealer Hans Goltz, whose influential gallery gave Klee major exposure, and some commercial success. A retrospective of over 300 works in 1920 was also notable.[42]

Klee taught at the Bauhaus from January 1921 to April 1931.[43] He was a "Form" master in the bookbinding, stained glass, and mural painting workshops and was provided with two studios.[44] In 1922, Kandinsky joined the staff and resumed his friendship with Klee. Later that year the first Bauhaus exhibition and festival was held, for which Klee created several of the advertising materials.[45] Klee welcomed that there were many conflicting theories and opinions within the Bauhaus: "I also approve of these forces competing one with the other if the result is achievement."[46]

Klee was also a member of Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four), with Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky; formed in 1923, they lectured and exhibited together in the USA in 1925. That same year, Klee had his first exhibits in Paris, and he became a hit with the French Surrealists.[47] Klee visited Egypt in 1928, which impressed him less than Tunisia. In 1929, the first major monograph on Klee's work was published, written by Will Grohmann.[48]

Klee also taught at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1931 to 1933, and was singled out by a Nazi newspaper, "Then that great fellow Klee comes onto the scene, already famed as a Bauhaus teacher in Dessau. He tells everyone he's a thoroughbred Arab, but he's a typical Galician Jew."[49] His home was searched by the Gestapoand he was fired from his job.[3][50] His self-portrait Struck from the List (1933) commemorates the sad occasion.[49] In 1933-4, Klee had shows in London and Paris, and finally met Pablo Picasso, whom he greatly admired.[51] The Klee family emigrated to Switzerland in late 1933.[51]

Klee was at the peak of his creative output. His Ad Parnassum (1932) is considered his masterpiece and the best example of his pointillist style; it is also one of his largest, most finely worked paintings.[52][53] He produced nearly 500 works in 1933 during his last year in Germany.[54] However, in 1933, Klee began experiencing the symptoms of what was diagnosed as scleroderma after his death. The progression of his fatal disease, which made swallowing very difficult, can be followed through the art he created in his last years. His output in 1936 was only 25 pictures. In the later 1930s, his health recovered somewhat and he was encouraged by a visit from Kandinsky and Picasso.[55] Klee's simpler and larger designs enabled him to keep up his output in his final years, and in 1939 he created over 1,200 works, a career high for one year.[56] He used heavier lines and mainly geometric forms with fewer but larger blocks of color. His varied color palettes, some with bright colors and others sober, perhaps reflected his alternating moods of optimism and pessimism.[57] Back in Germany in 1937, seventeen of Klee's pictures were included in an exhibition of "Degenerate art" and 102 of his works in public collections were seized by the Nazis.[58]

Death

Klee suffered from a wasting disease, scleroderma, toward the end of his life, enduring pain that seems to be reflected in his last works of art. One of his last paintings, Death and Fire, features a skull in the center with the German word for death, "Tod", appearing in the face. He died in Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland, on 29 June 1940 without having obtained Swiss citizenship, despite his birth in that country. His art work was considered too revolutionary, even degenerate, by the Swiss authorities, but eventually they accepted his request six days after his death.[59] His legacy comprises about 9,000 works of art.[17] The words on his tombstone, Klee's credo, placed there by his son Felix, say, "I cannot be grasped in the here and now, For my dwelling place is as much among the dead, As the yet unborn, Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, But still not close enough."[60] He was buried at Schosshaldenfriedhof, Bern, Switzerland.

Style and methods

Klee has been variously associated with Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction, but his pictures are difficult to classify. He generally worked in isolation from his peers, and interpreted new art trends in his own way. He was inventive in his methods and technique. Klee worked in many different media—oil paint, watercolor, ink, pastel, etching, and others. He often combined them into one work. He used canvas, burlap, muslin, linen, gauze, cardboard, metal foils, fabric, wallpaper, and newsprint.[61] Klee employed spray paint, knife application, stamping, glazing, and impasto, and mixed media such as oil with watercolor, watercolor with pen and India ink, and oil with tempera.[62]

He was a natural draftsman, and through long experimentation developed a mastery of color and tonality. Many of his works combine these skills. He uses a great variety of color palettes from nearly monochromatic to highly polychromatic. His works often have a fragile childlike quality to them and are usually on a small scale. He often used geometric forms as well as letters, numbers, and arrows, and combined them with figures of animals and people. Some works were completely abstract. Many of his works and their titles reflect his dry humor and varying moods; some express political convictions. They frequently allude to poetry, music and dreams and sometimes include words or musical notation. The later works are distinguished by spidery hieroglyph-like symbols. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about Klee in 1921, "Even if you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many occasions his drawings were transcriptions of music."[13]

Pamela Kort observed: "Klee's 1933 drawings present their beholder with an unparalleled opportunity to glimpse a central aspect of his aesthetics that has remained largely unappreciated: his lifelong concern with the possibilities of parody and wit. Herein lies their real significance, particularly for an audience unaware that Klee's art has political dimensions."[63]

Among the few plastic works are hand puppets made between 1916 and 1925, for his son Felix. The artist neither counts them as a component of his oeuvre, nor does he list them in his catalogue raisonné. Thirty of the preserved puppets are stored at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.[64]

Works

Some of Klee's early preserved children's drawings, which his grandmother encouraged, were listed on his catalogue raisonné. A total of 19 etchings were produced during the Bern years; ten of these were made between 1903 and 1905 in the cycle "Inventionen" (Inventions),[65] which were presented in June 1906 at the "Internationale Kunstausstellung des Vereins bildender Künstler Münchens 'Secession'" (International Art Exhibition of the Association for Graphic Arts, Munich, Secession), his first appearance as a painter in the public.[66] Klee had removed the third Invention, Pessimistische Allegorie des Gebirges (Pessimistic Allegory of the Mountain), in February 1906 from his cycle.[67] The satirical etchings, for example Jungfrau im Baum/Jungfrau (träumend) (Virgin on the tree/Virgin (dreaming)) from 1903 and Greiser Phoenix (Aged Phoenix) from 1905, were classified by Klee as "surrealistic outposts". Jungfrau im Baum ties on the motive Le cattive madri(1894) by Giovanni Segantini. The picture was influenced by grotesque lyric poetries of Alfred Jarry, Max Jacob and Christian Morgenstern.[68] It features an cultural pessimism, which can be found at the turn of the 20th century in works by Symbolists. The Invention Nr. 6, the 1903 etching Zwei Männer, einander in höherer Stellung vermutend (Two Men, Supposing to be in Major Position), depicts two naked men, presumably emperor Wilhelm II and Franz Joseph I of Austria, recognizable by their hairstyle and beards. As their clothes and insignia were bereft, "both of them have no clue if their conventional salute […] is in order or not. As they assume that their counterpart could have been higher rated", they bow and scrape.[69]

Klee began to introduce a new technique in 1905: scratching on a blackened glass panel with a needle. In that manner he created about 57 Verre églomisé pictures, among those the 1905 Gartenszene (Scene on a Garden) and the 1906 Porträt des Vaters (Portrait of a Father), with which he tried to combine painting and scratching.[70] Klee's solitary early work ended in 1911, the year he met and was inspired by the graphic artist Alfred Kubin, and became associated with the artists of the Blaue Reiter.[71]

Mystical-abstract period, 1914–1919

During his twelve-day educational trip to Tunis in April 1914 Klee produced with Macke and Moilliet watercolor paintings, which implement the strong light and color stimulus of the North African countryside in the fashion of Paul Cézanne and Robert Delaunays' cubistic form concepts. The aim was not to imitate nature, but to create compositions analogous to nature's formative principle, as in the works In den Häusern von Saint-Germain (In the Houses of Saint-Germain) and Straßencafé (Streetcafé). Klee conveyed the scenery in a grid, so that it dissolves into colored harmony. He also created abstract works in that period such as Abstract and Farbige Kreise durch Farbbänder verbunden (Colored Circles Tied Through Inked Ribbons).[72] He never abandoned the object; a permanent segregation never took place. It took over ten years that Klee worked on experiments and analysis of the color, resulting to an independent artificial work, whereby his design ideas were based on the colorful oriental world

Föhn im Marc'schen Garten (Foehn at Marc's Garden) was made after the Turin trip. It indicates the relations between color and the stimulus of Macke and Delaunay. Although elements of the garden are clearly visible, a further steering towards abstraction is noticeable. In his diary Klee wrote the following note at that time:

In the large molding pit are lying ruins, on which one partially hangs. They provide the material for the abstraction. […] The terrible the world, the abstract the art, while a happy world produces secularistic art.[73]

Under the impression of his military service he created the painting Trauerblumen (Velvetbells) in 1917, which, with its graphical signs, vegetal and phantastic shapes, is a forerunner of his future works, harmonically combining graphic, color and object. For the first time birds appear in the pictures, such as in Blumenmythos (Flower Myth) from 1918, mirroring the flying and falling planes he saw in Gersthofen, and the photographed plane crashes.

In the 1918 watercolor painting Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht, a compositional implemented poem, possible written by Klee, he incorporated letters in small, in terms of color separated squares, cutting off the first verse from the second one with silver paper. At the top of the cardboard, which carries the picture, the verses are inscribed in manuscript form. Here, Klee did not lean on Delaunay's colors, but on Marc's, although the picture content of both painters does not correspond with each other. Herwarth Walden, Klee's art dealer, saw in them a "Wachablösung" (changing of the guard) of his art.[74] Since 1919 he often used oil colors, with which he combined watercolors and colored pencil. The Villa R (Kunstmuseum Basel) from 1919 unites visible realities such as sun, moon, mountains, trees and architectures, as well as surreal pledges and sentiment readings.[75]

Works in the Bauhaus period and in Düsseldorf

His works during this time include Camel (in rhythmic landscape with trees) as well as other paintings with abstract graphical elements such as betroffener Ort(Affected Place) (1922). From that period he created Die Zwitscher-Maschine (The Twittering Machine), which was later removed from the National Gallery. After being named defamatory in the Munich exhibition "Entartete Kunst", the painting was later bought by the Buchholz Gallery, New York, and then transferred in 1939 to the Museum of Modern Art. The "twittering" in the title refers to the open-beaked birds, while the "machine" is illustrated by the crank.[76]

The watercolor painting appears at a first glance childish, but it allows more interpretations. The picture can be interpreted as a critic by Klee, who shows through denaturation of the birds, that the world technization heist the creatures' self-determination.[77]

Other examples from that period are der Goldfisch (The Goldfish) from 1925, Katze und Vogel (Cat and Bird), from 1928, and Hauptweg und Nebenwege (Mainway and Sideways) from 1929. Through variations of the canvas ground and his combinated painting techniques Klee created new color effects and picture impressions.

In 1931, Klee transferred to Düsseldorf to teach in the Akademie; the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus soon after.[78] During this time, Klee illustrated a series of guardian angels. Among these figurations is "In Engelshut" (In the Angel's Care). Its overlaying technique evinces the polyphonic character of his drawing method between 1920 and 1932 .[79]

The 1932 painting Ad Parnassum was also created in the Düsseldorfer period. With 100 cm × 126 cm (39 in × 50 in) it is one of his largest paintings, as he usually worked with small formats. In this mosaic-like work in the style of pointillism he combined different techniques and compositional principles. Influenced by his trip to Egypt from 1928 to 1929, Klee built a color field from individually stamped dots, surrounded by likewise stamped lines, which results in a pyramid. Above the roof of the "Parnassus" there is a sun. The title identifies the picture as the home of Apollo and the Muses.[80] During his 1929 travels through Egypt, Klee developed a sense of connection to the land, described by art historian Olivier Berggruen as a mystical feeling: "In the desert, the sun's intense rays seemed to envelop all living things, and at night, the movement of the stars felt even more palpable. In the architecture of the ancient funerary moments Klee discovered a sense of proportion and measure in which human beings appeared to establish a convincing relationship with the immensity of the landscape; furthermore, he was drawn to the esoteric numerology that governed the way in which these monuments had been built."[81] In 1933, the last year in Germany, he created a range of paintings and drawings; the catalogue raisonné comprised 482 works. The self-portrait in the same year – with the programmatic title von der Liste gestrichen (removed from the list) – provides information about his feeling after losing professorship. The abstract portrait was painted in dark colors and shows closed eyes and compressed lips, while on the back part of his head there is a large "X", symbolizing that his art was no longer valued in Germany.[82]

Red/Green Architecture (yellow/violet gradation), 1922, oil on canvas on cardboard mat, Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Senecio, 1922, oil on gauze, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel

Fright of a Girl, 1922, Watercolor, India ink and oil transfer drawing on paper, with India ink on paper mount, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Last works in SwitzerlandIn this period Klee mainly worked on large-sized pictures. After the onset of illness, there were about 25 works in the 1936 catalogue, but his productivity increased in 1937 to 264 pictures, 1938 to 489, and 1939 – his most productive year – to 1254. They dealt with ambivalent themes, expressing his personal fate, the political situation and his joke. Examples are the watercolor painting Musiker (musician), a stickman face with partially serious, partially smiling mouth; and the Revolution des Viadukts (Revolution of the Viadukt), an anti-fascist art. In Viadukt (1937) the bridge arches split from the bank as they refuse to be linked to a chain and are therefore rioting.[83] Since 1938, Klee worked more intensively with hieroglyphic-like elements. The painting Insula dulcamara from the same year, which is one of his largest (88 cm × 176 cm (35 in × 69 in)), shows a white face in the middle of the elements, symbolizing death with its black-circled eye sockets. Bitterness and sorrow are not rare in much of his works during this time.

Zeichen in Gelb, 1937, pastel on cotton on colored paste on jute on stretcher frame, Foundation Beyeler, Riehen near Basel

Nach der Überschwemmung, 1936, wallpaper glue and watercolors on Ingres paper on cardboard

Revolution des Viadukts, 1937, oil on oil grounding on cotton on stretcher frame, Hamburger Kunsthalle

Die Vase, 1938, oil on jute, Foundation Beyeler, Riehen near Basel

Heroische Rosen (Heroic Roses), 1938, oil on canvas, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

Insula dulcamara, 1938, oil color and colored paste on newsprint on jute on stretcher frame, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Ohne Titel (Letztes Stillleben), 1940, oil on canvas on stretcher frame, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Tod und Feuer (Death and Fire), 1940, oil on distemper on jute, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

Klee created in 1940 a picture which strongly differs from the previous works, leaving it unsigned on the scaffold. The comparatively realistic still life, Ohne Titel, later named as Der Todesengel (Angel of Death), depicts flowers, a green pot, sculpture and an angel. The moon on black ground is separated from these groups. During his 60th birthday Klee was photographed in front of this picture.[84]

Reception and legacy

Ingres paper

on cardboard, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen near Basel“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

"Klee's act is very prestigious. In a minimum of one line he can reveal his wisdom. He is everything; profound, gentle and many more of the good things, and this because: he is innovative", wrote Oskar Schlemmer, Klee's future artist colleague at the Bauhaus, in his September 1916 diary.[85]

Novelist and Klee's friend Wilhelm Hausenstein wrote in his work Über Expressionismus in der Malerei (On Expressionism in Painting), "Maybe Klee's attitude is in general understandable for musical people – how Klee is one of the most delightsome violinist playing Bach and Händel, who ever walked on earth. […] For Klee, the German classic painter of the Cubism, the world music became his companion, possibly even a part of his art; the composition, written in notes, seems to be not dissimilar."[86]

When Klee visited the Paris surrealism exhibition in 1925, Max Ernst was impressed by his work. His partially morbid motifs appealed to the surrealists. André Breton helped to develop the surrealism and renamed Klee's 1912 painting Zimmerperspektive mit Einwohnern (Room Perspective with People) to chambre spirit in a catalogue. Critic René Crevelcalled the artist a "dreamer" who "releases a swarm of small lyrical louses from mysterious abysses." Paul Klee's confidante Will Grohmann argued in the Cahiers d'art that he "stands definitely well solid on his feet. He is by no means a dreamer; he is a modern person, who teaches as a professor at the Bauhaus." Whereupon Breton, as Joan Miró remembers, was critical of Klee: "Masson and I have both discovered Paul Klee. Paul Éluard and Crevel are also interested in Klee, and they have even visited him. But Breton despises him."[87]

The art of mentally ill people inspired Klee as well as Kandinsky and Max Ernst, after Hans Prinzhorns book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) was published in 1922. In 1937, some papers from Prinzhorn's anthology were presented at the National Socialist propaganda exhibition "Entartete Kunst" in Munich, with the purpose of defaming the works of Kirchner, Klee, Nolde and other artists by likening them to the works of the insane.[88]

In 1949 Marcel Duchamp commented on Paul Klee: "The first reaction in front of a Klee painting is the very pleasant discovery, what everyone of us could or could have done, to try drawing like in our childhood. Most of his compositions show at the first glance a plain, naive expression, found in children's drawings. […] At a second analyse one can discover a technique, which takes as a basis a large maturity in thinking. A deep understanding of dealing with watercolors to paint a personal method in oil, structured in decorative shapes, let Klee stand out in the contemporary art and make him incomparable. On the other side, his experiment was adopted in the last 30 years by many other artists as a basis for newer creations in the most different areas in painting. His extreme productivity never shows evidence of repetition, as is usually the case. He had so much to say, that a Klee never became an other Klee."[89]

One of Klee's paintings, Angelus Novus, was the object of an interpretative text by German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, who purchased the painting in 1921. In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Benjamin suggests that the angel depicted in the painting might be seen as representing the angel of history.

Musical interpretations

Unlike his taste for adventurous modern experiment in painting, Klee, though musically talented, was attracted to older traditions of music; he neither appreciated composers of the late 19th century, such as Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler, nor contemporary music. Bach and Mozart were for him the greatest composers; he most enjoyed playing the works by the latter.[90]

Klee's work has influenced composers including Argentinian Roberto García Morillo in 1943, with Tres pinturas de Paul Klee, and the American artist David Diamond in 1958, with the four-part Opus Welt von Paul Klee (World of Paul Klee). Gunther Schuller composed Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee in the years 1959/60, consisting of Antique Harmonies, Abstract Trio, Little Blue Devil, Twittering Machine, Arab Village, An Eerie Moment, and Pastorale. The Spanish composer Benet Casablancas wrote Alter Klang, Impromptu for Orchestra after Klee (2006);[91] Casablancas is author also of the Retablo on texts by Paul Klee, Cantata da Camera for Soprano, Mezzo and Piano (2007).[92] In 1950, Giselher Klebeperformed his orchestral work Die Zwitschermaschine with the subtitle Metamorphosen über das Bild von Paul Klee at the Donaueschinger Musiktage.[93] 8 Pieces on Paul Klee is the title of the debut album by the Ensemble Sortisatio, recorded February and March 2002 in Leipzig and August 2002 in Luzern, Switzerland. The composition "Wie der Klee vierblättrig wurde" (How the clover became four-leaved) was inspired by the watercolor painting Hat Kopf, Hand, Fuss und Herz (1930), Angelus Novus and Hauptweg und Nebenwege.

In 1968, a jazz group called The National Gallery featuring composer Chuck Mangione released the album Performing Musical Interpretations of the Paintings of Paul Klee.[94] In 1995 the Greek experimental filmmaker, Kostas Sfikas, created a film based entirely on Paul Klee's paintings. The film is entitled "Paul Klee's Prophetic Bird of Sorrows", and draws its title from Klee's Landscape with Yellow Birds. It was made using portions and cutouts from Paul Klee's paintings.[95]

Additional musical interpretations

Sándor Veress: Hommage à Paul Klee (1951), phantasy for two pianos and strings

Peter Maxwell Davies: Five Klee-Pictures (1962), orchestral

Harrison Birtwistle: Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum (The Perpetual Song of Mechanical Arcadia) (1977), for orchestra

Edison Denisov: Drei Bilder von Paul Klee (Three Pictures of Paul Klee) (1985), for six players (Diana im Herbstwind − Senecio – Kind auf der Freitreppe)

Tōru Takemitsu: All in Twilight (1987), for guitar

John Woolrich: The kingdom of dreams (1989), for oboe and piano ('Landscape with Yellow Birds', 'The Bavarian Don Giovanni', 'Tale à la Hoffmann', 'Fish Magic')

Leo Brouwer: Sonata (1990), for guitar[96]

Walter Steffens: Vier Aquarelle nach Paul Klee (Four Watercolor Pictures to Paul Klee) (1991), op. 63, for recorder(s)

Tan Dun: Death and Fire (1992), Dialogue with Paul Klee, orchestral

Judith Weir: Heroic Strokes of the Bow (1992), for orchestra

Jean-Luc Darbellay: Ein Garten für Orpheus (A Garden for Orpheus) (1996), for six instruments

Michael Denhoff: Haupt- und Nebenwege (Main and Sideways) (1998), for strings and piano

Iris Szeghy: Ad parnassum (2005), for strings

Patrick van Deurzen: Six: a line is a dot that went for a walk (2006), for Flugelhorn, DoubleBass & Percussion

Jason Wright Wingate: Symphony No. 2: Kleetüden; Variationen für Orchester nach Paul Klee (Variations for Orchestra after Paul Klee) (2009), for orchestra in 27 movements

Sakanaction: "Klee" (2010), from the album Kikuuiki; a song envisioned as a dialogue with Klee's paintings.[97]

Architectural honors

Since 1995, the "Paul Klee-Archiv" (Paul Klee archive) of the University of Jena houses an extensive collection of works by Klee. It is located within the art history department, established by Franz-Joachim Verspohl. It encompasses the private library of book collector Rolf Sauerwein which contains nearly 700 works from 30 years composed of monographs about Klee, exhibition catalogues, extensive secondary literature as well as originally illustrated issues, a postcard and a signed photography portrait of Klee.[98][99]

Architect Renzo Piano constructed the Zentrum Paul Klee in June 2005. Located in Bern, the museum exhibits about 150 (of 4000 Klee works overall) in a six-month rotation, as it is impossible to show all of his works at once. Furthermore, his pictures require rest periods; they contain relatively photosensitive colors, inks and papers, which may bleach, change, turn brown and become brittle if exposed to light for too long.[100] The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a comprehensive Klee collection, donated by Carl Djerassi. Other exhibitions include the Sammlung Rosengart in Luzern, the Albertina in Wien and the Berggruen Museum in Berlin. Schools in Gersthofen, Lübeck; Klein-Winternheim, Overath; his place of birth Münchenbuchsee and Düsseldorf bear his name.

Works and publications

Acrobats (Artisten) at the Guggenheim Museum

Aged Phoenix (Invention 9) (Greiser Phönix) at the Guggenheim Museum

A Pious One (Ein Frommer) at the Guggenheim Museum

Barbarian Sacrifice (Barbaren-Opfer) at the Guggenheim Museum

Before the Festivity (Vor dem Fest) at the Guggenheim Museum

Comedian (Invention 4) (Komiker) at the Guggenheim Museum

Curtain (Vorhang) at the Guggenheim Museum

Flower Family V (Blumenfamilie V) at the Guggenheim Museum

Fright of a Girl (Schreck eines Mädchens) at the Guggenheim Museum

Gemmi Pass, Valais Alps (Gemmi Passhöhe, Walliseralpen) at the Guggenheim Museum

Hat, Lady and Little Table (Hut, Dame und Tischchen) at the Guggenheim Museum

Hilterfingen at the Guggenheim Museum

Horizon, Zenith and Atmosphere (Horizont, Gipfelpunkt und Atmosphäre)at the Guggenheim Museum

In Angel's Care (In Engelshut) at the Guggenheim Museum

In Readiness (Bereitschaft) at the Guggenheim Museum

Inscription (Inschrift) at the Guggenheim Museum

In the Current Six Thresholds (In der Strömung sechs Schwellen) at the Guggenheim Museum

Jumping Jack (Hampelmann) at the Guggenheim Museum

Magic Garden (Zaubergarten) at the Guggenheim Museum

Night Feast (Nächtliches Fest) at the Guggenheim Museum

Portrait Sketch of a Costumed Lady (Bildnisskizze einer kostümierten Dame) at the Guggenheim Museum

Public Duel (Öffentliches Duell) at the Guggenheim Museum

Rocks at Night (Felsen in der Nacht) at the Guggenheim Museum

Singer of the Comic Opera (Sängerin der komischen Oper) at the Guggenheim Museum

The Idea of Firs (Die Idee der Tannen) at the Guggenheim Museum

Thunersee near Schadau (Thunersee bei Schadau) at the Guggenheim Museum

Tree Culture (Baum Kultur) at the Guggenheim Museum

Tropical Gardening (Tropische Garten Kultur) at the Guggenheim Museum

Two Ways (Zwei Gänge) at the Guggenheim Museum

White Blossom in the Garden (Weisse Blüte im Garten) at the Guggenheim Museum

(From the Song of Songs) Version II ((Aus dem hohen Lied) (II. Fassung))at the Guggenheim Museum

Publications

Jardi, Enric (1991) Paul Klee, Rizzoli Intl Pubns, ISBN 0-8478-1343-6

Kagan, Andrew (1993) Paul Klee at the Guggenheim Museum (exhibition catalogue) [1] Introduction by Lisa Dennison, essay by Andrew Kagan. 208 pages. English and Spanish editions. 1993, ISBN 978-0-89207-106-7

Partsch, Susanna (2007). Klee (reissue) (in German). Cologne: Benedikt Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-6361-9.

Rudloff, Diether (1982). Unvollendete Schöpfung: Künstler im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (in German). ISBN 978-3-87838-368-0.

Baumgartner, Michael; Klingsöhr-Leroy, Cathrin; Schneider, Katja (2010). Franz Marc, Paul Klee: Dialog in Bildern (in German) (1st ed.). Wädenswil: Nimbus Kunst und Bücher. ISBN 978-3-907142-50-9.

Giedion-Welcker, Carola. Klee (in German). Reinbek: Rowohlt. ISBN 978-3-499-50052-7.

Glaesemer, Jürgen; Kersten, Wolfgang; Traffelet, Ursula (1996). Paul Klee: Leben und Werk (in German). Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. ISBN 978-3-7757-0241-6.

Rümelin, Christian (2004). Paul Klee: Leben und Werk. Munich: C. H. Beck. ISBN 3-406-52190-8.

Books, essays and lectures by Paul Klee

1922 Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre ('Contributions to a pictorial theory of form', part of his 1921-2 lectures at the Bauhaus)

1923 Wege des Naturstudiums ('Ways of Studying Nature'), 4 pages. Published in the catalogue for the Erste Bauhaus Ausstellung (First Bauhaus Exhibition) in Summer 1923. Also published in Paul Klee Notebooks vol 1.

1924 Über moderne Kunst ('On Modern Art'), lecture held at Paul Klee's exhibition at the Kunstverein in Jena on 26 January 1924

1924 Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch ('Pedagogical Sketchbook')

1949 Documente und Bilder aus den Jahren 1896–1930, ('Documents and images from the years 1896–1930'), Berne, Benteli

1956 Graphik, ('Graphics'), Berne, Klipstein & Kornfeld

1956 Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre ('Writings on form and design theory') edited by Jürg Spiller (English edition: 'Paul Klee Notebooks')

1964 The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918 ed. Felix Klee Berkeley, University of California

1976 Schriften, Rezensionen und Aufsätze edited by Ch. Geelhaar, Köln,

1960 Gedichte, poems, edited by Felix Klee

1962 Some poems by Paul Klee ed Anselm Hollo. London

1956 Band I: Das bildnerische Denken., ('Volume I: the creative thinking'). 572 pages review. (English translation from German by Ralph Manheim: 'The thinking eye')

1964 Band 2: Unendliche Naturgeschichte ('Volume 2: Infinite Natural History') (English translation from German by Heinz Norden: 'The Nature of Nature')