On to the Next...
Opportunities missed, roads not taken.
As it turns out, I did not go to the retreat last week. Family needs cropped up, plus a bit of personal rest was welcome.
Our Visual Influences
Visual art reflects our need to communicate beyond the verbal. Making it is an experience in itself, which can be simultaneously isolating and empowering. Visual art is a thing we can share, forever in hard copy, with everyone. Learning to appreciate visual art helps us understand the whole territory of design, the vast acreage of visual communication. I hope you’ll allow me a metaphor to illustrate!
If we look at a graph of our planet’s rising surface temperature, we see a recent upswing that is increasingly steep, toward a rarified atmosphere that is hard to comprehend. What once seemed static has become noticeably kinetic on a frequent, even daily, basis.
We are greatly aware of how rapidly things are changing, and so-called future shock sets in. That phrase was coined by Alvin Toffler in his eponymous 1970 book that describes a syndrome of disorientation and anxiety caused by too much change in a short period of time. We get this. And in the face of chaos we somehow create meaning through small individual acts.
Similarly, if we look at the development of art through the ages, we see the same speeding up of change. There was only slow growth over eons as primitive petroglyphs appeared all over the world. Visual expression changed gradually over thousands of years of prehistory, eventually showing stylistic differences marked by centuries (Baroque, Rococo) instead of millenia, and more recently by decades in which art styles fall into the “isms” (e.g. Realism, Impressionism, Vorticism, Cubism). Artists who happened to be working along the same lines and often in the same environment belonged to stylistic categories that were applied after the fact by art historians. With today’s digital tech, artists anywhere on the planet have immediate access to every influence. A stochastic effect has occurred, in which stylistic directions have been so intermixed that art exposure has increased exponentially, like the climate change curve. Artists today are affected by their exposure to everything that has preceded, plus everything that we are now experiencing. The effect can be overwhelming. Art is always a search for form and meaning, and is a considerable investment in time. There is nothing quick about it. A timeline of self portraits over the last 500 years looks like this:
Art imagery comes about through availability of materials, observation and education, as well as reflection on the actual and cultural environment in which we find ourselves. It’s a product of skill as well as philosophy, discipline as well as feeling. It’s also unpredictable, therefore approached freely.
A pivot point.
This alphabetic piece by Tim Donaldson—typographer, graphic designer and teacher—may illustrate the pivot point, the place where two ideas merge to create a new reality. It takes us from the focused discipline of polyrhythmic letterform to the immediacy of feeling expressed by the bold brush stroke that obliterates the rest of the alphabet. Two attitudes are present. Building and destroying. As realization happens, past efforts are relegated to history and subsumed by new approaches and new forms. Attention to one’s feelings is of prime importance in determining the outcome of any work. Art is a recording, not a premeditation.
Being caught in a rapid upswing of influences can cause hesitation and confusion about where to start. But you know you have already begun. And you know you can make a mark at any moment. What’s stopping the process? Just make a mark.
In my new class, I’m hoping to present a fresh way of working with visual ideas to strengthen and guide a balanced approach to making visual art. We’ll explore the roots of Notan and its popularity for the last 150 years or so throughout the art and design world. We’ll approach the balancing of figure and ground using both ancient and modern perspectives, and to build perceptiveness and dexterity we’ll explore inventing glyphs, letters and alphabets that have strong interactive dark/light balance or Notan reversal.
This image is from the Victoria and Albert Museum, a collaborative 1939 coat design by fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the multi-talented artist Jean Cocteau. It shows the influence of Notan in its version of the famous Edgar Rubin face vase image. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
By studying Notan you may find a delightful entry into the design world, reviewing the language of design, how to apply its principles to strengthen and transform your art, letterform, or typography, and how to make it your new best friend.
In our rapidly changing society, it seems that our artwork has become full of immediacy, a swift image caught in passing, a transient witness to a transient world. And yet the rules of design represent the truths of visual art that have not been and are still not subject to change.
Thank you all for reading and enjoying my posts. It’s great to be here with you.
ONLINE SUMMER 2026!
ART 232: The Design of Light and Dark: Text Art and Notan will cover optics, figure/ground theories and compositional methods in studio art, design, and letterform. I’m looking forward intensely to plunge into this area with you.
PRODUCTS
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Hey Ann, am looking forward to your new class ART 232!! Is it going to be offered on Stanford Continuing Edu online?
Thanks and great article!