# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Scarfolk is a fictional northern English town created by writer and designer Richard Littler, who is sometimes identified as the town mayor. First published as a blog of fake historical documents, parodying British public information posters of the 1970s, a collected book was published in 2014.
https://scarfolk.blogspot.com https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1t7KxXy44QC5qC1R0h53Mg

UK Government 2019: "We've announced £2.1bn to prepare for No Deal. Funding will ensure the supply of critical medicines".

UK Government 2020: pic.twitter.com/uuMJvzDKsO
- Scarfolk Council (@Scarfolk) August 1, 2019

Littler has said "I was always scared as a kid, always frightened of what I was faced with. ... You'd walk into WHSmith... and see horror books with people's faces melting. Kids' TV included things like Children of the Stones, a very odd series you just wouldn't get today. I remember a public information film made by some train organisation in which a children's sports day was held on train tracks and, one by one, they were killed. It was insane. ... I'm just taking it to the next logical step.

Scarfolk, which is forever locked in the 1970s, is a satire not only on that decade but also on contemporary events. It touches on themes of totalitarianism, suburban life, occultism and religion, school and childhood, as well as social attitudes such as racism and sexism.

Scarfolk was initially presented as a fake blog which purportedly releases artefacts from the town council's archive. Artefacts include public information literature, out-of-print books, record and cassette sleeves, advertisements, television programme screenshots, household products, and audio and video, many of which suggest brands and imagery recognisable from the period. Additionally, artefacts are usually accompanied by short fictional vignettes which are also presented as factual and introduce residents of Scarfolk. The public information literature often ends with the strapline: "For more information please reread."

The aesthetic is utilitarian, inspired by public sector materials in the United Kingdom such as Protect and Survive.

A television series co-written by Will Smith was described as "in the works" in 2018.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scarfolk is a fictional northern English town created by writer and designer Richard Littler, who is sometimes identified as the town mayor. First published as a blog of fake historical documents, parodying British public information posters of the 1970s, a collected book was published in 2014.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Inspiration for:
Image and text
Sources
Shaun Tan website
Shaun Tan is a graphic illustrator of very poignant short allegorical graphic novels whose work I very much admire. The strength is in the combination of very strong visual dynamics and simplification, coupled with a high level of artistic skill. His recent work uses maquettes and puppets.

Key works
http://www.shauntan.net/books.html
Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Beside The Lost Thing, The Red Tree and The Arrival are books he has written and illustrated. These have different but distinctive approaches to layout and combining image and text. Some of these have been animated - either straight animation of the illustrations with types text, or CGI.

His artistic process

Initially, Tan works in black and white because the final reproductions would be printed that way. Some black and white mediums he uses include pens, inks, acrylics, charcoal, scraperboard, photocopies, and linocuts.

Tan's current colour works still begin in black and white. He uses a graphite pencil to make sketches on ordinary copy paper. The sketches are then reproduced numerous times with different versions varying with parts added or removed. Sometimes scissors are used for this purpose. The cut and paste collage idea in these early stages is often extend to the finished production with many of his illustrations using such materials as "glass, metal, cuttings from other books and dead insects".

Tan describes himself as a slow worker who revises his work many times along the way. He is interested in loss and alienation, and believes that children in particular react well to issues of natural justice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Inspiration for: Image and text Shaun Tan website Shaun Tan is a graphic illustrator of very poignant short allegorical graphic novels whose work I very much admire. The strength is in the combination of very strong visual dynamics and simplification, coupled with a high level of artistic skill.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Anna Boghiguian was born in 1946, an Armenian in Cairo. Living a nomadic life, the artist has constantly moved between different cities across the globe, from Egypt to Canada and India to France. She studied political science at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Arts and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. The artist investigates subjects such as the history of the cotton trade, the salt trade and

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Anna Boghiguian was born in 1946, an Armenian in Cairo. Living a nomadic life, the artist has constantly moved between different cities across the globe, from Egypt to Canada and India to France. She studied political science at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Arts and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
'l love every minute of my life... I squeeze it like an orange and eat the peel, because I don't want to miss a thing.'

Huguette Caland (January 1931 - 23 September 2019) was a Lebanese painter, sculptor and fashion designer known for her bright abstract paintings, erotic line drawings, and her Middle Eastern-inspired fashion designs. I came across her work in July 2019 at an exhibition at Tate St Ives - see exhibition catalogue:
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-st-ives/exhibition/huguette-caland/huguette-caland-exhibition-guide
Born in Beirut in 1931, she was the daughter of Bechara El Khoury, the first president of post-independence Lebanon from 1943. She began to study art in her 30s at the American University in Beirut just after her father died in 1964. By this point, Caland had married Paul Caland (the nephew of one of her father's political rivals), had children, and taken a lover called Mustafa (who featured in many of her works). In 1970, she decided to leave her life in Lebanon behind and move to Paris to build a career as an artist. "Art is not a part of my life; it is my whole life." She became a regular guest at the Feraud studio, meeting many artists, including André Masson, Pierre Schaeffer, and Adalberto Mecarelli. In 1979, Caland collaborated with designer Pierre Cardin, creating a line of caftans that were displayed at Espace Cardin.In 1983, Caland met Romanian sculptor George Apostu. From 1983 until Apostu's death in 1986, they worked in Paris and in the Limousin, creating many paintings and sculptures during this time. In 1987 she moved back to Los Angeles. Then after moving from one studio to another, in 1997 she finally settled in a studio in Venice where she frequently hosted friends and members of the art community, including Ed Moses, Chris Burden, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, and James Hayward. In 2013 she returned to Beirut to say goodbye to her dying husband, and remained there until she died in September 2019 at the age of 88 - just after the end of the exhibition at Tate St Ives where I saw her work.

Her work - like her life - is characterised above all by a sense of fun, energy and delicacy in her treatment of themes of eroticism and relationships. It includes large abstract oil canvases of body landscapes, simplified ink drawings and fashion design.

Calland talking in 2009 about her work with rugs.

Calland 2013 interview in Detroit looks back on her life and family while she continues to work on her later more colourful textile work.

See overviews and reviews:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'l love every minute of my life... I squeeze it like an orange and eat the peel, because I don't want to miss a thing.' Huguette Caland (January 1931 - 23 September 2019) was a Lebanese painter, sculptor and fashion designer known for her bright abstract paintings, erotic line drawings, and her Middle Eastern-inspired fashion designs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I first came across Dan Eldon as part of my OCA Book Design course, and was struck by the impact of his combination of photographs, collage and text.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Chris Ware has been an important influence on the way I look at issues of image, text and narrative, and the possibilities of non-linear approaches.

Edited from Wikipedia

Franklin Christenson " Chris" Ware (born December 28, 1967), is an American cartoonist. His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression. He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail. His lettering and images are often elaborate and sometimes evoke the ragtime era or another early 20th-century American design style.

Ware often refers to himself in the publicity for his work in self-effacing, even withering tones.

I arrived at my way of "working" as a way of visually approximating what I feel the tone of fiction to be in prose versus the tone one might use to write biography; I would never do a biographical story using the deliberately synthetic way of cartooning I use to write fiction. I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I "draw", which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world. I figured out this way of working by learning from and looking at artists I admired and whom I thought came closest to getting at what seemed to me to be the "essence" of comics, which is fundamentally the weird process of reading pictures, not just looking at them. I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don't really "see" anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together. Unfortunately, as a result, I guess sometimes readers get a chilled or antiseptic sensation from it, which is certainly not intentional, and is something I admit as a failure, but is also something I can't completely change at the moment.

Although his precise, geometrical layouts may appear to some to be computer-generated, Ware works almost exclusively with manual drawing tools such as paper and ink, rulers and T-squares. He does, however, sometimes use photocopies and transparencies, and he employs a computer to colour his strips.

Graphic novel serialized in the alternative Chicago weekly newspaper Newcity and in Ware's comic book Acme Novelty Library in issues # 5-6, 8-9, and 11-14) from 1995 to 2000. Jimmy Corrigan is a meek, lonely thirty-six-year-old man who meets his father for the first time in the fictional town of Waukosha, Michigan, over Thanksgiving weekend. Jimmy is an awkward and cheerless character with an overbearing mother and a very limited social life. After an ill-timed phone call, Jimmy agrees to meet his father without telling his mother. The experience is stressful for him as he can barely communicate with anyone other than his mother, let alone his estranged father. The two do very little together and Jimmy's father, while well-intentioned, comes off to Jimmy as slightly racist and inconsiderate. A parallel story set in the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 shows Jimmy's grandfather as a lonely little boy and his difficult relationship with an abusive father, Jimmy's great grandfather.

Graphic novel made up of fourteen printed works-cloth-bound books, newspapers, broadsheets and flip books-packaged in a boxed set (inspired by Duchamp??). The parts of the work can be read in any order.

The intricate, multilayered stories pivot around an unnamed female protagonist with a missing lower leg. It mainly focuses on her time in a three-story brownstone apartment building in Chicago, but follows her later in her life as a mother.

Loss is a dominant theme. The characters suffer loss in terms of relationships, romance, finance, weight, and in terms of the main character, loss of limb. The characters fear and resist these losses-though sometimes they desire it. As in other works by Ware, there is much interconnectivity-the smallest details have great importance in the work.

Quimby the Mouse

Quimby the Mouse is perhaps Ware's most autobiographical character. Quimby's relationship with a cat head named Sparky is by turns conflict-ridden and loving, and thus intended to reflect all human relationships. While Quimby exhibits mobility, Sparky remains immobile and helpless, subject to all the indignities Quimby visits upon him. Quimby also acts as a narrator for Ware's reminiscences of his youth, in particular his relationship with his grandmother. Quimby was presented in a series of smaller panels than most comics, almost providing the illusion of motion à la a zoetrope. In fact, Ware once designed a zoetrope to be cut out and constructed by the reader in order to watch a Quimby "silent movie". Ware's ingenuity is neatly shown in this willingness to break from the confines of the page. Quimby the Mouse appears in the logo of a Chicago-based bookstore "Quimby's", although their shared name was originally a coincidence.

The Last Saturday

Ware's latest project, The Last Saturday, a "comic novella," began appearing online every Friday at the website of the UK newspaper The Guardian, starting in September 2014. The story follows a few people in Sandy Port, Michigan: Putnam Gray, a young boy caught up in his sci-fi and space fantasies; Sandy Grains, a young girl and classmate who is interested in Putnam; Rosie Gentry, a young girl and classmate with whom Putnam is infatuated; Mr. and Mrs. Gray and Mrs. Grains. The strip also features in the newspaper's Weekend magazine.

The serialization has now apparently ended after 54 instalments. The bottom right-hand corner of the last page has a note that says, "END, PART ONE", but so far there appears to be no indication from The Guardian or from Ware that there is to be a Part Two.

Mural for 826 Valencia

Dave Eggers commissioned Ware to design the mural for the facade of San Francisco literacy project 826 Valencia. The mural depicts "the parallel development of humans and their efforts at and motivations for communication, spoken and written." The 3.9m x 6m mural was applied by artisans to Ware's specifications.Describing the work, Ware said "I didn't want it to make anyone 'feel good', especially in that typically muralistic 'hands across the water' sort of way,"..."I especially wanted it to be something that people living in the neighbourhood could look at day after day and hopefully not tire of too quickly. I really hoped whomever might happen to come across it would find something that showed a respect for their intelligence, and didn't force-feed them any 'message'."

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

In 2011, Ware created the poster for the U.S. release of the 2010 Palme d'Or winning film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Describing the poster, Ware said "I wanted to get at both the transcendent solemnity of the film while keeping some sense of its loose, very unpretentious accessibility... This being a poster, however-and even worse, me not really being a designer-I realized it also had to be somewhat punchy and strange, so as to draw viewers in and pique their curiosity without, hopefully, insulting their intelligence."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chris Ware has been an important influence on the way I look at issues of image, text and narrative, and the possibilities of non-linear approaches. Edited from Wikipedia Franklin Christenson " Chris" Ware (born December 28, 1967), is an American cartoonist. His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
http://www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com https://www.victoria-miro.com/
Wikipedia

Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE (28 October 1925 - 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. Born in Nassau, Bahamas his family moved back to Scotland. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside. He was educated at Dollar Academy, in Clackmannanshire and later Glasgow School of Art. In 1942, he joined the British Army. He died in 2006 in Edinburgh.

Poetry

At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney. He published his first book, The Sea Bed and Other Stories, in 1958, with some of his plays broadcast on the BBC, and some stories featured in The Glasgow Herald.

His first collection of poetry, The Dancers Inherit the Party, was published in 1960 by Migrant Press with a second edition published in 1962.

In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press, in his magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.

Finlay became notable as a poet, when reducing the monostich form to one wordwith his concrete poems in the 1960s. Repetition, imitation and tradition lay at the heart of Hamilton's poetry,and exploring ' the juxtaposition of apparently opposite ideas'.

Art

Later, Finlay began to compose poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment. This kind of 'poem-object' features in the garden Little Sparta that he and Sue Finlay created together in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh. The five-acre garden also includes more conventional sculptures and two garden temples.

In December 2004, in a poll conducted by Scotland on Sunday, a panel of fifty artists, gallery directors and arts professionals voted Little Sparta to be the most important work of Scottish art. Second and third were the Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and The Skating Minister by Henry Raeburn. Sir Roy Strong has said of Little Sparta that it is "the only really original garden made in this country since 1945".

The Little Sparta Trust plans to preserve Little Sparta for the nation by raising enough to pay for an ongoing maintenance fund. Ian Appleton, Stephen Bann, Stephen Blackmore,Patrick Eyres, Richard Ingleby, Ian Kennedy, Magnus Linklater, John Leighton, Duncan Macmillan, Victoria Miro, Paul Nesbitt, Jessie Sheeler and Ann Uppington are trustees.

Hamilton Finlay and George Oliver's 1973 Arcadia screenprint uses camouflage in modern art to contrast leafy peace and military hardware. He continually revisited war themes and the concept of the Utopian Arcadia in his work.

Finlay's work is notable for a number of recurring themes: a penchant for classical writers (especially Virgil); a concern with fishing and the sea; an interest in the French Revolution; and a continual revisiting of World War II and the memento mori Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego. His 1973 screenprint of a tank camouflaged in a leaf pattern, Arcadia, referring to the Utopian Arcadia of poetry and art (another recurring theme), is described by the Tate as drawing "an ironic parallel between this idea of a natural paradise and the camouflage patterns on a tank".

His use of Nazi imagery led to an accusation of neo-Nazi sympathies and anti-semitism. Finlay sued a Paris magazine which had made such accusations, and was awarded nominal damages of one franc. The stress of this situation brought about the separation between Finlay and his wife Sue.

Finlay also came into conflict with the Strathclyde Regional Council over his liability for rates on a byre in his garden, which the council insisted was being used as commercial premises. Finlay insisted that it was a garden temple.

One of the few gardens outside Scotland to permanently display his work is the Improvement Garden in Stockwood Discovery Centre, Luton, created in collaboration with Sue Finlay, Gary Hincks and Nicholas Sloan.

Finlay was nominhe Turner Prize in 1985. He was awarded honorary doctorates from Aberdeen University in 1987, Heriot-Watt University in 1993 and the University of Glasgow in 2001, and an honorary and/or visiting professorship from the University of Dundee in 1999. The French Communist Party presented him with a bust of Saint-Just in 1991. He received the Scottish Horticultural Medal from the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society in 2002, and the Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award in 2003. Awarded in the Queen's New Year's Honours list in 2002, Finlay was a CBE.

Finlay's work has been seen as austere, but also at times witty, or even darkly whimsical.

He is represented by the Wild Hawthorn Press, the Archive of Ian Hamilton Finlay, which works closely with the Ingleby Gallery (Edinburgh)and the Victoria Miro Gallery (London) in the U.K.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
http://www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com https://www.victoria-miro.com/ Wikipedia Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE (28 October 1925 - 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. Born in Nassau, Bahamas his family moved back to Scotland. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
http://www.melbochner.net/
Mel Bochner is an American Conceptual artist best known for his text-based paintings. Bochner's popular thesaurus painting series consists of lists of synonyms displayed in rainbow-colored palettes, often featuring a single word repeated in painterly capital letters, as seen in his seminal piece Blah, Blah, Blah (2008). "My feeling was that there were ways of extending, or re-inventing visual experience, but that it was very important that it remain visual," he reflected on introducing text into his work. "The viewer should enter the idea through a visual or phenomenological experience rather than simply reading it." Born in 1940 in Pittsburgh, PA, he earned his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962. Travelling to New York in 1964, Bochner began working as a guard at the Jewish Museum and settled in the city. Like Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd, Bochner experimented with ideas that broke away from the dominate Abstract Expressionism of the early 1960s and developed an ongoing commitment to semiotic representation. His influential critical and theoretical essays on art have figured as a central component to his oeuvre. The artist continues to live and work in New York, NY. Bochner's works are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others. http://www.artnet.com/artists/mel-bochner/

http://www.artnews.com/2014/04/28/mel-bochner-brings-new-meaning-to-blah-in-jewish-museum-show/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
http://www.melbochner.net/ Mel Bochner is an American Conceptual artist best known for his text-based paintings. Bochner's popular thesaurus painting series consists of lists of synonyms displayed in rainbow-colored palettes, often featuring a single word repeated in painterly capital letters, as seen in his seminal piece Blah, Blah, Blah (2008).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linda Mayoux blog for Open College of the Arts Visual Communications Level 3: Advanced Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
https://projects.jennyholzer.com
Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick Falls, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces.

Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects. Her contemporaries include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler.

The public dimension is integral to Holzer's work. Her large-scale installations have included advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, and illuminated electronic displays. LED signs have become her most visible medium, although her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including street posters, painted signs, stone benches, paintings, photographs, sound, video, projections, the Internet, and a race car for BMW. Text-based light projections have been central to Holzer's practice since 1996. As of 2010, her LED signs have become more sculptural. Holzer is no longer the author of her texts, and in the ensuing years, she returned to her roots by painting. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jenny-holzer-1307
https://www.nowness.com/series/private-view/jenny-holzer-klaus-thymann

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
https://projects.jennyholzer.com Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick Falls, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces. Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linda Mayoux blog for Open College of the Arts Visual Communications Level 3: Advanced Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York) in January 1975. In his introduction to the catalogue, Jenkins defined the common denominator of the show as "a problem of style:" "stylistic anonymity", an alleged absence of style.

The exhibition was a reaction to the idealised landscape photography of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and was influenced by Ed Ruscha who, in the 60s, had made a series of artist's books with self-explanatory titles such as Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Walker Evans, who had photographed the vernacular iconography of America in road signs, billboards, motels and shop.
"The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion,." "[...] rigorous purity, deadpan humor and a casual disregard for the importance of the images." Technically, half the photographers were working with 8″×10″; (20 cm × 25 cm) large format view cameras; those who were not were using either square medium format (Deal, Gohlke), or in the case of Baltz, 35 mm Technical Pan, a slow and high-definition Kodak film that the photographer printed on 8″x10″ paper. Only Baltz and Wessel were using regular 35 mm cameras and film. A notable element of the show was that the artists were, or would be, linked with higher education as students, professors, or both-a change from the preceding generations.The shift from craft or self-teaching to academia had somewhat been started by photographers such as Ansel Adams and Minor White, but the new generation was turning away from the approach of these forebears. This was illustrated by the subject matter that the New Topographics chose as well as their commitment to casting a somewhat ironic or critical eye on what American society had become. They all depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach. In most cases, they gradually revealed themselves as coming from rather critical vantage points, especially Robert Adams, Baltz, and Deal.
Photographers
Sean O'Hagan The show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal. ...Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.
The prints were in a 20 cm × 25 cm (8″×10″) format except for Joe Deal (32 cm × 32 cm), Gohlke (24 cm × 24 cm - close enough to 8"×10"), and the Bechers with typical European (for the time) 30 cm × 40 cm prints.

However despite their similarities, there were significant differences between the photographers in their reactions to, and portrayal of, the suburban environment and their political conclusions on responses to it.

See Greg Foster-Price and John Rohrbach 'Re-framing the New Topographics' 2013 University of Chicago Press

Robert Adams: disappearing wildernesses, pointed his camera at eerily empty streets, pristine trailer parks, rows of standardised tract houses, the steady creep of suburban development in all its regulated uniformity.

Lewis Baltz: stark photographs of the walls of office buildings and warehouses on industrial sites in Orange County.
Frank Gohlke
Nicholas Nixon: innercity development: skyscrapers that dwarfed period buildings, freeways, gridded streets and the palpable unreality of certain American cities in which pedestrians seem like interlopers.
John Schott
Stephen Shore : shot in colour. It seemed to heighten the sense of detachment in his photographs of anonymous intersections and streets.
Henry Wessel, Jr
Bernd and Hilla Becher: stark images of Pennsylvania salt mines and giant coal breakers were as coolly architectural as their images of German cooling towers and industrial plants. The suggestion was that there was something determinedly European about this new American gaze.

Ecological citizenship and automobility

The works in different ways question our responsibility in relation to the natural environment. Taken at a time of rapid environmental change, commercialisation and often homogenised destruction of the natural wilderness romanticised by Ansel Adams, they aim to promote a sense of responsibility for what Robert Adams calls the 'half wilderness'.

There is a general concern with the homogenisation and also isolation of much of modern construction and urban sprawl. Roads that cut of and surround dwellings that can only be accessed by cars.

They differ in their approaches to technological advances like the reliance on the motor car. For Shore and Schott however there is more of a celebration of the accessibility and democratisation of life. Shore in particular celebrates the colour and vibrancy of cities and parking lots.

'Shore's images may be seen as ignoring environmental degradation...Yet his photographs encourage a sense of wonder and appreciation, even in the most familiar, most mundane spaces'.

There is thus a core message of the exhibition as a whole: we need to notice and appreciate what is around us in the 'semi-wilderness' and make sure we preserve and protect what is valuable in it. In terms of human colour and nature. Not relegate 'conservation' to an ever-shrinking small protected area of idealised wilderness. It is all important.

Legacy

The exhibition was recreated in various locations: in 1981, six years after its original presentation, it was shown in reduced form at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, UK, under the auspices of Paul Graham and Jem Southam. A large scale presentation of the exhibition was organized in 2009 at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. "New Topographics" began an international tour in 2009, with stagings at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2011 the exhibition was on view at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and later at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in Spain.

Baltz, Gohlke, and Shore were later commissioned by the French government for the Mission de la DATAR.

The exhibition was very influential in the subsequent developments in both US and European landscape photography, including the work of Andreas Gursky, Paul Graham, Candida Höfe and Donovan Wylie. See the following interviews with LA photographers discussing how they have been influenced by the photographers at the exhibition:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York) in January 1975. In his introduction to the catalogue, Jenkins defined the common denominator of the show as "a problem of style:" "stylistic anonymity", an alleged absence of style.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
google images
Aaron Siskind (1903 - 1991) was an American photographer. Siskind's work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement.
https://www.britannica.com/video/164452/Aaron-Siskind-influences-documentary-photography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
google images Aaron Siskind (1903 - 1991) was an American photographer. Siskind's work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement. https://www.britannica.com/video/164452/Aaron-Siskind-influences-documentary-photography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Nowhere in Particular
google images
Jonathan Miller writing about the book in the Independent

the capacity to resolve fine detail is confined to a surprisingly small area of the retina, the fovea, around which visual acuity falls off so steeply that it's impossible to take in the details of a whole scene at a single glance. Try fixing your eyes on the last word of this sentence and see how difficult it is to read the surrounding text. The result of this restricted acuity is that our perception of the visual world has to be assembled in discrete installments. Although we are not explicitly aware of doing so we are constantly flicking our gaze from one part of the visual field to the next, and by bringing the specialised centre of the retina to bear on one sector of the scene after another we collect an anthology of sporadic snapshots from which we build up an apparently detailed picture of the world around us.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-scavengers-hoard-1116630.html
On Reflection

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
google images Jonathan Miller writing about the book in the Independent the capacity to resolve fine detail is confined to a surprisingly small area of the retina, the fovea, around which visual acuity falls off so steeply that it's impossible to take in the details of a whole scene at a single glance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
https://www.richard-mcguire.com
Here
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-profound-mundanity-of-richard-mcguires-my-things
R ichard McGuire (born 1957) is an American illustrator, comic book artist, children's book author, and musician. His illustrations have been published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and . His short story is among the most lauded comic book stories from recent decades. An updated book-length version of Here was published by Pantheon Books in December 2014.

McGuire is a founding member and bassist for the band Liquid Liquid, best known for their song " Cavern ", whose bass line has been frequently sampled.

Short stories[edit]

"The Dot Man," 1 pg. from Bad News #3 (Fantagraphics, 1988)

"Here", 6 pgs. from vol. 2 #1 (1989) (ISBN 9780140122657). Reprinted in An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories vol. 1 (Yale University Press, 2006) (ISBN 9780300111705) and #8 (Buenaventura Press, 2006) (ISBN 9781584232575)

"The Thinkers," 1 pg. from vol. 2 #2 (1990) (ISBN 9780140122657)

"Bon appétit," fold-out comic booklet from 2wBOX Set I (Switzerland: Bülb Comix, 2002)

"ctrl," 6 pgs. from Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern#13 (2003) (ISBN 9781932416084)

Graphic Novels[edit]

Children's literature[edit]

Adult literature[edit]

A rough and random You Tube slideshow that gives some idea of the graphics - not sure who put this together. Not I think Richard MacGuire himself.

Richard McGuire's groundbreaking six-page comic "Here" was first published in RAW magazine in 1989. This is desscribed by Hamish Hamilton as a 'short black-and-white strip by Richard McGuire about a living room in which the present is locked in a constant conversation with the past and the future. McGuire then developed a book based on this short story over a period of fifteen years.

If Here is about one thing, it's that nothing lasts, whatever it is or however permanent it seems.'

McGuire explains that Here is not about his house or hometown but an abstract or symbolic idea of home. Whether portraying prehistory, recent events or dystopian future, he focuses on the moods and events of daily life, passing by in a perpetual present tense.

The evolution of Here itself has also come to reflect its creator's changing perspectives over time. The comic strip, completed when McGuire was in his early thirties, uses the spare visual language of the strip medium to put all of history on a shared, chiefly humorous plane. In Here the book, finished twenty-five years later, the stage of action has grown wider, the palette of colors and emotions more nuanced, as its author ponders the relationship between memory and history and the lasting pleasures of living in the moment. (hamilton)

a review for the Guardian by Chris Ware:

But who or what is the main character? Is it the man who seizes up at a joke told in the first few pages (yet dies, moments later, halfway through the book, after the reader has already ricocheted back and forth through millions of years of history)? Is it the indigenous couple, looking for a place to copulate? Is it the cat, the cat's cradle, the elk, the builders, the partygoers, the weeping woman? You could say it's the space of the room, the arbitrary geometry imposed by a human mind on a space for reasons of shelter and as a background to this theatre of life. But you could also claim it is the reader, your consciousness where everything is pieced together and tries to find, and to understand, itself.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/chris-ware-here-richard-mcguire-review-graphic-novel

The year each image is taken from is dutifully reported in accompanying captions. The year comes to figure as a reading anchor, stabilizing our navigation through vastly disconnected images. Most grounding of all is the image of a corner within a house, the very spot from which all the scenes of the graphic novel are taken. That corner undergoes momentous change over the decades, witnessing history remixed, as visual mélange. By reducing humanity as well as history to so many discreet units of possibility, Here presents captivating alternatives not only to comics narrative but also to the presumed subjects of autography. In its pages, place seems able to possess a life worth recounting, but not always according to the same standards of human reason or emotion common to autobiography.

https://michaelalexanderchaney.com/2016/06/19/richard-mcguires-here-and-the-spatial-ontology-of-comics/
The graphics use flat colour to represent different moods and emotions. The removal of distracting detail enable a combination of distance and intimacy.

Evolution of the idea and working process

An interesting compilation of the mixed media visuals - old photos, watercolour and gouache sketches and pencil sketches that were part of his process can be seen in Hamish Hamilton's Five Dials: Richard MacGuire Makes a book.

MacGuire speculates that a seed for 'Here' was planted in his mind by posing with his siblings for a Christmastime group portrait each year. The ritual impressed upon him both the cyclical nature of human affairs and the irretrievability of the past.

Set in an ordinary room, its panels would be split down the centre: history would move backward on the left side of each frame and forward on the right. When a friend showed McGuire the new Windows operating system, he dropped his split screen idea for a looser approach in which year-labeled 'windows' of time would float freely into each frame of action.

The separable objects inside the room began as monochrome drawings, often based on photographic sources - amateur snapshot photographs, which he mined for fragmentary narratives, gestures, and outfits he never could have made up. Each drawing was scanned, digitally textured and colorized, and inserted into the room.

Narrative

McGuire set Here in the corner of a living room based on that of his childhood home in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The comic strip 'Here' orbits loosely around the life of a man who is born in 1957 and grows up in the house. In the book, builders construct the house in 1907. It is inhabited and refurnished many times over, undergoing a fire (1996), a burglary (1997), a partial collapse (2015), and a flood (2111).

The book allots more attention to the remote past and future of the location.

Situated on a clay peninsula at the edge of the continental shelf, Perth Amboy is variously revealed as a dinosaur's hunting ground, the floor of a future ocean, and a stop on the tour for a group of visitors to a museum about twentieth-century life.

In a scene lifted from McGuire's youth, archaeologists from the local university come calling and seek permission to dig for Indian artifacts in the back yard. (McGuire's mother said no.)

In a scene dated 1624, the Dutch meet the Lenni-Lenape Indi- ans, whose peace offering-a sack of local soil-they mis- take for a practical joke.

In 1775, Benjamin Franklin visits town and has a rancorous reunion with his illegitimate son, William.

a century later, the painters William Dunlap (1776-1839) and George Inness (1825-1894) are joined into a composite figure, an artist who sketches on the grounds of William Franklin's onetime mansion.

E-book

An interactive eBook edition was produced in 2014 and published through Apple. Unfortunately it is no longer available, but an overview and selected content is available on:

The promotional description reads:

In the eBook, scenes can be shuffled and reshuffled, leading to new narrative combinations and connections. Visual surprises await you at the turn of every page. The eBook uses multiple panels to convey the different moments in time. Hundreds of thousands of years become interwoven. A dinosaur from 100,000,000 BCE lumbers by, while a child is playing with a plastic toy that resembles the same dinosaur in the year 1999. Conversations appear to be happening between two people who are centuries apart.

Meanwhile, the attention is focused on the most ordinary moments. The reader becomes the guide through the events that have happened HERE, where time and space are anything but finite and the only limit is the screen itself.

Video translation

This black and white video version gives a very powerful accessible presentation of the graphic novel. The video format enables very quick juxtaposition of fleeting images of far pre-history and dystopian future in a way that is not possible in sequential narrative.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
https://www.richard-mcguire.com https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-profound-mundanity-of-richard-mcguires-my-things R ichard McGuire (born 1957) is an American illustrator, comic book artist, children's book author, and musician. His illustrations have been published in the New York Times , The New Yorker , and . His short story is among the most lauded comic book stories from recent decades.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linda Mayoux blog for Open College of the Arts Visual Communications Level 3: Advanced Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This third assignment 'TeeTotal Street' produces a small graphic and text book based on a diary and photographs of a holiday flat where we stayed in St Ives in November 2019, just before the Brexit general election. It is a very personal response to my feelings of claustrophobia and helplessness at the time and doubts and dilemmas of trying to be a 'responsible tourist' amid all the social and environmental conflicts in St Ives. It draws visual inspiration from Richard MacGuire's 'Here', Jonathon Miller's 'Nowhere in Particular' and the work of Aaron Siskind, and brings together a lot of my earlier reading and visual experimentation in a way that considers more explicitly issues raised by Poynor in 'First Things Next'. To start to develop ways in which my work can provoke questions about the way we live - our relationships and social and environmental responsibilities. This more subjective approach to documentary underpins the more political 'voice' and approach to social and environmental documentary I explore with other people in Part 4: Audience: Outsider on the Edge.

NOTE: This was a very ambitious project to take on and the first time I have taken on something of this sort. The book is still at the development and experimental stage. I need about a month more to really work through all the images and text again into a focused narrative with more thought through visuals. This will best be done August/September as part of my work on Part 5 when the longer-term fallout from the election/Brexit vote is clearer to think through what I want to say of broader and longer lasting relevance. And I have improved my visual, narrative and Photoshop skills on other projects in Assignment 4 and Visual Research module.

Evolution of the Concept

My starting point and underpinning theme was the work of Rebecca Solnit's discussion about 'getting lost' and the need to open up and explore unfamiliar things without being afraid.

Losing things is about the familiar falling away. Getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
Rebecca Solnit 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost' 2005

My initial ideas for the assignment in July 2019 had been to do a political allegory about 'Islands' that was developing in my head - see Project 3.2.3 Finding Texts: Island and this is still a future possibility outlined in more detail in Part 5 of this course. But when my partner decided to attend a painting course at St Ives School of Art in November we decided to stay in town rent a low season (low price) holiday flat that actually cost little more than the summer campsite. In my earlier work in St Ives I had been fascinated by the evocative street names: Mount Zion, Bethesda Hill, Fish Street and particularly TeeTotal Street (See my black and white photographs that I started to collate in Assignment 2 and will be further developed in Project 5.1.5 St Ives in Black and White. When we looked at advertisements to book a flat we found that there was one free in TeeTotal Street - near the island - for the period we needed.

Initially I envisaged a short graphic 'stream of consciousness' work, a sort of cross between Laura Grace Ford's 'Savage Messiah' recommended by my tutor and Richard Littler's Scarfolk. But when we arrived at the flat it was not 'grungy' enough for the expressive black and white aesthetic I had in mind for sketching, and I quickly came to the conclusion that any attempt at documentary satire would require far more in-depth investigation and thought than I had time for in this Assignment. Much of the time it was raining heavily and cold, so outdoor sketching was difficult. As we had come by train we were not able to bring with us the normal load of books and materials to work with. So now many of those first ideas will now be applied to my home city of Cambridge in the Spring in Part 4 'I Love Cambridge'.

After studying Richard MacGuire's 'Here' I had started to think more about something that was based solely in the flat, following also psychogeographic 'one room walks' like Xavier de Miastre's 'A Journey around my room'. Combining my own subjective feelings attempting to face the TeeTotal Angst of being on my own in a 'minimalist' flat for five days, adding on layers of history and influences bombarding me from outside. I considered just doing simple flat black and white 'walking line' pen drawings, but decided in the end to use photography so that I would have a proper record of the flat to work on at home. When I got home I looked again at Jonathon Miller's 'Nowhere in Particular' and looked at the work of Aaron Siskind and decided that it would be really interesting to take a more collage approach.

On location: sketchbook text and Lighroom experiments

The basis of the work is a collaged sketchbook diary that I kept by me and wrote in through they day as thoughts came - and news of Brexit, burning rain forests and the election campaign filtered in its new South West version provided an addictive distraction. I had purchased a small square moleskin Notebook before leaving because I find this square format fits neatly in my camera bag and gives me most possibilities for altering formats as I go along through just masking off bits.

I took photos of objects in the flat and changes in the weather outside through the window with my DSLR camera. I was also lucky enough to have a 'local' next door neighbour whose family had lived in St Ives for generations and I took notes of our conversation and her history of the flat. I also periodically went out for a walk and made friends with a local fisherman who agreed to be photographed in return for my sending him copies. And I attended a local Labour Party campaign meeting as well as collecting local newspapers and visiting the Tate Gallery, library and walking around town and the island for further background to St Ives in winter.

Bringing together all this information while it was fresh in my mind I made a 'minimum' draft Photobook on my laptop in Lightroom, with initial narrative. and processing of the photographs experimenting with different black and white (high contrast as my initial idea), colour (Vivid detail as its opposite to see poosibilities I had not thought of) and orange and blue duotone versions (to get an idea of mood - following my work on blue orange and duotone collage in project 3.1). I decided to retain the small square format to give a feeling of claustrophobia and maximum 32 pages so I would need to really hone in on impact for each spread and drastically cut the content.

Insert pdf embeds BW-compressed; Colour vivid detail_compress; Duotone orange; Duotone blue. Pdf embed no longer works - despite paying for it!!!

I also drafted a series of concept maps as I went along with ideas for narrative. but with hindsight I should have spent a lot more time on this - maybe doing one each day to see how my responses evolved over time.

2: Back Home : review, collage/Photoshop experiments and first ideas

When I got home and had my sketching materials, printer, scanner etc I worked into the sketchbook pages making collages of the photos in the order they were taken and looking carefully through the text to remind myself and re-evaluate what I was aiming to do.

I found my added narrative in the first drafts rather heavy. It needed to be either drastically cut or a well-crafted detailed narrative - something that would need some creative writing skill. I decided the text should be either from found text, or overlays of handwritten sections from my diary notes, or cut out text. So I reviewed the collage and selected more text from the collected ephemera and newspapers, adding these to the diary. I then went through the text and photos again to refine the narrative and produced mixed photo and collage spreads with only the text from the collage.

I then looked carefully again at my written text to see what might be added further as hand written overlay in Photoshop to further refine the narrative.

Assessment of progress so far

I have learned a lot on this project, but still a lot more to think through. All the apparently disconnected exploratory projects have contributed in some way and my frequent shooting off in different directions has led I think to something much more interesting and with more depth than the initial ideas I had. As I revise the earlier projects in Assignment 5, I can think through more threads - contrasts between Orange and Blue, Mind landscapes and better juxtaposition of text and image.

At the moment it is still at the Minimum/Maximum stage and I am overwhelmed by the infinite possible variants on each image :
- what should be photography, what should be collage, what should be illustration, should I mix, or just stay with one style?
- colours, tones, layering, framing, picture in picture and the potential different meanings communicated even by just slight changes
- layering and collage - I have not yet tried tearing images to layer them physically.
- the ways in which the images can be sequenced - should the narrative go day by day (at the moment it does not), thematically and what exactly is the narrative.
- balance between clarity and simplicity for some images to avoid overload and complex multi-layering on others to provoke thinking in the viewer.
- There are also many images I have not used that could be added or replace those I have included so far in order to present a clearer/slightly different message.

Having now got a discreet and time bound set of images and diary notes, I plan to go through everything again in 6 months time once the implications of all the turmoil going on 'outside' is clearer, and:

1. Revisit what I am trying to say and narrow down to 2-3 possible narrative sequences, possibly with a somewhat different image selection.

2. Plan the aesthetic rhythm and sequencing to enhance the narrative based on my experiments so far.

3. Finalise the images and text spreads, redoing many of them in Photoshop.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This third assignment 'TeeTotal Street' produces a small graphic and text book based on a diary and photographs of a holiday flat where we stayed in St Ives in November 2019, just before the Brexit general election.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
[wpdevart_youtube]nPINngUibbM[/wpdevart_youtube]
The City
[wpdevart_youtube]PL3A50F1056B5192F7[/wpdevart_youtube]
Google images
Frans Masereel (31 July 1889 - 3 January 1972) was a Flemish painter and graphic artist who worked mainly in France. He is known especially for his woodcuts. His greatest work is generally said to be the wordless novel Mon Livre d'Heures ( Passionate Journey). He completed over 20 other wordless novels in his career. Masereel's woodcuts strongly influenced the work of Lynd Ward and later graphic artists such as Clifford Harper and Eric Drooker. There is a Frans Masereel Centre (Frans Masereel Centrum for Graphix) in the village of Kasterlee in Belgium.

Frans Masereel was born in the Belgian Blankenberge on 31 July 1889. He moved to Ghent in 1896, where he began to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in the class of Jean Delvin at the age of 18. In 1909 he went on trips to England and Germany, which inspired him to create his first etchings and woodcuts. In 1911 Masereel settled in Paris for four years and then emigrated to Switzerland, where he worked as a graphic artist for journals and magazines. His woodcut series, mainly of sociocritical content and of expressionistic form concept, made Masereel internationally known. Among these were the wordless novels 25 Images of a Man's Passion (1918), Passionate Journey (1919), The Sun (1919), The Idea (1920) and Story Without Words (1920). At that time Masereel also drew illustrations for famous works of world literature by Thomas Mann, Émile Zola and Stefan Zweig. In 1921 Masereel returned to Paris, where he painted his famous street scenes, the Montmartre paintings. He lived for a time in Berlin, where his closest creative friend was George Grosz. After 1925 he lived near Boulogne-sur-Mer, where he painted predominantly coast areas, harbour views, and portraits of sailors and fishermen. During the 1930s his output declined. In 1940 he fled from Paris and lived in several cities in Southern France.

At the end of World War II Masereel was able to resume his artistic work and produced woodcuts and paintings. After 1946 he worked for several years as a teacher at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken. In 1949 Masereel settled in Nice. In the following years until 1968 several series of woodcuts were published, which differ from his earlier "novels in picture'" in comprising variations of a subject instead of being a continuing narrative. He also designed decorations and costumes for numerous theatre productions. The artist was honoured in numerous exhibitions and became a member of several academies. Frans Masereel died in Avignon in 1972 and was entombed in Ghent. The cultural organizationMasereelfonds was named after him.

The American graphic artist Lynd Ward was greatly influenced by Masereel in creating his novels in woodcuts.A number of cartoonists have cited Masereel as an influence on the development of the graphic novel: Art Spiegelman cited Mon Livre d'Heures as an early influence on his . Will Eisner cited Masereel as an influence on his work, as has scratchboard novelist Eric Drooker.

Wordless novels

Source: edited from Wikipedia articles on Masereel and his different works, the You Tube videos and reading of his graphic novels themselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
wpdevart_youtube]nPINngUibbM[/wpdevart_youtube] The City [wpdevart_youtube]PL3A50F1056B5192F7[/wpdevart_youtube] Google images Frans Masereel (31 July 1889 - 3 January 1972) was a Flemish painter and graphic artist who worked mainly in France. He is known especially for his woodcuts. His greatest work is generally said to be the wordless novel Mon Livre d'Heures ( Passionate Journey).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
[wpdevart_youtube]DGfZi5JCI5g[/wpdevart_youtube]
Gods' men HD
[wpdevart_youtube]gUIvyBr09aw[/wpdevart_youtube]
The Biggest Bear
[wpdevart_youtube]4NGreOnPNok[/wpdevart_youtube]
Google images
Lynd Kendall Ward (June 26, 1905 - June 28, 1985) was an American artist and storyteller, known for his series of wordless novels using wood engraving, and his illustrations for juvenile and adult books. His wordless novels have influenced the development of the graphic novel. Strongly associated with his wood engravings, he also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward was a son of Methodist minister and political organizer Harry F. Ward.

Life

Ward was early drawn to art, and decided to become an artist when his first-grade teacher told him that "Ward" spelled backward is "draw". Ward studied fine arts at Columbia Teachers College in New York. He edited the Jester of Columbia, to which he contributed arts and crafts how-to articles.

Ward studied as a special one-year student at the National Academy of Graphic Arts and Bookmaking in Leipzig. He learned etching from Alois Kolb, lithography from Georg Alexander Mathéy, and wood engraving from Hans Alexander "Theodore" Mueller; Ward was particularly influenced by Mueller. Ward chanced across a copy of Flemish artist Frans Masereel's wordless novel The Sun(1919), a story told in sixty-three silent woodcuts.

Ward returned to the United States in September 1927, and a number of book publishers in his portfolio. In 1928, his first commissioned work illustrated Dorothy Rowe's The Begging Deer: Stories of Japanese Children with eight brush drawings. May helped with background research for the illustrations, and wrote another book of Japanese folk tales, Prince Bantam (1929), with illustrations by Ward. Other work at the time included illustrations for the children's book Little Blacknose by Hildegarde Swift, and an illustrated edition of Oscar Wilde's poem " Ballad of Reading Gaol ".

In 1929, Ward was inspired to create a wordless novel of his own after he came across German artist Otto Nückel's Destiny (1926). The first American wordless novel, was published by Smith & Cape that October, the week before the Wall Street Crash of 1929; over the next four years, it sold more than 20,000 copies. He made five more such works: Madman's Drum (1930), Wild Pilgrimage (1932), Prelude to a Million Years (1933),Song Without Words (1936), and (1937).

In addition to woodcuts, Ward also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint. Ward illustrated over a hundred children's books, several of which were collaborations with his wife, May McNeer. Starting in 1938, Ward became a frequent illustrator of the Heritage Limited Editions Club's series of classic works. He was well known for the political themes of his artwork, often addressing labor and class issues. In 1932 he founded Equinox Cooperative Press. He was a member of the Society of Illustrators, the Society of American Graphic Arts, and the National Academy of Design. Ward retired to his home in Reston, Virginia, in 1979. He died on June 28, 1985, two days after his 80th birthday.

In celebration of the art and life of this American printmaker and illustrator, independent filmmaker Michael Maglaras of 217 Films produced a new film titled "O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward." The documentary features an interview with the artist's daughter Robin Ward Savage, as well as more than 150 works from all periods of Ward's career. The 94-minute documentary, culled from over 7 hours of film and narrated by Maglaras, premiered at Penn State University Libraries, Foster Auditorium, on April 20, 2012, where it was warmly received. Penn State's Special Collections Library has also become the repository for much Lynd Ward material, and may continue to receive material from Ward family collections.

Novels in woodcuts

Ward is known for his wordless novels told entirely through dramatic wood engravings. Ward's first work, Gods' Man (1929), uses a blend of Art Deco and Expressionist styles to tell the story of an artist's struggle with his craft, his seduction and subsequent abuse by money and power, his escape to innocence, and his unavoidable doom. Ward, in employing the concept of the wordless pictorial narrative, acknowledged as his predecessors the European artists Frans Masereel and Otto Nückel. Released the week of the 1929 stock market crash, Gods' Manwould continue to exert influence well beyond the Depression era, becoming an important source of inspiration for Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg.

Ward produced six wood engraving novels over the next eight years, including:

Ward left one more wordless novel partially completed at the time of his death in 1985. The 26 completed wood engravings (out of a planned total of 44) were published in a limited edition in 2001, under the title Lynd Ward's Last, Unfinished, Wordless Novel.

He also produced a wordless story for children, The Silver Pony, which is told entirely in black, white and shades of gray painted illustrations; it was published in 1973.

Other works

Ward illustrated the 1942 children's book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, with text by Hildegarde Swift.

Ward's work included an awareness of the racial injustice to be found in the United States. This is first apparent in the lynching scenes from Wild Pilgrimage and appears again in his drawings for North Star Shining: A Pictorial History of the American Negro, by Hildegarde Hoyt Swift, published in 1947. Ward uses African American characters, as well as several different Native ones in his book The Silver Pony.

In 1941 his illustrations were used in Great Ghost Stories of the World:The Haunted Omnibus, edited by Alexander Laing.

In 1974 Harry N. Abrams published Storyteller Without Words, a book that included Ward's six novels plus an assortment of his illustrations from other books. Ward himself broke his silence and wrote brief prologues to each of his works. In 2010, the Library of America published Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, with a new chronology of Ward's life and an introduction by Art Spiegelman.

Source: Wikipedia, You Tube and reading of the novels.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
wpdevart_youtube]DGfZi5JCI5g[/wpdevart_youtube] Gods' men HD [wpdevart_youtube]gUIvyBr09aw[/wpdevart_youtube] The Biggest Bear [wpdevart_youtube]4NGreOnPNok[/wpdevart_youtube] Google images Lynd Kendall Ward (June 26, 1905 - June 28, 1985) was an American artist and storyteller, known for his series of wordless novels using wood engraving, and his illustrations for juvenile and adult books.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linda Mayoux blog for Open College of the Arts Visual Communications Level 3: Advanced Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gillian-wearing-cbe-2648
Gillian Wearing is a contemporary British artist whose conceptually driven photographs and videos investigate power dynamics and voyeurism in everyday life. Focused more on capturing the self-awareness of her subjects than on issues of aesthetics, Wearing employs prosthetic masks, voice dubbing, altered photographs, in her portraits of herself, individuals, and groups. This is especially notable in her series of work Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say (1992-1993), in which the artist confronted strangers and asked them write what they were thinking, then photographed them holding the sign. "It's always important as an artist to find a unique language, and that's why the Signs excited me," she said of her series. "They felt new. But I didn't realize they were going to be so influential, on everything from advertising to people doing signs for their Facebook page." Born in 1963 in Birmingham, United Kingdom, she moved to London in 1983, studying first at the Chelsea School of Art then Goldsmiths College where she became a part of the Young British Artists generation alongside Damien Hirst. In 1997, the artist was the winner of the prestigious Turner Prize for her 1996 piece " 60 Minutes Silence". She currently lives and works in London, UK. Today, Wearing's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., among others. http://www.artnet.com/artists/gillian-wearing/
https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/gillian-wearing/ https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2012/mar/26/gillian-wearing-dancing-peckham-video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gillian-wearing-cbe-2648 Gillian Wearing is a contemporary British artist whose conceptually driven photographs and videos investigate power dynamics and voyeurism in everyday life. Focused more on capturing the self-awareness of her subjects than on issues of aesthetics, Wearing employs prosthetic masks, voice dubbing, altered photographs, in her portraits of herself, individuals, and groups.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linda Mayoux blog for Open College of the Arts Visual Communications Level 3: Advanced Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ed Ruscha works in a very open-ended way exploiting tension between images and text that often seem rather arbitrary in their juxtaposition, making the viewer make their own connections and interpretations.

His approach is mainly aesthetic - interested in abstract potential of words against abstract design underlying his photographs and paintings. Some commentators on the You Tube videos below have seen this as rather vacuous. What concerns me is the way a focus on 'cool' leads to a sort of 'apathy of the sublime'.

Catalogue Raisonnee of his photography and signage work.

MoMA Painting Words

Ed Ruscha discusses his exhibition 'Course of Empire' at National gallery of large paintings of sections of buildings in LA at two points in time. The first 1990s in black and white and the second 2004 showing changes. References the paintings of rise and fall of civilisation by Thomas Cole on exhibition at National Gallery at the same time.
He discusses how coincidences happen in the making of a work. He does not think too much about meaning and has a compulsion to make things as an 'involuntary reflex' as he gets up in the morning. The words come from movies, things he hears on the radio, overheard conversations, things he reads. 'Things just come out of the air'. Then viewers make up all sorts of meanings and connections.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ed Ruscha works in a very open-ended way exploiting tension between images and text that often seem rather arbitrary in their juxtaposition, making the viewer make their own connections and interpretations. His approach is mainly aesthetic - interested in abstract potential of words against abstract design underlying his photographs and paintings.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linda Mayoux blog for Open College of the Arts Visual Communications Level 3: Advanced Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/peter-blake-763
Sir Peter Thomas Blake (born 25 June 1932) is an English pop artist, best known for co-creating the sleeve design for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. His other best known works include the cover of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and the Live Aid concert poster. Blake also designed the 2012 Brit Award statuette.

One of the best known British pop artists, Blake is considered to be a prominent figure in the pop art movement. Central to his paintings are his interest in images from popular culture which have infused his collages. In 2002 he was knighted at Buckingham Palace for his services to art.
https://www.biennial.com/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/peter-blake-763 Sir Peter Thomas Blake (born 25 June 1932) is an English pop artist, best known for co-creating the sleeve design for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. His other best known works include the cover of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and the Live Aid concert poster.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
http://www.baldessari.org
"What motivates me is the elusive quality if trying to get things right....art is the only thing that gets me close to understanding what the universe is all about."

John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography.

A short but detailed overview on Baldessari's art done by Baldessari himself with Tom Waites.

Most of his work plays with combinations and collisions between the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language. Found images are often collaged and worked into/over with stickers or flat coloured paper shapes. Much of the work is concerned with the nature of art in a playful manner. Other work is humorously enigmatic, turning things upside-down to make the viewer aware of how they think and show that there are different ways of understanding things.

He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California.

Baldessari explains his approach to appropriation - no one can own images any more than they can own words. Images are there to be used.

He takes things from everywhere, and can't throw anything away. It can all be used in art. He uses images from movies a lot. He prints a lot of images out, lays them on a big table and groups them. Some of his work is in grids eg on violence. Some is collage.

In depth discussion of different aspects of his work.

Collage takes things from here and there and puts them together. "Collage is when two things don't go together too easily. If it's right there's a kind of tautness there that if you pull them apart any further it'll snap. If you get them any closer it'll be just flabby. But if you can get it just right it's terrific."

He is interested in signifiers eg clouds are ephemeral, they change shape and we see things in them.

The important thing is to hold the audience's attention eg image of table and shark. Things must be dissimilar enough to be intriguing.

He often plays with different ways of combining text and image. In his Prima Face series he produced large square diptychs of image and text. In the first ones he just put simple captions that described the colours of the image. The next he put captions that made assumptions about the meaning of peoples' expressions. The third he put opposing interpretations of expressions for the viewer to choose. The next he put a list of synonyms and so on...

Some of his best known work is where he puts flat coloured cutout shapes on photographs eg people climbing up buildings. The bits he cuts out are those elements that people are most interested in, thus focusing on things we do not normally notice. One body of work are photographs of civic officials at events where he covers their faces with round coloured shopping stickers to focus on their postures instead of faces.

Some of his recent work uses vibrant colour and takes a more low relief 3D approach to collage.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
http://www.baldessari.org "What motivates me is the elusive quality if trying to get things right....art is the only thing that gets me close to understanding what the universe is all about." John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Conceptual art that privileges the relationship between a work of art and its environment, and a work of art and the observer. Examples are mirrors that have no content and only reflect the environment and/or invite the observer to interact.

Some works address the issue of art that has no physical object, and resorts to text to describe it.

Secret Painting 1967-68 is a black square painted within a black square and thus has nothing in it. But with accompanying block of text next to it in a dyptych frame the same size as the painting stating 'the content of this painting is invisible. The character and dimension of the content are to be kept permanently secret, known only to the artist. ' a sort of joke, using text to indicate that the painting is still a work of art.
https://media.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection_images/3/30.2003.a-b%23%23S.jpg
In terms of my own work I am not really sure of the relevance - I find the whole discussion somewhat obscure, self-indulgent and pedantic.

The main points that have some interest for me are that:

it is possible to produce a image that is completely opaque as a means of attracting the viewer's attention to a piece of text.

it is possible to produce an image whose main function is to reflect back to the viewer and leave the interpretation completely to them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Conceptual art that privileges the relationship between a work of art and its environment, and a work of art and the observer. Examples are mirrors that have no content and only reflect the environment and/or invite the observer to interact. Some works address the issue of art that has no physical object, and resorts to text to describe it.

# data[].attributes.headline
Developing Content: Love and Other islands

# data[].attributes.subject
Developing Content: Love and Other islands

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For this project I chose the image and caption option.

Using the principles of collage, juxtapose a series of images and captions. The images could be photographs, illustrations you've created yourself or found material. You could take the captions from existing sources or develop them in response to the images. Try and develop work that makes the most of the collision between what is shown and what is said. You can play this for laughs, political subversion or work in a more open-ended way.

I looked through the examples of different approaches in the course guide, see links to my notes in the righthand menu on this post.

NOTE I am planning to do a lot more work on collage and bring my thoughts together in a new Sketchlog/pdf analysing the different approaches to juxtaposition of images and image and text as part of my work on Cambridge in Assignment 4.

In the images below I am most inspired by Baldessari and Ruscha.

Collage takes things from here and there and puts them together. "Collage is when two things don't go together too easily. If it's right there's a kind of tautness there that if you pull them apart any further it'll snap. If you get them any closer it'll be just flabby. But if you can get it just right it's terrific." John Baldessari

They are all photographs from St Ives, broadly around themes of love and relationships. They were not taken explicitly for this project and some I think are better without a caption as a sequence with other purposely taken images in a photo book. That said, the exercise and work of the other graphic designers has made me think about my photography in a broader way, with potential for a range of ambiguity of meaning that could be suggested by different captions. This would be particularly useful in more political work to avoid being too direct, and leaving meaning more open to interpretation by the viewer.

Series 1 Say it With Flowers: Calla Lilly

I thought this project would be a good place to explore the mix of visual imagery (particularly sexual), stereotype and arbitrary convention and the ways in which these are used and promoted in advertising. The first series experiments with image colour and style together with typeface to produce different interpretations of the same image - tongue in cheek versions of conventional floral greetings cards. My starting point was a photograph of a Calla Lilly - a very common flower in gardens in St Ives - and one I had used for linocut design.

I started by looking at the Teleflora website which explained: 'During the Victorian period in the 19th century, there was a flower language boom that meant certain flowers were associated with expressing particular feelings. That means that sending someone a bouquet delivered a very specific message based on the flowers' meaning. There was no need for words - the recipient could decipher the intended message merely by the blossoms chosen and the way they were arranged.' Under Calla Lilly I found the following:
the name comes from a Greek word 'kalla' for beauty. It is also known as the pig lily, trumpet lily and arum lily. "The exquisite calla lily is an appropriate flower for any occasion that involves major transitions, rebirths and new beginnings." Used at weddings as traditional symbols of divinity, marital bliss and true devotion, and the calla lily marks the 6th wedding anniversary. Used at funerals they represent sympathy and the purification of a departed soul. https://blog.teleflora.com/what-do-calla-lilies-represent/
This series started with a pretty conventional floral card, ending with something more enigmatic and sinister. I like the dark graininess and sexualised ambibuity of the final version - reminiscent of animations like Pan's Labyrinth.

Series 2 Love Lost

The second series is based on a photo of a slowworm that someone had rescued along the Coastal Path - it had shed its tail to escape from a crow. The photo prompted a range of possible symbolic interpretations. It was the snake that the Bible blamed for the fall of Eve. The hand is lovingly cradling the slow worm and keeping it safe. But the worm's missing tail is still bleeding.

The first image is again a somewhat conventional card which might just prompt some questioning about the nature of love. Having experimented with different formats and styles, I decided I prefer the greyscale image, with a text caption 'Love'. This is a sad image - removing the text shows the slowworm with a frightened face, somewhat pleading. I find this simple textless image more powerful with its ambiguous connotations provoked by the simple title.

Series 3 Love islands

This third series of images started with text overlays and all entitled 'love islands' as a series. But again I preferred them with captions. I also varied the captions to make them less obvious.

Love Island emphasises the loneliness and insularity of many people on holiday.

Wish You were Here gives more ambiguity about the relationship/s of these two people than the original 'Love Island' title.

'Reflection' creates ambiguity with the text on the sign.

But possibly I prefer these as untitled photos as part of a photobook about relationships on holiday. I have other photos that could be added eg the images from the synchronicity series. But ideally I would go back and base the images on more detailed observation of the people over time. I also need to consider privacy issues if I wanted to publish them. Alternatively I could make them into illustrations and/or disguise the faces.

Series 4: Synchronicity

Synchronicity is defined as: the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection. It has Jungian and New Age connotations. It occurred to me as quite an interesting pseudo-scientific envelope for thinking about the potential relationships and connections between unconnected elements in a snapshot. The photos below are possible examples of such snapshots and this is again an idea I would like to take further.

Series 5 Wisdom of Gulls

I am interested in the ambiguity of anthropomorphic representation of birds and animals.

Last laugh

I am fascinated by the ways in which stones and rocks along the Coast Path suggest stories and animals. Particularly when photographed. More than other places I have been. Something about the granite and the light. This image reminds me of a god laughing - maybe he has the last laugh as one of the few things that might survive the predicted global warming and apocalypse.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
E2.3 Developing content: Love and other Islands

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For this project I chose the image and caption option. Using the principles of collage, juxtapose a series of images and captions. The images could be photographs, illustrations you've created yourself or found material. You could take the captions from existing sources or develop them in response to the images.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linda Mayoux blog for Open College of the Arts Visual Communications Level 3: Advanced Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Pendinas 'the Island' is a part of St Ives I really love. It is magical - a 'sceptred isle set in a silver sea' when seen at dawn from the Ayre campsite and a towering gloomy place when walking around it wishing 'no wo/man is an island' on a cloudy windy day. Its many faces and moods have an obvious hold on the imagination - not just mine. I had sketched around the Island for earlier OCA printmaking and illustration projects.

This text and image project started as an attempt to add some ink illustrations to the text of the tourist information board by the carpark outlining some of the history to the Island.

But in the context of the prevailing discussions around Brexit during my stays in 2019, Pendinas, my ideas on this 'sceptred/no woman is an island' evolved into a bringing together of the above together with new images and other historical text on St Ives as a humorous/semi-serious look at ideas of 'Englishness' and 'Islands' - bearing in mind the firm Cornish identity and calls for devolution in St Ives and the dependence on the EU and London fish markets and international tourism.

In the process I started to read more about the geology and history of St Ives and Cornwall and folk tales of stones and giants of Trencrom Hill above St Ives.

Project 2.2 Finding Texts only asked me to consider thumbnails. I produced a series of experimental watercolour-style drawings in Adobe Sketch and Adobe Draw on my iPad (see feature image above - the only original I could salvage after update to Adobe Fresco). I then brought these into Illustrator and InDesign to create comic-style mockup of 30 pages with comic images and text replacing the original text from the information board. I experimented with different digital styles on my iPad and considered visual approaches of different St Ives artists like Arthur Wallis. Wilhelmina Barnes Graham and the expressive gouaches at the Tate exhibition of Anna Boghiguian.

Planned as animation either collage Stop Motion in the style of Terry Gilliam from digital drawings in Adobe Fresco. The Text below is as submitted with Assignment 3. This still needs a lot of work to produce anything presentable - the current insertion of photos is indicative only of some of the visual inspiration I plan to draw on, as is the variety of styles.

I have a lot more text from old books in St Ives library, and interesting information from interviews with local people as part of my work on Assignment 3 Teetotal Street. I need to rethink and streamline the overall message taking into account the longer term outcomes of the Brexit vote, particularly for the Cornish Fishing industry. And meld together the Shakespeare and Donne 'patriotic' poems with real historical fact into a small illustrated book of wider reader interest.

The final version would I think be a rather childlike watercolour like 'The Little Prince' by St Exupery, with blind contour rough ink work as in the sketch above, and a disarmingly simple comic text. Done either by hand, or using Adobe Fresco watercolour brushes and Illustrator text.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pendinas 'the Island' is a part of St Ives I really love. It is magical - a 'sceptred isle set in a silver sea' when seen at dawn from the Ayre campsite and a towering gloomy place when walking around it wishing 'no wo/man is an island' on a cloudy windy day.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Maggi Hambling website Edge paintings The Wave Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition 2010
Walls of Water: The Monotypes, Marlborough Gallery 2014-2015
Google images
Hambling, M. 2009. You Are the Sea, Great Britain, Lux Books.
Hambling, M. 2010. The Aldeburgh Scallop, Suffolk, Full Circle Editions.
Hambling, M. 2010. The Sea, Salford Quays, Lowry Press.

Maggi Hambling is a British painter, sculptor and printmaker. Born in Suffolk, she has a particular link with Aldeburgh through her Waves paintings and prints - evocative of the ways the North Sea has ravaged the coast. Her recent work has had a much more political stance, for example in War and Requiem, and also in Edge the exhibition that was showing in Aldeburgh Peter Peers Gallery at the beginning of my visit for Project 4.2 'Aldeburgh Diary'.

Wave paintings

The North Sea, often like a raging beast, is eating away and changing the shoreline forever. As I get older, I identify with the shifting shingle, as time, like the sea, enforces an inevitable erosion. But this raging beast is as demanding as a lover and I am still seduced and challenged. (2010 The Sea p18)

"As the waves of the North Sea voraciously consume our coast, these new paintings respond to the energy of their action as they break. This sea, the widest of mouths, roaring or laughing, is always seductive. Life and death mysteriously co-exist in the timeless rhythm of the waves." Maggi Hambling, 2010 Wave website Fitzwilliam Museum

I am the shifting shingle, you approach with stealth, then the dark rooms of your curves, I am tossed, lost, displaced, with greedy lovers' tongues and lips, you suck in and in again. we rise together, we rise together, then float safe on liquid breasts until the dance begins again and you thrust deep and my resistance is low, dissolve, dissolve. no defence against your relentless advance. I am but a ghost of the shore, disappeared in you. (2009 You Are the Sea text)

Edge

This exhibition is more political than much of her earlier work on the sea, dealing with the refugee crisis, battle for Aleppo and global warming.

It is called Edge because I feel we are 'on the edge'. There is a fragility to our existence - both ours and the planet and these works attempt to address that and strike up a dialogue with whoever is looking at them.

The Edge paintings are large, with characteristic dramatic swirls of texture, that then on further looking show fine detail - people, remains of buildings and boats caught up in the chaos. The global warming paintings have a lot of gold, echoing renaissance paintings - but gold is now a reference to greed.

See: article by Andrew Clarke: Maggi Hambling creates new show about life on the edge

The Scallop

Hambling also designed the controversial Scallop sculpture on the beach at Aldeburgh that references the life and work of Benjamin Britten whose opera Peter Grimes was based on Aldeburgh. Part of the controversy comes from continuing homophobia of protesters.

The words read:

I hear those voices that will not be drowned

This first video below begins with very atmospheric photography of the Scallop and sea and sky in Aldeburgh to Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes opera - then unfortunately it descends into farce.

This second video has film of Maggi Hambling sketching to the Storm section from Peter Grimes opera.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Maggi Hambling website Edge paintings The Wave Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition 2010 Walls of Water: The Monotypes, Marlborough Gallery 2014-2015 Google images Hambling, M. 2009. You Are the Sea, Great Britain, Lux Books. Hambling, M. 2010. The Aldeburgh Scallop, Suffolk, Full Circle Editions. Hambling, M. 2010. The Sea, Salford Quays, Lowry Press.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Marjane Satrapi (Persian: مرجان ساتراپی‎) (born 22 November 1969) is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children's book author.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Marjane Satrapi (Persian: مرجان ساتراپی‎) (born 22 November 1969) is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children's book author.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The second set of texts were from a small cheap book of Cornish Folk Tales. From the book I selected stories that related to St Ives and places around so that I could better visualise them, but presenting a range of 'truth', 'myth' and imagination.

The Sands at Lelant and Phillack - about the encroachment of sand and sea onto what were earlier thriving market towns. Probably a true story.

Fairy Funeral - a true 'fairy story' set in Lelant Church. Supposedly completely imaginary, though illustrative of beliefs and superstitions that have been held until very recently.

The Lady and the Lantern - a story of shipwreck and loss against the rocks on the St Ives promontory. The actual shipwreck may well be true, but then elaborated with ghosts and spirits in the magical environment on the peninsula.

This project asked me to do thumbnails only to explore creative responses to the texts. What follows is only very rough, experimenting with developing my own ink brushes and black and white textures and styles in Procreate 5 and different black and white shape abstraction to create illusion of realism.

I am planning to work on these as practice for Scraperboard images in Assignment 5.2, cutting and changing the text and meaning as a series of tales about 'Fairies from the Dark' - a much darker treatment around myths and fear. This would require more background research and deeper consideration of my photographs of Lelant, Halye and St Ives promontory. The pages would be in comic form with very short text bubbles and/or captions - not the one-page image and text layout in Sands of Lelant below.

Identify a range of different kinds of texts as potential starting points for your assignment and use the questions above to unpick them. Try to find texts that challenge you in some way: pick an article about a subject you're unfamiliar with, pick a journal you've never read. Your text could equally well be a dialogue or a set of information you want to work with.

Read and summarise the main points and produce a series of thumbnail drawings that articulate your visual thinking on how you would deal with the texts chosen considering:
- How is the content being communicated - what tone does it tak? What is the writing style?
- What form is it in - is it a story? If so, what kind of story? Is it a piece of journalism, academic non-fiction, entertainment, factual text, dialogue or opinion?
- What is the text saying? ahat is the gist of the article, the plot of the short story or the aim of a piece of information? If it's a story, what emotional impact is it trying to create? What action or conclusion is a non-fiction text driving towards? What overall impression is the text giving you?
- Where and how does your creative response connect with the text. Are you aiming to visualise the conclusion, support the introductory premise or prioritise one aspect of the text over another?

Reflect on how the questions helped you identify a potential starting point. Did you develop your own line of questions? What decisions did you make about where your creative choices connect with the text?

Sands of Lelant and Phillack

A2 Sketchbook notes and thumbnails

Sketches from 2014

Thumbnails

Preliminary one page layout on iPad in Pages.

Fairy Funeral

A2 sketchbook notes and thumbnails

Old 2014 sketches of Lelant church. Photos of the church interior, pews and altar etc. still to be looked at again for ideas.

Thumbnails

iPad images

The Lady and the Lantern

A2 Sketches and thumbnails

Idea about style and sketches from 2014. Photos of the rocks and promontory still to be looked at again for ideas.
https://images.app.goo.gl/sxnJ6MdwLCqXyoeb6
Thumbnails

iPad sketches based on charcoals drawings

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
E2.2 Finding Texts 2: 'Fairies from the Dark'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The second set of texts were from a small cheap book of Cornish Folk Tales. From the book I selected stories that related to St Ives and places around so that I could better visualise them, but presenting a range of 'truth', 'myth' and imagination.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005) is a "seriously playful exploration of the possibilities and potential of comics and storytelling". The book is based on a simple one-page anecdote which is re-drawn and re-old 99 times in different genres and drawing styles, in the form of homages and parodies, and in formal experiments that test the boundaries of the medium of comics.

It was inspired by the French author Raymond Queneau's 1947 book Exercises in Style ( Fr Eng), itself inspired by Bach's .

What was most revealing to me about the experience was the sense of constant wonder and engagement I could find reworking this simple "non-story" of a comic 99 times and more (I worked on about 20 more that never made it to completion). I started this project as a challenge to myself: both to see if I could pull it off but also to see if I could plumb some of the richness of visual narrative that I was looking for. I chose early on to limit myself as much as possible with my process:

1. Every page would be one page only (Queneau's stories vary) to concentrate attention on page layout and composition.

2. every page would include all the dialogue in some form or other.

3. every page would try to change as little as posslble from the "Template" comic: number and placement of panels, position of characters in the panels, props used, and so on
Reading Comics This Way and That Way Interview with Steven Heller | June 16, 2011

Matt Madden: Constraints, Limitations & Persistence [Your Creative Push Ep 277

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005) is a "seriously playful exploration of the possibilities and potential of comics and storytelling". The book is based on a simple one-page anecdote which is re-drawn and re-old 99 times in different genres and drawing styles, in the form of homages and parodies, and in formal experiments that test the boundaries of the medium of comics.

# data[].attributes.headline
Finding Texts : 'Cornwall on a side saddle'

# data[].attributes.subject
Finding Texts : 'Cornwall on a side saddle'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For my first text I selected Celia Feinnes 1685-1703 'Through England on a Side Saddle: To Lands End pp?? '.

About the Text

Celia Fiennes (7 June 1662 - 10 April 1741) was born in Wiltshire, the daughter of Nathaniel Fiennes, a politician who had been a a Parliamentarian colonel in the English Civil War and the second son of William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele. Fiennes never married. In 1691 she moved to live with a married sister in London. She travelled around England on horseback between 1684 and about 1703, "to regain my health by variety and change of aire and exercise" ( Journeys). At this time the idea of travel for its own sake was still novel, and Fiennes was exceptional as an enthusiastic woman traveller. Sometimes she travelled with relatives, but she made her "Great Journey to Newcastle and Cornwall" of 1698 accompanied only by one or two servants. Her travels continued intermittently until at least 1712 and took her through most of England.

Fiennes worked up her notes into a travel memoir in 1702 but the was intended for family reading and never published. which she never published, intending it for family reading. The original text had no chapters and it has been edited and published in many different formats. Robert Southey published extracts in 1812, and the first complete edition appeared in 1888 under the title Through England on a Side Saddle. A scholarly edition called The Journeys of Celia Fiennes was produced by Christopher Morris in 1947. The version used here was a Penguin 2009 edition

Text content and summary

The diaries are written in a very informal, spontaneous, but factual manner, providing a vivid portrait of a still largely unenclosed countryside with few and primitive roads, although signposts ("posts and hands pointing to each road with the names of the great towns or market towns that it leads to") were appearing. Fiennes focuses on anything new, in innovations, bustling towns and in the commerce and "production and manufactures of each place". She spends a long time describing towns like Penzance, and there are long passages describing working conditions in the tin and copper mines. She also describes the aristocratic stately homes where she stays with people known to her family, as well as some of the inns and food where she stopped off. She is obviously observant and also has empathy for the people she meets, but her narrative is very much focused on herself and her perspective is that of an aristocrat - she does not question class and gender inequalities or satyrise those in power like her contemporary Jane Austen or slightly later novelists like George Elliot and Charlotte Bronte.

Developing my creative response

As the text is a travelogue, I decided to treat the illustrations chronologically. I started by scanning and annotating the text extract.

I then highlighted and marked in where I thought the sketches would illustrate the journey without duplication and with maximum variation and interest in content and style and sketched a series of thumbnails.

I then did a layout mockup in InDesign, experimenting with different ways of integrating the text. I decided that laying the text over the images, and reducing the size of the images was more interesting that putting whole page images opposite pages of text. Provided this could be done while maintaining the legibility of the text.

I then did a Google search on 1700 illustration to start to think about different types of graphic style.

Developing the illustrations

I started doing the illustrations using the watercolour brushes in Adobe Fresco - I really like the ways these flow, and the very moody effects that can be achieved. But I found them rather difficult to control, particularly when I wanted to experiment with text. I also got the idea of using some collage with from internet images eg for Celia herself, the buildings and Corsnish characters. At least as a mockup for this project, and the Adobe mobile Aps do not have a good selection tool for collage without moving a lot between Aps and also does not have features for photo manipulation.

So I decided to proceed with Procreate, developing my own watercolour brushes and image adjustment features from the new Procreate 5 version, on top of an imported picture of a blank sketchbook page for texture and working in layers on top of the text layer and exporting as the images below. The collage images were a mixture of cutout 1700 paintings and contemporary images digitally drawn over with the same colours and/or further cutouts from the original paintings. This process also led to some re-thinking on the number and placement of images, and ways of splitting the text.

The final layout was then done in InDesign (I have to export as jpg images because no matter what setting I put on the pdf it will not import as spreads into WordPress, only single pages and the layout is done as a set of spreads.

Assessment

I like the effect of the collage - a very real woman in all her finery, with muted versions of old engravings for the Cornish mines and people, against the whimsical watercolour of the countryside. Though some of the images need quite a lot of work still - after I have had more practice with this new Procreate and also cartooning in the VisRes module. The approach, like that of Feinnes herself, is 'picturesque' rather than critical or dramatic - very ladylike.

In terms of the questions, I think I need to do a lot more background research on 1700 illustration that cannot be found on the Internet. In the case of this Travelogue, it would have been difficult to start with the conclusion or take a non-chronological approach unless I was only doing one illustration. There were however multiple possibilities for more smaller illustrations eg in the margin that would have given a more comic approach. I could also have taken a more satirical standpoint, satirising the views of Feinnes herself - as for example in the illustrations by Ralph Stedman for Will Self's Psychogeography, but I need to develop my cartooning skills first. That would bring in my own voice much more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
E2.2 Finding Texts 1: 'Cornwall on a side saddle'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For my first text I selected Celia Feinnes 1685-1703 'Through England on a Side Saddle: To Lands End pp?? '. Celia Fiennes (7 June 1662 - 10 April 1741) was born in Wiltshire, the daughter of Nathaniel Fiennes, a politician who had been a a Parliamentarian colonel in the English Civil War and the second son of William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Description

Martha Rosler is an American artist. She works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Wikipedia

Website: http://www.martharosler.net

Rosler's work is quite diverse, but can be seen as underwriiten by four main themes around the question 'What is subjectivity in the context of late capitalism?'

Biopolitical: the way that power orchestrates the body, particularly for women. Draws on de Beauvoir, Lefevre and later Foucault.

Everyday/ordinary/banale and commodification

Vernacular projects referencing Pop Art, snapshot photography and citizen journalism

Urbanism an political economy of place

Her work is directly linked to her activism: feminist, anti-power, anti-militarist and in support of human subjectivity. She draws on the theory and practice of 'estrangement' of Brecht and Godard where the work invites the viewer to recognise/misrecognise and then deny the content of what they are seeing - leading to critical thinking - leading to taking a position that things should be different.

She has used image and text in different ways. Some of her work is very effective in exploiting gaps and contradictions between the two 'descriptive systems'.

This work is a large gallery frieze of a series of photographs of buildings and store fronts with bottles in various positions as traces of events, as a dyptych with 'poems to alcohol' - lists of words and phrases referring to drunkenness. They were produced as a counter to what Rosler sees as the voyeuristic and parasitic photography of homeless people and people with alcohol issues with quotations from them that are often taken by students, journalists or NGOs.

I find the unusual juxtaposition of two ' descriptive systems' of image and text that are 'inadequate' in themselves to communicate collisions of power very poignant.

Semiotics of the Kitchen

Short video intended for easy showing and distribution shot in single frontal framing. Contrasts single spoken words for everyday kitchen objects with video of possible ways in which they can be used, generally with explicit or implicit violence and a dark feminist humour.

House beautiful: bringing the war home

House Beautiful: Bringing the War Back Home is an activist series of collage images that integrate comforting domestic images of American life (mostly from Life Magazine) life with images of the Vietnam war that were shown on TV each evening. She is concerned with the ways in which viewer distancing from identification with people in the photographs is achieved as a means of raising their political awareness. Some of these images are very striking in their juxtaposition and captioning eg 'Cleaning the Drapes'. These images were photocopied and handed out to protesters on marches, and reprinted later as part of protest against other US comflicts eg Middle East.

Other works are much more direct and - I think to a modern audience used to very polished and well-constructed video on what are nowadays common themes - rather cliche. Though the same issues remain.

This 1977 video uses archive footage from US government eugenic experiments and links this with the explicit racism and violence underlying it (data on black and Southern Europeans was destroyed as 'abnormal', and the internalisation of ideal body types linked to anorexia and suicide. By modern standards the work is rather over-long, repetitive and direct.

Martha Rosler reads Vogue 1982 is a much more explicit critique of the fashion industry in terms of manipulation of women's self-image and exploitation of workers. Although the narrative often contradicts the images, this is rather too obvious and (for a modern viewer) cliche. It is over long and unnecessarily repetitive in conveying what is actually a simple message. If the repetition itself is the point, then that needs to be made clear somehow.

Rather rambling unfortunately.

Look up

secrets from the Street

Middle East photomontages

Garage

Passionate Signals

rites of passage

airports

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Martha Rosler is an American artist. She works in photography and photo text, video, installation, sculpture, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
http://www.barbarakruger.com https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/barbara-kruger/

http://www.artnews.com/2017/11/03/no-uncool-jokers-here-barbara-kruger-debuts-installation-at-les-skate-park/

https://ago.ca/exhibitions/barbara-kruger-contact-2010
Most important element is the political content, making it clear and bold, though often based on enigmatic images and comntradiction.

Short introductory overview.

She works visually with text usually short quotes in bold typeface eg futura, and uses black, white and 'lipstick' red, sometimes other bold colours or limited palettes. Sometimes in caps, sometimes lower case and often reversing front and background colours.

Appropriation eg images from 1950s used in 1980s. Silkscreen.

Kruger discusses how she constructs her work - deciding which elements of the image interests her most, then placing text accordingly.

Barbara Kruger discusses her life and work and how it has evolved from magazine cut and paste to large public murals.

Kruger discusses a collaborative project. It is the questions that are important in having a critical view of the world. Whose values, whose hopes and whose fears?

The questions are the important thing. Enjoys putting questins on a buge mural space.

Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist and collagist. Most of her work consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality. Kruger currently lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.

Imagery and text[edit]

Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989

Belief+Doubt (2012) at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Much of Kruger's work pairs found photographs with pithy and assertive text that challenges the viewer. Her method includes developing her ideas on a computer, later transferring the results (often billboard-sized) into images. Examples of her instantly recognizable slogans read "I shop therefore I am," and "Your body is a battleground," appearing in her trademark white letters against a red background. Much of her text calls attention to ideas such as feminism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, frequently appropriating images from mainstream magazines and using her bold phrases to frame them in a new context.

Kruger has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren't." A larger category that threads through her work is the appropriation and alteration of existing images. In describing her use of appropriation, Kruger states:

Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction.

Her poster for the 1989 Women's March on Washington in support of legal abortion included a woman's face bisected into positive and negative photographic reproductions, accompanied by the text "Your body is a battleground." A year later, Kruger used this slogan in a billboard commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts. Twelve hours later, a group opposed to abortion responded to Kruger's work by replacing the adjacent billboard with an image depicting an eight-week-old fetus.

Kruger's early monochrome pre-digital works, known as 'paste ups', reveal the influence of the artist's experience as a magazine editorial designer during her early career. These small scale works, the largest of which is 11 x 13 inches (28 x 33 cm), are composed of altered found images, and texts either culled from the media or invented by the artist. A negative of each work was then produced and used to make enlarged versions of these initial 'paste ups'. Between 1978 and 1979, she completed "Picture/Readings," simple photographs of modest houses alternating with panels of words. From 1992 on, Kruger designed several magazine covers, such as , , , and The New Republic. Her signature font style of Futura Bold type is likely inspired from the "Big Idea" or "Creative Revolution" advertising style of the 1960s that she was exposed to during her experience at Mademoiselle.

In 1990, Kruger scandalized the Japanese American community of Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, with her proposal to paint the Pledge of Allegiance, bordered by provocative questions, on the side of a warehouse in the heart of the historic downtown neighborhood. Kruger had been commissioned by MOCA to paint a mural for "A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation," a 1989 exhibition that also included works by Barbara Bloom, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince. But before the mural went up, Kruger herself and curator Ann Goldstein presented it at various community meetings over the time period of 18 months. Only after protests did the artist offer to eliminate the pledge from her mural proposal, while still retaining a series of questions painted in the colors and format of the American flag: "Who is bought and sold? Who is beyond the law? Who is free to choose? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?". A full year after the exhibition closed, Kruger's reconfigured mural finally went up for a two-year run.

In 1994, Kruger's L'empathie peut changer le monde ( Empathy can change the world) was installed on a train station platform in Strasbourg, France. One year later, with architects Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson and landscape architect Nicholas Quennell, she designed the 200-foot-long (60 m) sculptural letters Picture This for a stage and outdoor amphitheater at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Between 1998 and 2008, she created permanent installations for the Fisher College of Business, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Price Center at the University of California, San Diego. For a site-specific piece that she produced at the Parrish Art Museum in 1998, Kruger placed across the upper range of the museum's Romanesque facade stark red letters that read, "You belong here"; below, on columns separating three arched entry portals, stacked letters spelled "Money" and "Taste." As part of the Venice Biennale in 2005, Kruger installed a digitally printed vinyl mural across the entire facade of the Italian pavilion, thereby dividing it into three parts-green at the left, red at the right, white in between. In English and Italian, the words "money" and "power" climbed the portico's columns; the left wall said, "Pretend things are going as planned," while "God is on my side; he told me so" fills the right. In 2012, her installation Belief+Doubt, which covers 6,700 square feet (620 m²) of surface area and was printed onto wallpaper-like sheets in the artist's signature colors of red, black and white, was installed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
http://www.barbarakruger.com https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/barbara-kruger/ https://ago.ca/exhibitions/barbara-kruger-contact-2010 Most important element is the political content, making it clear and bold, though often based on enigmatic images and comntradiction. She works visually with text usually short quotes in bold typeface eg futura, and uses black, white and 'lipstick' red, sometimes other bold colours or limited palettes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/roni-horn-2402
Saying Water

Have you ever stood by a river and stared into the black water? In this video acclaimed artist Roni Horn takes us down by the riverside, performing a powerful 40 minute monologue based on her associations with water, including tales of sex and murder. https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/roni-horn-saying-water
https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/roni-horn-interviewed-dayanita-singh

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/roni-horn-2402 Have you ever stood by a river and stared into the black water? In this video acclaimed artist Roni Horn takes us down by the riverside, performing a powerful 40 minute monologue based on her associations with water, including tales of sex and murder. https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/roni-horn-saying-water https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/roni-horn-interviewed-dayanita-singh

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This third project further explores different relationships between text and image based on a 'bricolage' sketchbook of collaged photographs and mixed media mark-making for which I created meaning through adding selected text from Rebecca Solnitz 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'. I am particularly interested in the potential of using the following quotation to extend my creative thinking and process in linking personal and political perspectives on place:

There are known knowns. The things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know... (then there are) the 'unknown knowns,' things we don't know that we know... the real dangers are in the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we pretend not to know about. (Solnitz p168 referring partly to Iraq and other wars and quoting philosopher Slavoj Zizek )

I produced two main series, the first from photo collage of my own images, and the second from the magazine collage and markmaking experiments. For details click on each gallery to bring up the annotated slideshow.

The way to Zennor: Unknown Unknowns

The original photographs were converted to split tone cyanotype blue and beige colours in Lightroom. Then collaged in the sketchbook as a spontaneous association of text and shapes. This came to focus particularly on the contrast between the rather menacing white of the calla lilly, the no entry signs and many warnings about adders in the dry summer. I never got to Zennor!

Getting Lost on the Way to Zennor

Beware of Adders

Lost in Procreation: Unknown knowns

These image and text collages produced in Procreate originated in collage and spontaneous mixed media mark-making with ink and my new Acryla gouache tube paints.

I then further explored two of these idea threads in Procreate to extend the meanings and linkings of text and image.

Mind landscapes

The mind can be imagined as a landscape, but only the mind of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which I played with getting lost and vanishing. The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms than open up under foot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names. It's a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit. (p53)

The following images in Procreate were all created as variations on the same spread, manipulating them in different ways to give different meanings and emotional interpretation of text.

Butterfly

Butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is 'psyche', the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate...the violence of the metamorphosis which is often spoken of as though it were graceful as a flower blooming.

The butterfly sequence of 'metamorphoses' are variations on the top left image which is in turn a crop selected from the middle of the same landscape image above.

I converted this to a Lightroom slideshow but only the following low resolution version would upload to this blog. I would like to do something more elaborate later in After Effects where I have much more control over compression and also the ways in which the transitions appear.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
E2.1 Visual Dynamics 3: Searching for Zennor Collage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This third project further explores different relationships between text and image based on a 'bricolage' sketchbook of collaged photographs and mixed media mark-making for which I created meaning through adding selected text from Rebecca Solnitz 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. The process was discovered in 1842 by English scientist and astronomer. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints.
Cyanotype Google images
Process

Prints can be made from large format negatives and lithography film, Digital negative (transparency) or everyday objects can be used to make photograms.

The process uses two chemicals: ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide.

In a typical procedure, equal volumes of an 8.1% solution of potassium ferricyanide and a 20% solution of ferric ammonium citrate are mixed. The overall contrast of the sensitizer solution can be increased with the addition of approximately 6 drops of 1% solution potassium dichromate for every 2ml of sensitiser solution.

This mildly photosensitive solution is then applied to a receptive surface (such as paper or cloth) and allowed to dry in a dark place. Cyanotypes can be printed on any surface capable of soaking up the iron solution. Although watercolour paper is a preferred medium, cotton, wool and even gelatin sizing on nonporous surfaces have been used. Care should be taken to avoid alkaline-buffered papers, which degrade the image over time.

A positive image can be produced by exposing it to a source of ultraviolet light (such as sunlight) as contact print through the negative (traditionally, semitransparent paper) or objects. The combination of UV light and the citrate reduces the iron(III) to iron(II). This is followed by a complex reaction of the iron(II) complex with ferricyanide. The result is an insoluble, blue dye (ferric ferrocyanide) known as Prussian blue. The extent of colour change depends on the amount of UV light, but acceptable results are usually obtained after 10-20 minute exposures on a dark, gloomy day.

After exposure, developing of the picture involves the yellow unreacted iron solution being rinsed off with running water. Although the blue colour darkens upon drying, the effect can be accelerated by soaking the print in a 6% (v/v) solution of 3% (household).The water-soluble iron(III) salts are washed away, while the non-water-soluble Prussian blue remains in the paper. The highlight values should appear overexposed, as the water wash reduces the final print values.

Toning

In a cyanotype, a blue is usually the desired color; however, there are a variety of effects that can be achieved. These fall into three categories: reducing, intensifying, and toning:

Reducing is the process of reducing or decreasing the intensity of the blue. Sodium carbonate, ammonia, Clorox, TSP, borax, Dektol and other chemicals can be used to do this. A good easily obtained reducer is bleach. How much and how long to bleach depends on the image content, emulsion thickness and what kind of toning is being used. When using a reducer it is important to pull the cyanotype out of the weak solution and put the cyanotype into a water bath to arrest the bleaching process.

Intensifying is the strengthening of the blue effect. These chemicals can also be used to expedite the oxidation process the cyanotype undergoes. These chemicals are hydrogen peroxide, citric acid, lemon juice, and vinegar.

Toning is the process used to change the colour of the iron in the print cyanotype. The colour change varies with the reagent used. There are a variety of elements that can be used, including tannic acid, oolong tea, wine, cat urine, and pyrogallic acid

Long-term preservation

In contrast to most historical and present-day processes, cyanotype prints do not react well to basic environments. As a result, it is not advised to store or present the print in chemically buffered museum board, as this makes the image fade.

Another unusual characteristic of the cyanotype is its regenerative behavior: prints that have faded due to prolonged exposure to light can often be significantly restored to their original tone by simply temporarily storing them in a dark environment.

Cyanotypes on cloth are permanent but must be washed by hand with non-phosphate soapso as to not turn the cyan to yellow.

Artists

Artists using the process include:

Anna Atkins who created a series of cyanotype limited-edition books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection, placing specimens directly onto coated paper and allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is sometimes considered the first female photographer.

Contemporary artists who employ the cyanotype process in their art include:

Cyanotype postcard, Racine, Wis., c. 1910

Tutorials

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. The process was discovered in 1842 by English scientist and astronomer. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Solnit was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother, and in 1966 her family moved to Novato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid," she said of her childhood. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the GED. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17, she went to study in Paris. She returned to California to finish her college education at San Francisco State University. She then received a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and has been an independent writer since 1988.

Activism[edit]

Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early 1990s, as described in her book Savage Dreams, and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era. She has discussed her interest in climate change and the work of 350.org and the Sierra Club, and in women's rights, especially violence against women.

Writing[edit]

Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including the Guardian newspaper and Harper's Magazine, where she is the first woman to regularly write the Easy Chair column founded in 1851. She was also a regular contributor to the political blog TomDispatch and is (as of 2018) a regular contributor to LitHub.

Solnit is the author of seventeen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogs and anthologies. Her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster began as an essay called "The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government" published by magazine the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast. It was partially inspired by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which Solnit described as "a remarkable occasion...a moment when everyday life ground to a halt and people looked around and hunkered down". In a conversation with filmmaker Astra Taylor for magazine, Solnit summarized the radical theme of A Paradise Built in Hell: "What happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority."

In 2014, Haymarket Books published Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of short essays written about instances of " mansplaining." Solnit has been credited with paving the way for the coining of the word "mansplaining," which has been used to refer to instances in which men explain things (generally toward women) in a condescending and/or patronizing way, but Solnit did not use it in the original essay. Solnit's book included illustrations from visual and performance artist Ana Teresa Fernández.

In 2019, Solnit rewrote a new version of Cinderella, also for Haymarket Books, called Cinderella Liberator. In this feminist revision, Solnit reclaims Ella from the cinders and gives both the prince ("Prince Nevermind" in her version) and Ella new futures that involve thinking for themselves, acting out free will, starting businesses, and becoming friends, rather than dependent lovers. As Syreeta McFadden argued for NBC News, Cinderella has long been retold, changing with the times and this was a much needed revision. Solnit's retelling is creative in that she uses the original Arthur Rackham 's original silhouetted drawings of Cinderella, but liberates her through research, words, and story.

Reception[edit]

Solnit has received two NEA fellowships for Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, a Lannan literary fellowship, and a 2004 Rave Award for writing on the effects of technology on the arts and humanities. In 2010 Utne Reader magazine named Solnit as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World". Her The Faraway Nearby (2013) was nominated for a National Book Award, and shortlisted for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award.

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner called Solnit "the kind of rugged, off-road public intellectual America doesn't produce often enough. ... Solnit's writing, at its worst, can be dithering and self-serious, Joan Didion without the concision and laser-guided wit. At her best, however [...] she has a rare gift: the ability to turn the act of cognition, of arriving at a coherent point of view, into compelling moral drama."

For River of Shadows, Solnit was honored with the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the 2004 Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, which honors exceptional scholarship that reaches beyond the academy toward a broad audience. Solnit was also awarded Harvard's Mark Lynton History Prize in 2004 for River of Shadows. Solnit was awarded the 2015-16 Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography by the North American Cartographic Information Society Solnit's book, Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises, won the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. She won the 2019 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Non-Fiction.

Solnit credits Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Neruda, Ariel Dorfman, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf, and Henry David Thoreau as writers who have influenced her work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Solnit was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother, and in 1966 her family moved to Novato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid," she said of her childhood.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
David Carson (born September 8, 1954) is an American graphic designer, art director and surfer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography.
He worked as a sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 1970s. From 1982 to 1987, Carson worked as a teacher in Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, California. In 1983, Carson started to experiment with graphic design and found himself immersed in the artistic and bohemian culture of Southern California. He art directed various music, skateboarding, and surfing magazines through the 1980/90s, including twSkateboarding, twSnowboarding, Surfer, Beach Culture and the music magazine Ray Gun. By the late 1980s he had developed his signature style, using "dirty" type and non-mainstream photographic techniques.
As art director of Ray Gun (1992-5) he employed much of the typographic and layout style for which he is known. In particular, his widely imitated aesthetic defined the so-called "grunge typography" era. In one issue he used Dingbat as the font for what he considered a rather dull interview with Bryan Ferry. In a feature story, NEWSWEEK magazine said he "changed the public face of graphic design".
He takes photography and type and manipulates and twists them together and on some level confusing the message but in reality he was drawing the eyes of the viewer deeper within the composition itself. His layouts feature distortions or mixes of 'vernacular' typefaces and fractured imagery, rendering them almost illegible. Indeed, his maxim of the 'end of print' questioned the role of type in the emergent age of digital design, following on from California New Wave and coinciding with experiments at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
In the later 1990s he added corporate clients to his list of clients, including Microsoft, Armani, Nike, Levi's, British Airways, Quiksilver, Sony, Pepsi, Citibank, Yale University, Toyota and many others. When Graphic Design USA Magazine (NYC) listed the "most influential graphic designers of the era" David was listed as one of the all time 5 most influential designers, with Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Saul Bass and Massimo Vignelli.
He named and designed the first issue of the adventure lifestyle magazine Blue, in 1997. David designed the first issue and the first three covers, after which his assistant Christa Smith art directed and designed the magazine until its demise. Carson's cover design for the first issue was selected as one of the "top 40 magazine covers of all time" by the American Society of Magazine Editors.
In 2000, Carson closed his New York City studio and followed his children, Luke and Luci, to Charleston, South Carolina where their mother had relocated them. In 2004, Carson became the Creative Director of Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, designed the special "Exploration" edition of Surfing Magazine, and directed a television commercial for UMPQUA Bank in Seattle, Washington.
Carson claims that his work is "subjective, personal and very self indulgent".

Bibliography

Carson, David (1995). The End of Print: The Graphic Design of David Carson. Chronicle Books. ISBN 0-8118-1199-9.
Carson, David (1997). David Carson: 2nd Sight: Grafik Design After the End of Print. Universe Publishing. ISBN 0-7893-0128-8.
Meggs, Phillip B.; David Carson (1999). Fotografiks: An Equilibrium Between Photography and Design Through Graphic Expression That Evolves from Content. Laurence King. ISBN 1-85669-171-3.
Stecyk, Craig; David Carson (2002). Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing. Laguna Art Museum in association with Gingko Press. ISBN 1-58423-113-0.
Mcluhan, Marshall; David Carson, Eric McLuhan, Terrance Gordon (2003). The Book of Probes. Gingko Press. ISBN 1-58423-056-8.
Carson, David (2004). Trek: David Carson, Recent Werk. Gingko Press. ISBN 1-58423-046-0.
Mayne, Thom; David Carson (2005). Ortlos: Architecture of the Networks. Hatje Cantz Publishers. ISBN 3-7757-1652-1.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
David Carson (born September 8, 1954) is an American graphic designer, art director and surfer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography. He worked as a sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 1970s.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Linda Mayoux blog for Open College of the Arts Visual Communications Level 3: Advanced Practice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'l love every minute of my life... I squeeze it like an orange and eat the peel, because I don't want to miss a thing.' Huguette Caland I chose 'Orange' because I wanted to start this series of projects with something bright and optimistic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Use an image and a piece of text to create maximum information or detail. Next, strip back the design to maintain the same meaning or effect but with minimum visual content. Find a point between these two positions where there's just enough information or detail.

For this project I decided to explore one of Solnit's key themes in 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Blue. She uses the title 'Blue of Distance' for alternate chapters. In the first chapter she links this with a discussion of cyanotype visions of the world. The cover of my paperback copy has an atmospheric abstract watery watercolour landscape on the cover - much like my view over St Ives Bay where we were staying.

My working process was somewhat different from the previous project in that I started with existing physical images - cyanotypes - that were random and experimental rather than explicitly designed for this purpose. I then manipulated the images using Procreate on my iPad to fit three different extracts from Solnit's text.

Preparation

In my 'Lost on the Way to Zennor' sketchbook I had made a page of 'Blue' quotations from Solnit, matched with a collage of some of my ink and gouache doodles.

I had become increasingly interested in the cyanotype process as another photography-based printmaking process that I could do at home. I had booked my self onto a course with Karina Savage at Curwen Print Study Centre in Linton. These first cyanotype images were very experimental in exploring different textures - glass hangings, small sherry glasses, feathers, latex gloves, clingfilm, prisms, bubblewrap, netting, grasses and jewellery with different angles of exposure. Some of the images were produced on top of solution painted on with a brush so had brushmarks, other images were on pre-prepared paper and these produced different blue tones. But I really liked some of the textures and effects. I decided it would be interesting to use these rather arbitrary images and see where they led.

I used Procreate on my iPad for many of my most successful images in Illustration 2. It is a very flexible software that can produce many image variants quickly through blend modes, masks etc that can produce very evocative high resolution images from many different types of source image. There have been a lot of recent updates eg addition of text, more blur and selection functions and a sophisticated liquify mode. Further developing these skills is important in diversifying my digital work away from my pc and managing my RSI.

Theme 1: Blue light lost

My original inspiration for the project was the following text that I found calming and inspiring as I gazed out of our camper van window at the sea and sky of St Ives Bay.
Blue of Distance and Depth: The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that gets lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colourless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the colour blue. ( Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost p29) 'Not the right blue' ideas of unreachability and yearning from a story by Isak Dinesen about the daughter of a shipwrecked merchant obsessed with blue chinaware. "although she bought many hundred blue jars and bowls, she would always after a time put them aside and say: 'Alas, alas, it is not the right blue.' When her father suggested maybe the blue she was looking for did not exist she said 'O God, Papa, how can you speak so wickedly? Surely there must be some of it left from when all the world was blue.' After decades she finally found an old blue jar from the Chinese emperor's summer palace. When she saw it she said that now she could die, and when she died, her heart would be cut out and put in the blue jar. 'And everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue around me, and in the midst of the blue world my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently...' ( Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost pp 125-126) Cyanotypes (Prussian blue) and melancholy: This world was realised in the cyanotypes, or blue photographs of the nineteenth century - 'cyan' means blue, though I always thought the term referred to the cyanide with which the prints were made. Cyanotypes were cheap and easy to make, and so some amateurs chose to work in cyanotype altogether, some professional photographers used the medium to produce preliminary prints, treated so they would fade and vanish in a few weeks' time: these vanishing prints were made as samples from which to order permanent images in other tones. In cyanotypes you arrive in this world where darkness and light are blue and white, where bridges and people and apples are blue as lakes, as though everything were seen through the melancholy atmosphere that here is cyanide. ( Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost p34)

I selected the cyanotype that I considered the most evocative of 'beautiful blue light' as my base image, edited it slightly to give fewer glass circles and put the full text in the gap so that it was legible.

I then cropped the image to square in different ways and overlaid a much shorter version of 'Blue is the light that gets lost'. Of these I like the darker more dramatic image with its glistening light and the text that gets lost.

The fourth version was then really minimal with just the word blue, leaving the light to speak for itself.

The final image has excerpts for the text in Optima typeface for elegance and to give a bit more information. I tried several darker versions to be more like the version 3 and need to work on this more to make the blues more varied and the text more shimmery as it is a bit bland.

Theme 2 The fable of the blue jar: innocence and freedom

For the second theme I used a different crop of the same cyanotype and a different text:

The first maximum image is the same image as Blue Light Lost but flipped horizontally and making a masked hole for the longer text to make it legible.

For the second maximum image I cut and flipped the running figure to make her more obviously a woman running towards the pyramid palace. I like the very stylised figure produced by accident from the splayed ends of the jewellery.

In the third Minimum image I further cropped the image and reduced the text to make it a more enigmatic commentary on whether the dazzling beauty of the pyramid was 'innocent' and whether the figure running after the glitz is in fact free.

For the 'just right' image I reduced the text from the original tale to something shorter and more poignant. I added a rather robotic blue vase for her heart. But I think this is quite effective as an evocative fairy tale image.

Theme 3 Melancholy Blue

Theme 3 'Melancholy Blue' started with the same text as theme 1 'Blue that gets lost' but with the rather intriguing latex glove dog shape image. Imagining the dog is called blue. In the inverted image experiment I like the Prussian Blue lines against the pale blue. This suggested whistful melancholy.

So I returned to my Solnit quotes and started to work with different text:

The first maximum version takes the full dog cyanotype and full text, with a transparent background for legibility.

In the second maximum version I cropped the image square to create a more claustrophobic feel. I shortened the text to focus on the idea of depression and threat of suicide. I wanted to reduce the contrast between the blue and very bright white. But the black and cream do not work. The dog shape also becomes less clear.

In the minimum version I keep the cropped claustrophobic image and reduced contrast but with just the word melancholy, letting the image speak for itself. I put a further overlay to reduce the contrast between the white and blue and make the blue a darker melancholic Prussian blue.

The final version then draws on the inverted image above. I wanted a more tangled melanchoilc mess where the word itself was more expressive. I overlaid a crop of the image with a clipping mask. I like this image

Earlier Photoshop versions: Blue is the LIght that gets Lost

These are my original cynatoptype photographic experiments in Photoshop/DXo FX before I had learned the cyanotype process. The first using Silver FX antique cyanotype effect looks rather like a Bible reading - reminiscent of some of the posters outside the many churches in St Ives. The second one is more dramatic. I like the bold verticals like bars of a jail enclosing/excluding the viewer with depressive blue. Somewhat reminiscent of Ed Ruscha. I need to become more proficient in Photoshop to make them look more interesting.

Further possibility

Yves Klein Leap blue ( intense Ultramarine) globe and colour of the void, space and death. In 1957 Yves Klein painted a globe with his deep electric blue (intense Ultramarine), and with this gesture it became a world without divisions between countries, between land and water, as though the earth itself had become sky, as though looking down was looking up...Painting the world blue made it all terra incognita, indivisible and unconquerable, a ferocious act of mysticism'...1960 Leap Into the Void

( Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost pp ??)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Use an image and a piece of text to create maximum information or detail. Next, strip back the design to maintain the same meaning or effect but with minimum visual content. Find a point between these two positions where there's just enough information or detail.