Sunday 23 October 2011

Why Design?

The whole TED site is fantastic, but this should be worth a watch...

Steve Jobs


Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Tuesday 18 October 2011

Scott Wade

Try to ignore the fact he looks pretty/entirely ridiculous... I can't help but quite like these 'dirty car' images. More here.







Sunday 16 October 2011

After Hours Animators

A nice little documentary on the artwork created in free time by animators at Dreamworks.


Moonshine : Artists after dark from alexis wanneroy on Vimeo.

Monday 10 October 2011

Latest Turbine Hall Project Unveiled

The latest artist to be offered the opportunity of exploiting the vast cavernous space of Tate Modern's 'Turbine Hall', Tacita Dean, opens her exhibit tonight.


'Film' transforms the east wall of the Turbine Hall into a giant strip of film, complete with sprocket holes, and celebrates what Dean describes as a 'dying media'. The Turbine Hall will be only dimly lit, allowing viewers to be immersed in the images on the giant screen - a snail on a leaf; a fountain; a chimney giving off vapour.

Read a full report on the new exhibit on the Guardian website, here, and its 5* review from Adrian Searle here.

For more information on the Unilever Turbine Hall series, see these pages on the Tate site.

Sunday 9 October 2011

Apocalypse

This morning I had a look around Tate Britain's John Martin exhibition. Their advertising campaign is perhaps as overblown as the art itself, but it's still worth a trip. Martin's extraordinary canvases divided opinion in the mid 19th century, as indeed they continue to do today. It's easy to see him as a poor man's Turner, but some of the imagined landscapes are truly epic; it's just a shame he definitely couldn't paint figures!



I'd have liked to have seen a bit more of the contrast/comparison element. Glenn Brown's slick homage of a painting was tucked in almost as an afterthought in the final room:



There's also an interesting backstory of some controversial restoration work for paintings in the exhibition which were flood damaged 'beyond repair' in the 1920s - you can read more about it here, reported by the Guardian.

Saturday 8 October 2011

Richter at Tate opens

Quick review - called in all-too-briefly to Tate Modern this afternoon for a squint at the new Richter exhibition. Looking forward to going back for a proper look - if you can handle the hordes of try-hard hipsters with dodgy beards and glasses, you're in for a treat: the show is stuffed full of stunningly slick paintings.





A must-see show.