Recent drawing - Number series - 2

Industrial designer Marek Reichman meets graphic designer Peter Saville

In this episode of Only Artists on BBC Radio 4, the industrial designer Marek Reichman meets the graphic artist and designer Peter Saville.

Marek Reichman has designed cars for some of the world's best-known marques and is currently chief creative officer at Aston Martin. Born in Sheffield, he graduated from Teesside University with a degree in industrial design and continued his studies in vehicle design at the Royal College of Art.

Peter Saville was in his mid-20s when he created renowned album covers for Factory Records' bands including Joy Division and New Order. Since then he has worked with leading fashion designers and musicians and was appointed creative director of the city of Manchester.

I really appreciate the work of Peter Saville (see my previous blog post about him and his work), and this radio conversation gave me a better understanding of the systems he uses in his design process.

I was particularly fascinated to hear about how he transformed the alphabet into a colour system.

It was his interest in computers that lead him to allocate a colour to the numbers 1-9.

Saville explained: “The colour alphabet came from the fact that I understood the floppy disk contained coded information and I wanted to impart the title in a coded form - therefore I converted the alphabet into a code using colours.”

e.g.

1 = A

2 = B

3 = C

24 (2 and 4) = X

25 (2 and 5) = Y

26 (2 and 6) = Z



This was then used for the Blue Monday album cover.



https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006dqn

Boustrophedon style writing

Just came across an article about boustrophedon style writing, and think it will be interesting in relation to the work I am doing for an exhibition in a barn on the outskirts of Hexham.  

'Boustrophedon means something like "as the ox turns."  Today we write in stoichedon style, in which all the letters face the same direction, like soldiers standing in formation.  Boustrophedon is based on an agricultural, not a military ideal:the writer writes as a farmer plows.  Write to the end of the line, and then, rather than returning to the left side of the page, turn the letters to face the opposite direction and write from right to left.  When you read boustrophedon, your eye follows a zig-zag across the page -- or the stone.

Have a look at this close-up of the engraving at Gortys and look at the way letters like "E," "K," and "S" face in adjacent lines:

https://slowperc.blogspot.com/2013/01/writing-law-and-memory-in-ancient-gortyn.html

Rhythm in Research by Rachel Duckhouse

Rachel Duckhouse is a Glasgow based artist working in a range of media including drawing and printmaking. The complex patterns and systems in nature, human behaviour and the built environment form the basis of her practice.

She makes responsive, research based work that reveals hidden patterns in specific contexts. She uses the physical processes of drawing and printmaking to investigate relationships and flows of energy within real or imagined spaces and situations.



‘Rhythm in Research’ presents screenprints, etchings, lithographs and drawings created in response to several artist residencies and self-directed research projects she’s recently undertaken in Scotland and Canada.



As artist in residence for Watershed+ in Calgary, she worked with City of Calgary water engineers to research and develop a series of drawings and prints describing the complex flows of the Bow River through city infrastructure.



As Associate Artist at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) she worked with gallery staff to create a series of drawings based on their complex relationships to climate change, within the context of the GoMA building.





Most recently, as part of an on-going research project ‘Multiple//Parallel’, making work based on the geology and hydrology of southeast Canada.



"I'm interested in the patterns and rules that govern the universe as we understand it, from a molecular to planetary scale. I often work in series; posing a question or exploring a concept, devising a set of parameters or rules, and testing out a series of variations on the theme. The result is a set of images that work together to pull and push an idea in different ways. To make just one image would suggest a definitive answer to a question. To make several suggests there are an infinite number of possible answers."

http://www.rachelduckhouse.co.uk

http://www.edinburghprintmakers.co.uk/exhibitions/Rhythm-in-Research-by-Rachel-Duckhouse

Studio as a testing ground

I've finally realised that I need to stop thinking for a bit and focus my energy on making stuff for me to think about later. The studio is going to be a place of experimentation and a testing ground. Rather than isolating a few works in the space, I am going to put lots in, and once I have it there, physically, I can then find relationships between different items, and later make judgement on what works and what doesn't.

Chance Finds Us at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art

Chance Finds Us
2 May 2014 - 4 September 2014

Above image: James Hugonin, Binary Rhythm (IV) detail, 2012- 2013, Private Collection, USA, Courtesy the artist & Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

An artist led project by eight North East based artists who work across drawing, installation, painting and sculpture, who have all adopted systematic strategies in their practice. The artists in this exhibition all look at the opposition of order, intuition and the implication of the chance encounter. Artist include; Anne Vibeke Mou, James Hugonin, Alex Charrington, Richard Rigg, Rachael Clewlow, Sarah Bray, Peter J. Evans and Nick Kennedy.

http://www.visitmima.com/whats-on/single/chance-finds-us/