book design and when work is truly meaningful

Above Merle Armitage cover design for his book, George Gershwin, Man and Legend. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1958.

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Bernard Wolfe, Memoirs of a Not Altogether Shy Pornographer (Garden City NY: Doubleday and Company, 1972), p. 157.  

[THERE IS a Law of Laws] that says, it's not the paycheck you get that determines the value of the work you do, it's the inspired and organized energy you put into the project, the invention, inner direction, personal thrust no matter what payroll you're on, the best payrolls are your own, the best jobs are free-lance. That says, the difference between those who do and those who get done to and [who get done] in is what's hungered for, the life on your feet or the life flat on your back. That says, there are the active ones, the makers; then there are the passive ones, the made. That says, work ethic be damned, what we're talking about is the nature and direction of hunger, whether your need is to stiff the world a little or be steamrollered.

Chap-Book Style Poster for Bicycle Club / 1895

Above Will H. Bradley, Bicycle Poster (1895).

•••

Billie Holiday—

They think they can make fuel from horse manure…Now, I don’t know if your car will be able to get 30 miles to the gallon, but it’s sure gonna put a stop to siphoning.

title slide / what have you to share with us today

Speaking of class meetings and education, while they still exist, I am currently preparing a series of three online talks (for OLLI Drake) about various aspects of art and design. One source of pleasure in preparing these is (of course) to share my ideas about the process of designing. Another source is the process of designing the slides that are actually used in the talk. This is the title slide for the third talk in the series.

•••

Vernon Fisher, Navigating the Stars (Chicago and Kansas City: Landfall Press & Karl Oskar Group. 1989). p. 24—

One little girl never brought anything to sharing time. Other children might bring an authentic Indian head-dress acquired on a vacation in Arizona, or a Civil War sword handed down from Great Granddad, but whenever the teacher asked: "Dori, do you have anything to share with us today?" she only stared at the top of her desk, shaking her head firmly from side to side. Then one day, long after her turn had mercifully passed, Dori abruptly left her seat and walked to the front of the class. With everyone's startled attention she began: "Today on the way to school I found something that I want to share." She held her arm stiffly out in front of her and began slowly dropping tiny pieces of shredded Kleenex. "See?" she said. "Snow."

cockroaches in the pentagon / estimated number

Source

LEWIS H. LAPHAM, et al., The Harper’s Index Book (New York : Henry Holt, 1986)—

Percentage of Americans who never read books: 45. Estimated number of cockroaches in the Pentagon : 2,000,000. Percentage of Americans who say they don’t know how they could get along without Scotch tape: 46. Number of plastic pink flamingos sold in the US in 1985: 450,000.

Thanx to Soo Hostetler / Tom Tate / Philip Fass

the frustrations of small mistakes in video talks

Making online videos is apparently always a challenge. From my experience, the results are always uneven, largely because there are always mistakes. Some months ago, for example, I made what is presumably the best of my eighteen video talks—or at least the most popular one. The title is Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version, and currently (although I do not promote it by pleading for viewers to “like and subscribe”) on the average it is being watched by someone, somewhere in the world, day and night, about once per hour. As good as it is, I still wince in response to its errors.

One that always bothers me is a scene in which I provide an example of the simultaneous contrast of color, in which a single color appears to be two noticeably different colors, when placed in different settings. The still shot reproduced above is the slide that I intended to use. It is a persuasive example of simultaneous contrast, because the field of background gray (behind the name Bing Crosby) conspicuously appears to be two distinctively different grays. This is the image I should have used, and everything would have been perfectly fine. Unfortunately, as I was editing the final version, I slightly adjusted the overall color balance—with the result that the contrast effect is far too subtle in the film.

John Sloan / simple, modest & absolutely no airs

John Sloan, Cover illustration (1914)

Herbert Faulkner West, John Sloan's Last Summer. Iowa City IA: Prairie Press, 1952—

I was talking one day with Adelbert Ames, Jr., of the Hanover Institute, researcher, painter and experimenter in color, whose background was about as dissimilar to Sloan’s as could be imagined—Ames who went to Andover and Harvard; Sloan who went for a while to Philadelphia public schools and then graduated to newspaper offices in the same city. One the born aristocrat; the other the born democrat. Yet both got on wonderfully together, and Mr. Ames said to me one day about Sloan: “You can see what a really great man is like—simple, modest, and absolutely no airs whatever.”

John Sloan (1891)

 

which [two] things belong together // grouping

Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version

 

art, design, architecture / online published links

more>>>

 

i believe in the imaginative life and love to talk

© Mary Snyder Behrens

Above Mary Snyder Behrens, Edo Wan (1988). Textile collage with machine stitching. 38h x 45w. Private collection.

•••

These are the concluding words in Sherwood Anderson’s foreward to his autobiography, as published in Ray Lewis White, ed., Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969, p.29—

I am an imaginative man. I believe in the imaginative life, its importance and would like to write of that. My readers, therefore, those who go long with me, will have to be patient…

…I shall tell the tale as though you, the reader, were a personal friend. We are walking together, let’s say, on a country road. The road follows a stream and the day is pleasant. We are unhurried. We stop at times to sit on a rock beside the stream. We arise and walk again and I talk.

I keep talking, love to talk. I am telling you that this thing happened to me, that that thing happened.

Do you wish I would stop talking, let you talk? Why then, dear reader, go write your own book.

the extraordinary visions of Joseph Podlesnik

Above The photographs of Joseph Podlesnik are simply astonishing. A large selection are on sale through December 8, 2023, online here.

new poetry book with Mary Snyder Behrens art

It has been a pleasure to learn today about the upcoming publication of a new book of poetry by American poet J.D. Schraffenberger, titled American Sad. Its projected publication date is February 2024, but copies can be pre-ordered now, at an advance sale discount price. The author is editor of the North American Review and professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. More book information, examples of the author's poems, and ordering information can be found here.

Full disclosure: Personally, I am especially pleased that a major artwork by my wife, Mary Snyder Behrens, as been chosen by the author for use on the cover. I live with this work, since it has been on view in our dining room for years, and I pass it multiple times in the course of a day. It is large, for the scale of a dining room wall (48h x 30w x 4d), encased in a plexiglas cover, and so multi-faceted and visually provocative that one cannot help but be drawn in. Titled American Canvas II, it is one of several comparable-sized, related works that she completed in 2002 (can it really have been 21 years ago?).  All of them are mixed media, dimensional compositions of cast-off detritus from our farm, bits of junk that farmers buried years ago (in the manner of amateur landfills), and which, during heavy rains, rise up again to the surface—and, in some cases, cause us harm. 

I for one could not be more delighted that the writer J.D. Schraffenberger has found some strand of common ground between the art he makes with words, and the visual verse that Mary constructs.

window for first fifty exhibition at hearst center

A few weeks ago, I designed the exhibition mailing card (shown below at end of post) for an upcoming exhibition at the Hearst Center for the Arts (Cedar Falls IA). It is a non-juried public event that provides an opportunity for anyone—amateur and non-practicing artists included—to have their work exhibited at an art center. The theme of the annual event this year is FIRST FIFTY 2023: PATTERNS. The exhibition is on view from June 15 to August 6.

Having designed the card, I was subsequently asked to produce a six-panel window design, to promote the same exhibition. Shown above is a diagram of the window installation scheme, and below is a view of how the front of the building looked earlier this week.

the lash of the tongue of teacher Henry Tonks

Above Roy R. Behrens, exhibition card design, 2023.

•••

Bernard Leach, Beyond East and West: memoirs, portraits, and essays. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1978—

[As an art student at the Slade School of Art, he endured] the lash of the tongue of [his drawing teacher] Henry Tonks—Tonks with his gritty eye and tomahawk nose, tall in shiny blue serge, who had given up his job as house surgeon at Bart's Hospital to use his scalpel on us at the Slade; Tonks who became a second-class artist in the Impressionist manner, but a good draughtsman and perhaps the best teacher in all England. Often we saw some girl cowering in tears behind a plaster cast. He spared none; his bitter tongue was fearless and true. Here is tribute and thanks to him. His surgery changed our skins—saved our lives maybe. Tonks, who enunciated “action, construction, proportion” as the flaming guardians of the paradise of art; who, sitting on one of the student’s “donkeys” [drawing benches], after a glance at his drawing, buried his face in his hands, paused long, and then asked, “Why do you do it?”; and who once said to me grudgingly, “You may be able to draw one day.” I remember on one occasion he flung open the studio door, stood there in deadly silence, then burst out: “I want to know whether a day will come when I shall see a sign of art in this room,” and slammed the door behind him.

Herbert Simon / the fruits of being colorblind

Arcimboldo, Fruit Basket (c1590)

Above Painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo titled Fruit Basket. Oil on panel, c1590. It is a reversible still life of fruit. Turned upsidedown (as shown here), it resembles the head of a person.

•••

Herbert Simon, Models of my life. NYC: Basic Books, 1991, p. 5—

Whether during his fourth summer or on some later occasion, the boy [the author] was among a party picking wild strawberries. The others filled their pails in a few minutes; there were only a few strawberries in the bottom of his. How could the others see the berries so easily amid the closely matching leaves? That was how he learned that strawberries are red and leaves green, and that he was colorblind. 

•••

Postscript As Simon comments in his autobiography, he would later marry a woman with red hair. In view of his being colorblind (he continues): “'How did you know her hair was red?' the perceptive reader might wonder. Well, I had early been told that there were no green-haired people, nor any red lawns. Ergo. . . ."

In relation to the use of ambiguous, pun-like images in art (such as this painting by Arcimboldo), it may also be of interest to view my recent video called EMBEDDED FIGURES, ART AND CAMOUFLAGE.

Index of American Design / Toy Rocking Horse

Poster / Roy R. Behrens (2023)

 

Index of American Design / Dog Doorstop

Poster / Roy R. Behrens (2023)

 

Index of American Design / Billethead of Ship

Poster / Roy R. Behrens (2023)

 

Index of American Design / Toy Circus Wagon

Poster / Roy R. Behrens (2023)

 

Index of American Design / Dappled Toy Horse

Poster / Roy R. Behrens (2023)