to catch a green lizard without its tail falling off

Above Roy R. Behrens, book cover design for Joseph Langland, The Sacrifice Poems. Cedar Falls IA: North American Review, 1975.

•••

Lawrence Durrell, quoted in George Plimpton, ed., The Writer's Chapbook (NY: Viking Press, 1989), pp. 107-108—

To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off. In India when I was a boy they had great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who could catch lizards intact. No one knew quite how he did it. He had a special soft way of going up to them, and he'd bring them back with their tails on. That strikes me as the best analogy I can give you. To try and catch your poem without its tail falling off.

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an anagram overkill / What's for repas, Eclat?

Nature Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2019

W.V. Quine, The Time of My Life: An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. xii—

At Oxford we had an au pair girl named Tecla, and I could not get over the feeling that the name was a garble. I kept trying anagrams. I would say, "Set the table, Tacle." "Bring the treacle, Tecal." "Bring the meat, Cleat." "Take my plate, Clate." "What's for repas, Eclat?" "All set, Alcet?" My wife was afraid Tecla might leave.

the endangered practice of designing posters

Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2019

Above Roy R. Behrens © 2019, Poster (a collection of twenty-five bird posters). There are few things I enjoy as much as designing posters. I've created scores of them, especially in the past decade. Most often I've designed them (without charge, pro bono) for nonprofit organizations whose causes I want to help to support. But the opportunities have all but disappeared these days. Printed posters seem almost to have come to be an endangered species. Where would we display them? And for what purpose, since it is far easier to post and share the image and notification on various social media sites. Yet (to my mind) there are few things quite as beautiful as an exquisite poster on a wall. Above is what one might regard as a "metaposter," since it is a single poster made up of an arrangement of multiple posters for a local wildlife preservation site (Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Waterloo / Cedar Falls, Iowa). Too bad this practice is now passé.

•••

Wilbert Snow, Codline's Child (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), pp. 37-38—

There were no septic tanks and no sewers in our village. Each home had a backhouse that had to be cleaned out once a year. For three years, when I was between ten and thirteen, I did this chore for [a woman neighbor named] Fronie. Each time she gave me five dollars, and five dollars to me then was far more than five hundred would be to me now. In those days no lime was thrown over the dung to make the task easier for the shoveler. Each time I became deathly sick, but I needed the five dollars so desperately that I saw the job through. I have no words to express the horror of those two or three hours each year. I would lie on my stomach and throw up when there was little or nothing to yield. After the job was over, I would go to the Mill Cove for a swim and to Patten Point to smell the fragrance of fir trees and bayberry bushes.

•••

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

Tao Te Ching / Bauhaus / Gestalt / Invisible Core

In the past three or four years, I have produced about 18 online video talks, which are indebted to—but not the same—as years and years of classroom slide-embellished talks for courses in graphic design and design history. It is one way to continue to teach, long after having retired from in-person lecturing. The videos have become surprisingly popular, and I suspect that some are being used by university faculty as supplementary teaching resources. The most frequently visited has had thousands of viewers (6000 alone on YouTube, plus those at other sources) which is encouraging, given that I don't admonish viewers to "like and subscribe."The most popular video is a foundations-level overview of the most basic understandings about "how form functions" in design-based art, architecture and graphic design. The title is Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version. In referring to it as "the film version," I intended to distinguish it from an academic paper with the same title, that I published twenty-seven years ago (in 1998) in the journal Leonardo (MIT Press).

That print on paper version was (perhaps still is) one of the top-ten most downloaded articles in that magazine's history. The paper and the video address the same subject, but they differ markedly, and I think the film is better. The film is derived from a classroom talk that I nearly always gave on the first day of class in my university-level design studio and foundations courses. It evolved over the years of course. But it seemed to function reliably as a "big picture" overview of what designers, architects and design-based artists might hope to achieve.

At the end of the film, I conclude by saying how lucky I was to have taught during the last 29 years of my teaching career (not 39, as the film narration mistakenly claims) in the Kamerick Art Building at the University of Northern Iowa. As I noticed when I first spoke there, the design of that building is based on recurrent references to a rectangular motif, the shape and proportion (1 by 2) of a domino game piece. That same motif is also fundamental in traditional Japanese architecture, where it occurs in the floor mats or tatami, which measure 3 x 6 feet. I surmised that the Kamerick building pays homage to that, in features both inside and out, an assumption that was verified years later when I spoke to the architect.

Earlier in the film, I allude to the resemblance between Gestalt theory in perceptual psychology, and the Tao Te Ching, which may have been first introduced to me by Weimar Bauhaus Master Potter Marguerite Wildenhain, with whom my friend and teacher Dean Schwarz and I spent a summer studying pottery at Pond Farm (her mountain-top studio, home and school) in Northern California. In her autobiography, titled The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts, she makes explicit references to Lao-tze's famous passage that claims that the essence of a pot is not in the walls, but in the space (or void) within—its "invisible core."

Here is the full passage from Lao-tze:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub, but the empty space between them is the essence of the wheel. Pots are formed from clay, but the empty space within it is the essence of the pot. Walls with windows and doors form the house, but the empty space within it is the essence of the home.

Marguerite Wildenhain was one of many who were struck by that now-famous passage. Another was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was quoted as follows in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: His Living Voice (Fresno: California State University Press, 1987), pp. 25-26—

One day in 1912 I got a little book from the Japanese ambassador to America ... It was a charming little book and all you ought to own it. It is called The Book of Tea [by Okakura Kakuzo]. Well, there I read Lao-tze for the first time, and I read that the reality of a building does not consist in the roof and the walls but In the space within to be lived in. Well, there is my thesis.

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

BALLAST Quarterly Review / all issues online

At the moment I am preparing an online class session on the experience of founding a magazine in 1985. The magazine was BALLAST Quarterly Review, which I began in Milwaukee, while teaching at the university there. In 2002, a substantially different account of how that magazine began was published in an essay / interview titled How BALLAST Began, which can still be found online. 

The magazine's publication continued for 21 years. It was chosen by Milwaukee Magazine as one of "the best things in Milwaukee" and was also featured prominently in the Whole Earth Catalog, Communication Arts, AIGA Journal, and other publications.

Elsewhere, I have said that BALLAST was an online commonplace book. For those who may not know the term "commonplace book," it is a notebook or scrapbook of sorts in which someone collects interesting information (bits that trigger a double take) that he or she has run across. I had initially posted such findings (both text and image items) on a bulletin board in the hallway outside my office at the university. It became popular, as students who were passing by would check for the newest additions. With BALLAST I began to post such things not in the hallway but in a self-published quarterly mailing.

Throughout the life of the magazine, this forced me to keep reading, in search of flotsam and jetsam to include. In time, I also published essays and a multitude of book and film reviews, all of which were then republished in the journal Leonardo (MIT). But at least half of the pleasure derived from the inclusion of visual components that my students and I or others produced, or from historic sources. All issues of the magazine have since been scanned for reposting on the internet by the ScholarWorks division of the Rod Library at the University of Northern Iowa. Anyone can now search, read online, or download (free of charge) all issues of BALLAST as printable pdfs.

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.

•••

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.

Henry Mayer's WWI Pasteboard Charlemagnes

Here are two views of a single illustration, created by Hy Mayer (aka Henry Mayer) and published in Puck (19 September 1914), vol 76 no 1959, pp. 12-13. It was accompanied by a text about the outbreak of World War I, titled “The Pasteboard Charlemagnes by Benjamin De Casseres. 

Mayer’s illustration, titled “Militarism: From the Craddle to the Grave,” is an upsidedown double image. As shown here, it appears to be the image of a child when viewed upright, but turned upsidedown, it looks like a German helmet with a human skull inside.

Thanx to Soo Hostetler / Tom Tate / Philip Fass

pleased to attend / Elena Diane Curris Exhibition

Last evening, I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the 2024 Elena Diane Curris Biennial Design Exhibition the UNI Gallery of Art. Below is a two-part posting I uploaded to LinkedIn earlier this afternoon. Such a wonderful exhibition, as well as a pleasurable social event.

Elena Diane Curris Graphic Design Exhibit 2024

Curris Exhibition Opening

 

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.

the education of vision—before it's too late

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzYrUfsAvkZur5cBv6xlhSg

 

the anatomy of a conference / design education

download pdf

Earlier this week, I posted online this six-page pdf of a printed booklet that served as the schedule of events at a gathering that I was partly responsible for in 2005. It was a conference about design in relation to teaching—not only graphic design, but a more inclusive category, including, for example, industrial and architectural design. The conference title was THE BAUHAUS AND BEYOND 1919-2005: The Shape of Design Education.

Although this conference took place almost twenty years ago, it may be of value to current design faculty at art schools, colleges, universities, art centers, and museums. Conferences (whether online or in-person) can be inspiring events for both faculty and students. But they may as first appear to require too much effort on the part of those who organize them, or perhaps they aren’t affordable.

This booklet documents a conference that was one of three that were organized and hosted by members of the graphic design faculty and students at the University of Northern Iowa. In all three cases, the conferences were carried out with all but zero funding. A "call for proposals" poster was prepared, and sent out, months in advance, postage free, by distributing an email to prospective participants, with a pdf attached. Those who participated in the conference (whether presenters or attendees) were required to provide their own transportation, lodging and meals.

No honoraria or travel allowances were given for presenters, albeit with two exceptions, consisting of prominent speakers who had traveled in and were speaking elsewhere in the region, so that some costs could be shared between schools. The conference were purposely held on days of the week (Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday morning) when the departmental building spaces would most likely be available. Parking might also have been a problem (as is nearly always true for anything other than sports events), but that problem was avoided because campus parking was free and unrestricted on weekends.

Particular attention was given to making the conference schedule align with already-scheduled campus events, such as the annual student art exhibition, and an annual graphic design student portfolio review. Components were scheduled in such a way that participants might easily choose to be present for only the one full-day sequence of events, which took place on Saturday.

We used this method of sponsoring conferences on three occasions, over the span of three or four years. The approach worked reasonably well each time. Comparable information about the two other conferences will be posted here in the near future. Again, the full multi-page pdf can be downloaded here.

novelist Ruth Suckow / a celebration of her life

Suckow exhibition banner (2023)

On Saturday (two days from now), there is a gathering of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association. Suckow (pronounced Soo-Co), who lived from 1892-1960, was a once highly-acclaimed novelist and short story writer from Iowa, whose work was resoundingly praised by the famous literary critic H.L. Mencken. Much more information about her can be found on an online Wikipedia biography site, including a list of her books, and a link to the Suckow Memorial Association, which was founded in 1966.

The association's annual gathering will take place this weekend at the Hearst Center for the Arts at 304 West Seerley Boulevard (a few blocks east of the University of Northern Iowa campus) in Cedar Falls IA on August 26. Beginning at 1:00 pm that day, there is a one-hour session that is free and open to the public. One of her novels, titled Country People, will be the primary focus of that afternoon session, in which a discussion will follow a series of short presentations by four association members, Bill Douglas, Jim O'Loughlin, Julie Husband, and Cherie Dargan.

I have a particular interest in this event because earlier this year I was asked by Barbara Lounsberry, the association's president, to design a six-panel exhibition about Ruth Suckow's life, along with a banner for posting (as shown above) as it travels to libraries throughout the state. The panels and banner, which were made possible by a grant from Humanities Iowa, will premiere this weekend at the RSMA gathering. 

I have an additional interest because one of the communities where Ruth Suckow lived was the city of Manchester IA, at a time when my maternal ancestors, the family of John J. Pentony, also lived there. Suckow attended high school with my grandmother and several great aunts.

Walter Hamady // book artist and paper maker

Above (and below) Title frame and other single frames from a new 20-minute video talk about Walter Hamady (1940-2019), prominent book artist, paper-maker, and collagist, who was well-known as a teacher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 

Having earlier taught in Milwaukee for ten years, I had become aware of his work in the 1970s. Because of his liking for Ballast Quarterly Review (which I had founded in 1985), he and I began to exchange spirited letters (along with a mix of enclosures), once or twice or more a month. 

This led to collaborations of one kind or another, eventually resulting in exhibitions, published essays, and an archive of his artist’s books. I saved everything, even all the envelopes and mailing containers, in part because they were always addressed to mutilations of my name, such as Corps du Roy, Rhoidamoto, Trompe L’Roi at Labbast, Royatolla, and so on. This continued for more than a decade, perhaps to the mailman’s amusement.

Looking back on what I have, I have now produced a video talk (a brief memoir-like tribute) titled BOOK ART: Walter Hamady’s Books, Collages and Assemblages, which can be accessed free online on my YouTube channel.

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.