Local Design

Local Design

I visited Brighton the other day which is renowned for being the gay capital of England and everywhere you looked there were rainbow flags- popularised as a symbol of gay pride and diversity. However, I also noticed something that I haven’t noticed in a lot of other places- an element of local design.

When I was walking around, the ‘to let’ or ‘for sale’ signs outside houses and flats were embracing the rainbow flag. Granted, the normal estate agent signs aren’t exactly the most eye-catching pieces of design- you wouldn’t normally look at them and take any kind of notice as to the design of them but I thought it was really good to see a support of the local community through the display of designs in the surrounding area.

Action Art

Action Art

Should we be so precise and regimented in our way of working?

“Action art n. A style of abstract painting that uses techniques such as the dribbling or splashing of paint to achieve a spontaneous effect.”

Art critic, Harold Rosenberg coined the term ‘Action Art’ by shifting the emphasis from the object presented in the painting to the struggle to complete the painting itself.

Rosenberg in effect redefined the ‘meaning’ of art by saying that it was ‘an act rather than an object, a process rather than a product’. A brave statement. But as designers we are definitely interested in the PROCESS of creating pieces, so is the meaning the most important thing?

Action artists are so fresh and exciting- creating pieces of art through mistakes and chance. You can be so free and excitable when creating a piece of Action Art, so can we not take this way of thinking through to other areas of art and design? Can great designs come about due to accidents? I think it can. The only problem is that I think that we feel too constrained nowadays. This probably has something to do with the fact that we are being marked for what we produce at the moment and there will always be a reason for us to restrain ourselves from being THAT free with our work, but it doesn’t mean to say that we can’t take risks.

One thing I admire most about Action Art is the originality and novelty that it brings to art. The fact that you can use anything in order to create your work and through being able to use absolutely anything, it is almost impossible to predict what exact marks will be made on the canvas. For example, Yves Klein who used naked women covered in paint and being dragged around the canvas as his source of mark making. This is an exceptionally innovative way of making marks on a page and is a certain way to grab media attention.

Damien Hirst created ‘Spin paintings’ by placing his canvas on a spinning table and the paint being layered on whilst the table is spinning. I find it incredible how an artist can create such paintings by not even physically touching the canvas itself.

Jackson Pollock is probably the most famous artist to grace Action Art with his lively canvases being splashed with colour. He would literally take buckets of paint and throw them at the canvas yet so many of his paintings look like beautiful pieces of ‘organised mess’!

I just think that mistakes aren’t always bad and maybe we should sometimes allow ourselves to go a little bit crazy and take a few risks in our designs!

Boyle Family

‘Art should not exclude anything as a potential subject’
- The Boyle Family

The Boyle Family are a family of collaborative artists based in London- Mark Boyle & Joan Hills who met in Harrogate and their children Sebastian & Georgia Over the years they have worked with many artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers & dancers including Jimi Hendrix & the psychedelic jazz-rock pioneers Soft Machine. The family experimented with such a variety of media and more importantly had fun in doing so. This included performances and events, films and projections, sound recordings, photography, electron-microphotography, drawing, assemblage, painting, sculpture and installation.

Whilst researching them over the years I have come to love their outlook on art and design, ‘art that does not exclude anything as a potential subject’. Growing up with an interest in art I discovered a weird fascination…road markings. I don’t know what sparked this but especially in recent years I have just found them so raw and interesting. They vary so much and now with a knowledge of programmes such as Photoshop- you can manipulate images of them to create really interesting outcomes. Anyway! My art teacher recommended I research into other artists with an interest in this area and that’s when I discovered the Boyle family. Over the years they have concentrated on so many subjects, some of them being: earth, air, fire and water; animals, vegetables and minerals; insects, reptiles and water creatures; human beings and societies.

Their best known work, however, continues to be their Journey to the Surface of the Earth which they begun in 1964 and is an ongoing set of strange and interesting work. This work includes different projects from around the world including; the London Series, Tidal Series, Thaw Series, Japan Series and their lifelong project, the World Series.

'London Series' and 'Cobbles Study'

'Concrete Pavement study' and 'New York Study'

'Street Study outside School' and 'Tidal Series'

What is even more interesting is how they choose what to include in each of the series. Each section of work consists of a square of ground which is cast on the spot of a particular location. The way they decide upon a spot is great. They would display a map of the world on a wall and visitors would then be blindfolded and be asked to throw a dart at the map. Wherever the dart landed is where they would undertake their next piece of artwork. I think it’s such a refreshing approach. Sometimes, we are given a project to do and have no idea of where to start- this idea certainly solves that problem.’They attempt to present a slice of reality as they found it at the moment of selection’.Of the course the world is always changing so their work will never be a permanent and accurate representation of the world in which we live…but it was true at the time.

I personally find their work refreshing and interesting as I have a strange love for ‘natural’ art, but the way in which they work and their philosophy on art and design is so different and unusual it just makes them all the more interesting!


http://www.boylefamily.co.uk/