Here is your next installment of artists who inspire me. Sorry for the lapse / vast expanse of time between posts, I’m fighting in the muddy trenches of finals..I think I’m going to need a snorkel soon.

My first acquaintance with Mr. Wayne Thiebaud’s work was on the wall of the art room at West Sound Academy, when it was still in the strip mall across from the Texaco, in sleepy Suquamish, WA (which apparently means “place of clear salt water” in the Southern Lushootseed language). One of his ice cream cones was on the cover of an ancient New Yorker, and my highschool art teacher, Leigh Metteer, used it to show me how many different colors could be present in shadows.

I have since given up painting, thank god, but Thiebaud’s colorful desserts have stuck with me (and my hips… Anybody? Anybody?). He is another artist I used for the Identity Systems project I am avoiding at this very moment. Yay for blog-related procrastination!

Born in Mesa, Arizona in 1920, Wayne Thiebaud started his career as a commercial artist. From 1938 to 1949, he worked as a sign painter, an illustrator, a cartoonist, a publicity manager and as an artist for Hollywood film studios. Thiebaud joined the Air Force in 1942, and spent two years there painting murals for the army. It is not difficult to detect the influence that this commercial experience had on his later paintings attributed to Pop Art; Thiebaud’s characteristic work displays consumer objects such as pies and cakes as they are seen in drug store windows. Executed during the fifties and sixties, these works slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists, suggesting that Thiebaud may have had a great influence on the movement. Thiebaud uses heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included. Objects are simplified into basic units but appear varied using seemingly minimal means.

I’m working on rebranding an art museum in my Identity Systems class. To showcase our beautiful new logos, we are making posters etc., to complete the brand extension. Art museums mean exhibition posters, and I’ve been scanning the work of some artists I like. I thought I would share some of my non-design inspiration, starting with Richard Misrach.

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, California in 1949) is an American photographer known for his photographs of human intervention in landscapes. Misrach’s photography is sometimes referred to as cultural landscape photography as it shows human intervention in the landscape. His major work, Desert Cantos series began in 1979 and takes it name from the word for a section of a larger poem, canto. Each canto of his series is named for the area shown. The number of images in the final canto varies as does the time Misrach spends working on it. Each canto is numbered in sequence. The first 10 cantos are: The Terrain, The Event, The Flood, The Fires, The War, The Pit, Desert Seas, The Event II, Project W-47, The Test Site.

World’s Fastest Mobile Home, Bonneville Salt Flats, 1992

Chrysler Newport, Bonneville Salt Flats, 1992

Outdoor Dining, Bonneville Salt Flats, 1992

*this is not my desktop, it belongs to the library

This Identity Systems project has been eating my RAM

Clear and crisp Altadena mornings.

Sean Adams does more wonderful chalkboard drawings.

This week has been AWESOME, and next week is promising to be even MORE AWESOMER (yeah, I just used “more awesomer” in a sentence and meant it). I am on my second night (day?) of not sleeping—as in, I haven’t slept since Friday night. It’s pretty cool though. I mean, there are a lot of advantages to never sleeping—like not having to worry about pajamas.. and um… yeah… the pajamas thing for sure.

I have class tomorrow from 8:00am-1:00, 2:00-7:00, and 7:00-10:00pm (13-hours-but-who’s-counting), and I’m having a lot of trouble accepting that it’s Sunday night (ok, Monday morning). Somehow in the course of the day I have to magically make it into the model shop to vacuform completely new packaging (which is an incredibly long and devastating story, but I am choosing to take the high road and not complain to the internet-at-large), start and finish roughly three weeks of Identity Systems homework—which has been on hold while I tried to get my packaging finished for midterms—and do something-or-other for Ocean Science. Oh, and did I mention scholarship review is on Wednesday?

I’ve decided to offer up my workload as a condolence for anyone feeling overwhelmed about their own work. I have come to the very unsettling conclusion that it will be an absolute MIRACLE if I can pull this term off—and I don’t mean normal, Amelia-style pulling it off, I mean having somethinanything to turn in on week 14. I think I have been frustrated / exhausted to tears three times today, and the night is relatively and unfortunately young. It’s not even a question of getting to sleep anymore—it’s about praying to (a TBD) god that I can get enough done to have a chance in (a TBD) hell of getting to sleep tomorrow night. My theory is that it will be terribly difficult to fall asleep standing up—especially while TAing—but my body has been pulling some pretty impressive maneuvers lately. I haven’t been to bed earlier than 3:00am in weeks and weeks, and I can’t remember the last time I got more than four hours of sleep… That’s on the nights I actually GOT to sleep, of course.

Dwayne the bathtub, I’m DWOWWWNING!

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Edit: I just spent 25 minutes trying to figure out why my selection tool in Illustrator wasn’t working… View > show bounding box. How embarrassing. When my Adobe programs seem to have developed minds of their own, it’s probably time to sleep.

This is an educational screen capture, for someone who needed help with facing pages.

I found the program from Inspector Hound (higschool play) on an old flash drive and had a laugh.