Gallery Branding

The Raven

– Gina Lipere

Modern Art Documentary – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz0tJKRfaoA

The prices for modern art can be so high; it’s crazy to think about. Cezanne is one of the fathers of modern art along with Monet, and Van Gogh. Braque and Picasso became co-founders of one of the most influential art movements of all time Cubism. The Louvre was a home for art but it seemed the advent of modern art would put an end to its inspiration but it did not. For a few days even Picasso’s work was hung in the Louvre.  As cubism became more widespread its modeled method became more of a system which Chagall was one of the first to break.  In Munich, Germany during the 1972 Olympics the Germans put on a huge exposition of modern art with art displayed by every culture regardless of time or place.  European artists were surprised and thrilled to get support from Americans such as Alfred Stieglitz a renowned photographer. The MOMA in New York became the home of much modern art as is in the name Museum of Modern Art. In 1978 a handful of artists came up with a movement dubbed Dada. A movement about taking chance on not knowing where your art is going to end. Hans Richter tells a story of an artist as he was drawing and didn’t like it and tore it up and threw the pieces on the floor and looked down and the drawing was how he wanted it. Peggy Guggenheim took it upon herself to collect work from all of the non-realistic movements of art, doing her best to get the best example of each movement. She disagrees that pop art has anything to do with art though. The Guggenheim museum was built by Frank Wright. New York was also a center for abstract painting which leads to the birth of expressionism.  Jackson Pollack gave expressionism its most radical expression by dripping and throwing paint on a canvas creating paintings that didn’t look like nature but expressed nature’s inexhaustible vitality.

I thought it was great that Orson Welles narrated this video. Modern art is a great revolution in the history of art. The different kinds are so interesting even the ones that are difficult to interpret because that is what art is about if everything was straightforward it may not be as interesting. I really enjoy surrealism because of the crazy but calm feel of it; the artist I wish they had covered more was Salvador Dali. I also enjoyed Oldenburg’s sculptures as well, especially the plug.

Bauhaus – The Face of the Twentieth Century

Founded in Germany the Bauhaus School came about in a time of political problems. Walter Gropius was the creator of the Bauhaus, he dreamed of a school of art. After the war Gropius was asked to found an art school and his dream began to unfold. The school would be called Bauhaus or building house. He illustrated his Manifesto in a wood cut of a cathedral. This dream was not only his, the school became funded by public funds. Many of the teachers were upstanding artists and innovators of the time.  Gropius decided that everyone would be given the chance to enroll, everyone no matter what the looked or thought is capable of art.

The New Foundation course was also taught by Joseph Albers. He set up projects challenging the students to create space and designs out of paper using any tools they could find; they could fold it and cut it or anything else they wanted. They made folded papers that could carry vertical loads strong enough to hold a man. He forced people to think clearly, and trained the students not to think so much like artists but engineers.

In 1923 the Bauhaus finally went public. The government wanted to know what was happening with its money. They agreed to hold an exhibition. The most important part of the exhibition was a house constructed of pre-fabricated parts and furnished completely by the Bauhaus shops. It seems like they had an arts and crafts movement kind of mentality, the objective of the house was to create a house that could be bought by a skilled worker of the time.

In a city where the Bauhaus was not incredibly popular to begin with it was becoming more and more unpopular as Germany became hyper inflated. The Bauhaus was publicly declared closed. In 1925 the Bauhaus reopened in an industrial city north of its original location. The new building took little more than a year to construct due to advanced building techniques. It opened right near one of the worlds most advanced aircraft manufacturers; this seemed like a fit since many things designed in the Bauhaus were designed to be mass-produced.

The Bauhaus was destroyed by Nazi storm troopers. The Bauhaus would move to its final home in Berlin to a gloomy factory building. On April 11^th, 1933 German police arrived with trucks closed the building and took some students away. This would be the end of the Bauhaus school of art. Although the building and school were over, the teachers and students would bring their ideas throughout the free world.

Arts and Crafts Movement

A movement between 1860 and 1910 that was started as a sort of protest to the industrial revolution. In a time where everything was starting to be made by machines some people believed that took the soul out of the crafts man ship. Machines don’t create something with the same passion as a person does. Also machines can reproduce tens or hundreds of a product in the time it took a person to create just a few by hand. This movement started in Europe but eventually spread to the US. In the United States there was an issue though, the objective of the movement was to create things by hand in a cost-effective way that could appeal to the middle class citizen. It was soon realized that in the US this was very difficult and people who were creating items by hand soon began to inevitably be aided by machines. As an example in our own time of what the Arts and Crafts movement was about, I’ve created a Lamp out of Modeling Clay. To assist with the point of what happened in the US I’ve used a lightbulb, socket, and Plug that we’re machine-made in side of the clay which I hand modeled.

 

Hand Made Lamp

Side View of Clay Lamp

Illuminated

Artist Manifesto

Life should be filled with an an endless amount of pictures and art recorded in the digital realm. Taking a picture is more important than remembering a situation, even though a picture is only a single slice of a particular piece of time. When I see a something that I believe other people should see and can be affected by I immediately pull out a camera. I always have some form of camera on me either Phone, iPod Touch, or Digital SLR. There is not reason not to have a camera with you! I know if I see something I feel is worthy of my photographing that there is someone out there who will look at it and understand why. That’s important to me and is something I think about before taking a picture. If a particular picture doesn’t come out in an effective way It doesn’t get shared. Digital photography is great in that way because you get instant results. You know exactly what the picture looks like when you take it, if it needs to be edited or changed. Since the results are instant the can immediately be shared as well. The ability to take a slice of time and share it especially with the internet as a vehicle is priceless. The internet is an excellent way to share because there are so many people you are able to connect with through it. Also just as important is that the internet gives you the ability to view pictures others have taken.

Digital Design on the other hand while equally important, just like painting or drawing, computer art is an incredible expression. Advertising is a large section of computer art and for me an important one. Advertising is all about using my style and means of design to express a person or company through images, web design, and text. It’s important that it’s done in an artistic way that will appeal to the audience that it’s intended for. The world is all about advertising and it gives me great joy to reach people even if it’s not the work directly that they are thinking about, I’ve done my job to reach through my work to them.

Font History and Contemporary uses: Myriad Lithos Trajan Garamond

Font History

Myriad Pro is a sans-serif font designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly for Adobe Systems and released in 1992. Myriad Pro is famous for replacing Adobe Garamond as the corporate font for Apple, Inc.

Lithos is a glyphic sans-serif typeface designed by Carol Twombly in 1989 for Adobe Systems. Lithos is inspired by the, geometric letterforms of the engravings found in Ancient Greece.  The typeface consists of only capital letters, and comes in five weights, with no italics.

The Trajan design is a serif font with elegant, sweeping curves and due to its Roman typography inspiration is consequently an upper-case only font family. The Trajan typeface family was originally designed by Carol Twombly and released in 1989 by Adobe Systems Inc. in OpenType format.

Garamond is the name given to a group of old-style serif typefaces named after the punch-cutter Claude Garamond (c. 1480–1561). Most of the Garamond faces are more closely related to the work of a later punch-cutter, Jean Jannon. A direct relationship between Garamond’s letterforms and contemporary type can be found in the Roman versions of the typefaces Adobe Garamond, Granjon, Sabon, and Stempel Garamond.

Fonts create an important relationship between the author and the reader, by aesthetically changing the font the text can take on a different feeling.

Bitmap vs. Vector

Computers render images and text on-screen in one of two formats, as Bitmap images or in Vector Format.

Bitmap is the way most images are rendered because it allows for the most color detail in a fairly efficient way. The way images are displayed is that they are made up of pixels which stands for picture elements. These pixels extremely small colored dots that make up every part of the image. In a bitmap image the color data for every single pixel is stored in the bitmap file. Common bitmap file types include BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF, and TIFF. With these types of files the image is a set size defined as the resolution or the number of pixels high multiplied by the number of pixels wide and all of the information for each pixel is there. The problem with bitmap images is that as you make the image larger you stretch the pixels out, the computer will try to fill in the spaces appropriately but the image will eventually become what we call pixellated. pixellated is a term used to describe when an image is stretched out and there isn’t enough data in the image to keep the image clear and understandable.

Vector images on the other hand only store necessary information. This sounds like it would make them lower quality but they do it in a very interesting way. Vector images are made up of points connected by lines and between the lines colors can be filled in. Unlike the way that bitmaps store the exact location for every pixel, Vector images store mathematical equations for where the points are in relationship to each other. As you stretch a vector image rather than the pixels stretching out the computer just recalculates where the points are using the mathematical equations. This means that vector images are just as clear no matter how big you make them most of the time they are less detailed than their bitmap counterparts though and are generally not used for photographic or realistic images but more for logos and type faces.

 

Creating a Font

Creating a font starts with learning the basics of typography, Serifs, kerning, leading, height, and weight among other things.

• Serifs are a slight tail on the end(s) of a letter.
• Kerning means to adjust the space between letters in a piece of text.
• leading is adjusting the amount of space between lines of text.
• height is the vertical size of the letter.
• weight is the thickness of the letter in relation to its height.

Another important aspect of fonts that you should understand is the difference between different formats. Different formats will appeal differently to different audiences. When creating a font you should have both a vector version for printing and a bitmap version for onscreen programs that don’t support vector.

Postscript font includes both of these aspects in separate files and has been a popular format for graphic designers because they print very nicely.
TrueType fonts combine the two into a single file and are designed to properly display best on-screen.
Open type puts the two formats into a wrapper that works well in most situations.

There are many great pieces of software for helping create digital fonts. One way of doing it involves some calligraphic experience, a scanner, and the ability to obtain copies of Adobe Illustrator, and Fontographer. You can write out and design the font on paper scan it in and use Illustrators Live trace and layers features to turn the letters into vector images which can be used in a program like Fontographer. This gives you almost complete freedom over the way your letters look and makes it uniquely yours. There are other font programs that allow you to create the letters right in the program either with a tablet or using the computers mouse. These may be more difficult to use and don’t allow as much freedom over the way the letters look. One of such programs is an open source program although some what not user-friendly as well as not well documented is a program called Font Forge. The upside to Fontforge is that it is free.