For any disillusioned artist / designer trying to understand how you can avoid commercial ‘design fashions’ and enjoy genuine success from your individual way of working, Marian’s unique skills and her elegantly crisp designs should be inspirational. Attention to detail, clarity, refinement, honesty, harmony … its all there. And if you’re not sure its to your taste at first, then hang around her site a bit longer - I assure you by the time you leave, it will be.

Obviously her illustration and typography speaks volumes more than any brief blurb I can spew up but if you need a little more convincing to check out her work, here are a few quotes from her own writing:

INFLUENCES:

I am Influenced by most of the usual suspects such as 14th–18th century calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts, islamic art, art nouveau, the Arts & Crafts movement, typography, textiles from around the world, old lace, Baroque, Rococco or Gothic anything, psychedelia, grafitti, Victoriana, Money, engraving, Persian carpets … the list goes on.

WORK ETHIC:

I do not know if I am lazy or driven. A little of both. While I tend to work every day, from morning to night (I’m frequently working past midnight), my days are relatively stress free. In the summer I tend to take a lot of breaks and sit in the sun or go for a walk. I spend a lot of time thinking. Just staring into space and thinking. Does this count as work? Sometimes. When I wake up in the morning with the perfect solution to a given problem, have I been working while I was sleeping? Perhaps.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS:

I am impatient; I’m always about 6 steps ahead of myself, and I get frustrated that it takes me so long to reach where I feel I already am. But I have to remind myself I’ve made a huge amount of progress in the mere 3 years that I’ve been doing what I’m doing.

Feel free to leave your own impressions of her work, or maybe there are other similar artists / designers that you recommend I check out? Thanks. 

Since finding Upstart Blogger back when Robert Ellis was the custodian of its its content, I keep a casual eye on what is going on there with a view to giving it a more thorough read when I am finally ready to advance this blog.

The site still offers remarkably original (revolutionary I might even say?) designer themes that allow your average blogger to present his content in a much less average way - and they are all FREE! I was drawn in by the simplicity and minimalism of themes like Modicus and Minum before testing and settling on one of Mr. Ellis’ more recent offerings - Aperio.   Robert sold Upstart Blogger to Ashley Morgan in December 2007 but continues to develop new themes and content at futurosity.

Ashley of course continues to offer these great themes at Upstart Blogger along with a wealth of tips and courses for new bloggers and every once in a while posts a giveaway for anything from a domain name to iphones and MacBook Air laptops!  So shame on me for not mentioning that FREE MacBook Air again until this late in the article as that is of course the real truth behind the motivation for this post.  

To be in with a chance of winning the MacBook is really very simple.  Post an article that links to Ashley’s giveaway, and then leave a comment on his post so you can be included in the tombola of wishful thinkers.

Here is another direct link to Upstart Bloggers Macbook Air giveaway (in case you missed any of the others) Good luck! ;o)

STOP PRESS!!!  You can now enter for a chance to win one of the three remaining iphones by simply linking to Ashley’s latest post here.  Thats twice the odds of some good news on the 6th June! Oooh the anticipation is killing me. ;o)

The competition ends in 10 days so I felt I had to get something up there just to be in with a chance of enough people seeing it.  As a result its pretty short - but hopefully its still enough to appreciate the style and where the idea was going …   

[See post to watch Flash video]

If you are one of the few people that has come to this page as a result of already seeing the clip please take a look through the last four or five posts (they’re all linked from the home page) to see some of that ‘research’ I was talking about. I am just testing this as a potential blog setup so there are only these handful of posts so far but thanks for taking the time to drop by and please feel free to leave a quick comment before you go. ;o)

I will work with within after effects to sepearate all the individual photoshop layers and have them pass before a fixed camera point as they orbit around an unidentified (unattainable?) locus in the distance.  Within this essential concept I hope the film will fulfill the following agendas:

stream of consiousness expression:  a sort of emotive/cerebral chaos and catharsis that still has a sense of harmony in how it is held togethether / animated. Flowing in a sort of balanced complexity.

balancing dualities:  change + continuity | simplicity + complexity | chaos + order | open and closed space | …

conceptualisation of passing  time:  - unstoppable / continuous / perpetual / circular / obscured unity / permanent change / evolution

a distant, unidentified centre: ideas and activity orbiting something | symbolic | connected / anchored (to what? job / identity / family / routine / political agendas / morals / ideals / untangible / spirit / all of these…) 

multiple interpretations: some ambiguity in themes and motifs but stil with enough clarity for multiple interpretations (not to the point of drifting into pure abstraction)

animation specific:  a pitch that could only be made with animation (not a live action film that is being shoe horned into animation)

layers of appreciation/ complexity: - film should function in multiple levels i.e. on a purely aesthetic level, but also reward closer attentions to detail | curiosity | illustration, motifs, complementing album as a whole.

LINE BY LINE with NOTES: 

wakey wakey / rise and shine:  wake up | wipe fog from eyes | shaken out of mental sleep & ignorance | no more hiding behind excuses | face reality | ref to ‘pseudo proof of global warming as anti-capitalist conspiracy‘ on deadairspace (Thu 22nd Feb)

it’s on again off again on again: confusion over issues | in particular climate change | to-ing and fro-ing of evidence and reporting | ref to turnuptheheat.org George Monbiot’s “we’re all going to die/oh no we aren’t/oh yes we are” internet compendium. 

watch me fall / like dominoes / in pretty patterns:  knock on effect | crumbling | states / institutions | immensity of relationship & interconnectivity of modern constructs (internet / digital age) | power of single voice | increasing power of effect | applies to both failure and success | pretty patterns: detached, uncontrollable 

[See post to watch Flash video]

fingers in the blackbird pie:  ref  English nursery rhyme (always more sinister than they seem!) | wealth and money | amusements of the rich adversely affecting the poor (poor have their eyes pecked out) | perhaps reference Faust ( foundation of the empire is moved through Mephisto’s cunning from the solidity of metallic gold to insubstantial promises on paper to support extravagant spending) | also connection to coded messages -nursery rhyme originated as  pirate code (c.f. worm buffet code?)

I’m tingling tingling tingling: on edge | heightened awareness or numbness | nervous system | adrenaline from both fear or excitement | anticipation … | Radiation therapy?

its what you feel not what you ought to what you ought to / reasonable and sensible: ref Thom’s take on creative process and writing | getting in touch | freeing self from purely cerebral/cognitive action | power | conformity and conventions | laws / big brother / double think | responsibility (perhaps ref issues with activism - Bono, Dylan) | maturity | expectations

dead from the neck up / because I’m stuffed stuffed stuffed: body and mind duality | ref Breakfast of Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut) and how the rich and powerful that could change the world won’t change the world because they don’t know the hunger of the poor….When  well fed (stuffed, stuffed, stuffed) you get numb | information overload / too much to think about | spills over | excess |  [ ref:  ”They knew they were being lied to, but if lies were consistent enough they defined themselves as a credible alternative to the truth. Emotion ruled almost everything, and lies were driven by emotions that were familiar and supportive, while the truth came with hard edges that cut and bruised. They prefered lies and mood music…” JG Ballard ]

squeeze the tubes and empty bottles / take a bow take a bow: ref recycling and consumerism | not a fad  | self congraulatory (not something that once you have done your little bit you can pat yourself on the back and move on) | cynical | irony | and yet …

elephant that’s in the room is: ref English idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed | environment / religion / poverty /war / tibet etc | embarrassment or taboo | possibly also addiction / failure | ignoring self-knowledge

duplicate and triplicate and plastic bags:  again environment recycling | beaurocracy | statistics - documentation | issues re-emerging | reproduction | homogeneity? …

Ok obviously I will need to keep developing this but thats a start

SOME OTHER THEMES TO KEEP IN MIND:

Faustian Pact (Goethe) - retold a Renaissance legend about a doctor who bargains with the devil for youth power & knowledge. The second part, published posthumously, was a philosophical treatise in which Faust’s soul is saved because he loves and serves both God and humanity, despite his errors. This Faust is considered to embody the “modern” human (Similarly, the adjective “faustian” has come to denote acts or constellations involving human hubris (exaggerated self pride or self-confidence [overbearing pride]) which lead eventually to doom.  More recently, the term ‘Faustian’ has once again become a byword for reckless expansionism, private immorality, and the indiscriminate pursuit of scientific experimentation regardless of all consequences.)

Selling Out (Benjamin Franklin) ‘faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither. (People who sell their souls for the promise of a secure job and a secure salary are spat out as soon as they become dispensable.’ ) 

Arp? - arpeggio? sequence? separations? / Jean Arp dadaist artist? / Hans Arp, expressionist and surrealist poet?

Humanity? - ideals/myths as symbols and their effect on our humanity - escapism / reality / transcendence

SOME OTHER GENERAL LYRICS FROM AROUND THE ALBUM TO KEEP IN MIND:

“Now that you’ve found it, it’s gone/ Now that you feel it, you don’t”

“I’m the next act/ Waiting in the wings”

“Whatever happens now/ you shouldn’t be afraid because I know today has been the most perfect day I’ve ever seen”

“You’ll go to hell for our fathers. (you’ve got a head full of feathers)”

“Because we separate”

ON WRITING & INTERPRETATION

… I work with what I have, I make do with what is at hand. For now, I have more than enough of the copy/paste. But also of the ’stream of consciousness’, of the fact of setting down my thoughts on pages and pages. This time, the first draft imposed itself most of the time. It’s doubtlessly the first time that I leave it so much to my instinct. Usually, the songs take time to come out, I think a lot about their meaning. Here, I tried to avoid this process and I tried to spit everything out, to make everything spurt at one stroke. What I feared with making interviews, was having to explain all these things that I actually wrote in a very spontaneous way.

… Ed always banged on about how this record was very sensual. The mind boggles slightly, but I think there was a lot of that. It was as much about the way it flowed and whatever, not specific things. But it is kind of… it’s not supposed to be in any way cerebral.

… of all the lyrics I’ve ever written, I hope that the ones on this record will deliver the widest range of interpretations.

… the more you absorb yourself in the present tense, the more likely that what you write will be good……But that’s scary. I mean, ‘Faust Arp’ is the exact opposite of that, pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages until eventually, the good ones stick.

… I vaguely know the story of Faust. But that would involve me having remembered it in some detail or picked it off the shelf. Which I didn’t. But yes, hmm, Goethe’s Faust. I’m going to have to look that one up, actually, ’cause that sounds suitably pretentious. We live in Oxford, after all.  [ al little tongue in cheek methinks?]

ON EGO & POLITICS

 … Well, I think it’s human nature to want to get lost in it and believe that you’re wonderful. But I went the other way too fast and assumed that absolutely all of it - and we’re talking about the OK Computer era - was all bullshit, including me. I’d regularly stop midway through a song and think, I don’t mean a fucking word of this, I’m off. Which, I guess, is the polar opposite of someone like Marc Bolan. But it’s a product of the same thing. You’re always trying to deal with the fact that you’re a small crumbly piece of stuff when you write these songs, and maybe that’s why the songs are good. So you’re always taking one poison or another. Perhaps that’s what makes carrying on so hard. You make a record, you wake up and start writing something new, and everything crumbles again.

Using one’s influence as an artist to shed light on the atrocities of modern life isn’t really in the job description, but its evidently always tempting; the real dichotomy seems in his wanting to be in wanting to wake the world up to its complacency by screaming from the rooftops while simultaneously wanting to be nothing more than a good singer in a great rock ’n’ roll band:

… I wouldn’t want to take on that kind of responsibility, but I think I can’t help finding myself—given the particular weapon I have at my disposal—wanting to use it occasionally in certain circumstances. But I think it’s best used inside the music; that’s where you can have the best effect. Some people are able to do it—Neil Young, Bob Marley; Bob Dylan’s done it endlessly. Lots of rap does it; Public Enemy does it endlessly, so it’s possible to do and do well. But I always have to be aware when it comes to writing and when it comes to music, you don’t just come and say, ‘I want to put this in the song.’ It naturally evolves, and it’s naturally a part of what’s going on. … Anger is an energy source for me, especially lyrically when I’m presented with something I consider utter madness. … My writing is a constant response to doublethink.

I think I’m more acutely aware now than I was that the vast majority of human life on this earth is concerned with looking after their babies and making sure there’s enough food to eat. … For me there’s a different sort of ‘compassion’ there—for want of a better word—and I’m much more interested in trying to not be part of the fetish of general politics and the personality cults of this or that figure in public life because, to me, that’s all part of the game of irrelevance, which is, in a way, the fog held up for people to just ignore what’s going on in their life.

IN SUMMARY(?)

In much of this it seems that the value of the album is not intended to be a message per se but the way of expression. The value of a finer art is not teaching the audience something, not even awaking thoughts on the cognitive level, but awaking feelings by how it shows something - operating on another more subtle level somehow.  As one commentator puts it:  ”One of the best paintings ever was painted about a bunch of sunflowers. Are the sunflowers that interesting? Not, particularly. What is interesting is the way they were expressed.” This is not to be confused with simply appreciating technique but is more the careful distillation of all conscious and unconscious ideas into a form of expression that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

This all adds up to a large part of what makes this album so appealing.  It is woven with the same ideas, philosophies and human currency that has always pervaded Thom’s writing (and Radioheads music) but it is offered in a less absolute and less angst ridden style that somehow transcends the more literal themes.

… I started focusing on the words In Rainbows. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to go with the idea of trying to reach something you can’t. It’s there but you can’t reach it.

To the best of my knowledge the album took its In Rainbows title from a lyric on Reckoner (probably the best track on the album which dovetails in man ways with Faust Arp).  Rainbows are illusory. The album deals a lot with dreams and hopes / expectations.  Things going from being very vivid to little more than figments of imagination.  There is something of the desire to get somewhere you are not.  Many of the lyrics resist a definitive interpretation and conclusion there yet there is some degree of demand for judgement, acknowledgement.  More specifically for this project I make a connection with a line from the opening of Book II from Goethe’s Faust:

Life is not light but the refracted color.

This can be read many ways but one interpretation seems to suggest that life and human nature is not pure and focussed but mixed and inconclusive, like rainbows. This idea is reflected more in Thom’s discussion of how he was trying to approach the album as a whole:

… wrote this album from a very harmonious thought. I didn’t want to fight anything, but at the same time I didn’t want to be apathetic. That kind of mood. The others caught up on it as well–that it was a personal record, or at least a human one. It felt good not to attack in any way for once. I didn’t want to judge everything, just sing like how I am, like what I’m feeling. Cause I felt like they were sort of, they were universal, there wasn’t a political agenda, it was being human, you know, there’s a lot of humanity in them.

I think I leave this here and look in the next post at these ideas of interpretation and meaning.  I have added another image here retrospectively.  Its development might make more sense after the following posts. ;o)

[See post to watch Flash video]

So far I have given the style little thought but my first draft at some concept artwork produced the image below.  I think it is important that as the video is meant to be animation it is produced in a way that could only be made with animation. Obviously this is still a huge field of potential but the point is more that I dont want to fall into the trap of pulling together an idea / plot line that would in fact work better if it was filmed live action.  In the next post I’ll try and gather some thoughts about the album as a whole and what I want to hold onto and connect with from that perspective.

The rules are simple; select one of the 10 tracks on Radiohead’s latest album (‘inrainbows’) and create an animated music video for it.  

I guess I have no excuses for not having a shot so I will spend the next couple of days/posts pulling together some thoughts to craft a music video out of and will risk the shame (and fame?) of posting an entry some time next week.  Apart from that it’ll at least give me something to test my new blogging (God I hate that word) setup.