These are examples of testing the backgrounds out by putting them in some sort of context albeit they are not in response to any particular piece of music. Im not too sure as to how successful they have been however i do feel they emulate a certain 'Donwood' vibe.
Here are some photoshop tests that i have made kind of a last dash response to the fact that i needed something to show for tomorrows crit. They are kind of off the back of my recent interest in the work of Stanley Donwood and the way in which he constructs his images particularly where texture is concerned and colour as well.
The way in which i have made these images is through taking a watercolour texture which i have scanned in and then just extensively put it through digital editing. Playing around with hues and saturation, overlay, levels, brightness, opacity - all skills and techniques which i constantly use whenever i construct something on photoshop. So with that in mind i felt that i should put all these skills to the test and see what i could come up with.
The majority of what was said in the most recent COP lecture was certainly things that have been said before however it was also a good example of a wake up call (hence why it is all in capitals) as i have not been focusing enough time on my COP as i am struggling juggling the practical within the other modules so its times now that i need to get into gear completely. Resolving Your Project - GET ALL RESEARCH AND IDEAS ONTO YOUR BLOG! - DOCUMENT EVERYTHING - SHOULD HAVE A TITLE BY NOW - TITLE & SUBTITLE PERSONAL NOTE - I NEED TO SCHEDULE MORE AND FORCE MYSELF TO BE MORE DISCIPLINED!!! - BLOG REGUARLALY AND MAKE BRIEF SUMMATIVE STATEMENTS - IT IS ADVISED TO HAVE ENOUGH RESEARCH BY 3 WEEKS TIME - WRITE SIMPLY - SHORT SIMPLE SENTENCES - GO BEYOND THE 'SURFACE APPROACH' AND CONSIDER 'DEEP APPROACH' IN TERMS OF RESEARCH AND WRITING - AVOID ABBREVIATIONS AND CONTRACTIONS - AVOID SLANG WORDS AND PHRASES - USE 1ST PERSON BUT ONLY FOR CHAPTER 4 WHERE YOU TALK ABOUT THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT
“Our medium varies from project to project—at the moment we have work that varies from collage, to painting, to typographic, to straight up design layout.” This approach helps keep things fresh, as they admit “I’d hate for us to be 10 years down the line and still churning out the same kind of stuff.” “When you’re not feeling inspired it’s a struggle to create. This is good, as it forces you to think through your slump as you have to get it done.” “We’re down with cutting, sticking, painting, drawing—like what kids do. We like the tactile quality; it has a personality.”
As well as Stanley Donwood, Roger Dean was another one in which i was advised to look at although it was actually me that randomly thought of Yes album covers in my tutorial and mentioned it and that was when Jamie sort of said 'ah yes roger dean'. So i had seen his work before in that sense but i don't really know the man behind it. He definitely creates the kind of work that is beyond my way of working. Ways such as he is a painter and he is incredible at being able to use his imagination to create fantasy like work, a genre in which i don't really show any interest. However it is the principle in the way he works that i am interested in and just like with Donwood i want to see how he talks about translating the music into the visual. Cover star : Roger Dean Interview - http://www.longlivevinyl.net/roger-dean-interview/
"I felt that if the band were making an effort to reinvent music, that there was an obligation to make the effort to have this product look like it came from the place where the music allegedly came from. You’re communicating beyond the word, an idea that’s come from somewhere else and what that somewhere else might be.”
"I wanted to achieve a visual integrity, so the logo, the visual and the text looked like it came from the same place but somewhere else."
"I like that otherness, and I try to achieve it. When you look at a lot of modern album covers, the art school obsession with the Helvetica kind of undermines it. So instead of looking at an artefact that comes from another place entirely, you are looking at an artefact that has been caught and tamed and made corporate."
"The thing I am concerned about is the very simple dogma of modern design, and how it undermines quality in a surprising way. And it applies to graphic design, architecture, everything: that unbelievable necessity to strip everything down to its simplest form. I think it’s against nature. It’s a kind of religious zealotry."
“It was a very, very brief period in history when the album cover art and the music came together to make something that was the perfect gift. And it was, a perfect gift.”
Unfortunately this timei didn't find much useful in the video department with Roger Dean however the kind of things he's said in online interviews i've been very pleased and impressed with. Since he's been around in the profession a long time he has seen a development of the medium from vinyl where the album covers were most important and prevalent to the age of the digital download where the image might not be seen as important and definitely loses the tactile hand held element to the image.
So for all those reasons he therefore has a large appreciation for the visual element that goes along side the music to truly speak and reflect what that said music represents.
Since i had been advised by Jamie in my tutorial notes to look into the artist Stanley Donwood and his practice i thought i would make a start with looking into other practitioners as a way of informing my own project.
My favourite way of doing research is by watching videos or films for example as i just seem to be that kind of learner so i have searched youtube for what it had on Stanley Donwood and i found a fairly good one called - with Donwood : the directors cut.
It didn't quite give out enough quotes or information that i would have liked however there were a couple of very useful bits that he said.
"The artwork evolves from listening to the music so by the time the musics finished and the artworks finished they've intwined together"
"You have to imagine what its gonna look like before you've started (with this sort of stuff, Graphic-y not expressive)" - he said this when he was producing is elaborate hand lettered screen prints.
"I try to distill a sense of what the music conveys into the texture of the artwork - (i try to see what the music looks like)"
"By being in the studio, or at least very close by, i can hear the evolution of the songs and then attempt to figure out what the visual equivalent would be"
"'Make the horribly beautiful' is a short hand way of how i think of a lot of the work that ive done in the past. 'trivialising nightmares since 1993' is what i put on my notebook which is probably quite accurate as well"
The following two quotes i found really interesting in terms of Stanleys personal connection to music.
Responding to whether he gives feedback musically
..."i'm pretty much tone deaf when it comes to that so i don't really know much about music"
- i thought that this was bizarre to read as i have thought this whole time that you need to be a music buff and listen to all sorts of stuff in order to be able to work in relation to the music. So this statement was odd but encouraging.
" I didn't like that sort of music when i first started working with them" ....another wtf quote!?
Overall i fully appreciate Stanley Donwoods practice and i have that affiliation because i equally admire Radiohead, the band with which his work is most infamously known as well as work for Thom Yorke's solo stuff. However i am left slightly underwhelmed with the fact that he hasn't quite given me enough to go on in terms of the topic i am aiming to explore but this is the first time i have researched about him so i may find out more yet.
'All art constantly aspires to the condition of music'
'Music has the ability to convey an aesthetic message in purely abstract terms, through the manipulation of tonality, without recourse to words or other representational symbols. In the visual arts over the last 200 years, one can see a gradual shift towards the elevation of colour, line and structure over purely pictorial elements, culminating in full abstraction. This is the aspiration of art towards the condition of music.'
Prior to this tutorial i was quite unsure on exactly where i was going with the written side and the project on a whole. As it stands i am still a long way off from having all my research together and even starting the written work but the tutorial was very helpful and beneficial and at least now i have a bit more of a sense of direction with it. So the notes i have got from the tutorial are as follows: - Focus down on one music genre - The Key theme is 'visual representation' - Use interviews - A good valid source/way of getting reference material - Visual clues and symbols - Avant Garde and abstract Theme - 'The Phenomenon of Sound & Philosophy of Music' 'The role of the album cover in the visual' - Theories of art & music - Examples of album covers and relation to music - Your own responses to music - Visual arts and relationship to music
'All constantly aspires to the condition of music'
- Looking into album covers - specific genre? - Miles Davis/Jazz?....
-Key word -' Translation '
' The role of the album cover in the visual translation of music' ?...
'You need to unpick the music and the artwork!!!'
What is the practical?
- An exploration/unpicking of ONE single album? - Perhaps...
Use Case Studies to help make sense of the question
Could do an analysis of 3 to begin with - then narrow it down
I will be sure to do some more expansive posts on these theorists but for now these are a few notes i have collected so far... Aura of an image - Walter Benjamin https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-art-aura-authenticity/ - with a couple of 'edits' ' Historically works of art had an 'aura' - An appearance of magical or supernatural force arising from their uniqueness (similar to mana) - (in Polynesian, Melanesian, and Maori belief) an impersonal supernatural power which can be transmitted or inherited. The aura includes a sensory experience of distance between the reader and the work of art' Wassily Kandinsky https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/jun/24/art.art - The Painter of sound & vision He believed... 'Shades resonated with each other to produce 'Visual chords' and had an influence on the soul'. Theorist - Walter Pater Walter Pater on the Place of 'music among arts' The Journal of aesthetics & art criticism - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7443931-all-art-constantly-aspires-towards-the-condition-of-music-for Walter Pater said: ' All art constantly aspires to the condition of music' - look into what he means by this!
Thats it for now. Like i said at the start i will hopefully be looking more in depth into these guys and their theories so there will be a lot more to go on than just this obviously. Just using them as starting points for now...
The following information is what i have put down in my COP notebook where i jot ideas and thoughts down. I felt it would be a useful exercise in then putting it onto the blog as another way of documenting my thoughts on my project. As it is only notes in the notebook it might not appear coherent and as well organised as it could be. A few of these notes have also come directly from Jamie my tutor so it is of course best to make use of that valuable advice.
Possible themes/questions
'Looking into the relationship between music and the visual element of album covers'
'The emotional resonance of shape, line, texture, colour - visual devices/formal elements - that have meaning'
'The exploration of 'Sound and Vision'
Further notes/questions
Unpicking structure, feeling, emotion of music to TRANSLATE it into visuals (translate is i feel a very key word in that respect).
How do we read formal elements? - in terms of - mood, atmosphere etc.
WHAT IS THE 'AURA' OF AN IMAGE? - related to Walter Benjamin
Introduction to COP 3 - Lecture 1/4 - Organising your research project I didn't take a great deal of notes from this lecture however just like how we are taught to be in our research i have been selective and have taken note of what i felt was most relevant for me to take a note of. 'What is there to study?' - Ontology 'How can we know about it?' - epistemology 'What do i want to know?' 'What do i need to know?'
'To gain knowledge your research needs a purpose '
'Purpose should be formulated into a research question'
'These both Purpose and research question will change'
With my presentation tomorrow and the fact that i've been able to do no work over the weekend and yesterday due to an unfortunate bout of what seemed to be freshers flu, i thought i could at least make a last ditched attempt at correlating some research together on a theme i might want to explore.
For now i'm going off the basic phrase of researching artwork/illustration that looks like music/sound. The main incentive for doing so is i want be able to make work that vibes and make sure it represents the music i may be listening to while i'm illustrating it.
So for now its a basic start but i believe these books hold enough relevance to indeed get me started...i hope
This post is documenting the thoughts and notes i have made in preparation to doing the presentation which will outline to my tutor and my peers what i intend to do with my project focusing on written and the where to possibly go with my practical. Approaches to exploring my theme - Album Covers - Posters Visual Devices Colour, Shape, Texture, Light, Tone I have looked into the idea of being able to see the music within the image and have realised that this links to the neurological condition of 'synesthesia' so this could perhaps be something to discuss for my presentation. Im not sure whether to take this idea forward yet as it could get complicated with the nature of the subject. So with that in mind i might do more in depth blog posts on the topic but only if the advice i get it if its a relevant subject to do further research into. Synesthsia - Its a condition in which ones sensory perceptions are involuntarily unified - meaning sight, colour and sound come together.
People who have this are known as synesthetes - A perceptual phenomenon - Neurological Seeing colours and patterns based off music is one of the most common varieties also called 'chromaesthesia' e.g Billy Joel, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Frank Ocean and Mary J Blige. Benefits to doing the project (practical sense) - Helps me understand more about the aesthetics of an image (music related). - Better understanding of what makes a good album cover. - Need to produce work that doesn't rely on just portraiture. - Because i want to simply produce work that looks like music/sound or at least carries a strong aesthetic to appearing as though it does. Genres that encapsulate this way of thinking in design terms are (in my opinion) - Psychedelia - Relevant designers - Wes Wilson, Victor Mascoso, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley - Jazz - Relevant example - Mati Klarwein (bitches brew, Miles Davis) - Rock - Punk - Metal A possible theme to discuss...
'How image can convey the tone and atmosphere of music'
Basic theme...
'What makes a good music based piece of design such as an album cover or a gig poster'
This is a very brief post with a link to a website/article about Synesthesia. I have made notes briefly elsewhere on another post about my findings as i have planned to include it into my presentation however the problem is that i am unsure on whether this is a good or even relevant topic/subject to be exploring. For now here is that website.
