Art

Art

LOOK. AT. THIS.

I didn't really know much about Bea Feitler until I read this great article by Madeleine Morley in the latest issue of Riposte. I mean, I knew her work because we've all seen it or seen its influence in magazines, book covers, album artwork but I didn't grasp just how brilliant she was.

bea feitler

Bea was a graphic designer and art director best known for her work in Harper's Bazaar, Ms., Rolling Stone and the premiere issue of the modern Vanity Fair.

bea feitler
bea feitler

'Throughout her life Feitler thought about rhythm; about the flow of pages, about the beat, layers and corners of a city. Whether she designed for Harper’s BazaarMs.Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair she’d mix up the things she saw in whirring, non-stop New York—high art and fashion, pop and ballet, politics and print—symbolising how things were mixed up and connected already. The freedom she was given at these publications allowed Feitler to renegotiate commercial representations, using magazines as a mass vehicle to address social change.

Feitler often used classic lines to break up pages—the kind of lines she’d find underscoring the title pages of antique books. She used them to interrupt text, to geometrically puncture vibrant organic shapes, to impose rhythm, but mostly she used lines to emphasise. To make space. To make meaning. With lines she said: This is important. Look. At. This.'

bea feitler

'Feitler believed totally in graphic design, how the flow of images and visual energy give vital shape and form to information. She wanted modern culture to look like it was already classic—of the moment, but also apart from it. She saw designers not as invisible, functional guides, but as a singular blend of authors and artists. Documenting and decorating, explaining and exploring, creating the stage upon which everything performed. A dancing figure, a pop-art shoe, a political message, a woman kissing herself in the mirror; all reinforced by Feitler with a definitive line, a persuasive elegance and, ultimately, a love of life.'

bea feitler

Art

Paper Airplanes

Harry Everett Smith, an artist, collected paper airplanes he found in the streets and buildings of New York. A selection of Smith’s planes feature in a new collection by J & L Books and the Anthology Film Archives. 

Ever since I read the article in The New Yorker, I can't stop thinking about those paper planes and all the hands that made them. All the stories folded into the creases. Some made fast, some made slow. Crafted by tiny hands eager to watch their planes sink or soar. How those hands knew how to make the sharp folds to create the best wings. Running thumb and forefinger together along the creases to make them stay. They are all so beautiful. Made out of envelopes, receipts, letters, newspapers, library cards, junk mail and magazines. I imagine them cast from the top of staircases and angled out of windows. The fortunate ones, the ones that missed gaps in the grates and dark puddles of the sidewalks,  were gathered by Harry Everett Smith, marked with the date and location of where they were found, flattened and kept in boxes. Imagine those boxes stuffed full of hundreds of paper airplanes, all imprinted with time and the hands that made them. 

He would run out in front of the cabs to get them, you know, before they got run over. I remember one time we saw one in the air and he was just running everywhere trying to figure out where it was going to be. He was just, like, out of his mind, completely. He couldn’t believe that he’d seen one. Someone, I guess, shot it from an upstairs building.
— The New Yorker

I'm glad Harry Everett Smith found the planes beautiful and important enough to save. And I'm glad I get to think about the "someone" who shot it. 

Art

Trudy Benson - 'rainbows, grids, circles...'

This young Pratt-educated painter is moving toward a maximalist abstraction. The effect is a bit like a 1980s geometry textbook spazzing out and exploding on the wall. Benson works within a deliciously caffeinated language of gestures and shapes - the smear, the dripping line, rainbows, grids, circles - to create compositions that pair smooth, glossy sections with paint applied so thickly it resembles Play-Doh.
— Scott Indrisek, Modern Painters

I love her. 

Art

otherworldliness

My love of collage began back in 1998 in Leeds University bookshop while I was leaning against the shelves, waiting for someone to sort their life out. On those bookshelves I found Grete Stern's photomontages and I fell in love with the super-weird, women-focused worlds. Their weirdness, and their focus on women, was explained by the fact that were based on real women's dreams. 

In 1948 Stern was offered the unusual assignment of providing photos for a column on the interpretation of dreams in the popular weekly women’s magazine Idilio. The column, entitled “Psychoanalysis Will Help You,” was a response to dreams sent in by readers, mostly working-class women. It was written under the pseudonym Richard Rest by renowned sociologist Gino Germani, who later became a professor at Harvard University. The result was a series of about one hundred and fifty photomontages produced between 1948 and 1951 that show Stern’s avant-garde spirit. In these photomontages she portrays women’s oppression and submission in Argentine society with sarcastic and surreal images. The photomontage was an ideal way for Stern to express her ideas about the dominant values.
— Jewish Women's Archive

A lot of time passed and I eventually forgot about Grete and her beautiful dreamworlds but then I read about Beth Hoeckel in Booooooom and I was back in the game. Hoeckel conjures up her own magical worlds that take me back to recurring childhood dreams and memories I have never been able to shake. I fell in love. 

I've not thought too deeply about why I love collage so much and I'm sure overthinking will kill that love. I suppose it's the combination of reality and the unreal - it's the otherworldliness. 

Now my walls are packed with Beth Hoeckel, Eugenia Loli, Morgan Hislop and Sammy Slabbinck prints and their otherworldly weirdness fills me with joy.

Grete Stern

Grete Stern

Beth Hoeckel

Beth Hoeckel

Beth Hoeckel

Beth Hoeckel

Eugenia Loli

Eugenia Loli

Morgan Hislop

Morgan Hislop

Sammy Slabbinck 

Sammy Slabbinck