currents

Helvetica

Documentarian Gary Huswit put together an amazing film about the Modernist font HELVETICA (2007). What is most interesting are the interviews with legends of graphic design, like Vignelli. Among the many topics are the exact 1957 origin and the degree that it is the universal font.

100 Interesting Things

One Hundred Interesting Things is a creativity exercise I designed to help beginning artists identify personal content in artmaking. I have attached a recent article describing how it works and how the lesson evolved. Also attached is a concise lesson description developed for the upcoming FATE conference in Milwaukee. Foundations-level professors share lessons in what has become a ritual lesson plan swap. (FATE is Foundations in Art: Theory and Education).

Download cnr.Creativity&Aes.Kent..pdf

Download FATE_Vol28-final.pdf

The Sublime Work of Binh Danh

This month's National Geographic features Vietnamese artist Binh Danh. His work is the most sublime nature-based art that I have seen in a long time. He uses leaves and a contact printing process to create ghostly images on the leaf surface. He arrived at this method by noticing the changes that leaves go through slowly dying on a textured objects. I have sketched his process below. For more views: http://www.hainesgallery.com/Main_Pages/Artist_Pages/BDAN.work.html