‘To what extent does aesthetic ‘style’ reflect the context, audience and/or function of contemporary illustration?’
More specifically, I want to investigate how people respond to different styles of illustration and design (eg. formal/informal, clean and digital vs. handmade/painterly/naive lines) and how different styles are appropriate for different purposes.
(I’ll think of a good title later on)
Context: PURPOSE (what is Illustration used for?)
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Advertising Communication To explain an idea or concept Instructions eg. ikea manuals, recipes, those things you get with Lego packs Decoration Education Safety information Editorial ie. to accompany an article or text Political opinion Journalism Satire Humour Books (covers and inside) To tell a story: books, comic strips Storyboards Character design and concept art Infographics
etc.
Context: AUDIENCE (who is it for?)
• • • • • • • • •
Children Adults Researchers? Teachers/educators Websites (and their viewers) Newspapers/magazines (readers) Fine art prints Branding/corporate identity Fashion
etc etc etc
pretty obvious this stuff
The Digital Age High definition images and videos Social media Online articles using gifs and illustrations to draw attention on an oversaturated news feed ‘Fake news’ Meme culture Fake/photoshopped/out-of-context photographs being shared online something ironic about the fact that Illustration can be seen as more trustworthy? Similar - the effect of photography on Fine Art (ie. it no longer had to be realistic), or the invention of the printing press (Art for everyday people, rather than exclusively for the very wealthy or for the church etc)
Olivier Kugler
The Digital Age
Reaction against digital art? Rise in popularity for screen prints, same as film photography, polaroids etc Do people want something that seems handmade, organic, one-off, connects with the individual who made it? AUTHORSHIP - Postmodernism (we’ll come back to this in a sec) Roland Barthes even though he’s difficult to read (Authorship and meme culture, i.e. nobody knows who exactly put that specific text over that picture and does it even matter if it’s been shared 50,000 times? - sharing posts by people you don’t even know/follow) Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Phil Hawks - The Relevance of Drawing in a Digital Age
Aesthetics Is it art? Postmodernism challenges the idea that ‘beauty’ is central to art and aesthetics & refuses to recognise the idea that some art may be higher/ superior to others, eg. film vs an oil painting (see Walter Benjamin, Adorno etc) This contrasts with theories by Kant, Jean Francois Lyotard, about beauty and the sublime - ie. ‘kitsch’ realism vs. sublime painting. The latter is pleasing because we can’t make out all of it: ‘please by causing pain’ (maybe a bit dramatic) Echoed by Freud and ideas about the Uncanny - people are scared by intellectual uncertainty (and comforted by the opposite) The idea that what isn’t there is as important as what is - relevant to contemporary graphic design: negative space, minimalism, gives an impression of mystery, superiority, distance from the author
Aesthetics
Beauty and mathematics: Symmetry, simplicity etc ‘Beauty’ and ‘truth’ are synonymous (Stewart 2008, can be seen in linguistics) Basically, we like clarity because it is reassuring, and we dislike intellectual uncertainty (see Freud). It has been suggested that humans like symmetry as it can be a sign of nature/life/health (eg. the human body is pretty much symmetrical???) Another idea is the reverse: humans like these things just because they are familiar to us (AGAIN GOING BACK TO FREUD!)
Scott McCloud
Where a photograph represents one specific person, a more simplified face represents many people (eg. any male with short hair) A face made from a circle with two dots and a line represents any/every person, and resonates with the viewer as they recognise themselves in it.
Exercises in Style
Raymond Queneau tells the same story in 99 different ways. Matt Madden does the same experiment but with comic strips. Relevance: looking at how something can be communicated in different ways for different contexts and to appeal to different audiences. Links to changes in visual communication since the rise of the internet/social media. Also looking at how people respond differently to different aesthetic styles links to aesthetics theory and the stuff about millenials in the digital age.
Exercises in Style
Other artists have done similar(ish) visual experiments such as Hokusai and Monet - relevant because the work of both of these artists was affected by changes brought on by globalisation and the industrial revolution at the time, eg. the invention of Prussian blue pigment (among others) made paintings more vibrant and bright, mass production making prints available to ordinary people, and the invention of photography made realism in fine art paintings redundant (and a load of other stuff that was going on at the time)
Quentin Blake
An example of an artist that is very popular today for his handmade aesthetic is Quentin Blake. His style is very organic, with pen scratches/accidental blots of ink and the way the colour doesn’t always stay within the lines - ‘nothing to encumber movement’. ‘It is not necessarily part of the job to copy nature, or to convey anything but a selection of visual information’.
Scott McCloud’s theory and Quentin Blake’s characters
Social Comparison Theory ‘Social comparison theory states that we determine our own social and personal worth based on how we stack up against others. As a result, we are constantly making self and other evaluations across a variety of domains (for example, attractiveness, wealth, intelligence, and success).’ - Psychology Today ‘With social media, people are able to focus on key aspects of their lives, highlighting the positive and putting a curtain over anything and everything they want to hide. We're so busy continuously scrolling — curious about what we're missing out on and what everyone else is doing or looking like — that we neglect ourselves.’ - Elite Daily ‘The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-thescenes with everyone else's highlight reel.’ - Steve Furtick We’re constantly surrounded by photographs of other people, and we forget that these are edited moments and we don’t see the full picture of our lives. Scrolling through social media looks like everyone else is having fun, looks nice, has the perfect live etc. It can make us feel worse about our lives in comparison.
Millenials and Mental Health
Our generation is more likely to suffer from mental health problems. This is from a research article about students, however it says elsewhere in the article that a similar statistic applies to non-students of the same age group: ‘Evidence suggests that the mental health problems of students are more severe now than they have been in the past and that a greater number of students are seeking help. For example, in a national survey of directors of campus psychological counseling centers, 95 percent of directors reported a significant increase in severe psychological problems among their students. Likewise, the number of students who have ever been diagnosed with depression has increased from 10 to 15 percent since 2000 (Gallagher, 2008).’ Taken from Increased demand for mental health services on college campuses: Perspectives from administrators - Daphne C. Watkins, Justin B. Hunt, Daniel Eisenberg
It’s been suggested that comparing oneself to others on social media is a big contributor to mental health problems in our generation. Going back to Scott McCloud’s theory about faces and the idea of the Freudian ‘ego’… Quentin Blake’s drawings aren’t perfect - the colour bleeds out of the lines and there are ink splatters, the characters have exaggerated features and body language and the focus is more on capturing movement and atmosphere than an accurate representation of a person. This means we see ourselves in the characters. Oh by the way, we’re not perfect either - but the photos people choose to share on social media only show the highlights of their lives, so that they appear to be perfect. Perhaps there’s a need for more images in which the viewer can relate to as they recognise themselves, rather than comparing themselves to photographs of other people.
In other words‌ looking at simple drawings that we can relate to/identify with (as opposed to photographs) is good for our mental health! (Possibly maybe)
Brian Rea
Miranda Tacchia
Ruby Etc.
Laura Callaghan
Brian Rea (again)
COP3 Practical An extension of what I was drawing over summer: Images people can relate to Develop characters that people can identify with High energy, focus on body language, emotion, mood, narrative Humour/dark humour Themes: body image, mental health, success/failure, ‘downtime’, social media, romance/loneliness etc
(I especially like drawing things that make people feel uncomfortable as it reminds them of the worst side of themselves but it’s also a bit funny)