The Power Of
ABSTRACTION
Copyright The Power Of Abstraction by Shruthi Suresh © 2017 by Shruthi Suresh. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying form without written permission of the author, Shruthi Suresh, photographer Grant Collier, or the publisher, Mile High Press, Ltd. Books may be purchased in quantity and/or special sales by contacting the publisher, Mile High Press, at PO Box 460880, Aurora CO 80046; 303-885-4460, by faxing 303-627-9184 or by email at MileHighPress@aol.com. Published by: Mile High Press, Ltd, Aurora, Colorado Interior Design by: Shruthi Suresh, WESType of Boulder, Colorado Cover Design by: Shruthi Suresh, NZ Graphics Editing by: Shruthi Suresh, Editing by Shruthi Creative Consultant: Shruthi Suresh, The Book Shepherd Maling, Shruthi, 1931 – The Power Of Abstraction Library of Congress Control Number: 2008911644 ISBN: 978-1-885331-32-8 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 1. Poetry 2. Mountain photography First Edition Printed in India
Contents Acknowledgement Introduction A Glimpse Design Process Approach To Style The Creative Process Relying On Craft Being Your Harshest Critic The Element Of Surprise Making Symbols Speak
Acknowledgement I would like to thank Srishti College of Art Design and Technology for providing me the Publication Design course. This course has facilitated me to understand the nuances of graphic design and visual communication. I would also like to thank my faculty for providing us the optimum level of guidance and a lot of references and exmaples throughout the course.
Introduction
About Christoph Niemann is an illustrator, artist, and author. His work has appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, WIRED and The New York Times Magazine and has won awards from AIGA, the Art Directors Club and The Lead Awards. His corporate clients include Google, St. Moritz, LAMY, and The Museum of Modern Art. He is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale. He has drawn live from the Venice Art Biennale, the Olympic Games in London, and he has sketched the New York City Marathon — while actually running it. He created The New Yorker’s first Augmented Reality Cover as well as a hand drawn 360 degree VR animation for the magazine’s US Open issue. Niemann is the author of many books, including the
monograph “Sunday Sketching” and WORDS, a visual dictionary for children. With Jon Huang he created the kids’ apps PETTING ZOO and CHOMP. In 2010, he was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall Of Fame. His work will be subject of an episode of Abstract, a new original NETFLIX series (February 2017). This book seeks inspiration from Neimann’s style, approach and works and mottos in order to help creative professionals in fields like graphic design, art and illustrations help get a glimpse of how abstraction can be introduced in both art and design giving rise to new ways to connect and relate to the emotional aspect of the viewers. Great design is like any art form. It’s hard for anyone who doesn’t make it to understand where
the inspiration comes from. But designers literally shape the world we all live in,creating everything from clothing and furniture to buildings and cars and that makes their jobs endlessly fascinating.
A Glimpse
Design Process
Approach To Style “I try to let the object dictate where I’m going”- Cristoph Niemann “Abstraction can sound like it is about design that has few ornaments or avoids realistic representation. For me the process of abstraction is taking something very complex, and then stripping away unnecessary elements until you reveal its very essence”.
try to find the best possible way to get my point across to the reader. . This requires a lot of training and routine (drawing, writing and endless rounds of editing)” My first question is always: What does the reader or viewer already know? How much new information do I have to convey?
“I pick a random object, put it on my desk and then just start staring at it, desperately hoping that somethings clicks”. “I try to tackle these images with absolutely no plan regarding the end result. I’m searching for an unusual angle that leads to a visual connection that is surprising for me (and the viewer)”. “For most of my regular work (whether it’s a single image, an animation or a story) I come up with a specific idea first, and then
To tell a tight story, I have to have a good sense of the reader’s initial perspective. The most important skill of a visual artist: being able to look at something long and hard. The idea of art is to have a conversation at eye level with the audience. “I always rely on the visual wit of my readers. I’m not interested in sitting on a stage and showing off my artistic skills. The readers have to do the smart thinking — all I’m doing is giving them
cues on how put together what they already know in a new and (hopefully) interesting way”. His pieces often use non-threatening comic imagery to deftly pull readers into serious topics.
Creative Process “Creativity is like chasing chickens”- Christoph Neimann
The root of Niemann’s storytelling comes down to how he sees things – major and minor things, and otherwise imperceptible things – and how he reinterprets them as art and design. Abstract City is not illustration in the conventional sense, rather a kind of visual thinking that is as rational as science and as irrational as art. It is a curiously entertaining but also forward-thinking vision that appeals to senses on various levels. Each piece is so distinct that they can appear to have come from a different person. Niemann is stylistically ambidextrous yet also attitudinally consistent. Clearly, what draws him to a particular style is critical to his visual decision-making. ‘I am a designer by education, and my approach to styles is similar to a designer and his typefaces,’ he says. ‘There are styles that are fashionable, and sometimes I find myself trying to find a venue for a spiffy pencil drawing, but ultimately it is always the idea that dictates what style I must use. Every idea needs a pretty exact amount of realism / abstraction, certain emotional warmth or cold graphic objectivity.
Each idea uses a specific amount of information. Some use a lot of realism looking lavishly detailed, where as some ideas may just look like a single line. The art of abstraction is derived from the method of using an existing visual form in creative ways and thus turning it into an art piece. Let’s say you want to illustrate the idea of heart as a symbol of love. A
red square with a plain arrow in between would account to the ultimate level of abstraction. The idea totally falls flat resulting in nobody understanding the idea you try to convey to them. At the same time when the viewers look at a realistic pumping heart made up of flesh and blood and is pierced through by an actual arrow, the last thing they would think
about is love. It parts the feeling of disgust. Somewhere between the ultimate abstraction and realism lies the optimum graphic illustration/ shape. A simple red heart with an arrow, not to flat nor too realistic, being the ideal symbol to convey the idea of love.
Relying On Craft This routine is a lot less sexy than being an artistic genius. But it is an excellent strategy for not going insane. Even in the absence of talent and inspiration, you can—through sheer practice—become so good at art that you reliably deliver very good work. Now great work—that’s something else. For great work you also need a lot of skill and craft.
after night perfecting the burger, without realizing that every-one’s become a vegetarian. Which leads you to the next problem. The only thing you can do to make sure your work is in demand is actually focus on doing good work. This is difficult in the best of circum- stances. It gets downright impossible when you have to simultaneously worry about money.
But you need something else that you can’t control. Once you accept this, your life actually becomes a lot easier. (If you are a client, please remember: All you can ask from an artist is very good work. Great work is not really plannable.)The small but distinct downside of focusing on your craft is that you become blindsided. What if you are spending all your energy getting good at the wrong thing? Like a chef who spends night
Considerations about budgets and money while working are creative poison. “I’ve never worked with time sheets. Dreaming up ideas is not efficient. Whether the idea requires five hours or fifty has no bearing on the quality of the outcome. Not worrying about financials is not an option either” says Neimann.
Your Harshest Critic While working, one must be kind and forgiving with my fragile self. But sometimes one must try to look at my oeuvre with the eyes of an old and jaded misanthropic outsider (or a young and jaded misanthropic insider). Is my work just shallow pandering to an audience? Am I taking creative risks? Am I in touch with what’s happening out there? Am I blaming my audience when someIt’s hard to judge what you’re
doing wrong. Even harder, to be aware of what one’s doing right. “Ten years ago, I could only discuss these questions with a small set of friends and colleagues. They are still crucial when I’m facing a specific problem, but they can never look at something with the fresh eyes of somebody who’s unfamiliar with me and my work”.thing falls flat?
“But now that I have social media, I can take anything whether it’s a finished piece or a quick experiment and see what actual readers out there think about it.I just hit a button, and in a few minutes, I have a pretty good sense of whether the world deems the idea valuable or not. Any person who claims to not be flattered when a post receives a lot of likes, or who claims to not feel the least bit insecure when a post falls flat, is lying. Like anyone whose career precedes Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, I know how it feels to work with barely any reaction from my audience. I consider social media a fascinating and maybe indispensable opportunity. But all of those algorithms are so brilliantly designed to manipulate us with our own insecurity and vanity that it’s tempting to unconsciously equate likes and faves with quality.
Online approval and even viral success are just far too superficial and cheap to be true measurements of creative value. Of course I’m excited if something gets a lot of response, but so do all those cat videos and listicles that ultimately leave a viewer feeling bloated and empty. In this blinding ocean of smooth two-second HAHAs we have to remind ourselves that the art that really moves us is often slow and strange.”
Element Of Surprise This element of surprise is key to Christoph’s thinking – and for him it’s not only about surprising the viewer, but also about surprising himself. The technique is one that he first started to consider when reading Stephen King’s literary manual, On Writing.“King wrote that there are two ways to write a book: you either start with your outcome and everything is geared towards that ending, or you come up with a situation that has tension and see what happens. You let the characters go. I was always so plot orientated, laser-beaming towards the big ‘A-ha’ moment. Then I started to think: ‘What if I just start with the elements and see what happens?’” Christoph might start with a sock and end with a dinosaur, or he might start with a rifle and transform it into something
unexpectedly domesticated like coffee. The MoMA animations are surreal visual statements that distil complex, provocative and political opinions into a set of four brief and bold drawings. “For me, illustration is closest to writing,” says Neimann. “When I say ‘I love you’, with ‘I’ I take this entire universe of all my facets, hopes and dreams. With ‘you’ I do the same for you. And ‘love’ can designate a million things. You take all this meaning and then you put it into three words. It’s so simple, but if said in the right way, it can mean everything. In an ideal world, this is something drawing can do. It’s the incredible power of abstraction.”
Making Symbols Speak It is always challenging to unravel the mystery that is creativity, and Niemann is a wonderful case study. He is so adept at making symbols speak, of being at once representational and Rorshachian. He synthesises words into picture. Yet he insists there is no easy answer: ‘I wish there was a secret. To a very large degree it’s simply practice. You develop a way of rattling words, symbols and metaphors in your head, or preferably on a piece of paper. Then you try to mess with it, and ultimately something sticks. Unfortunately the painfulness of this process and the quality of the ideas are pretty proportional.’ But is there a kind of mantra that he recites when sitting down to solve a problem? Even while humouring me, Niemann is always a gentleman. ‘First,’ he says, ‘there always is another idea, and for each job I have a certain person in mind that I would want to like the piece (whether they end up seeing it or not). I always try to imagine that person looking at the piece and wonder whether he / she would think it’s funny / lame / unexpected etc.’ And does his facility for unlocking the hard-to-extract ideas mean he receives a larger than average share of themes and subjects to tackle and tame?
There are only a few illustrators who take as much pleasure in finding the perfect elements and creating the optimal image. Niemann explains: ‘Ultimately it’s all about how the piece is perceived by the readers. Sometimes I come up with a piece and think it’s hilarious, but realise it falls flat with the audience – and I instantly start disliking the piece myself. This means I have a somewhat distant relationship to my work. My favourites are always the ones where I have an obsession with a topic and realise that the audience shares this obsession, and something really
clicks.’ Niemann is stylistically ambidextrous yet also attitudinally consistent. Clearly, what draws him to a particular style is critical to his visual decision-making. ‘I am a designer by education, and my approach to styles in illustration is similar to a designer and his typefaces,’ he says. ‘There are styles that are fashionable, and sometimes I find myself trying to find a venue for a spiffy pencil drawing, but ultimately it is always the idea that dictates what style I must use. Every idea needs a pretty exact amount of realism / abstraction, certain emotional warmth
or cold graphic objectivity. I try to constantly broaden my range, and adapt new ways of solving problems, not out of vanity, but because it’s essential to my approach.’
Animals For Illustration He explains that animals are helpful illustration tools. “On the one hand, they’re like humans they have hands and feet, they can touch things, they can look in a certain way and have expressions,” he says. “I try to squeeze as many animals as I can into business illustrations like when I do the financial page for The New Yorker. I think animals are always whether for kids or grown-ups a fantastic tool for telling stories,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.
just big and strong and nothing else, so it really helps you establish a story and make a very simple point by cutting out all these other things that you would have to give as an attribution to a human being.” Niemann’s use of non-human creatures features in many of his pieces, and with good rationale. “Animals are the perfect medium,” he says. “You can take any kind of human trait and put it on an animal, almost as visual metaphors that everyone understands,
But on the other hand, animals can communicate the illustrator’s message more simply than the illustration of a human can. “[Animals are] not like us,” he explains, “We can just give them one certain characteristic. ... When I draw a big and strong person, immediately it’s a man or a woman, or he or she is being dressed this way or that way.” But take, for example, the elephant. “The elephant is
And then take it one step further. When you have a shark, you know the shark will be about eating. The butterfly will probably be about something pretty.” It’s techniques like these that make Niemann’s work so powerful — and fun. But it also helps that he truly believes in his medium.
This book seeks inspiration from Neimann’s style, approach and works and mottos in order to help creative professionals in fields like graphic design, art and illustrations help get a glimpse of how abstraction can be introduced in both art and design giving rise to new ways to connect and relate to the emotional aspect of the viewers. Great design is like any art form. It’s hard for anyone who doesn’t make it to understand where the inspiration comes from. But designers literally shape the world we all live in,creating everything from clothing and furniture to buildings and cars and that makes their jobs endlessly fascinating.