“There are lots of aspects that come up and you’re only partially conscious of them. That’s the freedom of art. People are going to experience what you do as they have to, and perhaps not as you might best like to direct them according to your own sense of place. Just as well.”
Dan Flavin, excerpted from Dan Flavin: A Retrospective
“As is the case everywhere, it is true that a wide and comprehensive knowledge of characteristics and elements is less important for creative work than the capacity and the courage to build up new relations among the elements of expression already at hand, to raise them above the commonplace by giving them a new meaning through shifting their meaning. This state of mind is most successfully attained in one relies on the centre of certainty in the active human being, whose existence and responsibility is grounded in the actual—in life.”
- László Moholy-Nagy, excerpted from The New Vision, 1938
Wojirch’s album cover art is so good. I ran across more of her work at Colin Buttimer’s site Hard Format, so I had to share.
Born in London in 1970 and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, Dan Eldon was the child of an American journalist and an English businessman. Caught in the whirlwind of multiple cultures and social classes, Eldon began documenting his experiences at a very early age. His later journals were sprawling, intricate works of art, blending illustration, photography and found objects. Each page veered between the personal, the political and those thin places in between. Eldon’s knowledge of seven languages, his extensive world travel and teenage experiences as a journalistic photographer quickly lifted his work above that of his peers.
At 17, Eldon moved to New York City for an internship at Mademoiselle. He quickly moved on to California, alternately spending summers traveling across Africa with a friend. After transferring out of UCLA, Eldon floundered, finally settling in Somalia in 1992 where his photographs caught the eye of the Reuters organization. Quickly Eldon’s skill as a photographer and and the escalating violence in Somalia propelled his career into the international scene. By 1993, Eldon had published his first book of photos and Somalia had become one of the most dangerous places in the world, with U.S. Troops and UN Peacekeepers fighting to maintain stability to rout the widespread humanitarian crisis that was unfolding. That it was a failure is well known—heavy civilian casualties served to inflame tensions between the civilians and the international military presence. Eldon himself died as a result of the tension at the age of 22—at the very genesis of his artistic prowess—the victim of an enraged Somalian mob in the wake of a failed military strike. After his death, Eldon’s family collected his journals and eventually published some of them as a book.
The Beggarstaff Brothers were two British brothers-in-law who established their studio in 1894, taking on the name “Beggarstaff” as a pseudonym so that they could continue working as painters as well. Completely ignoring the very popular art noveau style of the time, they pioneered a minimalized look that predated both the bauhaus and the constructivists—with hand cut sans-serif lettering and drastically reduced silhouettes. Interestingly, one-half of the duo, William Nicholson has recently been receiving some acclaim for his fine art work.
