I’m taking a moment here to reflect on my developing paper-cut style, and take stock of it’s strengths and weakness.
One thing that came to mind as I finished my portrait of Chez (Tarot VII) was this transition I’ve made in visual style: from sign to texture.
Initially, my visual style, my puppets, were meant made to be entirely communicative. Here is a man. I gave him my acute angle cut for a nose. He is a musician; musicians are stylish (with the exception of jazz musicians). He has a few lines cut into his shirt to suggest patterns and style. The lines aren’t really style, or the rich patterns their meant to signify; there are just a few lines. This was a standard technique I used. And it did the job.
And as I was consider how to design the foliage that is Chez’s backdrop, my first impulse was to take all that black positive space and just cut a few leaves here and there, wall keeping swaths of solid blackness. A nice solution - and time-saving. A few leaves suggest the whole thing is leaves.
But it didn’t feel satisfying. And so I went all out, so to speak, and cut ornate, over-lapping, diverse foliage. What the hell, I also added some wildlife - a curious robin, and honeybee, a snake wrapped around a branch.
And it looked nice.
And then I posted it to Facebook. That’s a good place for R&D. The amount and quality of the reactions was big. Complexity and texture - does something to our brains. It incites an emotional reaction.
And why is this? We like skill, we admire good craft and work that is either hard or beyond our own abilities.
But also, I believe there is also something specific about the energy of the visual field. Patterns and ornamentation draw the eye; the eye follows, the eye predicts, the eye is engaged in predicting the pattern, and finds itself sometimes correct, sometimes surprised, and this is satisfying. In this way, the static image actually moves - the energy of the patterns, the flow, is constant. The visual images is pregnant with life, with a force that can shoot up our spine.
I’m getting a little lamely purple here (Can one be purple with simple words? Is there such a thing as pedestrianly purple?), but the point is there: Dense patterns and textures, elements not reduced to the level of signs that the brain quickly processes and stops paying attention to, create a visual space for of vibrant energy.
:::
Now, I compare this stylistic success with a piece I like, but (sigh) also acknowledge as inferior. The cover for Joey Weisnerberg’s album is very spirited, and something I was very excited to bite into and visualize, but some of the elements I chose weakened it’s effect, despite it’s strong composition.
The chief culprit of deficient visual elements is: flat texture. Flat textures can be bold and strong, but in this case I combined it with very predictable architecture (I had never designed architecture before), and the result was a combination of simple shapes that lacked texture. The mind can read it as a sign, and ignore it; that is, the mind stops engaging with it. And to add to that, the very small human figures are small and cartoonish, and the stars are simple. So, there’s that. Despite the piece’s great design, it is not visually engaging.
To be fair, I was also responding to the fact that it was a cd cover, and my first sketches were ‘too busy’, and so I was motivated to do something minimalist.
If I were to do it over again… hmm. Well, texture on non-organic things is hard. Some super-stylized burning bush might have been a better choice. The fact is, I want to avoid ‘signs’ and flat textures as much as possible.
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