In an effort to slowly turn this blog into a non-personal artsy fartsy blog I am throwing around some concepts. I notice I don’t get inspired to do much of any of my own work anymore. No idea whats caused it but it has been going on for several years now. Whats cool tho, is that lately I have been given the opportunity to finally do some design and art work for a few friends who have totally different tastes and styles than me. Getting yourself out of your comfort zone is probably the best thing you can do as an artist because you end up in the “dirty bathwater” that is the inside of your head after a while. You get the same concepts and ideas wallowing around in there for long enough that you eventually get bored with them and in my case ignore the signals entirely.  So its a good thing  when someone comes up to you and asks you to design something for them that throws a wrench in the little gearbox in your head and forces you to think like them for long enough for them to get something good out of the process.

I’ve noticed there are two kinds of designers. Those who design around their own principles and if the client doesn’t like it then too bad you should feel honored to have had them design for you in the first place, and those who get in the clients head and design something to match the taste of the client to the point that the design may not even look good but makes the client happy.

Everyone has their own style they like to incorporate into their designs whether they are for themselves, a friend, or the lady who owns the bakery down the street. Personally, my work tends to be very minimal, not because I am lazy but because I like clean design. However that does not carry over into my tastes for fine art. In fact, it’s the opposite! I cannot stand minimalist painting or abstract art and sculpture in the slightest. I think it has to do with the effort that goes into these things. When you work with a computer its easy to get things out of whack when you don’t know what your doing. Dirty, overly noisy and textured design is easy to throw together because the mash up of objects and colors can look good, however the effort that went into it was probably minimal. On the other hand when a design is meticulously clean and even and the strokes look laser etched and machined that shows the artist has crazy manual dexterity with the mouse or tablet and knows the software well enough to get uniformity out of organic shapes.

However with fine art the opposite is true, you can draw super clean lines and straight edges using rulers and masking tape just as easy as the guy who paints your house. Destroying all evidence of brush strokes, being able to mix colors properly as well as portray lifelike colors and textures within a painting is in my opinion way more interesting and professional as well as requiring years of practice and education. A painting of a woman sitting in a chair is way more artistic to me than say a canvas with three red boxes painted on it. Yes they are both paintings, and yes its hard to make a red box even without using tape or a guide of some kind but technical painting skill and artistic painting skills are two different ballgames.

Technically the painting with red boxes is still art. Anything people make can be considered art. The McDonalds cup your holding is art because it was designed by someone to hold liquid and decorated to keep you drinking out of it. But it’s just a McDonalds cup. It’s not pretty or engaging or sensual in any way. Its industrial at best. I guess I don’t consider graphic design on par in any way with fine art. It’s always been two separate monsters to me. Graphic Design is the hyper-crafted, well oiled Japanese robot war machine while Fine Art is the Fabergé  Bugatti Veyron filled with reclining nudes. Graphic design is everywhere and on everything around you so it seems natural that it just gets ignored sometimes, yet it still needs to be at a high level of quality or your not going to read the sign or buy the product. Fine art is different in that it normally depicts a false image. While that image could be something real, or something that the artist was looking at, we all know the image is just the artists interpretation of what they saw which, I think, makes it much more intriguing.

What do you think? Do you feel graphic design and fine art are on the same level? Or do you agree they are to different monsters with their own highs and lows?