Notes from watching Netflix’s Abstract episode featuring Paula Scher
I miss the boldness with which I used to design Word Art in MS Word when my dad would make me wait at the reception of his office. Hours of enjoyment from typing out words and aligning their typographical design with their meanings and definitions as I understood them. “Water” would get a cool blue wavy face and “fire” would be warm and orange, jagged at the ends like a receding flame.
Paula Scher said sensibility and spirit meet meaning in design. The other day I thought of elegance in storytelling and I tweeted that “even in beginner storytellers, there is elegance. a sense of design even before they can see that design.” I find humor in the idea that my Word Art creations were my elegant design on display before I ever understood the concepts I exhibited.
At some point in the episode, Paula asserts an idea about the way being in a state of play frees the creative mind. Play is a fascinating activity because it brings together all the imaginative and fun aspects of being. Being without seriousness. Being with the seriousness of a play actor. Being one thing and then another, all while being oneself. Play allows the creative mind to engage in very, very serious conversations with itself, emotion, and environment without ever thinking that the grave nature of the conversation indicates rigidity or a lack of fun.
I miss the ornamental nature of Word Art. The words you read now are set in a modest typeface; focus is drawn to the words. This indicates the story will be told verbally, rather than visually. Visual art invites curiosity with its ornaments. Why is this letter shaped this way? Why this color? Why this weight and height? Why italics? Visual art offers a quest. It has something to give. It tumbles over from the space of the conversation the artist is having with themselves, emotion, environments and ideas. And now, look: you’re having a conversation with the art too.
Mostly, I long to create art that is parable again. Hyperrealism is a temptation that drips and shimmers in light almost too bright to turn away from. But, as people, as artists, it is a special thing to turn the one who views our art from the thing we’ve drawn, sang, painted, designed to the thing that exists in reality. I want the way I describe swimming in a lake on a warm afternoon, as the sun hangs low in the sky, while its rays sit on the water and bounce up into a face to make someone go, “I want to go swimming now.”
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