What Are You Like?

What Are You Like?
Self Revealing Artworks by
People in the Public Eye.

This was the name of an exhibition held in 2008-2009

The idea for this exhibition, curated by the House of Illustration, is taken from a Victorian game of describing yourself with images of your favourite things; like a cryptic visual essay, a self -portrait. It will appeal to a wide audience because it will give an insight into how the
contributors see themselves. The show will also celebrate the art of illustration as an eloquent tradition which, as a means of communication, crosses the boundaries of language, culture and age.
The House of Illustration has asked people from many disciplines who have the skills to express themselves visually.

Contributors have been asked to illustrate eight favourite things from a list of twelve – their favourite animal, book, clothes, comfort, food, pastime, place, possession, music, shoes, weather and their pet aversion. They have been encouraged to use whatever medium they most enjoy.
The artists' names will not appear on the artwork to allow the visitors the fun of trying to guess their identity – they will be provided with a definitive list should they wish to cheat.

Images by: Jonathan-burton, Posy Simmonds, Sara Fanelli, Peter Blake, Mary Fedden, Mini Grey, Peter Blake, Jeff Fischer

Movie posters Black Sawn_Image within an image

Droste effect

While visualising my character as a person with multiple identities I thought about the 'Droste effect'. The Droste effect is a Dutch term for a specific kind of recursive picture. An image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This smaller version then depicts an even smaller version of itself in the same place, and so on. Only in theory could this go on forever; practically, it continues only as long as the resolution of the picture allows, which is relatively short, since each iteration exponentially reduces the picture’s size.

And later I came across Kage-e (”shadow pictures”) — a popular form of Edo-period(Japan) woodblock print — were appreciated by children and adults and commonly used as party gags. These pictures consist of two parts: a “shadow” image and a “real” image. The shadow image, which typically bears the shape of a common, easily identifiable object, is viewed first. The real image, viewed second, reveals the surprising true identity of the shadow.

Magritte and identity

While thinking about emotions and identity, I thought about the person's painted by Magritte. These figures hide after objects or disappear within the background. It's frustrating you can't see the person's face and hence its identity. This is actually how we see a person in daily life. People judge you on what they see, your facial expression, the clothes you are wearing, but underneath all that there maybe a whole other identity than you expected.


“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible,” Rene Magritte once lamented. “Humans hide their secrets too well.” Born on this date in 1898, Magritte created mind-bending, Surrealist images that held up a mirror to humanity and showed it just how many secrets it kept from itself. In The Son of Man (above, from 1964) Magritte’s omnipresent bowler-wearing man in an anonymous dark suit hides behind a green apple. Whether that man’s identity lurks behind the sins symbolized by that Adam’s apple of Original Sin or if identity itself is the “sin” in unclear. Magritte sees identity itself as a state of crisis, something we can never fully grasp or understand yet something continually in peril.

From: http://artblogbybob.blogspot.com/2007/11/identity-crisis.html

Emotions

Emotions can be expressed by:
-Colours (clothes, surrounding)
-Prints (clothes, surrounding)
-Lining
-Emptiness (composition)
-Small vs big (making the character very small against the background makes her vulnerable)
-Technique (watercolour has a soft, transparant appereance while acrylics are less subtle)
-Symbolism (hearts=love)
-Fascial and body expression

Colours and Emotions

Colours and Emotions
by Juan C. Dürsteler [message nº 96]

Colours are good means to convey emotions. Although there is a psychology of colour and some of them have universal emotional effects, in most cases their meanings are culture dependent.

The emotions associated to some colours have a strong cultural component. For example in China death is associated to green while in the West it’s associated to the colour black. In other contexts green is linked to envy. Red means good luck in China while Westerners associate it with the sporting spirit. (See for example the page of Pantone about colour or the ErgoGero’s page).

Nevertheless it’s worth distinguishing between emotions and meanings. While emotions are unconscious, meanings have a stronger cultural and conventional component. The most emotionally primary colours appear to be red and blue. The act of seeing the colour red is capable of increasing the blood pressure and heart beat, while seeing the blue colour has the opposite effect.

Colours are typically divided into warm (yellows, reds, oranges) and cool ones (blues, greens and violets) due to primitive and probably universal associations to the sun and fire for the former ones and to water and vegetation the latter ones.


Warm and cool colours. In this example the colours of the left half are considered warm ones and those of the left half are considered to be cool.

Nevertheless it’s not easy to take advantage of the psychology of colour in visualisation for the very reason that their deep mechanisms are not yet well understood scientifically.

Market researchers have devoted considerable effort to know which colours are preferred by consumers and how the fashion works in this matter. For example, people interested in the preferences of Japanese consumers can try this link

The meanings and associations vary noticeably between societies but are somewhat uniform in the western world, probably due to the strong cultural homogenisation. See for example the page at Cornell University

From Cailin Boyle’s book Color Harmony for the Web” we extract some of the meanings associated to colour in western culture.


Red: danger, excitement, fire, passion, blood, fight or flight, some sexual connotation.


Purple: Wealth, royalty, sophistication, intelligence.


Blue: Quietness, serenity, truth, dignity, constancy, reliability, power.


Black: Sophistication, elegance, power, rebellion.


White: Purity, cleanness, luminosity, vacuum.


Yellow: Warmth, the sun for many cultures, brightness, joy if little saturated.


Green: Nature, fresh, vegetation, health, green/blues are the favourites of consumers

The application of the psychology of colour understood as conveying emotional information has its maximum exponents in design, architecture, marketing and advertising, more that in Information Visualisation itself.

There are authentic mountains of information on the colour in the web and about its (supposed) optimal use in this or that application. Nevertheless, the search for scientific articles about objective and verifiable features of colour psychology hasn’t given me good results regarding how to apply it to designing information. Any reference on the topic will be welcome.

Again, as in many other topics, many opinions are present but few truths show their colours.

Statements about consciousness and existence

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am by Sara Fanelli.

The book is introduced by writer and mythographer Marina Warner, who points out that its title ‘Sometimes I think, Sometimes I am’ has been borrowed by Sara from Paul Valery, who was himself echoing a famous statement about consciousness and existence. This signposts, she adds, its resemblance to a so-called ‘commonplace book’, in which children and adults used to keep quotations and mementoes. Originally, when someone like the scholar Erasmus was urging people to keep such records of their thoughts, the objective was improvement (cultivating a sense of self in relation to God). Gradually these transformed into idiosyncratic personal hoards of private moments of delight, something akin to Fanelli’s book.

Fanelli has selected quotations from a number of thinkers through the ages and set them within five themes; ‘Devils and Angels’, ‘Love’, ‘Colour’, ‘Mythology’ and ‘The Absurd’.

Picture book

The Incredible Book Eating Boy
Oliver Jeffers

Words integrated into the image/hand lettering.
Special cut outs to express the feeling of actually eating a book, it becomes reality.

Monolgue books

Lauren Child uses the 'I' format quite a lot in her picture books.

More 'I am' books

Monologue book

Me I am Jack Prelutsky
Jack Prelutsky (Author)
Christine Davenier (Illustrator)

Wordless book

Dutch book:
De paraplu (The umbrella) by Ingrid and Dieter Schubert (2010).

Semi wordless

The Quiet Book

Written by Deborah Underwood; illustrated by Renata Liwska (2010)
Simple words and pictures capture complex emotions. More a series of moments than a story. Sweet and gentle, good for sharing and staring at together.