Posters
I've become pretty interested in posters recently. I think I'm drawn to the way they are both very creative and very commercial.
The more I do things as a publisher the more I'm motivated to find ways to make the business I run feel interesting, creative, exciting, visual and cool.
For me, a good poster provides another form of raw material. Maybe I could print it and stick it under my car windshield wiper? Maybe I could print it and hold it up and take a photo and that's the promotion? Maybe I could photograph it displayed on my screen? Maybe I could print 10 and arrange them in some weird collage?
I find myself really buoyed up by ways where even marketing can become this fascinating form of creativity and play. My friend Morganna recently said 'maybe you're more interested in design than art', or something to that effect. And she certainly is right: often what interests me is when art work is used more as a material than an end in of itself.
As a publisher I work with others' images (art) and build a new form that can be sold and shipped. As an artist I work with photos, writing and research to construct something new. Rather than, say, a sculpture being the end point of itself, I want to remake things and use them as starting points, not finishes.
I find it hard sometimes to describe this - is it art? is it design? does anyone care? (I know I don't) - creativity is fun because it's not easily described but easily shown and felt. That's probably a bizarre point to make in this newsletter, but even this thing I find hard to clearly explain to folks. It's sort of journalistic, sort of confessional, sort of playful, sometimes silly, sometimes structured - I guess it's like me: a bit of a mess. But I like the mess, the mess is where I feel most at home.
Anyway, are some posters I like: