Spectacle of Lights - PLSN.com

Barney’s stuff or the street art of those
graffiti practitioners, is just as expressive,
just as detailed, just as instructive.
Early in my career I read a great book
by an author named Julia Cameron. It was
called The Artist’s Way. It’s full of useful
suggestions and practices that a working
artist can engage in to keep the font
flowing, keep the work productive and invigorating.
One of the best practices was
to give yourself “artist’s dates.” Find the
time, and schedule it if necessary, to go do
some extracurricular thing that is going
to feed your inner artist. This can be many
different things. Maybe it’s rolling down
to the local bookstore, grabbing a latte
It became instantly sensible for us to find
a place in the show where the twin contexts
of Frank’s own paintings and his
influence by Rothko could be expressed.
Another sampling of the graffiti art on Exchange
and a good book on art, architecture, design
or music, and doing some reading. It
might be finding a local museum, or, even
better, some local gallery shows featuring
the work of people you haven’t heard of,
and stopping by to see it. Or it could be as
simple as finding a unique vantage point
in the local landscape where you can see
the light of the sun moving across some
distant hills or buildings, and then watching
carefully… Channeling Monet yet? You
should be.
The artist’s date is one great way, but
some of us can’t interrupt our working day
that way. If so, good for you, and boy am I
sorry. I do know what that’s like. But find a
way to seek the influences at work. Instead
of spending lunch browsing MySpace on
the Web, go check out the sites of some
working artists, or google 10 different
words that occur to you, and then hit the
“images” button to see what happens. Random
influences can have extraordinary
surprises, and most of us find ourselves
online some part of the day.
Conversely, specific research on context
is also good, and even enjoyable. This
year we designed the multimedia and
projection elements for Sinatra Live at the
London Palladium. It turns out that Frank
was a painter as well as being a world-class
crooner. We had been granted access to
all of Sinatra’s materials by his family, and
the estate, in order to do the show. When I
looked at Frank’s paintings, I saw a fascination
with geometry and color graduations
that seemed familiar to me. It turned out
that Frank was a huge fan of Mark Rothko,
and that influence had shown up in some
of Sinatra’s art. I loved this, and it became
instantly sensible for us to find a place
in the show where the twin contexts of
Frank’s own paintings and his influence by
Rothko could be expressed. That opportunity
ended up being in the seminal tune,
“Learning the Blues.” The song was staged
to take place in a seedy blues bar. Frank
would be singing on one screen stage left,
while we would have to come up with “atmosphere”
on a full stage RP screen that
would back the bar. We ended up creating
a small library of Rothko-esque (is that a
word?) shapes and color gradients, all in
the blue palette, which would come and
go, morphing subtly. We added in some
blues bar texture as well: cigarette smoke,
a stiletto shoe, feminine lips parting…
All blended to create a scenic backing. It
worked beautifully at a purely scenic level,
but also as a real expression of Frank’s
explorations of blues music, blues culture
and the color blue through paintings. It
was way more than just great background;
it was linked and grounded by real influences
and priorities in Sinatra’s life.
So go forth, I say, and find narrative
and context. Look for it in the heart of
your design, whether that’s a script, a lyric
or a bar of music. But also, take the time to
look for it in other directions. Break down
the limits of your view, and find something
new.
Claude Monet’s Haystack
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PLSN DECEMBER 2006 43
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