Saul bass

Saul Bass is the great creator of film title design. Here’s his opening title sequence for “The Man with the Golden Arm.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGnpJ_KdqZE&feature=player_embedded

The movie is about the struggle of its hero – a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra to overcome his heroin addiction. Designed by the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addicts arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it – rather than Frank Sinatra’s famous face as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster.
That cut-out arm caused a stir and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form. By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, and Martin Scorsese. Bass was also responsible for some of the best remembered most iconic logos in America, including both the Bell Telephone logo (1969). Other well-known designs were Continental Airlines, Dixie and United Airlines. All of Bass's posters had a distinctive style. After his first film project Carmen Jones, he frequently collaborated with Otto Preminger as well as with Alfred Hitchcock and others. His work spanned five decades and inspired numerous other designers. I think his work is very influential and inspiring and is very useful towards my own work. I can use the can ideas and concepts.

Ellen lupton

Ellen Lupton is a writer and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture Letters from the Avant-Garde and Skin: Surface, Substance and Design
She recently has focused on bringing design awareness to broader audiences. Her book ‘Thinking with Type (2004) is a basic guide to typography directed at everyone who works with words. D.I.Y. Design It Yourself co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains design processes to a general audience.
I think ‘Thinking with Type’ is a state-of-the-art pedagogical tool for anyone who wish to improve his design skills. The lessons of Thinking with Type are applicable to typographic design wherever it is practiced. It is divided into three sections - letter, text, grid - each accompanied by an essay explaining key concepts, and then a set of practical demonstrations illustrating that material.

(http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/)

Semiotics

Semiotics is the idea that we attach a meaning to all things. We name something but in a sense of connotation it could mean different things to different people. One example is "The Birth of Venus" by Sandro Botticelli. (Look above)
This painting, represented an earthly goddess who inspired love in humans and represented a perfect female. Another interpretation is that the painting suggests an appropriate behaviour for a bride and a groom.
To me this painting represents femininity and divinity of the gods. The shell represents the birth as a Perl (jewel) is born. The woman next to Venus with the pink blanket is the obscurity which is trying to cover Venus. The sense of evil and darkness is represented through this female since she is in a dark part of the painting where the colour is grey and obscure. The angel on the other hand, may represent the divinity that has brought Venus but at the same time is carrying another woman. The flowers thrown represent spring with all the bright colours.

Modernism

Modernism started in the 1850s and this was a time to rebel against realism. The rules to painting, photographs, you could get away with being figurative and abstract. Jackson Pollock became a worldwide symbol of the new American painting after World War II. The paintings done by Pollock in the mid-1940s were coarse, heavy, and filled with a nervous brutal energy all their own. By 1947, the artist began to experiment with all-over painting, a network of lines, splatters and paint drips from which created the famous poured paintings of the next few years. These paintings, generally executed on a large canvas laid out on the floor, are the works most popularly associated with so-called Action Painting. The furious and seemingly haphazard scattering of the paint was not a completely uncontrolled, intuitive act. In the paintings of Pollock and many of the other Abstract Expressionists, the element of instinct, or the accidental, plays a large and deliberate part. Honouring the spontaneous aspect of art was one of the principal contributions of Abstract Expressionism. Pollock's drip paintings contributed certain elements that changed the course of modern painting. Pollock's paintings introduced the concept that the painting is an environment, surrounding the viewer, and not separated from him. The feeling of participating in the painting is heightened by the ambiguity of the picture space. The moving lines and colours surge back and forth, all within a limited depth.

Identity and Gender

For identity I’m looking at Jenny Saville. She is one of the female artists of the late-20th century who has truly reinvented the self-portrait. Her work raise questions about accepted ideals of beauty in fine art and life. No longer is the self-portrait confined to the values of society. Instead, the modern self-portrait is unrestricted in vision and form. Saville definitely breaks any boundaries meant to withhold women from exploring all parts of their self-identities she challenges the male fantasy of the perfect body and opens doors to alternative notions of beauty.

Saville fights society’s ideal of the perfect body by showing her own enlarged and distorted body, which is the opposite of the thin models and women we see on the covers of magazines. In many paintings, she uses her own head and face and the body of an obese woman. Most of her paintings and photographs have the body covering the entirety of the canvas, and sometimes spilling over the edges, this adds to the drama of viewing the human body’s flesh and imperfections. These disturbing enlarged and distorted views of the human body, forces the viewer to reflect on their own self-image and distorted views and emotions about their own body. She creates emotion by filling the canvas with raw flesh.

The image above is an perfect example of the freedom of the modern artist to explore the reality of the female body. No longer is the female body an object to view; it has become a vehicle to express ideas and emotions and to ignite introspection about the viewers own ideas and emotions surrounding body image.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/jenny_saville.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/oct/22/art.friezeartfair2005

Appropriation

Appropriation artists intentionally copy images to take possession of them in their art. They are not stealing. They are not passing off these images as their own. Appropriation artists want the viewer to identify the images they copy, and they hope that the viewer will bring all of his/her original associations with the image to the artist's new context, be it a painting, a sculpture, a collage, a combine or an entire installation.
The intentional borrowing of an image for this new context is called recontextualization. It helps the artist comment on the image's original meaning and the viewer's association with the original image or the real thing. For example Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans series. These images are appropriated. He copied the original labels exactly, but filled up the picture plane with their iconic appearance. Unlike other garden-variety still-life’s, these works look like portraits of a soup can. The brand is the image's identity.

Warhol isolated the image of these products to stimulate product recognition (just like in advertising) and stir up associations with the idea of Campbell's soup. He also tapped into a whole bunch of other associations, such as consumerism, commercialism, big business, fast food, middle class values, and food representing love. As an appropriated image, these specific soup labels could resonate with meaning (like a stone tossed into a pond) and so much more. Warhol's use of popular imagery became part of the Pop art movement.
All Appropriation Art is not just Pop Art, though. Artist Sherry Levine's After Walker Evans (1981) is a photograph of a Walker Evans photograph. She is challenging the concept of ownership, if she photographed the photograph, whose photograph was it, really? And she is addressing the power of male artists as Sherry Levine is a feminist artist.

http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=23
http://weblog.delacour.net/photography/appropriation-art-and-walker-evans/