Joan of Art

David Versluis
 
A Collage piece from the “Icon Series”

Collage media: graphite, prismacolor, gold paint, colored paper, refuse printed material, and drawing on 22 x 30 BFK Rives Cream, 1980.
 From a private collection.



Photo credit:
 Joan Mondale attends the Department of Labor’s “Bread and Roses” event.
 Photograph Collection 1980, Location no. Walter F. Mondale Papers; Minnesota Historical Society, used with permission.

The basis for the “Icon” series was finding a small elm tree growing in one of the spiked holes of a concrete parking lot car bumper. And after pulling it out, its roots were bound tightly in a cylindrical form.

The passing of Geraldine Ferraro several weeks ago prompted me to think, among other things, about this piece once again.

This piece was one of several in the series, which was exhibited as part of a group show in the early 1980s at Bergsma Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This show was the first show in the gallery when it relocated in prominent commercial space in the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel.

Highlighting the opening reception was a surprise visit by Joan Mondale who was in town as a keynote speaker for a National Organization of Women (NOW) Conference. Mondale was the wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale who at that time was laying the foundation for the Democratic Party nomination for President. That evening she cordially greeted me as we shook hands and said, “I like your work,” for which I politely thanked her.

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René Clement: “Promising Land” (how a Dutch photographer sees Northwest Iowa)

Phohograph by René Clement © 2011, all rights reserved

After photographing in Orange City, Iowa, for five years, the book project Promising Land has been published and is available for sale. René Clement, a New York City-based Dutch photographer, will exhibit 38 photographs May-July at Dordt College Campus Center Art Gallery in Sioux Center, and do book signings May 18-21 in Orange City.

Here’s the news release written by Lisa Burg:

Dutch photojournalist from New York releases book on local culture.
Photography exhibit and book signing to be held in May in Sioux Center and Orange City.

After visiting Sioux County 10 times over the past five years to capture photographs for his book on Dutch culture, New York City-based photojournalist René Clement returns in May for an exhibit and book signing of his recently-published Promising Land. The Dordt College Department of Art and Design will host an exhibit of 38 of Clement’s photographs from May through July, with a reception and book signing on May 18. In addition, Clement will be on hand in during the Tulip Festival, May 19-21, for book signings at Holland House Interiors on main street Orange City.

Locally, Sioux County has long been known for its Dutch heritage. But when Clement “stumbled upon” Orange City he was fascinated with the discovery of a place where community members openly celebrate and display that heritage. As a Dutch immigrant himself, he found the town and its history intriguing.

“I had unexpectedly found myself in a small town peppered with windmills, houses with Dutch stair-step gable fronts, and an abundance of tulips” said Clement of his first trip through the town. “And since it was a Sunday, there was not a living soul to be seen on the streets of this small community guided by an unshakable Dutch Reformed tradition. My curiosity was peaked.”

His curiosity pushed him to evaluate the importance of roots, cultural influences and how they shape individual identity, and what happens when people share a common cultural legacy. As he studied the community, he found the inspiration for his book, Promising Land, a series of portraits and landscapes featuring people in traditional Dutch attire against a modern day America backdrop.

“Because I wanted to honor my subjects” desire to connect with their Dutch ancestry, I emphasized traits many of them held in common “blond hair and blue eyes, similar facial structure, and a timeless confidence reflected in their collective gaze,” said Clement.

The Dordt College department of art and design was awarded $3,700 from the Consulate General of the Netherlands for partial funding of an exhibition and publication of Promising Land.

The exhibit featuring Clement’s work will be on display at Dordt College from May to July 2011. A reception and book signing will be held at the exhibit/gallery on Wednesday, May 18, from 7-9pm. The exhibit and reception is free and open to the public. The Campus Center Art Gallery is open every day from 8am to 5:30pm.

Clement will hold book signings each day of the Orange City Tulip Festival, May 19-21, from 11am-3:30pm and 5:30-8pm at Holland House Interiors on Central Avenue in Orange City. The book is also sold through the web site reneclement.com.

René Clement is an award-winning photographer. He has been based in New York City since 1998. He works for newspapers and magazines, and is a member of the Hollandse Hoogte agency in Amsterdam. He spends much of his time working on long-term projects. His work has been selected for Time Magazine Pictures of the Year (2003) and the Dutch Zilveren Camera competition.

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The Bridge as a Relational Metaphor

Image from iStockphoto.

The bridge can be thought of as a relational metaphor about establishing connections. Driving along on the Zeeland Bridge, which is the longest bridge in the Netherlands, you feel as if you’re magically riding on water. Writer/designer, George Nelson writes insightfully about bridges in his book, How to See:

Bridges

Of all the structures and machines used for going places, the bridge is unique. Unlike the road, an earthbound strip, the bridge leaps, taking imagination with it. Like the plane, it defies gravity, but noiselessly. It “moves” with infinite grace without going anywhere. It never causes visual pollution; it soars across rivers and chasms, enhancing natural environments. The names of great bridge builders [and bridges] are remembered.

The beauty of bridges, as we perceive the best of them, is related to the fact that they are a single-purpose design, and that all of their components are directly related to this one purpose. Everyone understands what a bridge is and does. The same is true of aqueducts.

Technology, while continually refining bridge design, has little effect on our response: The Pont-du-Gard, built by the Romans a thousand years ago, is as satisfying an ornament in the French landscape today as it ever was. … [1]

1. Nelson, George. How to See: A Guide to Reading Our Manmade Environment. Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1977. 129-33. Print.

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clean and elegant monochromatic relationships

Herbert Bayer (1900-1985)
Concentric Circles
powdercoated aluminum 6061 T5
ca. 1969/2007
84-108 inches (7-9 feet)
Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
photograph by versluis

Within this structure of a formal rectangular cube are values of neutral white, which are physically rendered as shades and tints. The sculptural circles form stepped and regular concentric circular rhythms as they progressively reduce asymmetrically in scale to punctuate a circular void. On the other hand, one can also sense amplification as the concentric circles move from smaller to larger scale. The sculpture becomes a backdrop for the variations in lightness and darkness by reflecting the environs surrounding this piece.

The dappled light from the tree foliage creates patterns and interesting color combinations that unify color relationships that seem to suggest both literal and an illusion of space.

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AIGA Dordt College student group: second anniversary

Chef Giovanni Romano in the kitchen at the Fruited Plain Café, Sioux Center, Iowa.
Photo credit: Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times.

Today is the second anniversary of the dcaiga blog and this site has gained regular visitors from all over the world. In addition to this blog, the AIGA Dordt College Student Group has held monthly events with guest designers who come to campus to talk about the world of graphic design and the work that designers engage in.

Either after the presentation or before, the students and I treat our guest designer to dinner at the Fruited Plain Café in their Backroom Bistro where on Wednesday evenings an all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinner is served. Last September our first guest was Erik Rodne who’s a versatile designer with HenkinSchultz in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Erik is young and smart and came early that day to help me with students’ critiques. As we began to eat our meals Erik commented that the pasta was done to perfection! I appreciated the fact that Erik noticed because in small-town NW Iowa, Italian food is perhaps the last thing you would expect. We sent word back to the kitchen to thank the cook, Giovanni.

Just recently I was reminded of the exceptional food that’s served here at the Backroom Bistro when my daughter in the Twin Cities asked if we had seen the article about Giovanni Romano in The New York Times. (The New York Times. Yes!)

Here’s the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/us/03iowa.html

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hot type and hot dogs full of mustard

“Coney” a photograph by Keith Roghair, Dordt College senior; Doug Burg, instructor. Photo is used with permission – all rights reserved. (select image for larger view).

Although taken during the off-season this picture seems to reflect an organized cacophony of typographic styles found in the amusement park at Coney Island, New York. The strength and order of this type works for emotive effect and utility and not the intentions of educated designers. For the most part the audience are common folk. Whether the work signifies good taste or bad taste, the impact is interesting, compelling and alive.

Seeing this picture reminded me of this poignant passage from The Seven Storey Mountain. The author Thomas Merton, thinking back as a young man to the 30s, contrasts the forebodings about world war in Europe with the fond memories of hot dogs and beer at Coney Island. Merton writes:

The Europe I finally left for good, in the late November of 1934, was a sad and unquiet continent, full of forebodings.

Of course, there were plenty of people who said: “There will not be a war….” But Hitler had now held power in Germany for some time, and that summer all the New York evening papers had been suddenly filled with the news of Dollfuss’ murder in Austria, and the massing of Italian troops on the Austrian borders. It was one of the nights when I was down at Coney Island, with Reginald Marsh, and I walked in the whirl of lights and noise and drank glasses of thin, icy beer, and ate hotdogs full of mustard, and wondered if I would soon be in some army or other, or perhaps dead.

It was the first time I had felt the cold steel of the war scare in my vitals. There was a lot more to come. It was only 1934.

And now, in November, when I was leaving England forever the ship sailed quietly out of Southampton Water by night the land I left behind me seemed silent with the silence before a storm. It was a land all shut up and muffled in layers of fog and darkness, and all the people were in the rooms behind the thick walls of their houses, waiting for the first growl of thunder as the Nazis began to warm up the motors of a hundred thousand planes.

Perhaps they did not know they were waiting for all this. Perhaps they thought they had nothing better to occupy their minds than the wedding of Prince George and Princess Marina which had taken place the day before. Even I myself was more concerned with the thought of some people I was leaving than with the political atmosphere at that precise moment. And yet that atmosphere was something that would not allow itself to be altogether ignored. [1]

1. Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948. 127-128. Print.

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van de Velde Behrens & Guimard — phytomorphism (plant patterns)

Pictured clockwise starting top left:

Leeuwarden Railway Station, interior column tile detail, designer anonymous, c. 1860s
Leeuwarden, Friesland, The Netherlands
© 2011 photograph by versluis

Peter Behrens
Ornamented initials to match the Behrens-Schrift type designs
for Rudhard Typefoundry, 1902. Image source: Mosley, James. “St Brides Printing Library.” Baseline International Typographics Journal, St Bride’s Issue (1990): 32. Print.

Henri van de Velde
Double title page for Ecce Homo, written by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1908. Image source: van de Velde. Nietzsche, Fr., “Ecce homo.” Ketterer Kunst. N.p., 17 Nov. 2008. Web. 18 Apr. 2011; http://www.kettererkunst.com/details-e.php?obnr=410805351&anummer=348.

Hector Guimard
Entrance to a Paris Métro station, c. 1900
“le style métro” — railings, balustrades, and lamp-holders
© photographs by versluis

Perhaps the insights of Phil Meggs can help us understand some of the contributions and historical importance of H. van de Velde as a design educator and P. Behrens who began to move design toward more objective geometric forms.

Although van de Velde became an innovator of Art Nouveau, he was far more interested in furthering the Arts and Crafts philosophy than in innovative style as an end in itself. After the turn of the [twentieth-] century, his teaching and writing (The Renaissance in Modern Applied Art, 1901; A Layman’s Sermons on Applied Art, 1903) became a vital source for the development of twentieth-century architecture and design theory. An example of his pedagogy is his observation that when a shadow is cast, a complementary form is created on the light-struck side of the shadow’s outline, and that this “negative” form is as important as the object casting the shadow. He taught that all branches of art—from painting to graphic design, and from industrial design to sculpture—shared a communal language of form and an equality of importance to the human community. Appropriate materials, functional forms, and a unity of visual organization were demanded. He saw ornament not as decoration but as a means of expression that could achieve the status of art. [1]

1. Meggs, Philip B. A History of Graphic Design. 2nd ed. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992. 209. Print.

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