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When I was a student,
we were able to collect a lot of things
that Rand would have around,
and he often had things
that he had excess copies of.
This was one of them.
This booklet that describes how to use the IBM logo in different ways.
And I'm just going to show you the cover because the inside is kind of bland, corporate stuff.
But the cover is really instructive.
It shows the IBM logo dancing around to this cover.
Same size,
different colors.
And we see how all these different colors are existing against the black ground.
And when we turn it over,
we have the same design,
but now it's on white.
So again, it's like this taught me so much about color.
How color is completely dependent on his background.
How the same design can look completely different based on a white background or a black background.
So Paul Rand was definitely one of my biggest inspirations and continues to be to this day.
In my practice and in my teaching,
he taught me so much.
My next influence is a little bit more recent.
I would say in the last 20 years or so of my life.
It's Corita Kent.
The first time I saw the work of Corita Kent,
I was in an exhibition in a gallery in Chelsea near where I live.
I was completely once again blown away by these designs,
and they reminded me a lot of Moran's designs.
They're very spirited,
very colorful,
based on abstraction,
some geometric shapes, but very, very free.
So I began looking into her designs and began thinking about how her work is something that would inspire me.
Sister Corita, Sister Corita Kent, began her artistic career as a Catholic sister,
a nun in Los Angeles.
And she was teaching at a girls school.
And a lot of her early work was based on religion, her own religiosity.
But she became involved in advocacy and protest in the 1960s.
And you see here this amazing image of all these women,
young women from the school, marching,
holding posters.
Corita's work was photographic,
it was handmade,
it was hand-colored,
but it was all done with silkscreen.
So one of the most rudimentary and primitive forms of printing became her medium for expressing her ideas
about social justice,
about advocacy,
about religion, and mostly about love.
So these are examples of some of her earlier designs,
very expressive.
The typography is handmade,
but not in a conventional sense.
She's looking at historical examples of lettering,
some of them religious,
and rendering the type herself,
in some cases painting directly on the screens with emulsion, like here.
Her work moves from purely religious work into work that is more about social justice,
advocacy,
anti-war.
And her visual language changes from being something that's very handmade and expressive,
to adaptations or repurposing typography that's found on packaging and in advertising.
In editorial design.
So Wonder Bread became a prominent theme in her work,
but it wasn't about bread,
it was about other things.
And she would combine lettering from the packaging with her own handwriting,
which was usually quotations about peace, love.
Safeway,
Safeway is a chain of supermarkets in California,
using primary colors.
Her coloring was just amazing.
Look at this, just beautiful.
Karita gave herself permission to do things like running type backwards,
sometimes upside down,
combining these letter forms,
which are found on packaging,
photographed,
repurposed in her silkscreens, with her handwriting.
Now I eventually figured out,
and I started to do this for myself just through experimentation,
that the way this handwriting,
or the way the typography was made,
would be to photocopy
the type onto some kind of a paper,
and then bend the paper,
much like the page is bending here,
photographing it,
and then through that process,
you distort the lettering.
So all of this distortion,
there was no computers,
there was no digital effects that could be applied to this,
this was all done photographically.
So beautiful and so expressive and so free.
As free as going
all the way back to Zwart,
and what he did with geometry and expressive typography in his own way,
Karita Kent here,
30 or 40 years later,
is doing something completely different,
but still, thinking about typography as an expressive element,
thinking about form and color in a really beautiful,
very expressive way, is very inspiring.
If I'm talking about my influences,
these next two designers and artists are really essential.
Johannes Itten,
probably the most important early influence in my color teaching.
And this is the cover of his book,
The Art of Color,
and right away you see something happening that's really quite extraordinary.
We see how the same colors,
the same yellows, can look different on different ground,
something we come back to later,
a simultaneous contrast.
Johannes Itten was one of the first teachers at the Bauhaus.
He was there at the very beginning, in 1919,
and he actually created what was then the foundation program,
or the preliminary course that all students who went to the Bauhaus took.
And it was a course that introduced these students to ways of working,
ways of thinking,
composition,
color,
all the essential ideas that are needed to become a prosperous and successful art student.
Every student took this.
Itten really invented that concept,
and it's something that has influenced art and design schools ever since.
I teach foundation courses,
and everything that I teach goes back to Itten,
goes back to the Bauhaus.
His way of doing this was through thinking about art and design,
composition,
color, in terms of contrasts.
So contrasts like large and small,
geometric, organic,
thick and thin,
up and down,
side to side, smooth and even,
and rough.
All of these different ideas could be employed in experiments created by students.
And through those experiments,
they would learn about all of the possible things that
are available to them for expressing their ideas.
Color was part of that.
The seven color
contrasts,
even though he didn't invent the color contrast,
he put that idea together,
and it made sense,
and it's become an essential part of my teaching.
This book, The Art of Color,
is just loaded with ideas,
and it really inspired me early on in my teaching.
These color grids are something that I just adapted to very quickly.
And this particular set of color grids is an expression of the four seasons,
which has become one of the essential assignments that I give all of my students.
The last influence I'll talk about right now is Joseph Elbers.
Again, just as important as Johannes Eden has been as an inspiration for my teaching,
Elbers has been an essential teacher for me.
This book,
which is one of two volumes that come as a set,
is his large-scale version of interaction of color.
We'll be talking much more about this stuff later,
but just to give you an overview of what's in here,
we have examples of color interaction, of simultaneous contrast,
the same color looking different on different grounds.
And if we just flip to the back,
we start to see other things, transparency, illusion.
One of my favorite parts of his work are the collages
that his students would make.
He would call these free studies.
So along with the very disciplined work that he would do,
where you would try to actively make three colors look like two,
or create the illusion of transparency,
he would tell his students just to go and play.
Work with those ideas you were exploring objectively,
and try to work with them in a subjective sense.
Be more expressive.
And then finally,
one of my favorite things, leaf collages.
I do this every year myself.
I go out and I collect leaves.
I dry them, I flatten them.
And at that point,
they become like paper, like colored paper.
And you can use them in combination with colored papers.
Albers began doing this when he emigrated to the United States
and taught at Black Mountain College,
and then carried on with this idea at Yale.
He thought that leaves were great for making collages.
They were free, they were plentiful,
anyone could find them.
And you could respond to them in the same way you would respond to paper.
The color,
the texture,
the shapes.
You could work with them monochromatically like this.
Produce really dramatic results.
It's very easy to be influenced by work like this,
that is so playful and so imaginative,
and uses material in such an interesting way.
So that's Albers.
So those are five of my major influences.
Pete Swart, Paul Rand,
Sister Corita Kent,
Johanna Sitton, Joseph Albers.
There are many more,
but those five are really key for me.
In this lesson, I talked about my five main influences.
In the next lesson,
I'll go in-depth into two of those influences,
Johanna Sitton and Joseph Albers.
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