Vampires From Africa Manifesto
I. Ideas > skill
II. Don’t be a musician!
III. Cool > smart
IV. It’s not about money or being liked it’s about expressing ourselves!
V. Everything should have an expiration date, especially art
VI. Fuck originality
VII. Don’t stop creating
— (via)
Lanny Sommese on teaching graphic design:
“Our belief is that at the heart of each project should be an idea that is fueled by the unique aspects of the problem at hand. The first step in the process is to find out as much as I can about the subject to assure that an idea has specificity. The audience and budget are also considered, as are the functional aspects, such as readability etc. Once a relevant concept is in place it drives the rest of the creative process. In this way the concept, to a large extent, dictates the visual approach… Once a style has been selected, its inherent potentials and characteristics “kick-in” and temper the realization of the final product.
Language is crucial as well, because of the context the words provide for the visuals. Ideally, the viewer will use the language to grasp the meaning of the image (sometimes the other way around) and entice the audience to interact emotionally and intellectually with the imagery.
Ideally each project is the product of a perfectly relevant idea manifested by appropriate imagery. It’s restrained-all that is non-essential is eliminated and form appears to flow effortlessly from content. It communicates-targeting an audience that is “tuned-in” to the nuances of meaning surrounding the visual and verbal aspects of the image. The message is, at once, literal and metaphoric and understandable.”
“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
— Gustave Gilbert
“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change.”
— Octavia Butler
“I picture my journey through life as a circle, as if I am travelling around a sphere, like an orange. I started at the bottom and began to climb up the side, becoming more confident as I went along. Sometimes life got difficult and I was hanging upside down, traversing it as best I could. When I reached the top, I tipped over and began to go down the other side. This part of the journey seems to be going faster. I find I’m drawn to behaviours and people that remind me of my past; even if they’re difficult, they’re familiar. I recognise some of my parents’ traits creeping into my character. My true nature – which I suppressed in order to function and succeed as an adult – is surfacing again. I’m shy and inclined to introversion. Still I keep on travelling to the underside of the orange, no way to stop it.”
— Viv Albertine
Harvey Kurtzman on artist Wallace ‘Wally’ Wood:
“Wally Wood was a workhorse and I feel that Wally devoted himself so intensely to his work that he burned himself out. He overworked his body. That’s my own observation. Wally had a tension in him, an intensity that he locked away in an internal steam boiler, and I always had the feeling that Wally was capable of erupting — which he apparently did occasionally — but he had that quality of frustration and tension and I think it ate away his insides and the work really used him up. I think he delivered some of the finest work that was ever drawn, and I think it’s to his credit that he put so much intensity into his work at great sacrifices to himself.”
“Be kind, be involved, believe in your art… At a time when people tell you art is not important, that is always the prelude to fascism. When they tell you it doesn’t matter, when they tell you a fucking app can do art you say, if it’s that important, why the fuck do they want it so bad? The answer is because they think they can debase everything that makes us a little better, a little more human. And that, in my book, and in my life, includes monsters.”
— Guillermo del Toro
“There are a lot of ways in which the destructive forces around us want us to be consumers, want us to be malleable and gullible. Anything that makes us something else—somebody with a robust sense of self, somebody with a sense of pleasure, somebody with independence of thought—is not the revolution itself, but it might help reinforce the character who can resist…
Being disconnected from curiosity about the production of things, from independent thought and investigation, from understanding the systems around you—that makes you a better subject of totalitarianism.”
— Rebecca Solnit (via)
“I always say that I basically make my work “to order”, by which I mean to my “inner order”. It is really inside me, what’s going to come out. The way I see it, each individual accumulates in his or her lifetime. That which accumulates inside him or her needs to find a way out. Basically, everybody can do that, but most people do not find a way of releasing it, they have certain blockage. There is no such thing as talent.
The artist is able to reach their resources, and overcome the block. But a clerk who sits in the office, obviously, has his blockage and cannot. This so-called “professionalism”, is much more a matter of technique, or skill than creativity. You can see that in naive art, or folk art, if an individual wants to express him or herself, they find a way to do it if they really want to.”
— Jan Švankmajer (via)
“I’m not very precious about my work. If I see something of mine that’s been stolen I get pissed, of course. But otherwise artists and designers all learn from each other. Most ideas have been done before so you just have to keep doing them in a better way. We all learn from the past so the best thing to do is just keep discovering things.”
— Seymour Chwast (via)
