These are little plaster and caulk and chinese ink “paint bricks”. They are sort of a step in a series of moveable type type abstractions that can be sort of mixed and matched on a wall, the way a typesetter used to move lead type around doing lay outs for the printing presses. It’s the job my dad had out of the Geweber School when he went abroad to swinging London. He bacame a “Graphic Designer” more or less off the boat in New York because of the fashion for Swiss Geweber School Modernism (international style, etc.)… and an Art Director in a few weeks. He told me what a riot it was to go from being low low man typesetter in conservative London, to the head man in crazy New York. I think he never trusted it and fealt he’d pulled really one over on those “Stupid Americans”… but that was just his insecurity talking. He was pretty good I’d say, as objectively as I can. And won the Art Directors Club Award two years in a row for in house promotion (67, 68… first was a calander using his own paintinngs and a cool lay out with diffent type faces for each month… and the next year he used his friend’s psychedelic abstract photographs of New York City. I guess I’m thinking about my dad after seeing David Conrad’s new Pilot for Ghost Whisperer on CBS in the fall. This is the one where he is married to Jennifer Love Hewitt (and her breasts) who can see and speak to ghosts. I wasn’t expecting much, but I found the show sort of affecting… a real tear jerker in fact… if only because it sort of makes you think of anyone you may have lost and starts you wondering if they are looking over you, or whatever. Cheesy yes, but I’m a sucker for this conceit as I have fealt powerfully haunted at times (and it nearly drove me mad)…. So if they get some good scripts, I have a feeling that the Ghost/M. Night Shalyman vibe might work in the intimate space of television (for me it worked sort of better actually as you could space out and deal with your own drama while the t.v. fades to background). It is that abliity to cause empathy in the audience that the show will live or die on. Conrad was pretty good… relaxed and charminng… and Love Hewitt was cute and sort of oddly sexy, but looking like a woman now…. I think it may work. She has pretty great eyes that she can open up wide and get teary (and there are a lot of teary shots… nicely lit and all)… it is like looking at a puppy dog and damn if you don’t tear up in sympathy. It’s manipulative as shit, but it works. I’m sure there’s about a million ways they can fuck it up, but the chemistry on the pilot could be a lot worse.
The calandars were actually for a typographer, I now realise and not his add agency as I’d always believed. It was a nice break for him from doing pharmaceutical design (his was the orginal Clearasil package design with the German flag of skin tones (black, red, “flesh”). It was even printed in Switzerland and on good paper, judging by how well my print looks 38 years later (same year as my birth… Coincidence?). This next image, he had turned into a wall sculpture of wood and colored laminates and you could spin each ring to change the composition and the center circle was the screw that held the whole thing together… naturally it nearly crushed a few overzealous ring turners who would unsrew the center circle the whole three inches of thread length just to see what happened. It was a good antitheft device as the whole thing teetered and leaned onto the potential thief. Wouldn’t chop your legs off like a Stella, but it did its job none the less.
