Paula Scher
I really loved watching and learning about these various artists. They all work in different mediums (music, paint, drawing, words, building materials, film) and have their own take on art and what it means to them. I wrote down some of my favorite parts.
Scher worked with jazz musician Wynton Marsalis on a poster for a musical event. He told her “whatever you do, it needs to be syncopated.” Syncopation is a form of percussion where all the beats are in order, but one of them is off.
Marsalis told Sher, “jazz guys are a little off too…they’re like the square peg that won’t fit in the round hole.”
“I operate by instinct. I’ve never been a refiner,” Scher says. Instead, she works in quick, bold strokes that come very quickly. She made the Citi Bank logo on a diner napkin in just a few minutes. “It takes just a second, but it’s also every single experience I’ve ever had over the years that’s still inside my head.”
Milton Glaser
"Art gives people something in common," Glaser says.
Glaser, on aging:
“One of the unfortunate things that happens to people as they get older is that they lose their capacity for astonishment. I’m happy to say I’m still astonished and amazed all the time. One of the benefits of being involved in the arts; you’re always finding new things to learn about.”
Mark Romanek: He's intense.
Mark Romanek
Filmmaker Mark Romanek is the master of creating intense dramatic illusions. When you create art, he tells us, there’s a series of decisions to make. He obsesses over these details. His secret is leaving things with a sense of being incomplete. Leaving the audience with a question is more engaging, he tells us. When art has an “it is what it is” quality, there’s no enigmatic nature to it, and there’s no guessing to be made, no questions to be asked, which is less engaging.
“Changing your expectations is what keeps music interesting,” Byrne says.
The Illustrated Malcom Gladwell
My favorite artist series selection was “The Illustrated Malcom Gladwell” with artist Brian Rea and designer Paul Sahre. Gladwell says the storytellers biggest fear is losing the audience to distraction. So it was important that the drawings not distract from the story, but rather support it and keep the audience engaged. Brian and Paul described their illustrations like a curvy wave over a straight line. Sometimes it would align with the story and sometimes it would swerve to the right or left, but the design was always parallel to the story.
Gladwell
My favorite part of this piece was when Gladwell talked about one of his big influences—his father. His father, he tells us, divides the world into subjects he feels he knows more about than most people (math, gardening, and dogs), and everything else (which he feels other people know more about). On topics he knows nothing about, he keeps his mouth shut. He just accepts the fact that he’s going to be in a subordinate position. “I think that’s a beautiful way to live your life,” Gladwell says. “To attempt to impose your will on areas in life where you’re not qualified is foolish. So once I accepted I was sharing the project with two incredibly talented people, my chief concern was that I would become too involved and screw things up.”
Daniel Libeskind—Architect
"You can't be a pessimist and build a building," says Libeskind
Libeskind tells us each building poses it’s own questions. A good building, he says, propels your consciousness into awareness—not only about what’s there, but about what’s not there (i.e. what are you longing for? What are you missing?) Libeskind’s main question is “How will it carry people into a world that is good?”
My favorite part was watching his scribbling turn into a building sketch. He says, “Sometimes when you first start, you’re just scribbling stuff. But sometimes you find that it’s not actually nonsense, sometimes it turns into something you’ve been thinking about.” I love how this shows the mind’s intuition working in syncopation with the physical act of scribbling.