Artist of the day

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Artist of the Day, November 28, 2023: Mucho, a Spanish design firm (#1969)

The Mucho team is scattered all over the world! With offices in Barcelona, San Francisco, New York and Paris they've pretty much got it covered. Let's chat with Barcelona based Creative Director, Marc Català, about the importance of visual language today; their public funded research project that's in the works;

We design with meaning. We find meaning and use images and ideas to convey it. Visual language is key, it is essential, it is how we speak today and brands too, through websites, videos, posts on social networks. Visual language is the 21st century language, and it has overcome the written word. And to say things with this language of images –like with any other– you need meaning. If you understand this, you can see how essential it is to design with meaning.

Who are your top five design crushes right now?
Marshall McLuhan. A media philosopher who understood media in the digital era better than any designer, and predicted the internet and social networks (including snapchat), 40 years ahead of his time. Elon Musk; to dream it is to design it, design and engineering to save the world. Socratic Design; it's not a person but a philosophy based design method to design how we could live, and to design moral codes for any project. It is being said that only moral companies will survive. That’s why it’s important.

All the partners at Mucho are involved in teaching. It is a fantastic learning process for ourselves, because it forces you to structure your knowledge so it can be explained. Teaching makes you think of what you think you know, and so it is a great experience which develops your own critical thinking. We also ask some of our designers at the studio to help us with the classes and come and teach, for the same reasons. Finally, we are preparing a big education project due to start next year in which we will concentrate all of our teaching and knowledge. It is an ambitious project of the highest standard, and we are very excited to be doing it.

What qualities and skills to you look for in a graduate?
There are really just three things. They are key and all the rest you can learn or doesn’t matter.
1. The capacity and the will to think.
2. The attitude and the character to want to work.
3. The curiosity to know the world and oneself.
It's easier said than done, as most people don’t want to think. With those actions all is possible. Without them there isn’t much to be done. I don’t believe in talent as a thing you are born with. I think that keeps people wondering if they have it or not, which is the wrong way to think about it. The thought is preposterous, toxic, and kills creativity.

© 2023. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Mucho or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

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Monday, November 27, 2023

Artist of the Day, November 27, 2023: Utagawa Hiroshige, a Japanese woodblock printing artist - Ukiyo-e (#1968)

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 –1858), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition.

Utagawa Hiroshige is recognized as a master of the ukiyo-e woodblock printing tradition, having created 8,000 prints of everyday life and landscape in Edo-period Japan with a splendid, saturated ambience. Orphaned at 12, Hiroshige began painting shortly thereafter under the tutelage of Toyohiro of the Utagawa school. His early work of narrow, vertical landscapes picturing thatched houses nestled between cliffs and vignettes of birds perched on flowering branches shows the influence of Chinese scroll painting as well as the previously dominant Kanō school of Japanese painting.

Much of Hiroshige’s work focuses on landscape. Partly inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s popular Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Hiroshige took a softer, less formal approach with his Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido (1833–34), completed after traveling that coastal route linking Edo and Kyoto. Mountains grow green and bands of salmon-colored sunrise hang in the mist in prints like Maisaka—No. 31, where traders and farmers mundanely pass by in the foreground.

Hiroshige’s prolific output was somewhat due to his being paid very little per series. Still, this did not deter him, as he receded to Buddhist monkhood in 1856 to complete his brilliant and lasting One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856–58). He died in 1858, 10 years before Monet, Van Gogh, Whistler, and a host of Impressionist painters became eager collectors of Japanese art. And so Hiroshige’s surging bokashi, or varied gradient printing, lives on—visibly influencing artists like Paul Gauguin (see the Art Institute’s Mahana no atua, 1894) and Frank Lloyd Wright.

For scholars and collectors, Hiroshige's death marked the beginning of a rapid decline in the ukiyo-e genre, especially in the face of the westernization that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Hiroshige's work came to have a marked influence on western European painting towards the close of the 19th century as a part of the trend in Japonism. Western European artists, such as Manet and Monet, collected and closely studied Hiroshige's compositions: Vincent van Gogh, for instance, painted copies of some Hiroshige prints.

© 2023. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Utagawa Hiroshige or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only