Baltimore

We like stuff. So do visionary artists. I can't believe yesterday was my first visit to the Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore. Chris Roberts-Antieau and J.J. Cromer are a couple of my new favorite artists. Self-taught, outsider art.  Over the winter I saw the James Castle exhibit at the PMA. Like a lot of the artists in the Visionary, he developed his own visual language and used any/all of the materials he had on hand to make his art. 

Justin was reminded of Dan Deacon while we were there. It did seem appropriate that such playful, glittery, silly things were housed in Baltimore where: 

There is a mountain of snow, up past the big glen.
We have a castle enclosed, there is a fountain
Out of the fountain flows gold, into a huge hand
That hand is held by a bear who had a sick band

Of ghosts and cats
And pigs and bats
With brooms and bats
And wigs and rats
And play big dogs like queens and kings
And everyone plays drums and sings

I want to make my graphic design more fun. More absurd. 

Still, this The City from Below poster is a step in the right direction - more me.  

Pause

It's been a few days since my internship ended and classes don't start until Tuesday. Today then, is a pause between what was honestly a fairly relaxed, low-stress foray into professional life and what I expect will be a very intense final semester. 

My internship ended well. We were working on illustrations for an editorial in Boston Magazine the last couple days and Oliver pretty much based the design off of my idea. It was good to feel useful, especially since there were some points where I questioned my competency. In Illustrator particularly. I learned a lot about it in an effort to avoid embarrassing myself and a lot from just watching how he did things. 

I'm not so clear on when it would be ok for me to post an image of this poster I did for The City From Below, but I'm impatient so I think I should be safe with this detail. I can put up the real thing sometime in March.