I had to get out of the house today, get away from the TV and see something with my own eyes again. I took my bike down to Brooklyn Heights so I could see the view from the Promenade that faces lower Manhattan, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. I also wanted to stop in on my friends Jason and Holly, since Holly, a teacher at a high school right by the World Trade Center, was settling down from an all-day ordeal of getting 20 students and herself home from ground zero.
All the views from across the East River were odd, but not horrific, since all the damage was west, along the Hudson River. You could see smoke but no wreckage. And the skyline was wrong. The dominant feature that was always taken for granted, sometimes appreciated, was just plain gone. People were out checking the scene, and it was odd mix: some people were enjoying a sunny day, some were taking tourist photos just as if the buildings were still there, and here and there people just sat crying or sitting silently.
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The view from the water by the landing of the Brooklyn Bridge |
Jason, Holly, and I watched the news for a while, but we had to get away for a while. We immersed ourselves at the movies for a spell, then returned to the Promenade for sunset.
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It’s CRAZY to see those large black spots in the skyline view. Everything ought to be lit up like Christmas, with the Towers topping it all off. The darkness is VERY eerie. |
Life is returning to normal in some ways. I go back to work tomorrow, and the restaurants and streets of Brooklyn were full of people, even if they were a little subdued. I’m very curious to see how the next few days go. People here have an incredible ability to adapt and reassert their daily lives. I wonder how long it will take for daily life to conform to this new set of circumstances.
Well, back when I was a senior studying design in 
I was plucky, though, so I still kept reading about design and keeping myself involved in the field, hoping I was just in a rut. I tried to get the most out of my student membership in the 
It wasn’t just the final products that struck a chord, but also the way Art spoke about how he came up with stuff. He hadn’t become enslaved to a Mac, and has never really made use of a computer part of his work at all. He made stuff with his hands, pushed around typeset galleys, and experimented with what could be done on or off press. He played with the materials at hand, and tried some things just to see if it could be done. A cruddy budget could be an opportunity to see how interesting a picture could be made with photocopies and white-out. If a retro-style wood-type poster was needed, why not just have an authentic old poster shop set the type? If a burnt edge was needed for the design, why worry about creating an illusion when it’s simpler to singe the stack of press sheets? This is what real “thinking outside the box” was about before that became such a terrible cliché. And behind all this was a sharp wit, a really solid sense of typographic texture and form, and an understanding of craftsmanship needed by the designer, the printer, the typesetter, and anyone involved. It was so damn refreshing. It was exhilirating to see that there really could be a place in design for all the other things I loved and was learning: drawing, printmaking, photography, painting, whatever. It made me realize that design could be what I made of it. It could be personal and expressive and still work for someone else. It could be tactile and physical and textural, not just a flat abstraction or a printout.
I raced home that night with my head overflowing with ideas and inspiration. Nothing specific, but just these flashes of other ways to try things I’d been doing all along. I took out a couple of huge pieces of paper and feverishly scrawled all the ways I could think of to make images or to set type or make marks on paper or deal with paper’s third dimension. It sounds corny, yeah, but that single brainstorming session opened the floodgates for me. I wound up redoing all the projects I’d worked on that semester, starting most of them over from scratch and doing about a million times better. I got the same grades I would have otherwise, probably, but that wasn’t the point. I realized how to do work that I was excited about, that I was proud of.
With a few lapses in conviction over the years, those lessons have stayed with me, really playing a huge part in making me the designer — the artist, if you can generalize like that — that I am today. This is not to say that I do work that looks like Art Chantry’s. Far from it. I’ve worked out a lot of my own visual and conceptual and philosophical ideas over the years, and seem to have arrived at an approach that is certainly my own, little seen as it may be these days. (I might also point out that this is the same approach that led me to give up on working as a designer for the time being, freeing me to think of design as my medium of choice for personal work, not just a job I happen to like.) No, I learned how to incorporate play and handicraft and integrity into my work. I learned that slick or flashy is not always good, and that new solutions can come from old tricks, as long as you maintain a fresh perspective. I know, that’s a lot of ethereal-sounding hoo-hah, but it’s true. Damnit!