A Moment of Peace, Q. Cassetti, 2010, digitalAnother day predicted to be early Fall. Cool days and nights, though there is talk that the weekend will be summery and warm enough to swim. That would be excellent. Never enough swimming this summer.
I had a nice lunch with the artistic director of the Hangar Theatre, Peter Flynn. We talked about the outstanding things that kept people from their expertise this summer and then settled down to talking about next summer’s Mainstage performances. As we ate lunch, I was delighted and thrilled as Peter told me the stories of these performances so we could suss out what the imagery might be for each piece. The plays are: Rounding Third, Ragtime, another August Wilson: Gem of the Ocean, Tim Pinckney’s Ever So Humble, and the stage version of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Peter took me through each one, entertaining me, underlining important stuff…so I feel like the pen can hit the paper and start going. I am most puzzled with what to do for the Rocky Horror as it is so well known ..from the movie, that breaking from the iconography of the lips and the dripping type will be hard (and maybe not recognizable. So onward. I am aiming to have the graphics completed by November to get a jump start for the next season well in advance of 2011. It would be so great to be able to get the Hangar on a schedule that is more like a retail one (all the holiday stuff done and printed by August 1)…or in the case of Mainstage, all the stuff ready to roll by January 1. I can hope for that.
I am surprisingly liking all this graphic illustration work. I have gotten my head out of “its a logo” to its a picture…enjoying working the curves in illustrator (with a fineness that even my hands could not render and a knowledge of french curves beyond my elementary understanding). Making lovely shapes, reversing shapes out of them As I was coming back from dropping Alex off at the park this morning, driving through all the greenery, the lake views and the summer fields, I thought about this emerging approach, and would like to do some more pattern studies in a grid/or in a grid with some obvious overlaps per yesterday’s Bird Collection. I have broken my own rules by adding gradients to this style (one of my personal rules has, until now, been no obvious Adobe Illustrator tomfoolery with filters and the “cheats”). But this work occasionally wants a bit of gradient and I do not think the tiger tooth approach is as nice in this approach. If I were working with cut paper or screenprints, a gradient or screen blend is not out of the palette of options available. So, you will see a bit of tentative gradients plunked into this work.
Gotta go. I have to dial into a call.