I have to admit I felt really discouraged after my last tutorial a couple of days ago and kind of had an ‘artistic crisis’. I begun all in a sudden to doubt my self and I just felt confused about what I was doing and why. All this after just some question of my tutor like who am I inspired by and why and who are they inspired by? etc. After that I just felt lost and in the wrong place until now. And it might seem a short period of time these two days but I felt every minute of it as if it was months.
Since the beginning of Uni I always felt energised and passionate in doing every brief and even if I’m still in the process of finding my style I never felt discouraged, on the contrary, finished the brief I felt I wanted to do more, just to have all my ideas out of my head and getting it lighter while proudly seeing my technical file getting thicker. Well, not this time. This time nobody assigned us a company but we had to chose it ourselves. Based on the style we found until now to be more keen of. And here all the problems begun. The responsibility of not only making the choice, but to justify it. And I was only able to realise what the problem was thanks to my mom that happened to be in the right place, learning a process of organising ideas from one of her lecturers and transmit it to me.
I knew I was attracted to this company’s designs but when I was asked again why I could barely say the words ‘abstract’ and ‘beautiful colours’. Common denominator of all designers if took them subjectively :).
This way of organising thoughts consists in a simple but very effective method: Describe, Analyse, Reflect and Reference. So I took my beloved company, the Timorous Beasties and began to look at each of their designs that I liked describing it the most accurately possible what I was seeing. At first it was ‘colourful’, ‘abstract’, ‘irregular patterns’. Then I took each voice and described it more accurately trying to transform in words what I was seeing and why I liked that particular design or piece of it. I zoomed in the first one and saw layers of what seemed to me individual designs. The colours of the background layer were neutral cold tones probably ink based from the way they were merging into one another ending in irregular shapes like they dropped some ink on a paper and cropped it where the shape was ending. The top layer that before was just other splashes of beautiful colours it resulted in being an organic Damask pattern composed by flowers and leaves reminding the Baroque style. At this point I could also associate their historic influence they claim to be inspired by but I could never see.
Everything was beginning to make sense. I could not only relate to most of their work by understanding why or why not but it helped me understand that classifying the little elements their designs were composed of could inspire mine in a constructive way. This is how I can take those elements I’m inspired by, because I fell them part of my personal taste, and change those that I don’t with the ones that more represents me, so I can actually make a collection that could enter their style but with my personal touch that it would make them different as well.
Quite a mental journey!
Anda Avramescu 