The Modern-Day Court Painter

Andrew Vicari, self-proclaimed “King of Painters. All images are from the BWW Society.

As I discussed in my last post a few days ago, imagery and symbols play an important role in how we remember the past. Going along with that theme and applying it to institutions like governments and organizations, it’s a pretty common occurrence to see the use of imagery as a means to subtly project a level of legitimacy and to tell a preferred story of past events.

An amazing and quirky example comes to mind that I’d like to share: A month ago, I read an interesting article in the New York Times about British artist Andrew Vicari. This man somehow found himself on board a plane destined for oil-spewing Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, where he made a series of connections that landed him the role of court painter to the ruling House of Saud. On the unsteady political ground of the Arabian peninsula, the Saudi royal family looked to Vicari to provide them with large, gradiose paintings that told the story of their rise to power. Over the course of several decades, Vicari wined and dined with royal elite from all over Europe and the Middle East while reeling in obscene amounts of money for, quite frankly, nothing more than cliché-laden amateur work. Continue reading…

Connecting to and Crafting the Past

My grandfather, John H. “Harry” Link (third from the left), just before getting his Marine haircut in 1942. Image from the Anderson Independent.

For a good while now, I have been fascinated with researching my family history. I think it all started with a project in the eighth grade, but it’s been ongoing ever since. I would guess that a reason that dabbling in geneaology is such a popular past time among Americans is because our history here is so new, at only a few hundred years old—wait, but what about the Native Americans?—that’s a sad story for another day. Nevertheless, odds are, the ancestors of most Americans came here in order to start new, perhaps even to forget their past in search of better opportunities. Continue reading…

Chris Pullman: Design that Matters

If you’ve ever spent time watching anything on PBS, chances are you’ve seen a moving version of the image above accompanied by a signature electronic crescendo. This three-second end title sequence was the work of WGBH design director Chris Pullman in the 1970s and it still airs today.

Last night I was fortunate to hear Chris Pullman speak at an AIGA event at SCAD Atlanta. Pullman was VP of Design at WGBH Boston from 1973 to 2008, during which time the small local public television outfit grew into a producer of one-third of PBS’s total national content, responsible for such institutions as Julia Child’s cooking show, This Old House, NOVA, Masterpiece Theatre, Frontline, and children’s shows such as Arthur and Zoom. On-air projects made up only a small percentage of Pullman’s work there. His team was responsible for creating companion guides for programming, fundraising and outreach pieces, books, and eventually a slew of interactive work. Continue reading…

The Designer As Cultural Curator

Special Exhibition at the Sackler Museum at Harvard University, 2010

It’s been almost nine months since Furman University sent me packing from its beautiful campus with my big purple diploma into the daunting landscape of “the real world.” I must say, it’s true that an education rooted in the liberal arts seems to make you observe the world closely, to take nothing for granted, and to question everything. All of that certainly didn’t go away when I graduated; however, I seem to have lost a good outlet for expanding on everything I’ve been thinking about. So, finally, after a few ill-fated attempts in the past, I’m really leaping into the blogosphere. Continue reading…