Syd Mead

Syd Mead is one of the most celebrated concept designers, artists, futurists and illustrators of our time, having been responsible for many memorable designs from feature films to interiors and even toys. Over the last 50 years, Syd Mead has created startling pictures for clients all over the world. His technique infuses finished scenarios with a vivid reality, allowing the viewer to gain a look into many visions of future worlds. He has designed and illustrated for corporations, motion pictures, themed entertainment, and a wide range of transportation projects. His most well-known works include production designs for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, TRON, Aliens and 2010, the pivotal science fiction movies that got many budding visual effects artists inspired to enter professional careers in this field.   Off screen, Syd has designed a 747 interior, a yacht and the Spaceship 2056 pavilion in Japan. Numerous magazines have featured his art and he has published several books of his work including Sentinel, Sentury, Kronolog, Kronoteko, KronovectaandOblagon.

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Anita Kunz

Anita Kunz was born in Toronto, Canada in 1956. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1978.  She has worked for international magazines, book publishers and advertising agencies, including The New York Times, GQ, Sony Music, Random House Publishing and many others.  Using a combination of watercolors and gouache, she has produced critically acclaimed paintings which have been featured in Graphis (Switzerland), Communication Arts Magazine (USA), Idea and Creation magazines (Japan), and Applied Arts (Canada).  She has been honored with many prestigious awards and her paintings and sculptures have appeared in galleries worldwide.  Her works are in the permanent collections at the Library of Congress, the Canadian Archives in Ottawa, the MusEe Militaire de France in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, and a number of her Time Magazine cover paintings are in the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.  In 1997 she received the Les Usherwood Lifetime Achievement Award from the Advertising and Design Club of Canada.  Anita was recently named one of the fifty most influential women in Canada by the National Post Newspaper.

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Dennis Allain

Dennis Allain, AIA is an award winning architect, artist, and designer. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1967, and from an early age demonstrated an unshakeable desire to create.  He attended Wentworth Institute, graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture degree. Dennis Allain was the winner of the prestigious Hugh Ferris Memorial Prize for “Architecture in Perspective 21.” “Architecture in Perspective” is the preeminent exhibition of architectural illustration in the world.  Each year the best works of architectural illustration from around the globe are assessed in the competition organized by the American Society of Architectural Illustrators. This year’s competition drew nearly 500 entries from five continents. Sixty pieces were selected by an esteemed jury including the special category awards. The exceptional works in this 21st annual exhibition--60 pieces selected by a jury of respected professionals in architecture, illustration, fine art, or design--were culled from hundreds of entries.  Mr. Allain presented and discussed his work, demonstrated his digital drawing process and reviewed portfolios of Communication Arts students.

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BRAD HOLLAND: POST MODERN, POST MORTEM

Brad Holland: Visiting Scholar in Communication Arts for 2005-2006
April 13, April 20, April 27, 2006
Thursdays at 2pm,
Bowe Street Deck
Room 535, 609 Bowe Street

His series of talks entitled “Post Modern, Post Mortem” will be about the role of drawing and painting as a form of popular art in a postmodern society. Over the course of the year students will be exposed to seminars focusing on different aspects of post modernism.  Brad Holland will be returning this month to present the final three lectures of his series. The names of his lectures are as follows:

1.) We’re All Experiments
2.) Public Intimacy
3.) The "Gilded" Age of Illustration
4.) Express Yourself, It's Later Than You Think
5.) Folk Artists in Electronic Winter
6.) The Left Brain Doesn't Know What the Right Brain is Doing

Brad is a self-taught artist and author whose work has appeared in nearly every major American publication as well as in feature films. In 1999, he was voted by the editors of RSVP, the artist’s directory, as the one artist who has had the single greatest impact on the illustration field during the last twenty-five years. He has been awarded the prestigious Hamilton King award and in 2005 he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

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LET'S TALK ABOUT RUSSIAN ART

April 6, 2006
Thursdays @ 3pm
Franklin Terrace Building
Room 02 in Basement, 812 Franklin Street

Lecture by Albert Ephsteyn

Albert Ephsteyn is a painter and consummate draftsman, who was born in Russia. He has a rich and comprehensive understanding of 19th and 20th century Russian Art. We are pleased to have his expertise on an important part of Russian and European history. Mr. Ephsteyn is adjunct professor in Communication Arts.

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BRAD HOLLAND: POST MODERN, POST MORTEM

March 9, March 23, and March 30
Thursdays @ 3pm
Bowe Street Deck
Room 535, 609 Bowe Street

We are pleased to welcome Brad Holland, Visiting Scholar in Communication Arts for 2005-2006.

Brad is a self-taught artist and author whose work has appeared in nearly every major American publication as well as in feature films. In 1999, he was voted by the editors of RSVP, the artist’s directory, as the one artist who has had the single greatest impact on the illustration field during the last twenty-five years. He has been awarded the prestigious Hamilton King award and in 2005 he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

His series of talks entitled “Post Modern, Post Mortem” will be about the role of drawing and painting as a form of popular art in a postmodern society. Over the course of the year students will be exposed to seminars focusing on different aspects of post modernism
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Visiting Artist: Robert Cottingham
March 2, Thursday 2 pm.
Student Commons Commonwealth Ballroom A
907 Floyd Avenue

For decades, my paintings have examined familiar, yet somewhat obsolete, objects from our recent past. Whether these canvases have depicted houses, movie marquees and other commercial signs, railroad cars, cameras, typewriters, or machine parts, the reference, for me, has always been to our mid-twentieth century consciousness, and the ingenuity and imagination prevailing in our culture at that time. I want to continue exploring the iconic power of these artifacts and the impact they have had on my life. In so doing, I hope to also convey to the viewer some sense of the American experience.
-Robert Cottingham 2006

Cottingham is an internationally known painter whose work is represented in the following collections:

The Tate Gallery in London, The Art Council of Great Britain in London, The Ludwig Collection in Cologne, Germany, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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BRAD HOLLAND: POST MODERN, POST MORTEM

November 17 @ 3pm
Room 1031 Oliver Hall
Physical Science Wing
1001 W. Main St
First floor, second door on the right when you walk in the front door.

We are pleased to welcome Brad Holland, Visiting Scholar in Communication Arts for 2005-2006.

Brad is a self-taught artist and author whose work has appeared in nearly every major American publication as well as in feature films. In 1999, he was voted by the editors of RSVP, the artist’s directory, as the one artist who has had the single greatest impact on the illustration field during the last twenty-five years. He has been awarded the prestigious Hamilton King award and in 2005 he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

His series of talks entitled “Post Modern, Post Mortem” will be about the role of drawing and painting as a form of popular art in a postmodern society. Over the course of the year students will be exposed to seminars focusing on different aspects of post modernism. The seminars are listed below. Times and dates to be announced

1.) We’re All Experiments - [Lecture with slides] A historical overview of the relationship between art and the societies in which art is produced - and how a major change in an existing social order requires (or brings about) a new approach to art.  For example, the aristocratic societies that produced artists such as Rembrandt and Velasquez are gone.  So are the primitive cultures that saw everyday objects turned into folk art.  No one knows how artists are going to fare in modern mass democracies.  Every artist’s career is an experiment.

2.) Public Intimacy - In terms of grandeur, the Renaissance, with its church-commissioned frescoes, was probably the Golden Age of western art.  But the Reformation created the modern concept of individuality.  And with the invention of the printing press artists could use illustrations in pamphlets and books to speak to individuals person to person, finding the individual within a mass audience.  This was a major change in the way art reached people - even though for several hundred years, artists never took full advantage of the printing press - unlike writers who from the beginning sought the widest possible audience for their work.  By the time artists finally embraced the potential of the press - with the invention of offset lithography, full-color presses and fast-drying inks - the work they did was dismissed as illustration - as if the integrity of any work can be defined by its purpose, its means of production or dissemination.  

Now that artists have finally started to make full use of commercial printing, the Internet presents an even newer challenge to the marketing and disseminating of graphic art.  Will popular artists learn to control this new tool to their advantage, or will they let middlemen determine how art is created and distributed?

3.) The "Gilded" Age of Illustration - The "Golden Age of Illustration" is the usual name given to the period that produced work by artists such as Pyle, Wyeth, Parrish and Rockwell.  But one could just as easily find a Golden Age in the era of Gilray and Hogarth in England, Hokusai and Hiroshige in Japan, or in the developments in Mexico that began with Posada's woodcuts in the popular press and led to the Mexican mural paintings of Rivera and Orozco.

Seen in this broader context, Americas "Golden Age of Illustration" was just an enormously popular genre of art - one that signified the emergence of the modern mass media and defined the rise of a new middle class.  The kind of illustration that was so popular during this period has now been replaced by the movies.  But as a collaborative art form, movies are a kind of factory-made product, reflecting the work of teams of craftsmen, the commercial interests of the producer and the tastes of the public.  For graphic artists, who still want to make art as an individual enterprise, the challenge of finding viability in a mass culture is as open to innovation as ever before.

4.) Express Yourself, It's Later Than You Think - The pejorative distinction between art and illustration had its roots in the French Revolution, when artists such as David and Ingres politicized art, using it for didactic and iconic purposes, just as the church had previously used it to promote faith.  By the eve of the 20th Century, didactic historical paintings had become the highest form of serious art.  To make headway against this, "Modern Artists" such as Picasso began to disparage all representational art as "illustration."  

While Modernism might have defined its achievement as clearing the decks for a greater acceptance of diverse forms of expression, many artists - perhaps beguiled by the social revolutions sweeping Europe - chose to portray modernism as a "revolution" against the "decadence" of middle class culture.  A hundred years later, this definition of art as cultural revolution has become such an ingrained cliché that many artists have forgotten there was ever any other reason for making art in the first place.

In this environment, the challenge for artists is to examine the well-known canard that art exists to "push limits" or "transgress boundaries."  Nothing is so subversive to the creative imagination as an uncontested cliché.

5.) Folk Artists in Electronic Winter - In the 1950's television began to replace mass-circulation magazines.  And as magazines reinvented themselves for niche markets, illustrators and designers began to experiment with new ways to get the attention of readers.  This led to the adoption of styles, forms and approaches that would once have been associated with fine artists, folk artists, naïve artists, even the art of the insane.  

Rather that "illustrating" a story or article, artists encouraged editors to accept independent images, created around the theme of a text.  These images could then be married to the text, a juxtaposition that created a form of popular art quite different from the old concept of illustration.

6.) The Left Brain Doesn't Know What the Right Brain is Doing - Because public education focuses on left brain functions such as speech, many artists learn what they learn about art as a series of concepts.  But concepts are an intellectual - not a sensory - means of understanding.  To express oneself in visual terms, it's good to examine how you can say things with pictures that you can't with words.

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Alice Carter
Visiting Artist

Alice Carter is an award winning illustrator and a professor in the Animation/Illustration Program in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State. Her illustration clients have included Lucas Film Ltd., Rolling Stone Magazine, and The New York Times. Her illustrations have been exhibited at the New York Society of Illustrators, in the Communication Arts Art Annual, and the Print Regional Design Annual. She has won Best of Show Honors from the AR Show USA: 100 Best Annual Reports, the Hatch Awards of the Boston Ad Club, Simpson Printed Paper, and the Western Art Directors West Coast Show. Her recent publications include: The Art of National Geographic, The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love, Thomas Eakins, and Cecilia Beaux: A Modern Painter in the Gilded Age. .

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Barron Storey
Visiting Artist

Born in Dallas, Texas, Barron Storey was educated at Art Center School in Los Angeles. He has worked for Ziff Davis, Time, Boys Life, The New York Times, Saturday Review, The Franklin Library, National Geographic, American Heritage, as well as corporate clients and the United States Information Agency and NASA. His awards include the gold medal of the New York Society of Illustrators, and its Distinguished Educator Award. He is represented in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, The American Museum of Natural History and the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institute. He received the Eisner Award for his work for DC Vertigo’s Sandman comics. He is a painter, a musician and has worked in theater and the performance art in San Francisco for the past twenty years. Barron’s visual journals, a daily endeavor since the 70’s, are in their 137th volume. He has taught at SVA, Pratt Institute, Syracuse University in New York and at Art Center, the Academy of Art, Pixar, and the California College of Art and San Hose University in California.

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The Art of Promotion: Lisa L. Cyr
Visiting Artist

Wednesday, April 13, 2005
3:00pm to 6:00pm
Auditorium
School of Engineering
601 West Main Street

In today’s volatile marketplace, survival is dependent upon the ability to make an impact with key clients. An insightful lecture by author and artist Lisa L. Cyr will assist artists in breaking through the competitive landscape with engaging and thought-provoking promotions. Participants are encouraged to bring samples of their work for consideration in future editorial and book projects.

Lisa L. Cyr is an artist, author, and national lecturer. In addition to her speaking engagements, Cyr writes for many of the industry trade publications including Communication Arts, Step Inside Design, How, ID, Alt Pick, and Applied Arts.

She is currently working on her latest book, Innovative Promotions At Work (Rockport Publishers). A graduate from The Massachusetts College of Art (BFA) and Syracuse University (MA), Cyr’s creative work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her work is also in the permanent collection of the Museum of American Illustration, NYC. She works in partnership with her husband Christopher Short, 3D illustrator and animator.

Cyr’s latest books The Art of Promotion, Brochure Design that Works, and Graphic Design that Works will be available for viewing. (www.cyrstudio.com)

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