Fusion: Word and Image by Marshall Arisman
by Bennett Holzworth, (1 comments)
Marshall shared his shorthand notes with us in a preview for this blog. It is interesting to compare his finished session with his notes. As a designer that is slowly becoming more of a writer, this session is very pertinent to what I do here on the blog. Of course we as designers work with images and words on a daily basis.
Here is some of his advice about writing. Write about what you know about. Anything else is plagiarism. If you don’t like dogs don’t write a children’s story about a dog. He also talked about how he recommends that a writer should write by hand first because it looks too finished when you write on the computer. It was interesting to hear that perspective about writing since we hear it very often in reference to design. After you write it by hand, Marshall recommends that you read it into a tape recorder. If you can’t read it through then there are problems in your writing.
I have to admit that I was not very familiar with Marshall’s persona. He is definitely and individual. He is obviously a very visual and spiritual person. He has psychics in his family and he says that he sees auras. That is a hard one to digest for a person that doesn’t see them.
I liked what Marshal had to say about being autobiographical in your design and your writing. It seems easier to do this in writing than in design. He encourages his students to write stories and then base their design off of their writing.
I was kind of surprised that he didn’t focus a little more on incorporating images and words. He talked a lot about just writing and how to do it better. I enjoyed this, but I would think that quite a few people at this conference aren’t that concerned with writing. Am I wrong here?
He did spend some time talking about his upcoming book, Divine Elvis. This is going to be a strange book. He walked us through the story and some of the paintings and initial sketches. The story is fairly autobiographical. Many of the characters are based on his family. There are monkeys, auras, pedophiles and many other non-conventional subjects in this book. It will be interesting to see how this comes together.
I’m glad I attended this session and Marshall has definitely honed his craft and has a very specific way of doing things.
Comments (1)
Steve Corning said:
This was my first session, at my first conference, so I really did not know what to expect. For my first session this was a great choice. Marshall provided a very personal view of illustration and writing. I left the session feeling very inspired to create, which is what I was looking forward to in this first session. He talked about his background, and how it influences his art. He did provide some specifics, such as writing everyday, keeping a journal, and look at your own life for inspiration. As mentioned, his idea of reading your writing into a tape recorder and making sure it sounds right, makes a lot of sense. The video was beyond strange, and a little long, but still made his point. His slides were meant to inspire and serve as examples on how he finds his voice. As an illustrator, I found his work different, and complex. Part of his point seemed to be you don’t need a lot of words, if you have good images, which have meaning.
Posted on July 1, 2005