For many years I own a book presenting the painting of artist Ed Ruscha. Whenever I feel a little bit low I take the book to browse in it. It calms me down and inspires me. Since I am working with Biestmilch I was never happy with our ads. One always tries to make something new, something ground-breaking, something outstanding people won’t overlook so easily. This is very difficult nowadays. Especially the ads in the sports magazines I have to leaf through due to my job are mostly horrible, the photos are bad (athletes are no photo models!), and the text is not more than a superficial slogan.
Okay, my words are bold, I am aware of that. Anyhow, they reflect my view. I wanted to make something very different. The grafic designers I was working with simply didn’t have the skills to realize something different. I wanted to create ads that make a difference, so I started to play with words. I discarded all kinds of slogans that have been around our ads, and I thought of texts more like poems that give space to let your thoughts drift, an example is “time flies changes”…
But then, who is able to create the area, the atmosphere for the text. Grafic designers are no artists, they cannot do it. Many times I made the mistake when I had an idea that I wanted to realize by all means to forget that I need the people who can do it. I don’t know why it took me so long to think of my dear friend and painter Isabel Warner (I see her paintings everyday on my walls at home) as the one who was perfectly apt to do a job of this kind. She is as a maniac as I am 😉 … Actually, I was a little bit afraid that she might be reluctant to see her work as ads in strange sports magazines.
No, she was not, she was 100% positive.
And so we started this project. The goal was to make text and painting one piece, and not only to put a line of words on a canvas like a description. The lettering is all hand-made, and treated in different ways with acid, with heat, with sandpaper etc. A fabric emerged, exactly they way I wanted it.
2 ads are published now. I have no idea how they are received. But I actually I don’t care. I know that they are special, and we shall continue the series. The 2 themes you can see here we did until now.
