January 13-February 6, 2009
9600 College Way North, IB 1322, located next to the bookstore

This gallery show features artists influenced by math and science, and ponders the question, “When will I ever use this in real life?” Well, these artists found a way to do just that. Check out the fabulous artwork in person if you can, featured artists are listed below along with their url.

All images and artwork are copyright protected by the individual artist. Please be respectful and pay credit where credit is due.

FEATURED ARTISTS:

Renee Adams  www.punchgallery.org

David Ehlert  www.cognitionstudio.com

David Eisenhour  www.eisenhoursculpture.com

Justin Gibbens  www.justingibbens.com

Patricia Hagen  www.patriciahagen.com

Eric Olson  http://erico-art.com/ideas/index.html

Cathy Sarkowsky  www.cathysarkowsky.com

Grace Willard www.flickr.com/photos/GraceWillard

Frederic Wong  www.nonactionpainting.com

Cognition Studio’s Kristine Johnson recently wanted a “more hands on” feel for specific projects and found making good use of the letterpress to get that unique quality in a world filled with 6 color printing, aqueous coating and non-recycled materials. Making custom art pieces that have a personal touch, but that are balanced by cost effectiveness and have a cool factor can be challenging but very rewarding.

Here is a little background: “Letterpress is the oldest of the traditional printing techniques and remained the only important one from the time of Gutenberg, about 1450, until the development of lithography late in the 18th century and, especially, offset lithography early in the 20th.

Originally the ink-bearing surface for printing a page of text was assembled from individual types by a typesetter or compositor, letter by letter and line by line. The first keyboard-actuated typesetting machines, the Linotype and the Monotype, were introduced in the 1890s.

Letterpress was originally carried out on platen presses, in which the paper is pressed against the flat, inked form by a flat platen; later, the platen was replaced by a roller in the flat-bed cylinder press; still later, the printing form was wrapped around one cylinder and the paper was passed between this cylinder and a second, creating a rotary press.

Letterpress can produce work of high quality at high speed, but it requires much time to adjust the press for varying thicknesses of type, engravings, and plates. To compete with offset printing, letterpress printers have developed printing plates made from a photosensitive plastic sheet that can be mounted on metal.” Source - http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/337488/letterpress-printing

Taking purely digital creations and translating them into letterpress crafted pieces isn’t as easy as you would think. Having a clear understanding of how presses work, what happens to the ink when pressed into the paper and working with the limitation of vector (line) based artwork and one color can be challenging for young designers who’ve trained solely in a digital era.

My recommendation, focus on getting back to the basics…really think about your design in terms of contrast, composition and messaging. Working out a design that translates into letterpress means ditching all you know about Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or HTML. It means thinking in black and white, the balance of space, form and function. Thinking about the page, how the design is effected by the hand holding it, the physical user experience. Throw in the delicate play of color on paper: ink bleeding, paper pushing, texture in your hand and all of a sudden your possibilities seem endless! But not really. Just like any medium, personal restraint is clearly important and working within the constraints of the medium are vague to newcomers.

So how do you work with the limitations but push the envelope? Think outside the box. And rely on what you do know. Good design is simply good design. The use of the letterpress medium is just a bonus. My advice to young designers wanting to dabble in letterpress: 1) take a class (it’s fun to get your hands dirty); 2) design in black and white. Think hard about what your brain sees and play with that image/experience until you have achieved that ‘a-ha!’ moment. Remember you can’t throw the kitchen sink at a letterpress design (and you can’t do it quickly either, they call it a craft for a reason), but you can think outside of the box to achieve that “wow” feeling by applying innovative thinking you cull from the digital world that you do know and love so much.

“The process requires a high degree of craftsmanship, but in the right hands, letterpress excels at fine typography. It is used by many small presses that produce fine handmade limited-edition books, artists’ books, and high-end ephemera such as greeting cards and broadsides.

To bring out the best attributes of letterpress, printers need to understand the capabilities and advantages of what can be a very unforgiving medium. For instance, since most letterpress equipment prints only one color at a time (unlike presses for offset printingfour-color process printing), printing multiple colors can be challenging. The inking system on letterpress equipment is less precise than on offset presses, which can pose problems with some graphics: detailed, white (or “knocked out”) areas, such as small, serif type, or very fine halftone, surrounded by fields of color, can fill in with ink and lose definition. However, a skilled printer can overcome most of these problems.

While less common in contemporary letterpress printing, it is possible to print halftoned photographs, via photopolymer plates, on letterpress equipment. However, letterpress printing’s strengths are crisp lines, patterns and other graphics, and typography.” Source – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterpress_printing

The letterpress movement has been helped by the emergence of a number of organizations that teach letterpress such as Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Book & Paper Arts, New York’s Center for Book Arts, Studio on the Square and The Arm NYC, the San Francisco Center for the Book, Bookworks, Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts, Black Rock Press and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

Affordable photopolymer platemakers and milled aluminum bases, have allowed letterpress printers to produce type and images derived from digital fonts and scans. Photopolymer plates have encouraged the rise of “digital letterpress” in the 21st Century, allowing a small number of firms to flourish commercially.

Here are some of my favorite resources:

• http://www.briarpress.org/1930
• http://www.sternandfaye.com/
• http://www.themandatepress.com/
• http://www.artcraftprinting.com/
• http://www.flickr.com/groups/397879@N22/
• http://ilovetypography.com/2008/07/24/letterpress-from-scratch/
  

If you’re in the medical, technical or scientific fields then it’s worth your time checking out the award winners announced on The Lennart Nilsson Award web site. The award is based on the world-renowned Swedish photographer and scientist, Lennart Nillson. This man is an amazing visionary and even if you’re not in the aforementioned fields listed above, you’ll love his work!

The Lennart Nilsson Award goes out to those that follow his visionary qualities and this year is a choice selection! Anders Persson’s is the award winner:

For the development of new imaging technologies and methods, which are extremely useful in health care and medical research.

Sample image of Anders Persson

When you go to the web site, you can watch short movies or individual photos of his work. Congrats Dr. Persson! An award justly deserved!

Enjoy!
Dave

Having a better understanding of nature in all its forms is one of the reasons why I became a medical illustrator. I love getting in close and seeing how things work, behave, grow and exist.

For the first time, it is possible to actually watch the initial 24 hours of the life of an embryo at the cellular level.

With a newly developed microscope that uses a sheet of light to scan a living organism from many different dimensions, scientists were able to track the complex cellular organization of a zebrafish embryo as it grows from a single cell to 20,000 cells.

To watch a 0:50 second time-lapse, please visit this Wired Science blog post. Hope you will enjoy this post as much as I have. The potential to better understand embyronic development is incredible.

Cheers!
Dave

The Radiology Art web site takes everyday objects one step further than the naked eye. Info on the Project:

Since the summer of 2007, the Radiology Art project has been underway. This is a project dedicated to the deeper visualization of various objects that hold unique cultural importance in modern society. So far, these objects have included toys, convenience-related foods, and personal electronics.

Be sure to watch the movies on this site to see a full 360° revolve on some of the images like the Chicken McNuggets shown below. I’d love to see a before shot, like this image here and then have a DICOM scan of what they look like after you’ve eaten them. Mmmm….

CT Scan of 6-piece Chicken McNuggets

Enjoy!
Dave

This exhibit is on display from August 30, 2008 – January 4, 2009 and if you’re in the area, please be sure to check this out. If you have an appreciation for artists that have achieved mastery of a medium, you won’t want to miss out…besides, it’s free! 

Richly detailed, incredibly vivid paintings took our breath away while awe inspiring engravings of architecture and encyclopedic cataloging of animals, shells, insects, and so forth had us shaking our heads in disbelief at their quality and execution. 

Below is an excerpt from the Frye’s web site on this exhibit:

Focusing on the French invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt features engravings from the Description de l’Égypte (1809–1828), the seminal multi-volume work that remains the most important European scholarly study of ancient and modern Egypt.

All I can say is that I left the Frye inspired and I’m certain Kris felt the same way. Please find the time to attend and let us know what your thoughts were here in our blog. While you’re there, check out “Gaze: Vision, Desire, and Difference in the Frye Collection”.

Cheers!
Dave

This is our first post on our new blog and we are using it to announce the launch of our new portfolio based website. In August 2007, we began developing our strategy for a new web platform for Cognition Studio. It was a slow process at first, but grew momentum in October when we signed contracts with Livebooks to design and build our new site from the ground up.

Being creative people, and doing design for a living, it was not an easy decision to hand over the reigns to someone else, but I relinquished the idea that I could do it all myself. Our website was started in November 2007 and a full rebrand of Cognition Studio ensued. After a month or two of laborious work, it was all done and ready to launch on January of 2008. A new marketing campaign was launched, new logo, new custom letterpress printed business cards and a new website all ready to roll out in January for the new year. Then….life took an unexpected turn and everything got put on hold.

My grandmother suddenly passed away on the early morning of December 26th and it shook me to the core. She was my rock and had been my closest friend all my life. Her death was not a surprise (except for the fact that it was Christmas), it was a joyous occasion as she was ready to move on and we had a grand celebration for her. A mere few weeks upon my return from her funeral, my father fell ill and was hospitalized. In early February, we go the news that he had pancreatic cancer and was being released on home hospice, time was not on his side. At that time, I put everything that was ancillary with Cognition Studio on hold and traveled to Texas to work remotely while taking care of my father while I could. 

The day we brought my father home from the hospital was the day the website was to launch, and I just didn’t have the heart to follow it through at that time. Now, as time has past and things are back to normal…gears working, work cranking as usual around here, and September upon us, we felt it’s time to roll out that website and let the world finally see what we’ve been holding back for the past three years.

Our work is better, stronger and winning awards. Guess it’s time to step up and show it off! So we invite you to take a moment and browse around, things are still not 100% done, but we’re dedicated to wrapping it up quickly!

Now our goal for this blog will be to share some of our more unique projects, working theory and inspirations. Dave and I are quite distinct in our process and background. We bring a lot of training, formal education and creative juice to the table that we’d love to share. Our true nature is to be teachers and nurturers, we’d like to carry that over into our blog. We hope to share and we hope that you learn and engage with us.