Public Domain Treasure

The Interwebs just get more interesting all the time: today's special is a new-to-me site for public domain book illustrations.  Wonderful Stuff!

OldBookIllustrations.com

A 12th century half timber house drawn by Viollet-le-Duc

at www.oldbookillustrations.com

The treasure trove of public domain material easy to access via the computer on your desk - or on your lap, or in your hand - is becoming a wellspring of inspiration...  I just wish countries would stop extending and/or enlarging copyright protections to unreasonable limits.  The UK is heading toward a redefinition of copyright that would make it illegal to stick a photo of your (English) sofa on Craig's List.  (Is there Craig's List in the UK?  Maybe not for long!)  HERE's an article on that silliness at BoingBoing.

I'm all for copyright - I copyright stuff myself after all - the rules just need to be fair and sensible.  A family snapshot sitting on its own sofa ought not to be illegal, huh?  Or that for-sale photo either.

(For more on copyright issues, look in my Set Design Archive under, um, "Copyright.")

PS.  That house pictured above?  Torn down.  Like Kitchen Dog Theater's home of 20 years will be.  Don't forget our new-home fund raiser - see blog post below.  
The Deadline Approacheth!

Minimalism

Sometimes the best set is the least.  The simplest.

Simple perfection.

That's all.

A friend of mine recently designed Hamlet for an incredibly successful children's production.  Both the budget and space were modest and fine materials and carpentry skills limited.  Generally, if a designer is going to pull off a minimalist style then what IS on stage has to be exquisite.  Perfect.  But here (as often is the case) perfection was kinda hard to come by.  Still, theater has its tricks:  smooth out lumpy carpentry by stretching fabric over it.  If you still can't get a perfectly smooth wall? then texture/spatter the surface so you can't tell it's not perfect.  Fool the eye.

Whatever the clunky reality of the build, what the audience saw was clean, simple, geometry.

Hamlet at Funhouse Theatre and Film, set design by Joseph Cummings - copyrighted

I love the bold simplicity of this world.

The other remarkable thing about this photo is the use of projections - integral to this production.  Here the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet's Father is enriched by this classic illustration.  (Sorry I don't know the artist's name.)  It was this image, in fact, that was the inspiration for the whole set design.

Below, you see a similar use of Millet's iconic Ophelia to illustrate her off-stage fate.

Hamlet at Funhouse Theatre and Film, set design by Joseph Cummings - copyrighted

Hamlet at Funhouse Theatre and Film, set model by Joseph Cummings - copyrighted

The model gives a better idea of the design: sliding panels plus two rolling raked platforms.  Clever.  Simple.

You can see more of Joseph's work HERE.

The Fun of Research

At present I'm doing research for a writing project so I'm having lots of giddy history fun (battles, cannibals, pirates, woohoo!), but research for set design is also fascinating.

One of a set designer's mandates is to understand the time period and milieu of a play's setting.  Even when you have a dramaturge (a production's Official Research Guru), it's usually still the set designer who is the authority on the visuals.  Dramaturges concentrate on aspects that affect actors and director more than set, while set designers have professional interest in architecture.  And interior design.  And furniture.  And...

So it's your job to know what the time period looked like.  Plus, as much as possible, to understand the logic - economic, construction, social, artistic - behind why it looked as it did.

Recently I've been researching the countryside and villages of Connemara, Ireland, Victorian-Gothik mansions, ancient Egyptian monuments, and office spaces in 1919 New York.  A nice varied menu!

The law office of R. Y. Williams in 1919, part of the Santa Ana Public Library's History Room Photograph Collection

Here's the most inspiring photo I found for Ghost Writer.  Though this law office pictured was on the west coast, not in New York, other photos showed it was characteristic of the time.  

What I found fascinating as a scenic designer was the spartan quality of the room: the severe wooden furniture; the contrast between dark woodwork versus plain paint; the rectilinear geometries, with only curved chair arms for relief; the details of picture rail and paneled door with textured glass; and the bare, bare walls - that ad-calendar the only decoration.

In my interpretation for the set of Ghost Writer, I added an opened transom above the door for a little 3D-ness and more verticallity for Circle Theatre's short space.  (More on my version of that calendar HERE.)  But though our writer's office remains bare looking, we did add books (from the script), soften the color contrast into sepia tones, and add a wainscot of bead-board -  because spartan was a bit too spartan onstage for a romance! 

A theater set needs to be true physically - to its time or location - but it must also be true emotionally.

Many thanks to libraries and collections like the Santa Ana Public Library, that generously make their collections accessible to the public online.  It's impossible for a designer to own every book on every topic or even to find all information needed locally, so I'm very grateful.  

(BTW, I believe copying this photo here is Fair Use, as I'm teaching theater set design, but please let me know if I'm mistaken and I'll remove it instantly.  Please don't copy it elsewhere, Dear Reader, without researching restrictions HERE.)

Inspirational Photos

Sometimes when you're trying to find a design idea it helps to look around...

For some weeks now I've been trying to come up with a schematic design for Smokey Joe's Cafe, a sort of '50s musical revue(ish), or rather, an evening made up entirely of music - no book - that seems to be more unified than a typical random revue, yet has no strong story-line either.  Scenicly, it has a strong sense of Time, but not so much of Place.  Specific settings change, as they tend to in a collection of songs.  Ambiance, maybe, is what this show demands.

I find musical reviews difficult, since sound isn't my leading sense (I favor words and pictures) and my imagination tends to fasten on stories and specificity...

So I've been struggling.

The plan?  Oh, the plan was easy - I had it half sketched before I left the initial meeting with the director.  But the "look"... really tough.  All that came to my mind were '50s cliches not worth drawing up.  The only thing that seemed hopeful was the lovely name of the show: "Smokey Joe's."  There seemed promise, though in fact all I developed from that was badly doodled smoke curlicues on the edges of all my notes made in other shows' meetings.

So I've spent a while flipping through books or the Internet, researching, looking for a hint.

And on the morning I absolutely HAD TO FINISH, I finally found my inspirational photo:

Believed public domain photo - from Imprint

I won't include the sketch yet (if you can, please go see the set itself!  at WaterTower Theater), but the secret was the circle.  Smoke rings gave me the design nudge I needed for a good set for Smokey Joe's Cafe.

What else is up lately?  Busy, busy.  Lots of emailing on various shows; lots of shopping mostly for Boeing, Boeing at WaterTower which opens soon; and several hours painting on Ruth at Kitchen Dog which also Techs this weekend and opens soonest.

Designer's Life -The Secret

This! is the reason artists accept serious underpayment, that inventors keep tinkering in their basements, or guys who work in commercial laundries go home to their own laundry rooms to type novels...

The  joy! when things fall into place, the plot thickens, the painting coalesces, the inspired metaphor falls from... the air?... the muse?... from who-knows-where? onto blank paper.

Frabjious Days.


Progress on my project.  (I'll tell you what it is later - don't want to jinx it.)  Meanwhile: Callooh!  Callay!

(The guy in the commercial laundry?  Stephen King in the early days.  Read his On Writing.  "Frabjous"?  Read Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There.)

Set Dressing is Everything!

Take a look at this art installation by artist James Hopkins:

Image borrowed from theinspiration.com

Just your basic wall with some basic shelves... except for the very clever use of set dressing which includes cut cardboard boxes.  I am so gonna steal this idea!

See more of the artist's work HERE at The Inspiration.com

Why Strip-Mine the Classics?

This is a thinking-point, a question that's been niggling at me...  When did it become matter-of-course to use iconic past art as the basis for new work?  

Warhol gets out-Warhol-ed

image borrowed from www.fanboy.com

I'm not talking about inspiration or about transformation - for instance, taking the Romeo and Juliet story and turning it into West Side Story or turning Hamlet into The Lion King.  Nor of outright theft, like the "novelist" who found a fine but forgotten novel, replaced the original author's locations with India and the original writer's name with her own... and won a honking big literary prize! (Until caught by a librarian - perfect.).  The motive there seems obvious.  No, I'm talking about mash-ups like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the poor Mona Lisa wearing silly hats on coffee mugs etc.  (Mind you, I've made Botticelli's Venus look silly a few times myself.)

Co-opted masterpieces can be very clever, as ...Zombies is.  I enjoyed that.  The icon can be brilliantly commented upon by their new context, which is fair game, and vice versa.  (There's a fascinating discussion near the end of Exit Through the Gift Shop talking about what Warhol did to the icons and what the main character/subject of the film did to Warhol and really did to the icons.)

But too often the icon is slapped onto a new context as a kid slaps a sticker randomly on a bus stop bench.  The impulse is everywhere!  Perhaps at the Millenium (more or less) it's reasonable to evaluate what we've accomplished as a culture and to reuse the icons.  Are we rescuing them from dusty museum-hood?  Or kidnapping and exploiting them?  ...Zombies and some street art are well done, but overall this trend seems to be getting lazier and... well, trivializing or even degrading to the original work.  Cynically, I wonder if using an icon doesn't just ensure public attention along the lines of, "Hey! I know that face!" which I suspect adds to sales.

As artists of this period in history, are we reevaluating tradition?  Are we lazy?  Are we just disrespectful?  Why don't we create NEW icons?  Are we?  Please point me to 'em...

image borrowed from www.feldmangallery.com

From an actual coffee mug:

Image borrowed from Cafe Press

image borrowed from www.BlogLifeTime.com

Some days poor Mona Lisa... well, I worry about her.
Is she sleeping under a bridge now?