Inspiration: Summer Landscape Edition
Inspiration: Summer Landscape Edition
Plus a first-look at new color-chapter illustrations from INFO WE TRUST.
🙊 Read to the bottom for a very special sneak-peek.
Info We Trust is now in copyediting! While I wait to receive my text back for final edits, I am producing several new hand drawn illustrations for my forthcoming book.
For example, the below rendering of ancient black-and-white duality, via Egyptian gods Set and Horus, opens my color chapter.
(While researching this image I learned that unlike other Egyptian animal-gods, Set is not believed to be based on a real animal, but there is a whole discourse about it.)
The next image compares two color models. On the left is the computer’s perfect cylinder. On the right is a perceptual color space inspired by Munsell’s color tree.
Human color vision is lumpy!
Pre-order your copy of Info We Trust, coming this fall, directly from Visionary Press:
Summer Landscapes
Thank you for the fantastic response to our “Delicious Parks” project. In conjunction with its release I spent a week camping in the High Sierras, visiting Yosemite Valley, Hetch Hetchy reservoir, and generally relishing big trees and big views before the mountains got too hot.
With summer and national parks in mind, I wish to share with you an assortment of landscapes that bring me joy. They are roughly ordered with increasingly wide-angle perspectives.
“Carmel Point” is a 1996 reduction woodcut by Gordon Mortensen via Davidson Galleries.
“El Manojo” is a new painting by Anna Ortiz via artsy. From the artist:
My paintings reference statuary, botanicals and landscapes I have seen and visited on my travels to Mexico. . . . Their narrative nature references ancient Aztec and Mayan mythology while reflecting back on current and personal events. Dualities define them; they give them shape. Weaving together invented spaces with references to actual places, the paintings take both a familiar tone and a sense of the uncanny. Taken as a whole, my paintings offer a purview into an invented world existing just slightly out of the realm of possibility. By playing with spatial compression and a filtered palette, I invite viewers to consider the realities we create for ourselves and the possibilities that lie ahead.
Via Door Of Perception:
Hirō Isono was a Japanese artist born in 1945. In the 90s he worked on the art direction of video games and published several books throughout his life. All of them reflecting his one big love: the forest.
Isono’s work reminds me of Miyazaki’s magical forests. I couldn’t find the title of this specific piece beyond “Untitled”—a variant appears on the cover of Emerald Green (1990).
Tino Sehgal arranged a continuous horizon through paintings by Van Gogh, Hodler, Max Ernst, and more at the Fondation Beyeler. See a tour of the exhibit on view through August 11, on Instagram.
“Coast Range” (1928) by by Gustave Baumann.
“Thjorsá River #1, Iceland” by Edward Burtynsky via Colossal.
“This Land is Your Land: High Dive” by Leslie Wayne (2023) is an enormous (109 × 125 inches) painting that looks as if it was painting on a trampoline.
“Lightning Lake” by Tom Rae was shot in Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand, via Capture the Atlas.
Big Bonus Preview
In a near-future edition of Chartography I plan on sharing a monumental chronology by an early 19th-century woman creator. Dozens of enormous plates, each one brilliantly colored. Here’s a preview, look at these colors!:
To my knowledge, this is a super rare work that is yet to be on anyone’s radar. Please contact me directly if you’d like to help me research its origins.
Onward!—RJ
About
RJ Andrews helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.
RJ’s next book, Info We Trust, will be published fall 2024 and is currently available for pre-order. He published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.