Election night muse… for the elders
November 7, 2018
Preamble to the Constitution of the United States scribed on November 6, 2018 by Meredith Eliassen.
Inspired by a poster by an unknown artist produced during the 1968-1969 student-led strike for educational equity at San Francisco State College that featured the Preamble in blue with the word “justice” echoed in deep red, this version employs the dynamic of empty space with diverse information vectors produced by words found in Chinese design.
Zen design dos not seek to recreate reality, but creates with artificial space relations that point beyond visible reality to the essence of reality with chi. Chi is life, force, or essence, which in design is reliant upon obtaining connection between the observer and the observed… between design and recipient through empathy or aesthetic harmony. Zen design utilizes the vital movement (information vectors) produced through the circulation of chi… to say without saying. Lao Tzu (533 BC) asserted in Tao Te Ching XI that Zen design is conceived within an emptiness where “being and not being engender each other…” taking equal advantage of was is, “just as we recognize the usefulness of what is not.”
Happy Halloween!
October 31, 2018
Dragonfly in flower costume gets ready to go to the Butterfly’s Ball on Halloween. Design by Meredith Eliassen, 2018.
William Roscoe’s poem “The Butterfly’s Ball, and, The Grasshopper’s Feast” (1802) appeared in Gentlemen’s Magazine in 1807. Thomas Jefferson clipped this early nonsense rhyme about a party for insects and other small animals for his granddaughter Cornelia and soon it was considered to be the first purely entertaining verse for children.
In this image a dragonfly appears to to fly into a flower, both objects are drawn utilizing empty space, their vectors are in an apparent conversation. Eastern designers treat empty space like a positive mean and not as an entity that must be filled in or that is something spare. In Western design, this sensibility is known as Gestalt where objects and their environment are mutually defined.
The flower is grounded to the earth, whereas the iridescent dragonfly moves through the essence of change as a vector in the breeze where space is alive creating tension that gives way to the broader world of imagination.
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