rockpaperink

July 14, 2012

Develop and sustain an art practice throughout your life

Continuing Education and Professional Development

Author: Plazm

Ed Fella occupies a unique position as a retired designer, functioning somewhere on the edges of the design world but not fully in it. "I've carved out this odd position where I'm still a graphic designer using graphic design but as an art practice. Graphic design has to have a subject, a deadline—all of that. With these pieces, I'm the subject—it's the opposite of graphic design, where the artist is never the subject. The designer is never the subject."

Fella recently published Letters from America, a collection of his Polaroid photographs of lettering and surfaces. In addition to this, he has a backlog of work that he hopes to eventually get out into the public world. "I have a bunch of books sitting here, but I haven't really gotten around to them. I have one all on faces and landscapes. They are signs or windows, or posters with faces and landscapes painted on them. Polaroid format. I have thousands of those. My wife has put them together and edited them, but we haven't gone to any publishers. I have about 80 sketchbooks with 100 drawings in each one. They are shown here and there, but they haven't been published. I like to make stuff, I don't really like to put it together. It is always such a pain in the ass, just to send stuff to shows. I get plenty of calls, so I haven't gone out there and pushed." Although he supported himself doing conventional graphic design for many years, Fella's personal work has been his most enjoyable, as well as his most successful and critically regarded.

Source: 100 Habits of Successful Graphic Designers

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