Paula Scher

Paula is an American artist and graphic designer. She studied at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia where she received her BFA, and later finished her schooling with a Doctor of Fine Arts degree at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C. Early in her art career, she designed album covers for Atlantic and CBS Records and followed that up with art direction for some magazines, specifically magazines through Time Inc. She is now a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and has been the principal at the Pentagram design consultancy office in New York since 1991. She has received a few awards and recognitions including: induction into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame (1998), the Chrysler Design Award for Innovation in Design (2000), a gold medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (2001), four Grammy Award nominations for album cover designs, and a few pieces that have become permanent parts of art collections at the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in Manhattan. She has held a few exhibitions at the Stendhal Gallery, the most recent of which was in January earlier this year.

The most noticeable correlation between Paula's perspective and work and our line study work would be how her work (the acrylic paintings of maps) took on the forms of overlapping and intertwining lines. In the interview on the blog, she talks about how New York City is always growing. I relate this concept directly to the practice of art. Artists are always growing and always developing their ideas. An artist could probably almost always improve a piece of work at any time. Deciding when a piece is done is really just deciding when it works. A piece could convey a message a million different ways using a million different details, so there isn't ever only one answer to the project. An artist just needs to find one that works. Then this idea can be expanded on as many times as it needs to be to make it the most practical, the most interesting, or the most meaningful. Artists should always look back at their work and wonder how it can be improved.

In terms of this current line study project, Paula and her work relate because of the interaction of city scape and the artwork that we do (us students and Paula). The designing she did in New York City was often integrated with the architecture of the city. She painted and applied graphics to many buildings. In the second part of the interview, Paula talks about how she would be commissioned to do the large map paintings she's known for. She points out that most of her clients had expectations for the commissioned work, so she was never really able to expand on the concept and production of her maps, until she started to apply them to three dimensional space. When she began to do this she was interested in her work again. It was new. It was developing. It was changing. This translation to the three dimensional space is exactly what we did in class with the manipulated line studies. We projected the work we had (the processes and techniques we were familiar with) onto different planes and surfaces. This changed our work in concept and direction and we were able to expand on the line studies and expand our abilities as artists.