Off The Page Illustration Exhibition

My housemates and I went to an exhibition at Munroe House last night to see the Illustration students work on display. I went despite it not being Graphic Design, because I thought it'd be interesting to see a variety of different styles of work.

I was really impressed with the quality of all the work, and the variety of visual styles on display. It has re-affirmed my thoughts that exhibitions are a place for purely visual things such as illustration and art, whereas taking things like graphic design out of their contexts and putting them in an exhibition such as the Print Festival doesn't really work. I didn't go the the Print Festival this year because last year it wasn't what I thought it was going to be and I wasn't very impressed with it.

Some of my favourite bits of work from the exhibition last night are shown below.

I spoke to the guy who did the American Gods posters, and asked about the intricacies he must have gone through to get the details to screen print well. He told me that it was really irritating and time-consuming, as well as hard to get the ink to print uniformly because of how large the posters were (A2). Prints of all the work on display were for sale, and he said that because of the difficulties he had printing, he hardly had any that were good enough to sell, which wasn't very well thought through given that he was only selling them for £15.

For me, things like this are what cause the boundary between graphics and art. Art is all about the outcome, so it doesn't matter that Joe only had a handful of prints to sell, because it wasn't about selling them, it was about making something that looks really nice, which he died. If you'd have given me the same brief as Joe for the American Gods poster I wouldn't have done anything like that because of how the commercial aspects of it aren't very practical. This isn't a criticism, but it illustrates the niche that graphic design has in the creative industries.