Stanley Donwood: Continuing to Explain
I’m easily influenced, and I’m painting pictures using these words and the seven colours in a way that I like to think is fairly true to the signs and advertisements I saw in Los Angeles all that time ago.
(Actually, I checked when I was there recently, and I’m not doing too badly.)
So I paint rectangles of all the seven colours, and then I paint the words on top of the rectangles. The words must stand out. They should be as vibrant as possible. This is like advertising. My favourite kind of advertising is that found on packets of detergent, bottles of toilet cleaner and bleach, et cetera. It’s fucking amazing. If you spend enough time in the aisles of supermarkets that deal with household cleaning products and you will see what I mean. Last year I almost got a job at the supermarket so that I could stack the shelves in that aisle every once in a while, but fortunately my girlfriend informed me that it was a stupid idea.
Well, anyway, this is about making the paintings of words from spam and colours from Los Angeles, not supermarkets or bleach.
When I have seven colours to paint with, one thing that’s important is to keep the colours away from each other, so, for example, blue isn’t next to blue. Another thing is to avoid a sort of chess-board effect, which means keeping, say, a red corner away from another red corner.
Read on at Slowly Downward