Penguin Green Ideas, simple graphic art
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I recently learned that in late 2021 Penguin Books released a
"Green Ideas" series of twenty very affordably priced small books
on environmental issues. Supposedly the chosen texts represent
"classics that define the environmental movement today". There are
some pretty big names amongst the list of authors, some of whom
I have read before and enjoyed, others whom I haven't but have
long wanted to. They are easily found for purchase online from
non-Amazon bookstores for around the 5 EUR mark per book. I found
that pretty compelling, and on the very same day I learned about
the series I ordered three texts:
* The Dragonfly Will Be the Messiah, by Masanobu Fukuoka
* Think Like a Mountain, by Aldo Leopold
* We Belong to Gaia, by James Lovelock
(maybe I'll make a separate post soon with brief reviews of these)
When they arrived, I was really struck by just how small they were.
Much smaller than I expected. In fairness, this is no fault
of Penguin's. Their official webpage for the series lists each
book's page count, dimensions to the nearest millimetre and weight
to the nearest gram, there is literally nothing more I could have
asked for them to provide and I could have hunted those details
down before ordering, but I didn't, and so I was surprised. Now,
we are talking about a 5 EUR book here, I certainly didn't expect a
weighty tome, but somehow I expected more than 80 or so small pages
of regular sized print. Was that unrealistic? I still would not say
that these books are a rip-off, but they are also not the excellent
value I thought they were. I will probably buy still buy others.
I bought "Think Like a Mountain" because I had previously read
and really enjoyed Leopold's well-known "A Sand County Almanac"
and wanted to read more by him. Well, I was once again surprised
to find that TLAM is actually just a collection of excerpts from
ASCA, and this time I would allege that the surprise *is* Penguin's
fault, because I cannot see that this is disclosed anywhere in their
official description of the book. In fact, after checking the fine
print in the inside covers, I now see that the other two books are
collections of excerpts, too. Once it's clear just how small these
books are, the fact that they are mostly going to be excerpts perhaps
becomes obvious; classic, movement-defining texts are rarely this
small. But I feel Penguin could have been more upfront about this.
They really ought to make it clear *which* full-length book each
of the Green Ideas books is pulled from, so people can avoid buying
stuff they've already read, or see whether they can easily buy the
full-length book used for not much more than the excerpt new.
The books themselves look fantastic, which provides the bridge
to this post's second topic. The covers are all monochromatic,
meaning not black and white but varying shades of a single colour.
Each book's cover is in shades of a different colour, and if
you buy the whole set and stick 'em on your shelf in order they
blend together into a rainbow. That is actually a bit naff to
my eye and I don't think I'll necessary aim to collect the set.
But don't let the "rainbow" description mislead you, the colours are
actually quite subdued, not bright but, appropriately, earth tones.
By coincidence the three I bought are all from the blue-green end of
the spectrum, and they all look great. Each book has a design on its
cover comprised of no more than four distinct shades, sometimes as
little as two, the cover colour and white. The designs themselves
are simple and minimalistic with natural themes, as you'd expect.
From a strictly visual perspective I find them immensely appealing.
This is almost but not quite the first time I've mentioned enjoying
art of broadly (perhaps quite broadly) this type. A few years back
in my now dormant "pikkulog" I mentioned discovering some styles of
Japanese woodblock prints that were much simpler and "more graphic"
than the stereotypical Ukiyo-e prints you've probably seen[1]. I
still really like these and have become quite a fan of Azechi
Umetaro. I lack the proper vocabulary to even try to describe
exactly what this broad category of stuff I like is. It is usually
characterised by a limited colour palette being used in a "flat"
style, i.e. with minimal if any use of shading, hatching, stippling
or anything like that to give a real sense of three dimensional form.
And the shapes are mostly simple, too. This constraint arises pretty
naturally out of various production mechanisms, like having to
physically carve the image into a block of wood or linoleum. Of
course the same style can be and, in the case of the Penguin covers
I don't doubt for a second *was*, emulated on a computer without
carving anything, but the fundamental origin of the style clearly
arises from physical constraints. This style can and does verge on
the cartoony, and sometimes I really enjoy that. For example I am
deeply enamoured with the designs printed on matchbooks in what
were at the time various Soviet Satellite states[2]. And Umetaro is
often outright cartoony too.
But my tastes don't run exclusively to the cartoony. People who've
talked with me about bike stuff know that I'm a big fan of Grant
Petersen's Rivendell Bicycle Works. Earlier this year Grant
mentioned in a "blahg" (blog) post that the artist who produced the
RBW posters you could buy from them (which for the record I don't
actually much like the look of), David Lance Goines, had passed away.
I had always thought those posters were quite over-priced, but I
hadn't realised they were produced by an accomplished and respected
printmaker, using old school pre-digital techniques, which involve a
lot of labour. I have since perused Goines' work online[3] and while
I don't like all of it I like a lot of it. It has the same economy
of colour which I described above, but generally speaking it is
nowhere near as cartoony simplistic as the matchbox designs are.
I don't like it any less for this, I still put it in the same broad
mental basket.
Each of Goines' posters linked to above comes with some commentary
from Goines himself on either the subject of the print or the
process by which it was made. Some of these are really very short,
but one of them, number #164, commemorating a visit to the Berkeley
Symphony Orchestra by the conductor Kent Nagano, features a very
long and detailed description of the entire process by which the
poster was made[4], so-called "solid-tone lithography" (you have to
scroll past some left brain vs right brain pseudoscience and some
Greek mythology first, Ctrl-F for "Technical Note"). He explains
how with this technique it is "difficult to create the impression of
a continuous tone", i.e. you can't do gradients, but the advantage
is that when you lay down solid colours you have much greater
ability to "faithfully reproduce...the range of colours that the
eye is able to see", compared to when you are using tiny clusters
of red, yellow, blue and black microscopic dots as in some other
printing techniques (which make gradients easy). Correspondingly,
he designed his posters "with both the restrictions and virtues of
solid-tone printing in mind". So again there's a direct influence of
constraints of a physical process on the artistic style. I guess
it's no surprise that the idea of accepting, even embracing,
limitations and learning to best work within them rather than
striving to eliminate that strikes a chord with somebody writing
on Gopher/Gemini. Anyway, there's lots of really interesting
technical detail in that post, if you are at all interested in
printing technology it is well worth the read.
The notes for a few of Goines' posters explicitly state that he
took influence from Alphonse Mucha. Now, I adore Mucha's work,
and have done for longer than anything else mentioned in this post,
but funnily these tend to be some of my least favourite works
by Goines. But I only have Mucha half in the same mental basket
as these other things. He is not completely unrelated, but he's
borderline, he helps to define the fuzzy boundary of this category.
The two things I love most about Mucha are the way he does plants,
flowers, vines, trees, and the way he captures the flowing form of
fabric loosely draped over the human body. The first thing, the
plants, is all down to line and shape, and *this* aspect of Mucha
does go in the same mental basket as Goines. I don't know if there's
a connection here to physical constraint, I don't actually know
the technical details behind Mucha's work, but there is a definite
similarity of visual style here. It's nothing to do with colour,
you can recognise Art Nouveau style in black and white drawings.
But Mucah's fabric draping magic, all the heavy lifting there is
being done precisely by subtle variations in colour, continuous
graduation in tone, it doesn't translate to a process like solid-tone
lithography at all (Goines obviously understood this on ten more
levels than I ever will and didn't even try, the women in his
Mucha-inspired pieces are nude, not draped, but actually I don't
think solid tones work for that either). So it's not like I'm
incapable of appreciating art where you can't count the number of
distinct colours on your fingers, but I seem best able to do so when
it still heavily utilises line and shape styles which otherwise seem
to occur more often than not in the context of a limited palette.
Whatever it is that defines this artistic category that I'm ineptly
fumbling through a description of, it is clearly multidimensional,
but the dimensions are also very far from being orthogonal.
Looping back to the Penguin books to try to wrap this rambling
post up, even though I immediately connected my appreciation of
them to this overall style that I like, they are actually a bit of
a departure from everything else, too. They still have the very
limited colour palette, obviously. But in terms of form most of them
are very different from Mucha or Goines or the Soviet matchbooks.
In some sense they are simpler, often dramatically simpler, simpler
even than the matchbooks, but at the same time they are in no way
cartoony. I guess some of them are actually downright abstract,
or close to it, at least if they are trying to be representational
of something I can't figure out what. Others are obviously just
simple images of something, a leaf, an animal. I say "simple"
because they are "just" a silhouette, but the precise shape is often
finely detailed in a way that isn't seen in any of the other examples
I've mentioned. Both the abstract and representational examples both
rely heavily, I suspect, on some kind of very considered minimalism,
where's there not much obviously going on but the precise position
of the one or two leaves on an otherwise blank canvas is carefully
chosen for its, I don't know, balance or something. There are
probably elements of this in all my other examples, but the Penguin
covers turn it up to 11. Some of the covers seem to be somewhere in
between abstract and representational. I actually particularly like
the cover for "Think Like a Mountain". It conveys the sense of being
a landscape scene without being very easy to actually interpret and
describe literally as such. Is there a mountain range? A valley?
A cloud? A lake? There's at least one of those things lurking in
there, probably two, I reckon. I can actually very easily imagine
it as the background of an Umetaro print.
[1] gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/pikkulog/2020-07.gmi
[2]
https://matchbloc.com/collections/posters
[3]
http://goines.net/poster_art.html
[4]
http://goines.net/Poster_art6/poster_164.html
