Signal Horizon
Aaaannnnnd, Action!
That’s what a director says to set into motion the plan for each element of a scene. It’s also how this project, Desert Signal, got started. A choice to take action.
The idea of this blog is to pull back the curtain of a process. How do ideas start, and where do they go? We will get into all of that here over time to help frame what this work is, what it’s about, and why it’s fun to put it together. So let’s get into it.
Two weeks ago I watched a movie called The Brutalist. It was a pretty good movie. The story of an immigrant man who brought with him to America, an education from the Bauhaus School of Design in Germany. There are a lot of moments in this film, which I will not get into here. But, there was a concept that was so fundamental it became the lead character's superpower. The concept was applying a new perspective. In this movie’s case, it was a new sense of design and clarity to architecture that had not been seen before.
After watching this movie, I appreciated it, but did not think of it after that… consciously.
Jump ahead in time. Summer is now officially started. Memorial weekend has just past and for me, that is the best time to explore America. As a younger man, I drove my cars all over the Western part of the United States. And eventually around the Eastern. Now, living in Texas, this is a great state to get out and find time. Small towns exist in a different time and run at a different speed. West Texas has several of these types of towns. Marfa, Alpine, Terlingua, and Marathon to name a few.
Sparse landscapes that frame the Big Bend National Park. What if we create images of West Texas and apply Geometric simplification to them? Focus on colors. Focus on Form. Focus on the simple shapes that frame the landscape.
Cut ahead to this past weekend and I was recalling the time I stayed I Marfa, Texas as I was on a drive across the country. Then through a google search in looking into the town, it came up that the Joel and Eathn Cohen brother’s film, No Country for Old Men, was filmed in Marfa. A great movie and interestingly, one of the only movies filmed in Marfa. If you don’t know about the art community that exists in Marfa, you may be interested to learn more about it here.
This is how creativity starts. Find influences and create something new from those influences. Pro tip: Seek out the best people to gain influence from.
