On this special episode of Design Matters, we look back at the collective brilliance of artists interviewed in 2024. Best of Design Matters 2024 with Es Devlin, Olafur Eliasson, Carson Ellis, and Nell Irvin Painter is live!
Olafur Eliasson:
The glacier, if the weather was good, the glacier would be spectacular. It was fantastic.
Es Devlin:
And she was filming herself in front of the concert all night long.
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. To mark the end of 2024, on this episode, we’re going to hear excerpts from interviews Debbie did with visual artists in the past year.
Nell Irvin Painter:
My bona fides, which came from academia, counted for nothing.
Carson Ellis:
I was moved when I read it. I read it and I thought it was very funny how boring it was.
Curtis Fox:
If you had to add out what kinds of creative people have most appeared on Design Matters, designers would come in first, especially since Debbie interviewed designers almost exclusively in the early days of this podcast. But a close second would probably be artists. So many designers also have an art practice or their work simply bridges the divide between design and art. On this episode, we’re going to hear excerpts from interviews that Debbie did with four very different artists.
Es Devlin is a set designer who often works on a grand scale. She’s done concert sets for Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, for opera festivals, the Olympics, and even for the Super Bowl. One of her latest projects was creating digital sculptures for U2 and the inaugural performance at the Sphere, the giant immersive entertainment arena just outside of Las Vegas.
Debbie Millman:
In an article that I read about your involvement with the Sphere, you talked about the iPhone occasion of the experience of being at the Sphere and seeing the unbelievable explosion of art and graphics where you’re fully immersed in this environment. It is really transformational. It does feel like either a religious experience or a drug-induced experience. It’s really unlike anything that has come before it. I’m wondering how you feel about the throngs of people videotaping while they’re watching and experiencing.
Es Devlin:
I want to break that into two parts really, because when I said it’s like the iPhoneification of concert design, I sort of meant that when Jony Ive designed the iPhone, in a way, he’d sort of reached the ne plus ultra of design, of that object because it was this infinity call, this beautiful black thing. And in a way, no one’s really gone any further with it because it was like, “Okay, we arrived. This is what this object needs to be for now until it’s in our body. This is as edgeless as it can be, as infinity-edged as it can be before it actually migrates under the skin probably.”
And we had talked with Willie Williams, U2’s creative director 10 years ago when we were first working with U2. We talked about the possibility and the desire that we had for sound and vision to coexist in one piece of technology at a concert because it irritated us that there were two departments, people up ladders and genies putting truss up to hang giant great big speakers in front of necessarily other people up, other ladders putting up big screens. And we longed for a video screen that was permeable to sound.
And we actually commissioned a lot of research on this with our colleagues who made a lot of new video technology, but they couldn’t solve it for all the frequencies for an outdoor concert. It wasn’t possible. And that’s where I think the Sphere has iPhoneified concert design. It has just simply in an iPhone-y way combined the thing you need to do at a concert, which is to hear, and the thing you want to do at a concert, which is to see. And it’s done a sort of sinusthesic, synesthetic move where the speakers, and I can’t remember how many thousands and there are, but many, are behind the screen. And the screen is permeable to sound, and that’s brand new. So that’s one piece.
To give you the other answer about how I feel about the fact that certainly on the opening night, I went back again just before the closing and it was somewhat different then. But certainly on the opening night, it really was like being in a film studio in that everybody is holding their phone because this was new, everyone had to film it. And listen, that’s fine. Making a film, everybody becoming a filmmaker is rather beautiful in its way, but it does preclude dancing. And if there’s one thing I think will be put on most of our gravestones, certainly mine if I died tomorrow, is, “Had a cool life but didn’t dance enough.” So I think-
Debbie Millman:
Who among us? Who among us?
Es Devlin:
So I do think being a filmmaker is cool. I don’t even mind being a self-portrait filmmaker, although I was at the weekend concert [inaudible 00:05:17] the weekend in London at the Olympic Stadium. It was a beautiful night, really beautiful. And the lady in front of me had her camera pointing to me all night. I was like, “That’s weird.” And then I realized, “Well, it wasn’t. It was pointed at herself.” And she was filming herself in front of the concert all night long. And you could say that’s a heroic and majestic act of sustained self-portraiture in the School of Dürer and all the other great self-portraits that have been made. That’s an important act.
Debbie Millman:
That’s a generous way of putting it.
Es Devlin:
I have found life far more interesting when I try to always find an alternative to judging. I thought if I can apply my curiosity rather than my judging bone, life just becomes a bit more interesting.
Debbie Millman:
The Sphere is 360 feet tall. It has 580,000 square feet of fully programmable LED exterior. And it’s a curved 160,000 square foot screen inside. How did you approach making this level of artwork for U2 and for the Sphere?
Es Devlin:
Well, first thing obviously to say, that this was very much not something I did at all alone. The project was led by the band and by their very long top-standing creative director, Willie Williams, who has a wonderful team called Treatment who are beautiful crafters of video.
But that band, very broad in their seeking when they come to make a show, and they gathered together a kind of board, creative board, that we had been working together actually 10 years since the Innocence and Experience tour. So it’s that same group, and we spent three days together and just brainstormed ideas. And I think the first thing we knew was there was a concern that this giant object, what would be the reception of it? Should the world have it? Is it a good thing to even be part of? Really, everyone was questioning that. And I think we wanted to declare our awareness of its materiality, that we weren’t going to just treat it as a portal to something. We were going to start at the beginning by saying, “Hey, we know the minerality of this thing. We know what it took to build it. We know the resources that have gone into it, financial, mineral, human planetary. We know that there’s a commitment to solar power eventually, but that hasn’t happened yet.”
So when you go in, the concretization of it was sort of very purposeful. And actually I went back the other day and someone I was with said, “Oh, how are you going to get rid of all the concrete panels to reveal the LED?” And oh, the other person looked up and said, “Oh, I didn’t know it had a hole in the roof.” And I said, “Oh yeah, the rain sometimes comes in.” So it’s quite believable when you walk in this concrete interior. I say when you walk in, that shows now finished, but when you walked in. And then very purposeful, this splitting apart, it’s a gesture that’s really important to me. That line of light I saw, and obviously important to many other people including Tadao Ando and all sorts of people, not just me.
So, splitting the concrete apart to then reveal the video and then, ultimately, a gesture that Jim Dolan and Bono had been clear on since the very beginning of their conversations was that they wanted to deconstruct the Sphere and reveal what you would see if the sphere weren’t there. So this reveal of Las Vegas built with such precision by industrial light and magic deconstructs itself. And the way that they researched that, they unbuilt every building in Las Vegas in the order in which they were built until you just got back to the planet, the place on the planet where we are, that space in the desert. None of the lights, just that. And then we went back ultimately to the species, which also call that place home.
And I think we were clear that we wanted to consecrate the building, like a cathedral, to make a sort of offering and say, “Let’s dedicate and consecrate this building to the species that call this place home, that don’t have any say in whether or not we use this sister build a giant dome.” So that’s what that final Nevada arc gesture was about.
Debbie Millman:
There were two things that I was really struck by regarding this sphere. One is how much it takes its shape and form from a planetarium and how you lose sense of there being any boundaries when you’re in it. It just feels as if you’re in this infinite space, literally and figuratively. The other thing I was thinking about was how almost impossible it feels to make a film of this show. So many shows turn into films. Hamilton is even a film. And so I was wondering if there was any consideration of that when making this.
Es Devlin:
I think it’s such an interesting thought. I think we were really focusing on making the show to be honest in the medium that it is. But I think there is a version where you could play the show as it is and intercut it with footage of the singers. Because if you think about it, if you’re watching the show from the 400, it’s right at the back, which is where frankly you get the best sense of the architectural form of the place, then your awareness of the people on the stage, they take up a very small percentage of your range of vision there.
So if you were playing recorded sound as well rather than live sound, I think you’d have also a lot of different controls over those speakers. I think that system can do a whole load of things that we didn’t do with it yet because we were working with live sound. So I personally think there’ll be a whole nother level you can take it to when you’re working with a recorded sound and you would just place footage of the performance within that film. I think it’d be pretty spectacular and hopefully make it far more accessible to a lot of people to come and see that work even when the band aren’t there. I think it’s going to be pretty exciting actually for that.
Curtis Fox:
Es Devlin.
Olafur Eliasson is an artist who also works on a grand scale. His sculptures, installations, and experiments with light and water have been drawing huge audiences for several decades.
As she often does with guests, Debbie asked Eliasson about his childhood.
Debbie Millman:
You talked about a powerful memory in your childhood in the late 1970s. There was a rationing of electricity in the town where your grandparents lived. And I read that at a certain hour in the evening, all the lights would go off and you’d all move to the windows and watch how the colors of the twilight sky would take on a new quality. Why do you think that memory is so resonant in you?
Olafur Eliasson:
I think it was the social aspect that sort of stamped it into the back of my mind. In ’72 and ’73, the oil was rationalized because it was the oil crisis. But I remember my grandparents, they had a small house on top of a hill called [inaudible 00:12:49] in the small suburban town to Reykjavík called Hafnarfjörður. And the house was facing… The windows facing north. So in Hafnarfjörður, when you face north, you’re looking up to the part of Iceland, the other arm, so to speak, called Snæfellsnes. At the end of Snæfellsnes, there’s something called Snæfellsjökull or the Glacier of Snæfell. Snæfell means snow mountain. So on a clear day, we could stand in the window of the living room of my grandparents and we would look across the ocean to that other peninsula called Snæfellsjökull, and we could see in the summer the sun would set in north. The sun would go down and it would just go under the horizon and come up again. I mean, if you’re at the North Pole, the sun doesn’t go down at all as we know, right?
So the glacier would be lit from behind sometimes. This is such a spectacular phenomenon. You have this chunk of ice, like about 1 kilometer high and 3 or 4 kilometers wide. This glacial chunk of course now is almost gone. It’s much, much smaller, right? So at a certain time of day, I believe just after dinner, in order to save money, because Iceland had not yet fully harvested its geothermal power that it has today, so it was relying on oil. So Iceland was just in the process of getting up onto its feet. So oil actually was an important thing to make everything run in Iceland still in the ’70s.
So there was a bell, a huge bell in the city, and it was like an alarm bell. It was always fascinating to stand up in the window and look over the small city of Hafnarfjörður. The bell was out and all the lights would go out, like all the streetlights, all the house lights, everything was just-
Debbie Millman:
Instantly.
Olafur Eliasson:
Yeah, it’s a fascinating, right? And then my grandma would come with a candle and, “Let’s all sit by the window,” she said, because that’s the only place there’s a bit of light. So sitting by the window with the family and doing what we were doing, reading and just sitting and talking and so on, I like rolling around on the floor if we wanted to. That was very special because the light outside was really blue, very intensely sort of twilight blue.
The glacier, if the weather was good, the glacier would be spectacular. It was fantastic. And then there was this one candle, this burning little piece of fire. So you had the ice and you had the fire and you had this blue color and you had the warm color in everybody’s faces and the skin. It’s like a little bit of a campfire. So it’s a little bit like you had this sort of red and warmth coming together.
I did not really have much of rituals routines. I didn’t have a childhood where everything was ceremonialized. I always envy the people who had a very clear patterns of Christmas and this ceremony, that ceremony, because there’s something very beautiful in the repetition of things. There’s something really unique about falling into the rhythm of life, the respiratory rhythm of how to live. I had a bit of this and that. My mother got married, then divorced and married again. It was like my father then was here and there and then he died.
This was one of the times where there was a routine. You just knew at… What was it? 8 o’clock, there would be this bell and we’d all run to the candle. And when you’re five years old, they’re so nice to know what was about to happen. And that’s an interesting thing to think about these sort of expectations and then the happening and then memories and how you anticipate. And then you have the moment of presence and then you have the kind of warmth of a memory that you carry with you into life.
Debbie Millman:
Olafur, you had your first art show, your first solo art show of drawings when you were 15 years old. What kind of work were you showing in that exhibit?
Olafur Eliasson:
Yeah, there was where I lived on the countryside in Denmark with my mother, there was a small artist group and artist associations of all kinds of artists. It’s more like kind of a gathering. They had shows in libraries and shopping malls or here and there. And I was the youngest member there.
The first time I ever kissed one was one of the kids of the other artists in that group. It’s not funny, but in a shopping mall at night on an opening where it just drifted into the mall somewhere with this one, wonderful young woman. Looking back at it today, what it was, it was nice because it was nothing in particular. This is me having fun. So what must have been the case is that there was not a lot of pressure to perform because I think I can remember roughly there was a cat and there was a puffin, the Icelandic puffin and stuff like that. And it wasn’t really the best drawings of a cat or puffin or something like that, but it was okay to just be like that.
And then because one of the people in this artist group had a little gallery where they normally showed ceramics and then I had a show there that was kind of funny because I was not so old, I was just turning 15, well, I was just turning 14 or whatever, and I was like, “Oh, I have a show.” My God, I going $40, $30, $60 for the drawings. I was like, “Oh my God, if I sell everything,” I’m like, “$300. It was going to be so wild.”
But what I think now looking back, it was not like my mother looked over my shoulder and said, “This drawing is not good enough. Do it again. Tiger mom is here.” So what was beautiful is that I had a good time, and I said, “Oh my god, this is great. I love having an exhibition.” And I did… I think I did. I don’t really remember. I think I did sent a few of them probably to my family members or something. But these drawings, they must be around or maybe not.
Debbie Millman:
Now, despite having your first solo exhibition at such a young age, I actually read that your first passion was breakdancing. And you even won a Scandinavian championship as part of a trio you named the Harlem Gun Crew.
Olafur Eliasson:
Yeah, it’s funny, right? It’s not-
Debbie Millman:
Tell us. I saw a couple of-
Olafur Eliasson:
Maybe it’s not funny actually.
Debbie Millman:
No, I saw some wonderful videos of you breakdancing on YouTube.
Olafur Eliasson:
So this is actually around the same time of this show. So I went to Copenhagen to see my granddad. I was 14. And in the window, and this is now, this is ’81. Can you imagine? ’81. I’m in Copenhagen on the pedestrian shown and there’s a clothing store. And in the window of this clothing store, there’s like three or four human mannequins. I’m looking at them and say, “My God, they’re real people, but they’re standing very still.” And suddenly they moved like robots, like… You know, the hands.
And then one of them, out of nowhere, just made a wave from one hand through the elbow shoulder over to the other arm and to the other hand. And I was shocked. And I realized my life in that moment had changed. I’m not being overly dramatic. So I went home and from that moment on, I started moving around my house as a robot or as a kind of some kind of moving.
See, now there was nothing called internet. There was barely something called video, like a VHS didn’t exist. There was [inaudible 00:20:18] called Betamax, I think, or what. So I had no idea until a little later I actually met one of the people in Copenhagen and I said, “What were you doing?” Because he was standing on the street. “Where is this one?”
“Yeah, I was in high school in America,” he said. “At there it was quite normal to do it.”
“But what are you doing?”
“It’s called electric boogie or break-dance.”
And I said, “My God, it’s amazing.”
So I was then 15 and I hit puberty. Finally, I was the last one in the class hit puberty. And then I said,
“Okay, I need to acknowledge that I have a body. And how better to acknowledge embodiment by disembodying and becoming a robot?” So I felt very comfortable in being present and being un-present at the same time as you could say. And of course, as things went on and music videos then came and then the Rocksteady crew, and then there was suddenly a whole handful of… Then suddenly there was rap music. And so I just completely by coincidence happened to be on the front end of that movement also when it took place in America.
Curtis Fox:
That was Olafur Eliasson.
Nell Irvin Painter is a celebrated historian in academic who took up art later in life. Painter says her interest in art grew out of the biography she wrote of Sojourner Truth.
Debbie Millman:
You decided, despite already having a PhD from Harvard University, you wanted to go back to school to get another bachelor’s degree.
Nell Irvin Painter:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
But this time in fine art. What inspired that decision?
Nell Irvin Painter:
Two things, Sojourner Truth, and that stay in the art history library had really reawakened my attraction to images and to imagery. And the other thing was I just wanted to do it and I could. My husband takes care of me. I didn’t have to worry about… I had the money. And art school is, as you know, absurdly expensive.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Nell Irvin Painter:
And the degree you come out with is not going to pay your rent. So luckily, I didn’t have to worry about my rent. I wanted the degrees, plural, because I wanted to be professional. I wanted to be professional in the way I was professional as a historian. That has not been totally smooth, but with, I just keep talking, you see where I got to in ways that I could put the two together, it took me 10 years to put my historical self together with my visual artist self. It was very bumpy. And even now, I cannot go from concentrating on writing to concentrating on drawing without a kind of week or so of just changing gears.
Debbie Millman:
You got your BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. And though you originally didn’t know if you wanted to go to graduate school, you ultimately realized that you did. And you’ve written that this was because you wanted to work harder than the kids did. You wanted to be more intense than the kids were. And you thought graduate school would do that for you. Did it?
Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah, it did. It did. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I tell people getting a PhD from Harvard in history was a piece of cake in comparison.
Debbie Millman:
Why is that now? How is that possible?
Nell Irvin Painter:
Well, I guess the easiest way is to say that as a historian, I knew what the values and the standards were. In art, I did it. So some of the art that I looked at when I was an undergraduate just looked like piles of stuff to me. I didn’t understand how you use visual archives as opposed to how you use historical archives. And I was too tight and too focused on what I call discursive meaning when I started, to, what I came to later on in graduate school was a real loosening up and that was something I really had to do.
Debbie Millman:
You went to the Rhode Island School of Design or RISD?
Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
What did the students make of an African-American woman in her ’60s alongside them in class?
Nell Irvin Painter:
I think kind of nothing.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Nell Irvin Painter:
That is not true of everyone. I mean, we were very small. We were 12. But a couple of them felt old because they were like 31, 32. But I was just this old lady. And my bona fides, which came from academia, counted for nothing. And the thing that really summed it up, at the end of the school year, we were going to take our picture. So everybody assembled at the given time and nothing happened and nothing happened and people weren’t there. So finally, I am always on time, but I finally said, “Look, I have to take care of this thing in my studio. Call me when you’re ready to take the picture.” And as soon as I left, they took the picture.
Debbie Millman:
Oh. Despite all the accolades you got as an historian, you often got what you referred to as stinging criticisms that were one long tearing down in addition to this other utterly disrespective behavior. One professor even told you that you would never be an artist.
Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I’m assuming that that was a white cis-heterosexual man.
Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
In any case, why did he say that to you and how did you respond and how did you recover from that?
Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah, his name was Henry. He was printmaking teacher. And this was my first semester at RISD and I was feeling my way. I was not an experienced printmaker by any means, but I tried hard. And he called me dogged. And it wasn’t like, “Oh, you are dogged. You are very hardworking.” No, it was, “You are dogged.” So I called him out on it because I knew teaching. And if you are a good teacher, you don’t say things like that too. So I said, “Henry, that’s bullshit.” He said, “You may sell your work, you may have collectors, you may be in museums, you may have a gallery, but you will never be an artist.” And that stung. And I would say-
Debbie Millman:
Oh, my God. Yeah.
Nell Irvin Painter:
… what saved me was I had friends at Yale, they put me back together again.
Debbie Millman:
You did a fellowship there, did you? Didn’t you?
Nell Irvin Painter:
After I graduated from RISD, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You did a lot of research after that experience and discovered how many people have either been told that they’ll never be an artist or known somebody who was told that there would never be an artist, whether it’s a fine artist or a poet or a playwright or any field in the arts.
Nell Irvin Painter:
Right. Right.
Debbie Millman:
And you talk about this in relation to what you refer to as the talent mystique, the great man mystique and the genius mystique, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.
Nell Irvin Painter:
Yeah. I can talk about that actually more easily through publishing, because the publishing world right now, people are tearing their hair, “Oh, it’s terrible. All this consolidation.” And in the good old days, an editor could foster a writer even though the writer was not selling out and just wait until that writer flourished. And now there’s just, “Oh, it’s so terrible. The marketing, oh.”
But at the same time, the early reviews came through. I got two really good, strong early reviews from Kirkus and from Publishers Weekly, and another list maker said, “These are the 45 best books by women of color this spring.” And I thought, “45. Wow, that’s fantastic.” So I wonder if my 45 best books by women of color is related to the good old days gone by when the good old days gone by were white male writers.
In the 20th century, there was a tiny sliver of publications by white women. There was almost nothing well known by Black women. The breakthrough is with Toni Morrison, and that is in the 1980s. When I am with other Black women writers and they talk about what made the difference from them, they talk about when they were girls and they read Toni Morrison. When I was a girl, there was no Toni Morrison.
Curtis Fox:
Nell Irvin Painter.
Carson Ellis is an author and illustrator. Her bestselling books for children include Home and Du Iz Tak. Her latest book, One Week in January, is for adults, and it illustrates a diary she kept in her 20s.
Debbie Millman:
The book relays the story of one week of your life in 2001, the monumental week, you first moved to Portland, Oregon. And that week you decided to keep a journal documenting every single thing you did each day, everything you ate, every book you read, every time you checked your email. Why that week at that time, and why so much detail?
Carson Ellis:
I don’t remember why that week and I didn’t remember anything about this journal when I found it. I just found it in a box of ephemera a few years ago and I couldn’t remember why it even existed. I hadn’t seen it in 20 years or something. I was like, “Why would I have kept not only this journal for one week, but a journal that was so meticulous, such a detailed, meticulous chronicle of everything I did?” But then I spoke to my friend about it who is in the book a lot, my really old friend Emily, and I asked her if she remembered anything about it and she was like, “I do. You kept that journal because you were worried that you were losing your memory. And it was some kind of memory exercise because you always were feeling like you were too forgetful and you were somehow trying to boost your memory by writing down everything that you did.”
So I think every morning when I woke up, I wrote down every single thing that I could remember from the day before. And it was the week I moved to Portland, and I think, I don’t know if there’s significance to that, I’m not sure if that was intentional, I’m not sure if it was something that was sort of helping me get my bearings in a new city. My sense is that at the time, I was 25 years old, and I had just a million half-formed art ideas in my head, and this was just one of them, like a bunch of just ways of being creative that I was sort of exploring and trying to find some purpose for in my creative practice, you know?
Debbie Millman:
You said that the text doesn’t read so much like a journal, that you feel that it reads more like a stoic catalogue and that you don’t reveal much emotionally. And I have to say, Carson, I don’t agree at all. That to me doesn’t even feel like we’re talking about the same book.
Carson Ellis:
Interesting.
Debbie Millman:
There’s so much emotion in it. And what’s so interesting about it is that there’s a lot of emotion because the things that you don’t say that give a sense of there being deep emotionality in it.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah. I mean I think my favorite books are books where we’re not hearing from a narrative voice what the characters are going through. We’re witnessing it and we’re discerning it from context and dialogue and stuff. And so I guess in that way, this book is similar where I don’t really ever say how I’m feeling, but because you see everything I’m doing and are privy to so many of my conversations, you can see that I am broke, I’m probably in love with my best friend who I’m hanging out with all the time, but he’s dating all of my friends friends.
Debbie Millman:
And sleeping with in the same bed, but nothing is happening.
Carson Ellis:
Yeah, we’re sleeping in the same bed, but we’re “just friends.” There’s so much sort of longing and unfulfilled stuff in it that it is. I agree with you. I do think there’s a lot of feeling in it, but I think I’ve really go out of my way to not actually express anything, which does seem counter to a diary because I feel like other diaries I have kept, I’ve kept them because I was in some kind of moment of emotional tumult and I wanted to be like, “Dear diary, I am so unhappy because of this reason and this reason,” and there’s none of that in this book.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s certainly very unselfconscious, but that’s also what I love about it. You kind of know that this young woman is in love with this man and he’s bringing her pizza every night because she’s so broke. She doesn’t have money for dinner. I don’t know, there’s so much unsaid beauty in it.
What made you decide once you found it again, that you wanted to make it into a book and make all of these, I think, 20 or 30 illustrations, paintings for the book?
Carson Ellis:
I was moved when I read it. I read it and I thought it was very funny how boring it was. It’s just sort of like, I woke up and I put on this song and then I ate this bagel, and then I checked my email and no one had written me, and then I took a shower. It’s like just page after page of that. And I realized I’m not really selling it. But I think there is something to that.
For one thing, it’s such a time capsule both of my life, which was so different then because I was broke and I wasn’t a working artist, and I was also kind of transient and in constant transition when I was 25 years old, but also because we were in the middle of this radical cultural shift into a digital age. So it was like my email was novel, the internet was novel, and I had no sense of how profound this shift was or the magnitude of it or the fact that it was irreversible and that we were all moving headlong into a era of digital everything that we would live in whether we wanted to or not. So there was something kind of moving about that, and I do pine for a time before my iPhone and my social media. And so it was very, very sweet and moving to be taken back to that period and also to that period in my own life.
And then also I feel like because it is… I do think of it as a pretty stoic account of that week, and so it just felt like a thing that would serve from illustration. I was like, “Oh, the other side of the story is all the sort of emotional poignancy and resonance of that week,” and maybe that could be something that would be in the art if it’s not in the text, or maybe those two things would kind of communicate with each other to tell a more interesting story or something.
I guess as an illustrator, I think I’m always trying to find places where art helps text be more interesting or sophisticated or tell a story that is a little deeper because you’ve combined it with some visual element, and this occurred to me as a good candidate for that.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean, what I find so remarkable is that the paintings are so vivid. They really do help expand the text in a lot of ways. And because it is so matter-of-fact, you never really tell your reader how they should feel. It almost feels very objective in a lot of ways. There’s nothing purpley about it. It’s all very clear, and then you see these beautiful paintings that seem to perfectly articulate the memory. And so I think there’s such a nice of duality to that without sounding really sort of eye-rollingly ridiculous. There’s such a nice kind of play between the very ethereal, very beautiful memories as paintings or paintings as memories, and then this very matter-of-fact way of going about your life.
Carson Ellis:
Thanks, Debbie. I was sort of hoping for that. And I was hoping that the two things would feel like these separate voices sort of working together to tell a story, like the voice of the 48-year-old painter and the voice of the 25-year-old writer who are the same person, but kind of not really. So much time has passed.
Debbie Millman:
Do you see this 25-year-old version of yourself as part of who you are, as integrated into who you are? How do you feel about these two women, one at 25, one at 48, that share the same soul?
Carson Ellis:
They feel like they’re the same person, but they also feel really, really different. It did feel certainly more like I’m collaborating with an author than it felt like I was writing and illustrating my own book.
Debbie Millman:
Carson, before we finish the show, I’m wondering if you could read a little bit from One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary Diary?
Carson Ellis:
I would love to. I’m going to read the end.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, good.
Carson Ellis:
Which is Friday. It’s one week. And so this is the last day, and I’m going to start about halfway through the day.
“Colin called Emmy and asked her if she wanted to come to the track with us. She did, so we picked her up and went to Portland Meadows to bet on horses. It was rainy, and we drove down to MLK instead of I-5 and got sort of lost.”
“Colin was being a real brat. To everything that Emmy and I asked, he would say ‘No.’ And when I patted him on the shoulder, he said, ‘Don’t touch me’.”
“I said, ‘You’re never coming to the track with me again, are you?’ He said, ‘No’.”
“I said, ‘That’s mean’.”
“He said, ‘Good’.”
“And I said in my head, ‘I hate Colin Malloy’.”
“We got to the track in time for the third race, and I told Colin that I was so mad and went to get a hot dog, a program, and a beer. I placed my first bet, $2 across on the number 6, and went to the paddock to look at my horse. Then I saw Colin and was still angry, so he half-heartedly apologized and we made up. The only good bet either of us made was the same bet, 3 bucks across on a long shot, and we both won $24.”
“Emmy made one bet on a horse named the Cisco kid in the 5th race and lost. I was wearing Emmy’s grandma’s rings, my red dress, and red high heels for luck. Our luck was never very good though, and we left after the 6th race.”
“We dropped Emmy at home and came back to the warehouse where I fell asleep on Colin and Stiv’s couch for about an hour. Nathan woke up at 10:10, and the three of us walked downtown to see Marjorie, Lucia, and Heidi in a dance performance at an art school. I kept slipping and falling all the way there because of my lucky shoes. When we got there, it had just ended and we all felt dumb for missing it. I walked around and looked at the art, which was bad, except for a painting of a rooster on a pane of glass.”
“Heidi then drove Colin, Nathan, and me to a bar called 15 where we got so drunk. Colin drank screwdrivers, Nathan drank beer, and I drank scotch. I started talking to a boy named Donald, and Colin pretended to be my jealous boyfriend. Then I slipped and fell on a ramp going down to the bathroom because of drunkenness, and again, the lucky red shoes. I broke two glasses, one with scotch and the other with water. And two men rushed over to help me and brush me off. I was sad because my scotch was now on my dress, but one of the men offered to buy me another, so I didn’t care.”
“Then Marjorie came and introduced me to a guy named Shantos in Elvis sunglasses, who was some sort of promoter or something. We talked about me making some posters for him and exchanged numbers. And the owner of the bar brought me another scotch because I had fallen down and broken mine.”
“I went back to talk to Donald, but he told me he was looking for his one true love and tucked my hair behind my ear, so I left and sat down with Lucia, Jebediah, Colin, Marjorie, Nathan, and some of Jebediah’s friends.”
“Nathan was sad because the hot girl that he hadn’t worked up the herd to talk to had left. Colin and I started singing Pogue songs as loud as we could and slamming our fists on the table. The bouncer came by and told us to shut up, but we didn’t. Another guy collecting glasses said to us, snidely, ‘Is that really necessary?’ But still, we sang. I vowed never to return.”
“Then we got up to go home and Nathan tried to solicit a ride from Marjorie who was in the midst of a conversation and I said, ‘We ought to walk anyway, because we were so drunk’.”
“A couple of blocks from home, we spotted some scaffolding on the roof of a building with 30-foot ladders tied to either side. Nathan somehow got on the fire escape and busted the chain that was securing the lowest part of the ladder and keeping it from touching the ground. It was one of those seesaw type ladders.”
“It was raining now, and I ran to get Nathan’s bag and slipped and fell on my ass. We climbed the fire escape to the roof, and Nathan got out his video camera. Colin and I each climbed a ladder on either side of the scaffolding. I was still wearing high heels and climbed so carefully. When we got to the top, we were dozens of feet up with about 30 feet between us.”
“After some time, Colin put a cigarette in his mouth and yelled to me, ‘Do you have a light?’ I yelled back, ‘Yes. Come down and we’ll have a cigarette.’ So we climbed down and ran around on the roof, going up some more ladders and looking into a creepy brick room.”
“Nathan had filmed the whole thing, so we went home to watch it. When we got back on the ground, we started running and I yelled, ‘Wait, you guys,’ and fell in my ass once more. I had left my red candle that I stole from the bar on the ground next to the building, but I couldn’t find it and decided to come back for it the next day.”
“We walked home in the rain and went straight up to Nathan’s. First, we watched the rap video that we made in San Francisco for [inaudible 00:43:44] which was so funny. Then we watched the video of the roof, which was beautiful and eerie with only the noise of cars on the highway and some yelling in the background. We shared the last two cigarettes and the last two beers between the three of us.”
“Nathan rewound the tape and we watched the whole thing again with outtakes from [inaudible 00:44:03], scenes of Colin and Nathan driving out to San Francisco, and some video shot at the Shanghai.”
“Colin went to sleep, and Nathan and I talked about lost love. ‘Now I’m sad,’ I said. ‘Now I’m really sad,’ said Nathan. I kissed him good night on the cheek and went to bed.”
Curtis Fox:
Carson Ellis, her book is One Week in January: New Paintings For an Old Diary. You can hear the full interviews with all four of these artists on designmattersmedia.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.