Ron Wong,
Founder and Executive Creative Director

It's been awhile since I picked up a brush, a piece of charcoal or looked closely at the surface texture of a canvas and water color paper, wondering, anticipating how paint and gesso will react to it. How it will transform it. How if I applied a bit more water to the medium, it will have a certain desired outcome or affect. Conversely, if the brush is too dry or does not carry enough paint, the stroke will not be fluid and I will not be able to finish a continuous thought without having to double back; and by doing so, the affect will seem labored, not spontaneous, if not less pure.

But what I've learned about painting or should I reference "art" versus design and illustration is that art is not about succeeding in duplicating a fixed image in your head or replicating what inspired you in the first place. For me it's about imagination and the ability to use a wide variety of mediums and instruments that have creative properties of their own. When vigorously put to work together, the experience becomes a series of spontaneous and sensory visual events that are, for the most part, unexpected, if not purely accidental. Colors merging, creating new colors or traces of accent colors. These colors might create layers of textures that add desirable subplots and give richness and context to forms. Then as shapes collide or are juxtaposed against one another, they create mass and voids on the canvas not before anticipated but worthy of further exploration. Art is an experience combining sensory, intellectual and tactile engagement with your mind and the piece you are creating. Whether you like the outcome or not, two things are certain; the result is totally unpredictable and it's a signature guaranteeing that it's one of a kind.

What an interesting prospect to entertain as I think about design. How to forge the intuitive, the spontaneous and rewarding sensory experience with the logical and prescribed rules of success (must generate profit) and then make it palatable to a wide and opinionated audience. Is art and design that far apart nowadays? They used to call what we do "commercial art." A not so cool combination of words but there was some justification for the terminology. Andy Warhol did beautiful album covers for Count Basie, Artie Shaw, The Velvet Underground, to name a few. And most of the "design" professionals then were fine arts majors. The idea of "art" is seldom in any creative brief these days. But then, who can argue the possibility of creating a brand that is highly differentiated (one of a kind), exudes karma (Warhol's Marilyn) , beckons investigation (Picasso's Guernica) and is timeless in look and feel (Van Gogh's Starry Night)?