Let your squares be squares

Julie Rozman, an architect-slash-ceramics blogger I’ve followed for a few years now, posted some images of her work for sale. She’s moving from Chicago to Urbana to study ceramics, and one of her sets of work reminded me of a post I’ve been thinking about for a while.

A long while, actually. Probably since I graduated from college almost ten years ago now.

Julie's sculpture does not forget it's roots.

In my architecture classes, in my graphic design classes and some of the time in my ceramics classes I watched aspiring artists and designers, myself included, forget the basics of design. We’d go after an assignment with passion, with dreams of being featured on the front cover of Architectural Digest, and forget that there are certain building blocks to every visual and spatial solution. They were overthinking the problem.

I suppose this is a symptom of the genius mentality, the drive for stardom usurping the desire to make useful and beautiful contributions to our surrounding environments.