Description

Hand

Hand is an Anti-Brexit Greeting Card – A satirical greeting card in the style of a poster showing a hand flailing in the water and the text ‘Now in its 52nd Week, Riding High Within the EU – Will the country sink with Brexit?!’ and ‘The Unintended Consequences Of Brexit’

Saul Bass

Saul Bass is one of our graphic design heroes. He was best known for his design of motion-picture title sequences and film posters. And his style was so individual that one could tell his work immediately upon seeing it. Moreover, he used paper cut outs to create the strong graphic designs, and that is a technique that we too like. Of course, Bass was not the only artist to use cut out pieces of paper to create images. Matisse did likewise, especially after he lost power in his arms and could not paint as he wished.

Henri Matisse

I wasn’t a big Matisse fan until i saw a ‘Dance’ painting of his in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 2017. It’s a painting of dancers in a circle. I had seen this or similar ‘dance’ paintings from Matisse. And in fact, we had beeb to a Matisse exhibition at the Tate Modern in about 2014 that was specifically about his cutouts.

Be that as it may, it was only in the rooms on the fourth floor of the General Staff Building of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg that I came to appreciate Matisse. It’s not that I specifically didn’t like him before – it’s just that I didn’t get a lot from him. Perhaps it was seeing a big painting on the wall, well lit and with room to really look at it. Whatever the reason, I saw how clever the layout was and commanding his understanding of layout.

The Hand Has Slipped

On looking a bit more closely at the painting I saw that the circle of dancers was broken. The person to the left in the painting was elegant and poised. But the hand has slipped from the person next to him or her, and that person is falling. And the hands that miss each other are placed over the leg of the person behind.

If they were placed in space – in the plain blue background – then we would see it immediately. But with the placement where it is, it was easier to miss. You know, people raved about Matisse. Other painters raved about him in his day. Yet I had previously found him so so. So appreciating him was like resolving a doubt. And it was a pleasure.

A Hand Or An Arm

In a different but equally dramatic style, Saul Bass commands the attention. One simply doesn’t look at one of his graphics of a hand or an arm or whatever it is, without being pulled in.

SKU: B0017