Recovering from my busy spring, and needing an escape valve for the pressures of teaching, designing and the drudgery of office work has made me feel like I need to have more of a creative outlet. So here it is. My new project: Office Art… Work created in between tasks at the office. Lets face it, we all do it. Maybe you doodle while on the phone. Maybe you arrange office supplies or bring in pictures from home to make the space yours. The purpose of this project is to explore creativity in small ways and in unusual spaces. I propose to document them with the camera in my cell phone, which of course adds to the challenge, as it is a really crappy camera.

My first entry shown above is called Three Nickels and a Dime – Money on Edge. I am not sure what is about yet. Perhaps a commentary on the precariousness of our finances, and our reliance on silly office work to make a living. Or perhaps it is about conformity, as the line is as straight and even as I could make it. The truth is that I usually have a few coins on my desk, and I tend to stand them up on edge while talking on the phone – answering the same question for the gabillionth time. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to make your own. Send me pictures and perhaps I will post them.

I have given it some thought, and I now know what I mean, which is this: The movie relies on the viewer to bring his or her positive sentiments about the characters to the film. If someone had written that script without using any characters known from any other story it would never have been made into a movie. The situation is further worsened by the fact that the characters were not particularly true to themselves, as they had developed through the previous two movies (I won’t even compare them to the ones in the comic books).

Art demands truth. And some sort of revelation through truth. Sentimentality comes about because of laziness, and because it is genuinely difficult to be truthful. It doesn’t really matter if it is a movie like X-Men 3, or a cheesy painting of a lighthouse, or some fluffy music. If the work requires the viewer to bring his or her happy sentiments about the subject for the thing to have any value at all, then it is sentimental.

Sentimentality is less of an issue in design, I think because design is generally focused on accomplishing something specific, such as communicating a particular idea. There is no room for sentimentality.