Grant Wiggins

Here’s a photo of Give It Up or Turn It Off, taken in my studio about 15 minutes ago. It’s almost done … I just have some cleaning up to do.

I’ve been painting geometry quite a bit lately. The painting you see here is based on the sketch I posted March 24: “On minimalism and pop art.”

I think I’m pretty much done with the pattern in the upper right for now. I accidentally happened upon it, but it feels a bit like Verner Panton pattern. I’ll have to check that.

Anyway, for as much as I love painting geometry like this, I feel like I’ve done this pattern to death … at least for the moment!

Pardon the disjointedness of this post from here on out, but there’s a few things I just have to get off my mind:

I’ve listening to: Mother Mallard’s Masterpiece Co. by David Borden. This is a Moog synthesizer classic and it makes my head spin. I’ve also discovered Gershon Kingsley’s God Is a Moog. That one is way too deep and complicated to sum up here. That one, too, is mad. And also I’ve discovered Popol Vuh’s Affenstunde.

I stopped into a used book store, while waiting for work to be completed on my car, and could not resist the temptation to purchase: New Directions in Shopping Centers and Stores by Louis G. Redstone. Cover to cover, this gem offers billions of black and white photos of shopping malls (interiors and exteriors) from the 1960s, up through 1973, when the book was published. Geometry was everywhere. It’s like people were swimming in geometry as they shopped.

Also, I picked up Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods by Charles Jencks. I haven’t yet jumped into this one yet, but I can safely say that there’s nothing quite like predictions of the future from the past — especially predictions of futuristic architecture.

Also, I am inspired by: The design supplement in last Sunday’s New York Times. Titled Op Culture, its cover features a gorgeous op art interior (You must see the video of the making of the shoot). Here’s a quote: “The 1970s are back in original designs and new pieces that graphically evoke that era.” For me, however, they never really went away.

So where am I going with all of this? I think an Aquarius Records reviewer is right in writing that “everything cool was already done about thirty years ago.” But I’m not interested in nostalgia. I just think that, in terms of pure design, something bad happened on the way to the 90s.

— Grant Wiggins