![]() ![]() Their equipment allowed them to set your type and then fill the space that you defined. I was still dependent on the typesetters. RV: We were right at that transition from analog to digital. That was a very seminal piece for me.ĮL: You were talking about stretching the photograph. If I do not hit that tingle, then the design is not reverberating strong enough. That is when I really could feel a tingle inside, and that is what I wanted to go for in the future. It was pulling the cords and playing those chords that Peter was working with, but doing it through the medium of graphic design. I was as close to the director’s subject matter, his subject matter, as I could be by reenacting it and then using the poster as a document of his point of view. Poster, Tannhäuser, 1988 Designed by Rick Valicenti (American, b. And then I add a couple of red dots for the umlaut. But, I say, leave a space for the “S” because a three-letter word that begins with an illuminated letter is sex. I had them stretch the type to fit the space. Wow, you can stretch a picture! Now, what can I do with the type? I specify some Gothic type from Ryder Type Gallery. Underneath, I stretch the photo of the Bible to fill the space. I blew up the image of the singer’s face. Sellers says, “This is my character.” So, I say, “Would I be able to videotape the baritone or the lead tenor and photograph the monitor?” He says, “Sure!” So, that is what we did. I meet with Peter and he is enamored with a picture of Pentecostal evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, crying on TV after he was caught visiting a prostitute in a place with striped awnings. I’m doing a poster for Chicago’s Lyric Opera, a there’s no budget. RV: It’s 1988, and I’m on my own as a designer. I am inclined to use tools of aptitude, which means if you do not have much of an aptitude for it, but you sure like it, try it!ĮL: Tell me about your poster for the opera Tannhäuser. How does graphic design do that? We saw Herbert Matter, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and Nathan Lerner do that. How can we use photography to play in a different realm? Advertising has learned how to do that. This is the directorial mode of photography. You do not have to be the guy who clicks the shutter or the person who fills the airbrush. My ineptitude at illustration allowed me to develop another talent, which is working behind the camera as a director. It never mattered to me whether an idea was rendered illustratively or photographically. So, this poster was me doing that-creating a painterly illustration with a camera. Can Paul McCartney sing Little Richard? No, not really! But he did his version and that is cool. How could I do that? I am not one of those guys. So, they brought this other flare, this illustrative painterly flare. They got modernism and geometry but they could not shed themselves. You can feel Herbert Bayer in the Bauhaus colliding with these illustrators. Their illustrations teetered right on the edge of modernism. Turn on the colored gel and we are done! Shoot a four-by-five color transparency, and it is over. ![]() We found a model of a World War II bomber, we found a globe, we got some dry ice, we hit some water on it, and we got ourselves fog. RV: The image is a photograph created by myself, photographer Corinne Pfister, and her assistant, Michael Pappas. 1951) Offset lithograph on textured white wove paper H x W: 91.3 × 61 cm (35 15/16 in. Poster, Deja Vu, 1990 Designed by Rick Valicenti (American, b. The theme of my poster is deja vu, baby! Here we go again! There is a reference to world peace in the typesetting along the bottom. I wondered, “Man, did I dodge that? Should I have participated in that?” You carry those conflicted emotions if you missed the draft by good luck in the lottery, not bone spurs. In college, my draft card number was ninety-eight in a year they called number ninety-three or ninety-five. When asked to make a lecture poster, I thought “How do I ignore that we just started a war?” My own narrow version of history was the Vietnam war. ![]() The poster was for a lecture at the Alberta College of Art, sponsored by Gilbert Paper. I created this poster at the start of the 1990 Gulf War war. We are quarantined in a studio apartment above our friend’s garage. This is the second day of a fourteen-day quarantine as we prepare to visit my mother-in-law, who is ninety-three years old and in assisted living. Rick Valicenti: I am in a garage in Toronto. Behind him, a red car is suspended in the air for repairs. Rick is smiling and wearing a dark sweater. Rick Valicenti, screenshot from a Zoom call. ![]()
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