An Innerview: Rebecca Burgess asks Holly Ollivander many good questions and Holly cannot seem to shut up. With pictures.

the source for this interview is featured on Rebecca Burgess' Blog

Rebecca: Who or what has had the greatest influence on your work?

Holly: without a single doubt in my mind it is Paul Rand. One of the first things I ever remember seeing in my life was the Colorforms logo. Paul Rand did that.

Have you ever gone to a public toilet and seen those generic people signs on the doors denoting the male/female sections? That's Paul. Have you driven to the supermarket and been tempted (for half a second) to park in the space for the handicapped? That wheelchair figure stencilled on the pavement is Paul's design, too.

It's entirely possible that as you go through your day you could be seeing Paul Rand everywhere. Like Elvis.

Above is a pic of Paul as a sexy young thing
and featuring two of his most famous works.
To the right is Paul at the very peak of his powers.

I often think about cave paintings - petroglyphs and pictoglyphs - and how they still manage to convey an entire world of meaning and mystery with a few simple brushstrokes. Paul Rand re-captured that magic perfectly in the mid twentieth century with his unerring ability to laser-in on the very essence of a concept.

The progression went something like this: Tens of thousands of years after the cave paintings, artists were expressing the still very flat yet now richly detailed world of Ancient Egyptian art and European Medieval tapestry and illuminated manuscripts.

Then came the Giotto revolution where - with judicious use of light and shadow and the startling new concept of perspective - art and artists began to take the world by storm. They literally showed humanity a new way of seeing. It all began to get a little nuts so some artists got together and decided it was useless to fight the inevitable and they may as well go for a full-on Renaissance.

Before the Renaissance, artists were - for the most part - as anonymous as a bricklayer or woodcarver or any other craftsman, but after Giotto there was a sudden stampede of egos in search of a rich patron and the artist was catapulted to the 15th century equivalent of a Rockstar.

Then came Vermeer and Rembrandt, Van Eyck and Holbein - all the great Flemish Painters. Later, the Pre-Raphaelites took the stage and really pulled out all the stops with full-blown colour, texture and emotion bursting from every square inch of the canvas in operatic excess.

So what has this ridiculously abbreviated art history to do with Paul Rand? Simply this: Paul took us back to where we began, and in the most elegant way possible. He pared down complex information and overblown emotional romanticism to the barest essentials needed to communicate to anyone, anywhere, and with no language translation necessary.

He was a master of geometry and balance and - dare I say it - manipulation, like any good magician. He foresaw the soundbite before television, the assault on people's attention span before MTV and the Internet, he knew the necessity of grabbing and holding people's interest long enough to convey a complex concept and accomplished this trick time after time without the viewer consciously realising why they were deeply moved.

This is what any artist wants most to accomplish: to have an effect on the beholder that transcends their conscious awareness. This is where the power lies to move people. However, the instant they suspect they are being manipulated the jig is up and you've lost them. Possibly forever.

Paul Rand never forgot that good art is good communication and that when you communicate effectively, people often want to hand you large bundles of cash.

He shook the Renaissance till its teeth rattled, briskly slapped the cheeks of the hysterical Pre-Raphaelites, took us all by the hand and led us to where we started in the caves. He reminds us once again of the power of the iconic image.

Above all, he teaches us that all great art is well-crafted, but not all good craft is great art.

Below are some of Paul Rand's Greatest Hits...

and may the colorforms logo never be forgot.