Look, it's Evan Lysachek and Alissa Czisny... really.
I'm looking proudly at the end result of a several month process creating a logo for US Figure Skating and the competition we are hosting in March, Adult Midwestern Sectionals.
The process started in late July/early August when our bid was approved. We discussed how we wanted to represent ourselves and the club to make us unique from other cities.
I was completing my painting for ArtPrize and the thought was capitalizing on Grand Rapids' reputation as an arts destination. We have the Meijer Gardens, the GRAM, and the UICA, not to mention Kendall College of Arts and Design, Aquinas and Calvin.
Excited about my co-chair's enthusiasm for the idea, I explored famous artists for inspiration. I wanted to spoof Warhol's Marilyn quad with a depiction of Dick Button, but without permission to use Dick's face and no connection to him and Grand Rapids, that idea was killed.
A cartoon panel a la Lichtenstein was also in my sketchbook, the idea that I would create 5 panels: one for the event and one for each discipline. Response was lukewarm and even though it was a great idea, the task of creating so much for one logo was rather overwhelming.
Several other ideas were batted around until I came back to Alexander Calder. In Grand Rapids, you always come back to Calder. We are the home of La Grand Vitesse, the nation's first publicly fund work of art. The co-chairs perked up with this idea, and so I began to explore the world of Calder and his art.
I looked at his paintings, sculptures, mobiles and jewelry. I sketched twisty skates, twistier skaters. I experimented with his 70s groovy suns and bendy figures. Every time, I came back to his whimsical mobiles.
I played around with shapes and forms, attempting to have skates dangle from one of his geometric wonders. It looked.. tacky.
Frustrated, I stared at a few mobiles for inspiration and let my pencil to its work. One of his swoops looked like a body in arch. Bet that could be shaped into a layback.
Not satisfied with one form, I wanted a second. Since the layback is accepted as a feminine form, I wanted one that could be id'ed as masculine, so I looked at male skater pictures and it came down to Braden Overett's camel spin (perfect!) and Evan Lysachek's (Olympic champ!) bullet sit spin.
Evan's sit seemed to compliment the Calderesque forms I was experimenting with.
I doodled and sketched to get the arches just right, and it was at a Basic Skills competition I judged up north, in between events, that I finally got it just right.
From there, I drew the logo in Adobe Illustrator and constructed the artwork based on US Figure Skating specifications. Being my second logo (!), I knew to do some things, but needed to send it to USFSA for tweaks. The final tweak was a register mark last night and I got approval today.
In math and the sciences, it's important to "show your work" so you can pinpoint where your calculations went awry. As an artist, it's also, in retrospect, fascinating to see an idea evolve.
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