Marlene
Dumas
Book Jacket
raw
beauty
emotion
Mandate
To design a book jacket and cover for an artist to showcase their artworks and identity.
To embrace the style and feeling of the selected artist and showcase their work in a coffee table format book that encompasses their identity. Wrapped in a book jacket that expresses the values of the artist, the page layout also must match the artist’s tone and style. The artist here is Marlene Dumas. She is a contemporary South African artist.
Process
Understanding the artist and their work
This was done by mimicking their style. It required learning about their values through interviews and getting a feel of their personality so that it can be replicated by the graphic designer to create something they’d be proud of.
Marlene Dumas artwork often references her personal Polaroids, photographs from magazines, and pornography. Her paintings are seen as portraits, however, they do not represent the person but rather the emotional state that one could be in. Her art focuses on serious, often controversial, themes such as guilt and innocence, sexuality and race, violence and tenderness. She uses loose brush strokes and a wet on wet technique.
Solution
After seeing the artwork and listening to the artist in many interviews, it was clear that her artwork was about core emotions and the beauty in things that are real and raw, because meaning matters. “There is no beauty, if it doesn’t show some of the terribleness of life”.
“There is no beauty, if it doesn't show some of the terribleness
of life.”
