fascination book - concept vs. expression

Fascination: Expression vs. Conception

Fascination:

What is a fascination? For me understanding the fundamentals, dare I say the principles, in which a critical view on design requires. What is it that I appreciate in the natural and composed environments that surround me? What catches my eye at first sensational glance and what keeps me in-terested with sunstained story behind it. These elements make up my so called appropriated identity, not of my own creation but of an organized curation. The purely sublime manifestation of witty invention mixed with the cleverly altered classics. At first I am only drawn by the substanti-ated and intellectualized but the emotional and romantic come through in moments of self professed weakness. Its a melange but continuity exists with consideration for aesthetics, formal integrity, proportion, material, context, and message.

Expression vs. Conception:

Define what it is that you are accomplishing or initialy engaging in when embarking on a creative process. It is important to later communicate how it is that you arrived at your final result. With in design and perhaps art, for me there are two clearly different modes of creation, that of ex-pression and that of conceptual thinking. It isn’t that these two notions never combine, follow each other, or at times blur, but it is valuable to define their meaning. With in design, a term such as conceptual is often misused to define something that is expressive. Of course there are design questions that are conceptual but they are far and few between. Expression is the act of demonstrating one’s feelings through different forms where as conceptual thinking is the analyses of something new through the adapta-tion of references that already exist. Both toil with sister notions of the sublime but conceptual thinking often results in completely nascent sets of ideas, expression remains only from the self. The danger in misuse and mis-interpretation comes through as gimmicks. This paradox of expression versus conception constantly haunts my creative process.

The following pages reveal images from my collection that fit the theme...