In 2011, I was recently divorced and needing an ambitious creative project to sink my teeth into during the bleak New England winter. I have a life long appreciation of quotations and decided to make a poster featuring quotes paired with portraits of notable people. Unfortunately, my project had a time limit on it - because I was entering it into a local annual art exhibition in the last week of January.
I decided to use Adobe Photoshop to create my portrait collages, as the digital art program would allow me to effectively manage my visual assets, while allowing me to make design changes more quickly. My intent was to use Photoshop in a minimal way, avoiding most of the digital tools available in the software, yet enabling me to reduce elements to simple shapes, cropped and/or tinted different colors. After weeks working late into the night, I created a 20”x36" poster with 20 portraits of people who played an important role in the 20th century. A quote attributed to each person was displayed beneath their portrait. At the time, I figured this would be a stand-alone art project. The first portrait I completed was of Albert Einstein.
This is the first displayed version of this poster. I would later add 5 more portraits to the poster and that was the format used in the subsequent posters.
The art show, which had well over 100 hundred participants, was on display for two weeks. Because I missed the opening night reception, I never had an opportunity to see how my project was received. When I finally went to reclaim my poster 2 weeks later, there were two older women looking at it very earnestly. One was kneeling and reading the glossary of attributions at the bottom of it. After informing them that I was picking up my art, the woman on her knees said, "So you're the artist? This is wonderful! You should make another poster about religion." In that moment, I knew that I had stumbled upon an art project that might engage me for a while.
Since that fateful meeting in 2012, I have made hundreds of portrait collages, and each poster has a unifying topic, linking all of the featured people. Each comprises 25 portraits, like the original poster, and has a quote paired with a collage. I selected significant quotations related to the theme of the poster.
The posters were produced in this order:
20th Century Visionaries (2012)
This is the final redesigned poster, completed after it’s initial design. It has 5 more portraits than the the first poster. this is the format that all the later posters would adhere to.
