THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DUMB DESIGN IDEAS, ANOTHER DOWNTRIP

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DUMB DESIGN IDEAS
ANOTHER DOWNTRIP

Another find from the Nevelson master, this painting above hopefully illustrates the downtrip. If you compare the two similar pictures you will see that the arrows signify the direction that the lines and forms carry the viewer. In the painting below, the upbeat, the lines and forms rise up from the lower left and churn up towards the upper right. In the painting at the top of the pamphlet the lines and forms carry the viewer down hill. The paintings are directional. Some of you were having a hard time figuring this one out, I hope the new artwork helps.

A few quick biographical notes on the life of Dirk Van Assaerts;

As an arts administrator Dirk was spending an awful lot of time shuffling paper and he really wanted to further his art career, so he began working on his masters degree in fine arts. The day care ministry paid his tuition, and promised him a raise when he secured the terminal degree in his field. Uncertainty nagged poor Dirk, he already had one degree and that didn't help him become a full time artist, why get a second? However many people did, and it was the usual way of doing things. Besides he could always teach and with that masters degree, he could maybe secure a job at the Peoples Conformity District art school.

At his home, children were being born and beginning to knock things over. His wife gave birth to twin sons. In those days fathers didn't join their wives as they struggled and complained giving birth. Fathers paced back and forth in the waiting room, smoking cigarettes and reading Argosy magazine. As he paced, Dirk wondered how everything had gotten so complicated and expensive, he was going to have to find a way to increase his income. With four children now, the little house by the fetid canal was starting to get mighty cramped, and his carriage hardly fit them all, particularly since his wife had now more than doubled in size. She also bought a small dog like the rich Hollywood starlets prefer, that snarled and bit Dirk whenever he got too close to her

So on weekends (instead of painting, incidentally) he and his humongous wife hunted for a larger house, with four bedrooms and in a neighborhood with better schools. The schools were all exactly the same, the state consistency monitors decreed that. But some of the suburbs where the swells lived did seem to get better average test scores and place more students into the prestigious bureaucracies. People insisted they weren't actually better, but they were nicer.