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Drawing Is Thinking
For more than fifty years Milton Glaser has designed much of the world we experience every day. His posters, books, albums, restaurants, advertisements, and so much more have made him the pre-eminent force in design in America. Drawing upon an amazing vocabulary of images and techniques, Glaser has now created his most personal book. Based on his view that all art has its origin in the impulse to create-primarily through drawing - he has designed a book that powerfully delineates this idea. In "Drawing is Thinking", the drawings depicted are meant to be experienced sequentially, so that the viewer not only follows Glaser through these pages, but comes to inhabit his mind. The drawings represent a range of subject matter taken from throughout Glaser's career.They illustrate the author's commitment to the fundamental idea that drawing is not simply a way to represent reality, but a way to understand and experience the world. Glaser's two signature books, "Graphic Design" and "Art is Work", are still in print decades after their first appearance. Each displays his work with short descriptions of how the work came about. But in "Drawing is Thinking", the author is less interested in display and more concerned with how the mind works to visually represent reality.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published November 13, 2008
2 people are currently reading
459 people want to read
About the author
Milton Glaser
101 books37 followersMilton Glaser was a celebrated American graphic designer and artist, whose notable designs include the "I ❤ NY" logo, the psychedelic Bob Dylan poster, and the logos for DC Comics and Brooklyn Brewery. Born in the Bronx in 1929, he was educated at Cooper Union. In 1954, together with Seymour Chwast, Reynold Ruffins and Edward Sorel, he co-founded Push Pin Studios, which became a guiding reference in the world of graphic design. In 1968 he co-founded New York magazine with Clay Felker. Glaser had one-man-shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Georges Pompidou Center. He was selected for the lifetime achievement award of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (2004) and the Fulbright Association (2011), and in 2009 he was the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of the Arts award. Glaser died in June of 2020, of a stroke.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 8, 2008
Milton Glaser, from the prefacing interview with Peter Mayer:
"When you look at a Vermeer and read in an art history book that the reason the work is successful is the compositional balance of yellow and blue, you are being informed of nothing. The reason you are responsive to a Vermeer is because he has moved your mind. Cézanne showed us that in a bowl of apples, and every artist does this same thing in his own way."
"The fact is we develop immunity to experience, because we have to, because if we responded to everything in life, we could not tolerate it. Most of our lives we spend deflecting most of the information we recieve. You go out in the street and you are besieged just by what your sight, your hearing, your mind encounter. People stop paying attention; they revert to cruise control. Every once in a while something will happen, like somebody dies, or you have an accident, or you see a great painting, and you realize that you are living in a semiconscious state. In fact, that may be the only way humans can cope with the complexity of life.
"What paintings do, and what theater does, and what poetry does, is to penetrate people's immunity and to embrace the puzzles to be solved. That's what I mean by the phrase 'moving the mind'"
"When you look at a Vermeer and read in an art history book that the reason the work is successful is the compositional balance of yellow and blue, you are being informed of nothing. The reason you are responsive to a Vermeer is because he has moved your mind. Cézanne showed us that in a bowl of apples, and every artist does this same thing in his own way."
"The fact is we develop immunity to experience, because we have to, because if we responded to everything in life, we could not tolerate it. Most of our lives we spend deflecting most of the information we recieve. You go out in the street and you are besieged just by what your sight, your hearing, your mind encounter. People stop paying attention; they revert to cruise control. Every once in a while something will happen, like somebody dies, or you have an accident, or you see a great painting, and you realize that you are living in a semiconscious state. In fact, that may be the only way humans can cope with the complexity of life.
"What paintings do, and what theater does, and what poetry does, is to penetrate people's immunity and to embrace the puzzles to be solved. That's what I mean by the phrase 'moving the mind'"
May 2, 2015
While staying at an artist friend’s house in Santa Fe – chock full of art books and artist bios – I was drawn in particular to two volumes by Milton Glaser: Drawing is Thinking (2008) and an earlier volume, Art is Work (2000).
On one level, Drawing is Thinking is a sophisticated exercise in pouring old wine into new bottles. In this case, Glaser has taken paintings, drawings, sketches, and posters from 1960 to 2006 and assembled them into a single book-length sequence, without captions, thereby rendering the images mysterious and their ultimate meaning elusive. There are varied visual and thematic connections among the works, but nothing is explicit. (Glaser does provide a guide to the original source of the assignment or project, with title and media, at the back of the book.)
Glaser offers the rationale for the book in an introductory Q-and-A with friend Peter Mayer:
People will try to “read” this book. And they will be disappointed. Because this is not a book to be read…. There is a sequence, but what you have to do in this case is suspend the inclination to “read.” As I said before, narratives will occur but your unconscious will convert them…. The images in [the book] are not new but the book itself is a totally new work.
I confess to not discerning any over-arching theme coursing through the whole book except for the rich soup of imagery that bubbles with the combination of Glaser’s imagination and his superlative drawing skills. Here, and in Art is Work, he makes the case for drawing as essential not just for creating art, but to thinking about and understanding the world.
Technical skill in rendering objects does not preclude abstraction and ambiguity that is essential to “moving the mind” with a piece of art, in Glaser’s view. “Why are we unmoved by many of the skills of academic painting? Because the information is complete and unambiguous, so you have nothing to add.”
The computer is tremendously powerful in generating images, he argues, but at a price. “There is something about the struggle and the energy used to make something that is being compromised.”
I “read” the book as a series of full-page spreads, not as a whole, observing how the left-page image connected visually and thematically with the right-side page – although many spreads have single or multiple images as well.
Glaser originally created many of the drawings and paintings for commercial clients – Tomato Records, book publishers, and Vanity Fair . Others are taken from Glaser’s travel sketchbooks in Europe (he seems not to have traveled in Asia), or for more academic exercises: “The imaginary World of Claude Monet,” “Ode to Toulouse Lautrec,” and “Works After Piero.” Here, they are remixed and matched in ever enticing ways.
For an art-travel week in Santa Fe, this book has been a wonderful companion.
On one level, Drawing is Thinking is a sophisticated exercise in pouring old wine into new bottles. In this case, Glaser has taken paintings, drawings, sketches, and posters from 1960 to 2006 and assembled them into a single book-length sequence, without captions, thereby rendering the images mysterious and their ultimate meaning elusive. There are varied visual and thematic connections among the works, but nothing is explicit. (Glaser does provide a guide to the original source of the assignment or project, with title and media, at the back of the book.)
Glaser offers the rationale for the book in an introductory Q-and-A with friend Peter Mayer:
People will try to “read” this book. And they will be disappointed. Because this is not a book to be read…. There is a sequence, but what you have to do in this case is suspend the inclination to “read.” As I said before, narratives will occur but your unconscious will convert them…. The images in [the book] are not new but the book itself is a totally new work.
I confess to not discerning any over-arching theme coursing through the whole book except for the rich soup of imagery that bubbles with the combination of Glaser’s imagination and his superlative drawing skills. Here, and in Art is Work, he makes the case for drawing as essential not just for creating art, but to thinking about and understanding the world.
Technical skill in rendering objects does not preclude abstraction and ambiguity that is essential to “moving the mind” with a piece of art, in Glaser’s view. “Why are we unmoved by many of the skills of academic painting? Because the information is complete and unambiguous, so you have nothing to add.”
The computer is tremendously powerful in generating images, he argues, but at a price. “There is something about the struggle and the energy used to make something that is being compromised.”
I “read” the book as a series of full-page spreads, not as a whole, observing how the left-page image connected visually and thematically with the right-side page – although many spreads have single or multiple images as well.
Glaser originally created many of the drawings and paintings for commercial clients – Tomato Records, book publishers, and Vanity Fair . Others are taken from Glaser’s travel sketchbooks in Europe (he seems not to have traveled in Asia), or for more academic exercises: “The imaginary World of Claude Monet,” “Ode to Toulouse Lautrec,” and “Works After Piero.” Here, they are remixed and matched in ever enticing ways.
For an art-travel week in Santa Fe, this book has been a wonderful companion.
April 4, 2010
Milton Glaser signed a my copy to me. A treasure in my art and design library.
April 3, 2013
read it in order. lot's of ideas for experimentation.
Currently reading
June 2, 2011More images than words.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews