I was very hard-pressed to make my perfect text-excerpt decision; and in the end I chose the less-meaningful piece of text, but a more exciting visual composition. I chose the lyrically stunning Beatles hit, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and focused mainly on the first stanza,
Picture yourself in a boat on a river
/With tangerine trees and marmalade skies/Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
/A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
/Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
/Towering over your head
/Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes/And she’s gone
The text to me is dreamy, wistful, optimistic, playful and charming. The imagery is powerful and demands vibrant colors, textures, and patterns. The voice of the text is almost of a father telling his daughter a bedtime lullaby, a myth almost, or a legend, about the far-away wonderland. It almost reduces the listener to a more infantile and lighthearted state, bringing out our inner child. For me the message of the text is about everyone’s perfect place, their dream location and fantasy. When the words begin its almost hypnotic, and one is lulled into the river and the song. Optimistically I will be able to visually re-create this pied-piper-esque magnetic energy; to re-create Lennon’s fantastical world by simply creating a tangible image of the image that is already in the highly descriptive text.
Truly this should be easy work, my direction is directed by the words. I would like to use cellophane for the flowers, and paste “diamonds” into the sky. I like to combine using text normally with using text as image/shapes, and the first line “picture yourself in a boat on a river” I feel should be text floating and smooth, running in the river towards the dreamland. It will be both tactile and digital, tactile for mediums such as crystal jewels and cellophane, gold foil or fabrics, then photos of tangerines and photos of water layered with cartoon images/objects. The important aspects to have are the over-all flowing and singsong happy attitude—which I will re-create with bright colors and many mediums/textures—while creating an image or perspective of the utopia. I want to use parts of the text but certainly not all of it, highlighting the important statements first. The manner in which the words are sung is also crucial, as the lilting method I will attempt to follow on the paper like a stepping path.
First and foremost, to illustrate the song is simply to close your eyes and see what the lyrics themselves draw out. In my mind this creates a stunning and hazy wonderland, reminisce of Willy Wonka or surrealist paintings. Particularly I noticed the work of the surrealist Roberto Matta, who began with simpler paintings but developed an interesting style of imagery creating a scene that was loosely connected but excelled as a compositional environment, such as his “Here, sire fire, eat I.” http://www.worldvisitguide.com/oeuvre/O0026388.html . Because the Beatles did the song, I enjoyed looking at the LOVE webpage (the Beatles musical special/live dance performance) http://www.mirage.com/entertainment/love.aspx because it shows graphic design work that has been done by others attempting to display the essentials of the Beatles and their work. I like the bright colors, the retro feel, and curving letters. To understand the time better I looked at some of the work of Bob Pepper, who designed album covers in the Beatles generation. His work showed me the typographic tendencies and characteristics of this song’s time period, the illustration-heavy work, and usage of bright colors. http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2007/07/12/the-art-of-bob-pepper/