"Paula Scher"

Designer and Artist

The relationship between fine art and design.

Paula Scher has a career which fuses rock and roll, corporate identity creation, and impressionistic geography. Scher studied at the Tyler School of Art in Philadephia, Pennsylvania, earning a bachelor of fine arts. Scher has been a principle in the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991. She began her career as an art director in the 1970's and early 80's, with her electric approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990's her landmark identity for The Public Theatre fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions, and her architectual collaborations have re-imagined the urban landscape as a dynamic environment of dimensional design.

In the early 1990's Paula Scher began painting small maps covered in words and colour depictions of continents and regions. Within a few years the maps grew larger and more elaborate. All of this detail is the result of work that Scher describes as "incredibly laborious and obsessive". The placement of states,cities and political statistics and facts are not precisely placed or accurate. Scher just went with it and added things almost in a meditative state where her imagination directed her. Schers sense of colour and use of typography placed intuitively has no doubt come through with years of text placement and colour theory from her graphic design career. I think her paintings are amazing and it goes to show you can do it all. Paint, design etc and combine them all.

http://gothamist.com/2007/11/13/_manhattan_2007.php
http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20051110/paula-schers-atlas-of-the-world