them he did not merely sanctify these lost artifacts of popular culture; he
recycled them as functional graphic designs.
The crude quality achieved by craftsmen isolated from inter-
national design movements held great appeal for one who regularly
undermined the canon. Years before the vernacular became an official 1980 s
graphic style, and before the progressive design academies affixed cultural
theories to such things, Chantry became a design archaeologist. “I un-
earthed the work of naïfs and then tried to ape it,” he admitted. “Ultimately
it became part of my general vocabulary and all of a sudden my language
expanded.” Other “outlaw” or anti-canonical styles, such as tattoos and “the
Hallmark card idea of what hippie stuff looked like in the 1960 s” informed
his work, too.
A large number of Chantry’s posters for alternative theater
companies in Seattle were done amidst considerable competition because as
he put it, “everyone here seems to be a graphic designer. So it becomes a
supply and demand thing; prices are usually low and quality must be high.”
One of his most memorable projects was the design for a small run of three
hundred posters for Propaganda, a production of the New City Theatre
Company, one of Seattle’s most avant-garde independent groups. Although
the play opened in 1990 to lukewarm reviews and closed soon afterward,
the poster left an indelible image. For this low-budget job, Chantry took a
photograph of a man’s tormented face from a 1950 s clip-art book. It was
enlarged and flopped, and printed over itself twice to give the sense of three
dimensions. The cheapest way to print it was on a web offset newspaper
press, and therefore Chantry produced the original artwork on a smaller
scale than the finished, ordering the printer to enlarge it five times to give
it an even cruder surface. The poster symbolized the plot of the script but
avoided a literal interpretation. “I rejected the billboard school of poster
design which says the message should be given and received immediately.
I don’t think that anyone is going to go to the play based on the poster
anyway,” Chantry said.
Generally, Chantry comes up with a concept and sells it to the
client as an idea. “I became acquainted with the work of the late Robert
Brownjohn [Brownjohn Chermayeff Geismar] who during the early 1960 s
was such a brilliant conceptualist that he could sell ideas to his clients over
the telephone. He believed that if it wasn’t good enough to talk it out, then
it wasn’t good enough to take to completion. I try to get so well versed with
the client’s needs that my concepts fit the problem, and I too can verbalize
them before putting them to paper,” he explained. If a client demands a
more visible interpretation, Chantry sketches things out, but most of his
composition is done in the mechanical stage. That’s where he does his best
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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