It's not often that I'll display a creative work up-for-sale, that is so blatantly a knock-off of another artist ie 'Mondrian', but since
he never actually painted a map we'll have to settle for
this interpretation of his 'plastic' style. Mondrian defined his art as a grid of horizontal and vertical lines that ignored the particulars of appearance - but for us map-makers it's a neat way of portraying information without (
cringe) wanting to seem too accurate.
An intriguing technique used in Mondrian's original paintings was that the white-forms were painted in sections (not simply as a first-layer background), using brush strokes running in different directions - generating a greater sense of depth in the white-forms, as though they are overwhelming the lines and the colors.
It's not immediately obvious, but a good book can be considered to be something of a spatial journey; our minds leave our bodies, and we gradually get transported to somewhere else. Character-development, sentence-structure, plot etc subsequently become hills and valleys along an imaginative path. Logically then, if someone wanted a review of a book; rather than read a laborious textual review, perhaps they would be better directed to look at a map and drink in the visual patterns all at once?! For example, are you considering reading Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road? Well, perhaps the beautiful maps of Stefanie Posavec can guide you to a decision!
Creating public art-works represents lots of challenges: Will the public understand it? Will it be salient years down the track? and possibly most importantly; will it survive continued vandalism? Let us applaud then this map roller triumph created by Carl Cheng in 1988! The 14 tonne concrete roller was cast with an inverted relief of a Los Angeles city block, including cars and buildings. Periodically it is rolled out onto the beach and leaves behind a positive relief in the sand ~~~ to be washed away by the inexorable tides.
