602 - Jimmy Turrell

Jimmy Turrell is a graphic artist and video director.
He studied at Central St Martins School of Art. He combines a love of handmade collage, drawing, screen-printing and painting alongside digital techniques.

"He’s presently very inspired by Fade To Mind Records, DJ Rashad, Erin O’Keefe, early copies of Flipside Magazine and good old London Town."

After Seeing Turrel speak in his hometown at SP-AN Newcastle, his whole persona and sense of humour really came through and resonated with me. 
In order to to be a designer and share a design with a client and get them to buy into that concept and make them feel and relate to what it is you are depicting is really something special - being a striking person and having that impact really helps you to have this lasting impression on people and get them to buy into your brain-waves and ideas. Making you a better salesman essentially.
You are aiming to create moments and invoke experiences with the impression of yourself and your work.

And his whole grungy yet colourful collage style to his work is bloody cool too!

He's worked with some mad clients to look into: Universal Music, Nike, Colette, Lexus, Pentagram, Levis, MTV, The New Yorker, Intro, Capitol Records, Conde Nast, The New York Times, Green Peace, Frame Magazine, Kyocera, Tokion, Esquire, Dazed and Confused, The Prodigy/XL Recordings, Channel 4, The Guardian, Spin Magazine, Baycrews, DC Shoes, Swindle Magazine, The Fader, GQ, The Times, Sight & Sound, Little Brown, LA Times, Newsweek, Getty Images, Adidas, Sony Music, Little White Lies, KK Outlet, New York Magazine, Wired, Teenage Cancer Trust, Getty, Glastonbury Festival, The Ride, Vanity Fair, Rome Snowboards, Uniqlo

Some of his work I was particularly inspired by:

Jimmy Turrell's bespoke typeface inspired by Newcastle’s Byker Wall

It’s Nice That commissioned 3 creatives to explore the broader possibilities of type. 

The result was Local Characters, a series of posters and typefaces inspired by each creative’s hometown. 

Illustrator and designer Jimmy Turrell designed a bespoke typeface in collaboration with Fontsmith on the Byker Wall, a council estate where he grew up in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
The Byker Wall, a council estate in the east end of Newcastle, is quite literally an architectural wall of housing. The estate curves around 200 acres of the northern city; 620 maisonettes capsuling a community. The term ‘wall’, could imply that these homes are shut away from the public eye, a private space. However, the socialist ethos of the Byker Wall, its architect and its inhabitants, couldn’t be further from this. Built from 1969–1982, the housing estate was designed and constructed by Ralph Erskine, a British-born architect who was fully involved in the idea, the construction, the immediate and continued success of the estate. From birth until the age of seven, the wall was home to illustrator and designer Jimmy Turrell. Its forward-thinking, primary-colour-clad construction and geometric forms has subtly informed his work ever since.
“His vision for Byker was for ‘a complete and integrated environment for living in the widest sense’.” His aim was fully achieved, but only by his own consistent and direct involvement. “He was a man of social democratic ways. His main concern was the people. 

He lived in the wall, he had his offices in the wall. He wasn’t the sort of guy based in London who just fucked off and left it. Erskine was intrenched in the whole thing.” 

With a background of socialist architecture in Sweden and Norway, Ralph Erskine’s approach was to speak to the community. 

The architect’s rejection of the failing familiar, coupled with an injection of community, care and colour, is the influence behind Jimmy’s bespoke typeface, FS Erskine.

His unique style and emotion he drives through his work is very hard-hitting and impactful and it is clear from the music videos how it is adaptable to motion work and potential experimentation within my work too...

- Various layers of vibrant collage, warped and moving across eachother
- duplication and movement of pics
- grainy vintage aesthetic - still has this element of an analogue technique, even though its very digital too.

Potentially for my research brief I have began to consider how I could choose to make a similarly styled, collage inspired animation but more specifically directed towards the history of skateboarding going from a sub-culture to a consumer culture.