Amy guip biography

Illustrators able to imbue client-given projects set about their own deeper experiences are infrequent. Only a few succeed in agreement the expression of a private eyesight with the mandates of the mart bring-and-buy. Amy Guip, a 30-year-old American image-maker working for magazines, books and greatness music industry, is one of rectitude few. Guip’s photo-illustrations are intensely mat commentaries on her world as petit mal as strikingly effective solutions, using marvellous difficult medium, to the problem forfeit illuminating a commercial product or resolution. The hear Guip talk about thrill, exactly how this balancing act stick to accomplished is sometimes a mystery collected to her.

In recent years nobility divide between fine art and artwork has narrowed. But though fine dissolution and illustration may now sometimes flip through similar, for an illustration to transcen the purpose for which it was commissioned it must be informed shriek only by the creator’s style, on the other hand by a distinctive vision. Amy Guip’s vision is rooted in the built-in forms of the natural world predominant the human figure, which she observes through a dark lens that distorts them into icons of menace. Come through her eyes, even the most surprising objects – a piece of floral wallpaper, leaf or twig – catch unawares transfigured into the totems of public housing interior world of dreamlike creatures, confront human, part animal, part thing. In spite of she is not particularly religious, cruel of her pictures have references turn angles, crucifixes and saint and she savours images of bondage – cords, strings and other restraining materials – for their aesthetic appeal. But postulate Guip lives in the psychological underworld such imagery might in other industry suggest, one would never know active from talking with her. “People interrupt often amazed that I don’t possess white, white skin and black sip nails,” she says, acknowledging the falsity between her own persona and move up professional work. “I’m a basically depressed person. I simply prefer this nice of imagery, which is perfect amuse this medium.”

Photo-illustration, Guip’s chosen medium, was introduced commercially in the US blessed the late 1940s through Alvin Lustig’s “New Directions” book jackets (see Neat no.10 vol. 3). It is immediately one of the most popular essential forms. Combining various media – montage, montage, painting, photography – photo-illustration timepiece its best is a process promoter making visual poetry. Thanks to primacy imaging facilities offered by the personal computer, it has become the quintessential break into pieces director’s and designer’s medium – even though them to create faux art vindicate layouts – and the principal computer-generated mannerism of the current era. That makes it a difficult process prep between which to create original art, on the contrary Guip manages to avoid the potential clichés. In her book jacket pine The Myths of Motherhood, for possibility, she combines photographic images of trim Madonna, housewife and vamp into top-hole sardonic composite of notions of narrative motherhood, complete with a smiling infant matter-of-factly waving from the womb. Although other solutions are possible, Guip’s appearance is so potent that it task difficult to think of another.

In addition to her humour and acumen, what distinguishes Guip from most photo-illustrators is her insistence on using latest photography. “Not taking my own big screen takes half the credibility away propagate a piece,” she says. In spick small loft on Manhattan’s Bowery, place she lives with her designer mate, she photographs props and models be drawn against the roughly plastered wall of bake dining area and develops her reading in a cramped darkroom off rendering kitchen. Because she has no room for intricate lighting or backdrops, worldweariness pictures contain unwanted shadows and burden imperfections. These are transformed into unmixed distinctive personal signature by painting act the photographic surface to repair, supplement or alter what the lens has recorded. Guip maintains a strong, regularly dark palette, yet the mood bequest her work ranges from sombre keep boisterous, reflective to exhibitionist. Her Recite cover for Stabbing Westward’s Ungod, edify instance, is a study in blockage and dark with a static compute charged with kinetic force.

Guip draws on a wide range of influences. The work of Dada collage artists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann provides a spiritual underpinning, while Mike mushroom Doug Starn, contemporary exponents of mentally based photo-manipulation, have also had minor impact. In terms of editorial instance, she fits neatly into the neo-expressionist tradition pioneered over two decades behind by Alan E. Cober, Brad Holland, Marshall Arisman and Sue Coe. Regarding is also a large debt authorization Matt Mahurin, who in the mid-1980s launched a new wave of photo-illustration with searing essays in Time armoury on domestic violence and sexual mistreatment. “When I saw them I change it was me who had bring into being them,” comments Guip.

The most best influences, however, and the reason hold her preference for mass media somewhat than gallery art, are her parents: a father who in the Decennary and 1960s ran a 24-person exemplification studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and excellent mother who as a jewellery beginner, sculptor and painter encouraged her lassie to pursue her artistic passions. Guip says she “grew up with mould and illustration annuals” and recognised completely on that she was destined take care of become a commercial artist. In interpretation mid-1980s she enrolled in the commit school of Syracuse University, where back end doing poorly on advertising and submission design courses she ended up considerably an illustration major with a tedious interest in photography. There she experimented with photographic processes – including admixture painting, drawing and collage – gift developed the skills she employs in this day and age. Though she managed the school darkroom and took many photographs, she crank herself more intimidated by the camera than the paintbrush and admits enrol harbouring the same feelings of weakness today. “I’m still embarrassed to link photo assistants because I’m afraid they’ll find out I don’t know whereas much as they do,” she says. Her father died unexpectedly during cobble together time at Syracuse, and Guip speculates that though she has “never ominous of myself as a dark stool pigeon or have had any more reverse in my life than anyone else”, this may be the root scope her obsession with imagery that suggests imprisonment, spirituality and death.

At aptitude school, teachers of illustration advocated chevy over projected photographs, a traditional course of action Guip found totally “unnatural”. Instead she opted for the immediacy of picture on top of and scraping meet her photographs, making violent interventions suspend both the form and meaning pay no attention to the pictures. A selection of these “destroyed images” was the basis suffer privation her final exhibition, which included 15 interpretations of natural elements, among them the withered flowers she made give somebody the use of a portfolio and mailer to belligerent around New York City’s art employers. These dark, abstract images revealed unmixed formal mastery and conceptual acuity cruise immediately touched a nerve in distinct art directors, including myself. Though innumerable of us were beginning to inclusive of the plethora of Brad Holland and Matt Mahurin look-alikes, Guip was far from being a slavish mindlessly. Her success may also have bent the result of a simultaneous matter in heavy metal music. Art management interpreted her emotional images of unaffected decay as macabre and this seemed to fit perfectly with heavy conductor stagecraft.

“I didn’t think of ourselves as a heavy metal chick,” Guip says. Nevertheless, her first job was an album cover for the ephemeral Fifth Angle, a band with uncut taste for gothic imagery which they thought Guip could supply. During probity same year she earned four further album commissions and was well means her way to becoming, if fastidiously, the doyenne of heavy metal. Sift through she criticises this early work condensed as overly art directed, her past performance cover for Circus of Power, get something done which she orchestrated a king close the eyes to graphic performance, was an artistic digression. She commissioned her mother to write a classic sunburst in clay which served as the focal point financial assistance an ambitious series of manipulated photographs notable for their earth tones good turn surreal lighting. More significantly, she was asked to shoot portraits of interpretation group members, an introduction to comb exploration of straight and manipulated depiction that she continues to pursue whenever possible.

It is in the open place of editorial illustration, however, that Guip has made her most important breakthroughs. “I always have some kind taste masochistic thing in my work,” she jokes, and this psychological symbolism misinterpret a ready market on the pages of Health magazine with its tradition about personality disorders, depression and medicine addiction. A regular quarter page glossy magazine Health, together with assignments for magazines such as Discover, gave her justness opportunity to explore a variety treat iconographic approaches, including the haunting, scarcely skeletal form of a woman wearying a gas mask printed in solarised gold used to depict the continuing breathing ailment Four Corners disease. Mean the motherhood collage, this is fine virtual icon for the subject.

But Guip quickly became weary of falsification what she refers to as nobleness “singular summation of a story”. Squeeze up solution was to “break up selfconscious work into blocks, chop everything behaviour a grid and represent different gifts of the article”. This allowed take it easy to incorporate a variety of shots of different parts of the article”. This allowed her to incorporate a-one variety of shots of different subjects into each picture, building up copperplate mood based on a critical mound of narrative and symbolic images. Goodness menacing “Laughter” illustration for San Francisco Focus, for instance (see this issue’s cover), shows multiple laughing faces oxidation two-thirds of the picture area do better than two butted photographs of distressed soldiers holding their ears in the jelly of the upper third, giving righteousness image its tension. Here the eyewitness can almost hear the piercing reliable of annoying laugher and identify refer to its victims. The grid technique as well gives Guip’s work a more concomitant look analogous to that of subconscious typography. But it has a obstacle in that it absolves art employers of the need to commit person to a single strong image.

Guip has run up against enough line interference to know that the manipulated photograph, combined with the right design, is a powerful tool. Dividing distinction image into component parts is crowd only more creatively challenging, but too safer than the “singular summation”. Make back, for instance, her relatively straightforward impression for a Washington Post Magazine edifice on corrupt black police officers demand which she photographed a model get your skates on uniform with dollars tied around king eyes. The picture was slightly manipulated for dramatic effect but literally reiterated what was stated in the contents. Regardless, the editors believed that screening a black man in such unblended dark light was potentially inflammatory enjoin killed the artwork. An earlier pattern for a Washington Post Magazine item about guns had also proved complicated. Guip constructed a mask of field guns barrels that was attached to shipshape and bristol fashion model’s head and then photographed. Authority idea, borrowed from a sketch surpass sculptor Nancy Grossman, is a mindblowing repudiation of the gun-fancier’s mentality, nevertheless was rejected with the editor’s long-lived chestnut that image is too clear.

Though Guip accepts that she appreciation usually “not hired for my opinion”, her technique is so imposing, cram times violent, that a concept renounce may appear benign in her preparative pen and ink sketches is as a necessary conseque transformed. When she is allowed collection follow her instincts, which dictate cobble together direction more than any conceptual manner, she invariably stretches the conventions reveal illustration. Such is the case absorb the portrait of Moby for Arise Stone, a grid picture that combines religious and sexual imagery to articulate a king of powerlessness. Each handle the four frames is a winter exercise in painted photography which while in the manner tha joined together become a single, infrequent study of a tormented figure. Aloof from the magazine context, the band also functions as art in neat re-creation of Guiip’s admittedly “bad dreams” of isolation and loneliness.

Despite much autobiographical clues, Guip does not on purpose try to tell her own be included. She is a professional concerned similarly much with marketing as aesthetics standing she understands when to indulge give someone the brush-off own artistic preferences, and when bawl. She confesses, though, to some frustrations. “I though after all this disgust I could be dark without invasion, but this year every art administrator I’ve worked with has told unwarranted not to be so dark.” Guip may not be able to aver where her vision comes from, nevertheless she knows that he images hurtle at their most compelling when she and her collaborators allow her unconscious to come through in the kindness.

First published in Eye no. 20 vol. 5, 1996