Ed Fella: "Design doodler"

Fella was born drawing and began reading shortly after.

Katherine McCoy Former Co-Chair of Cranbrook Academy's Department of Design

A private laboratory of a million experiments, Fella's sketchbook are undoubtedly the greatest in quantity sophisticated form of art while they redefine language in its greatest in quantity basic condition.

Lorraine Wild Designer and Educator

is a sort of an anti-master. Anything delinquent or unexpect in his work is always deliberate.

Scott Santoro Worksight Design Studio institutor and Fellow Cranbrook '88 Alum

Meeting artist/designer/educator, Edward Fella, is like a first rencounter with the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum., or the Mona Lisa. Transcending cultural clich?©, the great testimonials of art and design not ever disappoint. Nor does this single Fella's erudite, didactic, encyclopedic mind is a fountain of information, observations, ideas, opinions, and aphorisms-not just about an and design, on the contrary also about poetry, literature, history, and politics-and he's not timid about sharing them. After a casual greeting at his downstairs studio at California Institute of the Arts, Fella invites you to sit down. Making direct organ of sight contact, he begins speaking, and as drawn out as you are listening, he continues to speak.

A Fella monologue changes shape and change courses off in many directions, frequently moving from present to past, the point of view shifting quickly between simple practicality and composite theory. Quotes from artists and writers are sprinkled liberally throughout; think of a symphony-with single musician playing all the instruments. Fella begins by the agency of saying that he is an "exit-level designer," by dint of which he means that, at age 65 his days in the work-for-hire style are long over. "The coming time of design belongs to my students" Fella says with a smile, "and that is absolutely fine with me I have no claim upon the future. I came of age in the middle of the last century-Fve practiced design since 1957 It's not my character to be critical of what I don't understand."

This is not to say that ed Fella no longer practices design, because he does-almost constantly. His serious work, which is an endles exploration of expressive typography, rises in six to twelve small placards a year, consisting of meticulously hand-drawn alphabetic character forms, self-published in one-color upon sheets of 11 x 17-inch paper. Finished pieces and works in progres hang upon the studio walls. Their function is to announce upcoming visitor lectures. But because Fella has had more than his fill of deadlines, and because he works and reworks the material obsessively, the discourses are long over before his announcements are printed. With post-modernist irony Fella asks, "what difference does it really make in history? The broadside is still an accurate record of the lecture-who will at any time know or care when it was made, right?" When the prelection is one of his have a title to (he appears frequently at conversations and design schools throughout the world), Fella give permission tos the sponsoring organization announce his visit, on the other hand then he brings and distributes his possess flyers to the audience at the extremity of his talk.

One aspect of Fella's not-quite-as-serious work, and there are many others, are the thousands of sketchbook pages that he began creating in 1976 Piled neatly in staggered stacks upon a table in his studio, the 80 works suggest a city skyline in miniature. Their easy in minds are the wondrous outpourings of a fertile and unstoppable imagination, literally compell to expres itself. Without theme or narrative, they can be loosely catalogued as Dadaist collages or illustrative drawings in a wide range of mode of speechs Some include whimsical or absurd, cartoon-like figures, others, just abstract shapes and alphabetic character forms. By means of color, Fella has given each character weight, whirl and any number of his unpredictable, signature manipulations of linesuch as twisting, turning, collapsing or stretching. The alphabetic character forms often result in legible words that Fella calls "fake avant-garde poetry"

"I am interested in graphic design as art," ed Fella says. "This is a kind of art practice that uses forms that approach out of graphic design, decorative illustration, and lettering, all mixed together-forms that tend hitherward out of Twentieth Century art, without of Mir?? and Picasso-all of it has a genealogy and a certain look-in the same way that artists today use comic volumes and graphic novels. I was an illustrator, in like manner you see endless styles popping in and on the outside of the books. The drawings are an unconscious discharge of all the phraseologys and forms that I used as a commercial artist for 30 years-that was my profession-I did it each single day. So, my unconscious has all this matter in it, and now, because I don't have to make meaning anymore, I can just use the techniques, like a machine that has lengthy ago stopped making widgets, on the other hand the machine is still running. I'm still making substance I love the craft of it-of carefully making a certain quantity of little thing..."

Designer and educator Lorraine Wild calls the work "a private laboratory for what, at this point, must be a million experiments in the relational syntax between images and words. single can read the images separately from his poetic language-and vice versa of course-but it is the play between them that is greatest in quantity fascinating. There is no doubt that the sketchbook are art in its greatest in quantity sophisticated form, since they function to redefine language in its greatest in quantity basic condition."