Selling the Barcelona Chair
For my poster, I decided to sell the Barcelona Chair, which was designed by Mies van der Rohe. When I read the list of values, power immediately jumped out at me as a perfect way to “sell” the chair- having a Barcelona chair in your home or office is kind of a status symbol, and the chair itself just assumes an powerful stance.
Lino printing is my favorite hobby, and I decided that this medium would actually help present the “power” value really well. A linoleum carving prints an image in one color, with stark, sharp lines and high contrast, which you can see below in my final poster. The slogan I chose, The Most Interesting Chain in the Room, is a play on the highly recognizable Dos Equis ad which features “the most interesting man in the world”.
Despite my experience with lino printing, it was challenging to put this together in quarantine. I had run out of most of my materials, and when I couldn’t find any place to buy a fresh linoleum block in time, I decided to use the backsides of two linoleum blocks to carve the image in the size I had printed. Printing the image to transfer presented a whole other issue- I don’t have a printer, and was able to get one copy of my draft from a friend’s work place. This gave me one chance to transfer the image (which I don’t do very often as the process requires chemicals or an iron, of which I had neither), and I wasn’t able to transfer the image successfully. In a last ditch effort before free-handing the drawing (which would have taken much longer than the alternative), I traced the two different sides on parchment paper and rubbed the transfer onto the blocks.
I actually made a lot of mistakes while carving this because the left and right side were disconnected from each other. You can see this in the sunburst background, which I had intended to be white throughout, but it turned out to be a little bit of a happy mistake, and I think it makes the print a little more interesting. As for the other mistake, my dad sent me the following quote when I sent a picture to my family accompanied by a list of the details that hadn’t turned out exactly as I’d pictured-
Oblique strategy- amplify your mistakes. (Not that I see any)
A great reminder that sometimes I can be my own worst critic!
