SO WHO EXACTLY IS DAVID WEIDMAN?

by Jade Peplar

To my mind, David Weidman is the 1960s colour combo king.

Let me explain, in my last post I mentioned that the daisy collage was prompted by something I had seen a few weeks back.

To cut a long story short(er) I was watching the final season of Mad Men. No, I’m not late to the party, I was in fact very early to the party. I can remember watching Madmen at 10pm on BBC 2 way back in 2008. I didn’t know anyone else who was watching it, which was a travesty because I loved it so much and has some many thoughts I needed to discuss! Anyways, I was initially saving the final season, well the second half of the final season, for my 40’s- just for something to look forward too. But in light of a national pandemic, and the fact that Netflix were removing it, I realised that life is too short. 

 I watched the last few seasons as a refresher and noticed that Peggy had some of THE BEST art in her office.

 

A Google search later I find the prints of artist David Weidman, and then lost a couple of hours looking through his incredible body of work.

Here’s some the bare bone facts about David Weidman.

  • Born in 1921 died in 2014
  • He initially started working in animation (which I think you can totally tell from the playful illustrative quality of his work)
  • After becoming frustrated with the group work nature of animation he started screen printing.
  • Hung up his screen printing apron in the 1980s.
  • After a peak of interest in his work, due to Madmen, he started making work again. Thankfully!

I like everything about his work, form and shape, his use of layering, but especially his use of colour. The colour combinations are a triumph.

I often make colour studies of photographs I’ve taken to remember palettes for future projects, it can be a really useful log. I’ve taken a few of his works and made some colour swatches so we can really look at these excellent colour combinations.

 

 

Lets take the example on the left, a slight tweak in tone to the basic primary colours  instantly makes it way more interesting. That deep forest green with a pop of coral is so vivid. And that last example, good grief, so tasty. Making small swatches like this is a great way to dissect an image and see what about it  is appealing to you. (I use the colour drop tool either in Photoshop or Instagram, to make them.)

I’m new to blogging, so hopefully I don’t get trouble for using these images But many thanks to the David Weidman website for the imagery and inspiration. Hold back a 'Flowers 2' print for me.

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