Art and Artistry
Passion + Play + Purpose
When your passion + purpose collide, work becomes play; play + work = “plork”. To my delight I discovered that this term was penned by Corita Kent. Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa she entered the order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at age 18 where she became an art teacher. Innovatively, she used screen printing to not only blur the lines between the commercial and secular but also to produce art in quantity so that her work reached a broad audience.
Sister Corita was on the vanguard of a new field—pop art—and when asked about her style she replied: “There is no distinction between art and not art”. She encouraged her students — Buckminster Fuller, Alfred Hitchcock, and Charles/Ray Eames — to not only look at the world differently, but to actively be in the world.
Like all gifted artist her work evolved; she moved from religious themes to popular song lyrics fully incorporating the ideas of poverty, social justice, and the environment in her work. She left the Order in 1968 the year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. I wonder how– without being sacrilegious —her beautifully illustrated e.e.cummings quotation “damn everything but the circus” fit into her secular life. Corita moved to Boston and continued to plork and delight “us locals”. I smile when I see the rainbow of colors on the National Grid Gas tank when stuck in traffic on our oxymoronic Boston Expressway.
Although she struggled with cancer for years, her belief in humanity never wavered and you can see it in her art. Over the course of her life, her art became simpler, cleaner, clearer, and bolder. She discovered and mastered a way to say more with less — a simple stroke and a bright color, work + play “love and let be”. No surprise that love is a theme in her work.