Ed Fella: "Design doodler"

Graphis, May/Jun 2004 by Frolick, Stuart I

Ed 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 sketchbooks are undoubtedly the most sophisticated form of art while they redefine language in its most basic condition.

Lorraine Wild Designer and Educator

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

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

Meeting artist/designer/educator, Edward Fella, is like a first encounter with the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum., or the Mona Lisa. Transcending cultural cliché, the great monuments of art and design never disappoint. Nor does this one. Fella's erudite, didactic, encyclopedic mind is a fountain of information, observations, ideas, opinions, and aphorisms-not just about an and design, but also about poetry, literature, history, and politics-and he's not shy 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 eye contact, he begins speaking, and as long as you are listening, he continues to speak.

A Fella monologue changes shape and veers off in many directions, often moving from present to past, the point of view shifting quickly between simple practicality and complex theory. Quotes from artists and writers are sprinkled liberally throughout; think of a symphony-with one musician playing all the instruments. Fella begins by saying that he is an "exit-level designer," by which he means that, at age 65, his days in the work-for-hire mode are long over. "The future of design belongs to my students," Fella says with a smile, "and that is absolutely fine with me. I have no claim on the future. I came of age in the middle of the last century-Fve practiced design since 1957. It's not my role 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 endless exploration of expressive typography, results in six to twelve small posters a year, consisting of meticulously hand-drawn letter forms, self-published in one-color on sheets of 11 x 17-inch paper. Finished pieces and works in progress hang on the studio walls. Their function is to announce upcoming guest lectures. But because Fella has had more than his fill of deadlines, and because he works and reworks the material obsessively, the lectures are long over before his announcements are printed. With post-modernist irony Fella asks, "what difference does it really make in history? The poster is still an accurate record of the lecture-who will ever know or care when it was made, right?" When the lecture is one of his own (he appears frequently at conferences and design schools throughout the world), Fella lets the sponsoring organization announce his visit, but then he brings and distributes his own flyers to the audience at the end 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 on a table in his studio, the 80 books suggest a city skyline in miniature. Their contents are the wondrous outpourings of a fertile and unstoppable imagination, literally compelled to express itself. Without theme or narrative, they can be loosely catalogued as Dadaist collages or illustrative drawings in a wide range of styles. Some include whimsical or absurd, cartoon-like figures, others, just abstract shapes and letter forms. By means of color, Fella has given each character weight, volume, and any number of his unpredictable, signature manipulations of linesuch as twisting, turning, collapsing or stretching. The letter 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 come out of graphic design, decorative illustration, and lettering, all mixed together-forms that come out of Twentieth Century art, out of Miró and Picasso-all of it has a genealogy and a certain look-in the same way that artists today use comic books and graphic novels. I was an illustrator, so you see endless styles popping in and out of the books. The drawings are an unconscious discharge of all the styles and forms that I used as a commercial artist for 30 years-that was my profession-I did it every single day. So, my unconscious has all this stuff in it, and now, because I don't have to make meaning anymore, I can just use the techniques, like a machine that has long ago stopped making widgets, but the machine is still running. I'm still making stuff. I love the craft of it-of carefully making some 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. One can read the images separately from his poetic language-and vice versa of course-but it is the play between them that is most fascinating. There is no doubt that the sketchbooks are art in its most sophisticated form, since they function to redefine language in its most basic condition."