Design everywhere..

I watched an amazing French film the other night.  Called La Scaphandre et Le Papillon - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 
It's based on the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby who was the editor of Elle magazine in France.  Bauby suffered a massive stroke which paralyzed every part of him except one eyelid.  A speech therapist discovered a way for him to communicate using just that one eyelid and he wrote a short book about his experience.  Film director and artist Julian Schnabel made the film of the book 

The film is fascinating and beautiful, very visually beautiful and what really interested me was its design.  AFTER I've seen a film or read a book, I like to read the reviews to see how others' experience of it compared with mine.  One of the comments I read was "Why did Schnabel show three children in the movie, when Bauby actually only had two".  I started thinking about that and I realised that there were a number of scenes with the children playing on the  beach - they would not have been half so visually effective had there been only two children.  Schnabel as a painter made an artistic decision to change what was actually there in order to enhance his visual creation.

Time after time, I've walked around a workshop where people are making quilts based on photographs and I've asked "why do you have only two trees?  One on each side, like soldiers?"  And the response, of course, is "because there are only two trees in the photograph"!  Or that, in the photograph, the sky is blue, the sand is yellow, the grass is green, the house is grey so all of these must be literally copied!!  As artists we are not creating a documentary or an historically correct archive of How It Was, we are making something beautiful - and we must consider what changes to any of the variables with which we work will enhance that beauty.

 Bauby too - with the help of an extraordinarily dedicated therapist - made something beautiful from something which was not.

It was another Frenchman who wrote: we are what we think! Or was it the other way round!  Aha - but remember you can CHANGE things!!   
If you have been, thanks for reading!  Elizabeth