bcb: Vision and mission statements

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Vision and mission statements

I've been working on a vision and mission statement for the studio. The vision statement relates to my highest hopes for what we can do. The mission statement is more practical. It speaks to what we believe, and how and what we do.

Vision statement:

Our work brings about a understanding and visceral experience of the beauty, wonder and majesty of the world in all of its connectedness. Through this experience we bring peace, understanding and compassion to the world.

Mission statement:

To create the most clear, beautiful, elegant graphics and illustration.

To only work on jobs that benefit humankind.

To create a energetic, positive work place that fosters room for creative expression and positive change.

To interpret the clients needs. This means always digging deeper, asking as many questions as possible.

To respect each job.

To fight hard against boredom and a feeling of just reproducing. To not rest on what we have accomplished and done in the past. To always be building on what we have done. Not for the sake of change, but for the sake of beauty and clarity.

I shared these statements with the team on Thursday. It got a good response. Joe Lertola said that skepticism was a important thing for him. In skepticism there is a inherent rigor that I respond to. So I want to see how we can incorporate skepticism into our statements.

After working on these I feel a little intimidated by them. Being true to them will be difficult at times. Especially the one that states, "to only work on jobs that benefit humankind." What is and isn't beneficial to humankind is usually up for debate. For instance, we just finished a job for a energy company that fracks. I've heard mostly bad things about fracking. Scientific American published an article about it recently that was a little more balanced. With technical innovation that benefits our quality of life there usually comes a down side. Genetically modifies food has saved millions of lives from what I understand. I've been a proponent for nuclear energy. But after what happened in Japan I'm not so sure.

So how will these statements tangibly effect how and what we do here at the studio? I don't know yet. But I'm trusting that they will have an effect. At the least I believe they will help keep the studio energetic and vibrant.

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Bio

Bryan Christie was born on May 5, 1973, in New York City, toward the end of the sexual revolution, in a city very different from today's. His family moved to Seattle to experience the suburban middle-class American dream; within a year his parents were separated. Bryan and his mother returned to New York, where he grew up surrounded by his mother’s oil paintings, the smell of turpentine, the constant presence of her artist friends, and a deep and abiding sense of the spiritual in the natural world and the chaos of our human sensibilities. He was a gifted musician, playing saxophone in LaGuardia High School of the Arts, gigging in Manhattan jazz clubs by the time he was 19 and then attending the Manhattan School of Music.

Realizing that music was not the medium through which to express his muse but desiring to eschew his mother's vocation and the volatile lifestyle he assumed it required, Bryan began working at his father's studio as a scientific/medical illustrator and then, in 1998, took a job as an assistant art director at Scientific American magazine. He fell in love with science, witnessing in the editors the same passion he had seen both in his mother's art and his own music. He started to join his artistic and scientific pursuits, coming to believe, as Einstein did, that “all religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree … directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence.” It was here that Bryan began to produce his first anatomical illustrations.

In 2000, Mr. Christie left Scientific American to pursue a freelance career. His first award-winning illustration was for Newsweek in 2001. He continued to define his aesthetic, focusing on the essential structures of the body, until he came to the look of his black-and-white anatomical work. In 2004, his piece for Marie Claire on breast cancer won an SPD award; that piece was the DNA for his first body of work, "Flesh and Blood."

All of Mr. Christie’s graphic work, a body of work that spans 14 years, was like a long apprenticeship for his 3-D fine art. He spent years perfecting bodies, understanding light as an emotional tool, experimenting with camera angle and perspective. An early formative experience came with his viewing of an exhibition of Mark Rothko's art at the Whitney museum 15 years ago, where he "felt like aliens had come from outer space to put art on the walls." Rothko's ability to infuse his fields of color with such emotional force has had a deep influence in Bryan's emerging fine art work. Recently he had an intensely spiritual experience when he saw Michelangelo's first Pieta for the first time, solidifying his belief that the body can be used to express spiritual truths and propelling him forward into his own art and the search for the visceral experience of the truth and beauty of the world.

bcb

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Vision and mission statements

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