Face to Face-2

Where does the idea of these painting maps come from?
My father was a mapmaker, a photo- grammetric engineer, an expert in aerial photography.  He invented a device that corrected the distortion of aerial photography called “stereo templates”. He taught me there were no accurate maps; they are all distorted.

Please explain briefly the process of creating the maps.
I unroll a giant piece of canvas and tack it on to the wall in my studio.  I rough out the geographic areas by eye on the canvas and then begin to add information which creates a sense of complication and the canvas becomes crowded with relevant and irrelevant data.

How many are they? How long have you been working on them? To what extent are you going to continue?
There are 25 large scale (around, say 9’x9’) paintings. I began painting them in 1999.

What techniques have you used to create maps?
I have painted them as acrylic on canvas, silkscreen prints, and mixed media drawings.

There is a big difference between Paula Scher as a designer and as an artist. Am I right?
No, I am the same person.The process is different. Design has a purpose, art has no purpose.There is an economic structural difference.Design is commissioned; art is made on its own.

Information should have a significant role in your works. Is it true?
My paintings are mostly about information overload, information that has feeling. Feeling is what I meant to write.I mean that the information in impressionistic.

What roles have color, form and type to create a map … for example, India and Africa?
I paint places based on my knowledge and feeling about them.Sometimes my view is prejudiced.For example, India is pink because the fashion leader Diana Vreeland (at Vogue) once said that “Pink is the navy blue of India.” 

In some cases we can see shape of maps of some countries has been changed, especially in the World’s map. Why?
I look at maps to make the paintings and my eye distorts everything, just like the camera lens. My lens distortion is based on ignorance and prejudice.

Do you mean you paint the map using your imagination rather than a real map?
Not really, I just don’t do a careful job about trying to be accurate.

Did you redraw a special typeface in maps?
I paint the typography by hand; it is deliberately crude.