Article By: Eleanor Kaufman

Graphic design and art exist and survive on their own, and in their own separate categories. However, there are also those that choose to merge the two together. Artist Resa Blatman spoke at the New England School of Art and Design yesterday, where her graphic design-inspired paintings are currently on exhibition.

First, Blatman creates her compositions in Adobe illustrator. She carefully and meticulously uses the digital tools to connect round shapes, swirling floral designs, and silhouetted figures of animals and plants. She then sends the files to a laser cutter who cuts the designs out of a plastic material. She said that her inspiration for these designs came from her father, who was an upholsterer. When she was little she would spend hours in their ‘material room,’ playing among yards of draping fabric and patterns. She came to love these things, which would later become the subject for her designs.

Blatman attended Ringling College in Florida and studied fine arts before heading to Florence, Italy where she studied for three years at the Studio Arts Center, an experience she described as overwhelming and emotional. While there, she spent a lot of time sculpting and painting. In her thirties, after realizing that a career in fine arts didn’t exactly pay the bills, she decided to return to school and study graphic design at Massachusetts College of Art. After that, she went back to school at BU for her masters in painting, she graduated from BU in 2006.

Blatman’s paintings are heavily inspired by graphic design, showing elements such as the layering of effects. If you look closely at her work, you can see layers of paint built up on top of stamped patterns that screen across the compositions.

Blatman begins by collecting hundreds of photo references, a process that is extremely time consuming. She uses images such as birds, bats, fruit, flowers and other things in nature. Ironically, these innocent, beautiful- looking compositions are deeply mysterious, provocative, and extremely sexual in content.

Blatman’s themes of sex, fertility and reproduction are abstracted and dispersed discreetly behind bellowing shapes, leafy designs, and floral patterns. Sex is everywhere. The more time you spend walking around looking, the more visible it becomes. “Really when you look at nature, it is all sex,” she said. She spoke about sex as a thing of nature, and not a pornographic sense. She explained that the sexual imagery in her work is meant to be subtle, meant to whisper to the viewer instead of hit them over the head with it like so much other sexual artwork.

Blatman spoke to students and faculty from all three departments- fine arts, graphic design and interior design. Many students in the audience were interested in Blatman’s ability to work with both fine art and graphic design. Blatman creates fine art that utilizes the two contradictory form of art. Blatman has taken the visual elements of graphic design and has utilized them within a framework of her Fine Art.

Blatman’s pieces are visually dramatic, her colors literally pop off the wall and her imagery is strange and enticing. Each piece hanging on the wall leads into the next- and as you glance around the space, all of the paintings seem to have a conversation with one another…an intricate, sensual and very sexual conversation.

Resa Blatman’s exhibition runs through Jan. 12.
www.resablatman.com