Work
Tufte is an expert in the presentation of informational graphics such as charts and diagrams, and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. Tufte has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
His work habits are forward-looking. He is intensely critical in the self-editing process as he pulls in and casts out ideas from books, journals, posters, auction catalogues, and other less common source genres. He invites others to critique his work in progress and may nurture dozens of ideas over months in various states of growth and fruition. He deletes almost every photograph he takes. Over time, he deletes most of what he writes on his own forum, ET Notebooks. Every printing of every book corrects numerous small blemishes, ranging from color registration to kerning and hinting. This pattern of work is repeated in sculpture, where he digs through sources ranging from other art, other genres, most notably Richard Feynman, to flea markets and nuclear power plants and fields of grass in search of forms and ideas from which he selects some to build up into models, table pieces, and occasionally larger landscape pieces. Even some finished, large scale works are reworked heavily, but at the same time, some random sculptural equivalents of brush strokes or artifacts of a piece's former life are retained, a degree of wabi-sabi, as may be seen in the Rocket Science (circa 2006-2009, Hogpen Hill, Connecticut).
Read more about this topic: Edward Tufte
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Part of the pain in leaving our children to go to work is that we miss them, wish we could be with them. We also hate to turn them over to someone who is not identical to us, who will do things, at best, differently—at worst, in ways we don’t believe are good for children. We are up against this whenever we share the care of our children with others—even grandparents or trusted and loved ones.”
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“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
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“The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.”
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