This is the final major project for my first formal art class as an adult, Curt Lund’s Fundamentals of Design. He asked us to create a set of 20 icon-ic representations for a song with enough narrative content to sustain the endeavor. As the icons would be included on the inside of a CD cover, we needed to be mindful of scale and readability along with visual cohesion and a distinct/unique style. I definitely erred on the side of more rather than less detail, but I was also intentional about which details I included.
Dyan’s Looking for Knives captures a particular moment in the song protagonist’s life when the relationship they’re in is not the one they want. The opposing perspectives of the protagonist and their lover, the underlying expectation that they should explain themselves to the their lover’s satisfaction, the difficulty of doing this, as well as the pain it will cause are all effectively communicated through the lyrics’ series of paired lines that function as a back and forth, either between the protagonist and their lover and/or between the protagonist and themselves.
Knowing full well that the intention of the song is not to communicate a perverse pleasure to be had in going on the offense and cutting out an individual from our lives that does not deserve to be there, I nevertheless felt that while listening, and really appreciate the multiple layers of meaning the song title alone conveys.
So, my icon-ic representation of the song is a mixture of what I’ve made a calculated guess is the intended meaning of the lyrics, along with the meaning I’ve read into them. I did not follow the song structure exactly. Rather than visually referencing the chorus after each set of paired lyrics, I placed the chorus at the beginning and end to suggest that the song doesn’t offer a resolution to the conflict it presents.
I also intentionally omitted visual references to some of the lyrics due to the project constraints (it would have meant creating a larger number of icon-ic representations than required) and the difficulty I had in coming up with concrete enough ways of representing meaning that wasn’t also cliche.