Posteress

Posteress is the artistic alter ego of Angelina Severino, a graphic and brand designer based in Amsterdam. Since studying Graphic Design in Minsk, Angelina has worked as an Art Director in international advertising agencies creating visual concepts for brands including Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Finlandia, and Yamaha. After more than a decade in advertising, her professional focus now lies in Brand Identity and Digital Product Design. In her artistic practice Angelina transforms graphic design tools such as graphic elements, colour blocks, and typography into abstract and minimalistic poster art.

“My main inspiration is my professional frustration with the general attitude to graphic design,” says Angelina. All the years that she worked in advertising, Angelina saw graphic design being used solely for the practical, utilitarian purpose of creating an image that sells; “It has always raised all kinds of questions for me: why don’t I see graphic design works in museums? Why are posters not seen as art pieces? Why are traditional visual arts such as painting or sculpture more valuable than digitally created design artworks?” With her artistic practice she aims to show that graphic design is not just a functional tool for boosting sales. Angelina’s poster project declares graphic design as an independent, self-sustainable art form in which she researches and structures human hopes, dreams, illusions, and desires.

Born and raised in Russia before the fall of the Soviet Union, Angelina’s art is influenced by the radical, revolutionary approach of Russian Constructivism and Soviet design. She explains; “While most of the visionary work of Soviet designers remained unrealised, their innovative bold experiments and the dream of creating a new world continue to inspire, stimulate and attract designers all over the world, including myself. Russian Constructivists urged “Be a poster! Advertise and project a new world.” (Disk manifesto, 1923). This idea still resonates with me and keeps me going.”

Angelina’s work always begins by considering the message, asking herself; “what exactly do I intend to say with my new poster?”. She states; “I guess it’s in my DNA as a graphic designer and in the nature of the medium (poster) to transform messages into visuals and try to predict what a person who looks at them will feel and think”. Angelina usually starts with sketching some ideas in her notebook, and then works on the final look of the poster in Adobe Illustrator.

The next step is to actually materialise the poster by printing it out. After initially trialling different print houses to process her orders, in order to ensure the best quality, Angelina then started up her own in-house printing studio. She purchased a large format HP’s flagship Giclée printer and Hahnemühle’s award-winning ecological Bamboo paper; “This combination of a high printing resolution, pigment archival inks and a premium inkjet coating paper creates museum quality art prints that have incredible vivid colours and last for more than 100 years without losing their gorgeous look”. Each poster is hand-printed with personal quality control over the process and final product, and then hand-packaged by Angelina. Every order includes a set of cotton gloves for the unpacking and handling of the poster!

This year, Angelina hopes to create more one-of-a-kind mixed media hand-finished posters. Thus far, she has produced 3 mixed media canvases, each entirely hand-made and created with various materials such as acrylic paints, paper tape, spray paints, volcanic pumice stone, charcoal, bubble wrap, and markers. The creation of these works was big learning curve for the designer; “It took so much time and nerves to produce them, because any mistake or slip-up would have been catastrophic and would have destroyed the whole artwork. So in the future I will be taking a different approach: I will be Giclée-printing a part of the poster including all the outlines and texts, and will hand-finish the other parts with paint, markers or any other materials. This way I believe the final artwork will only win in quality, and more than that – the Giclée-printed part will be incorporated in the mixed media technique, which makes me really happy as I’m a big lover of printing.”

Creating her own printing studio has inspired Angelina to start her own Giclée printing business aimed specifically at artists. “I realised that I’m not the only artist who has trouble having their artworks printed with top quality and sent to their customers in branded packaging,” comments the artist. As a professional designer, she hopes to make the online ordering process as user-friendly and flawless as possible, and of course, creating a brand identity for her own company is a “world of fun and pleasure”!

Angelina concludes; “I think I would never be able to separate my professional design career from my artistic practice – they are closely interwoven by how they stimulate and inspire each other. Also I’m always very happy to switch between different kinds of activities that require totally different approaches but simultaneously belong to the same field of the visual arts.”

www.posteress.com
@posteress_amsterdam

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