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INVESTIGATIVE POETICS

When we founded Colored Horse Studios, on Paulo’s birthday in April of 1993, we knew that, as artists, we had something to contribute to commercial design.

As a poet trained in printing technologies—from fifteenth century letterpress to offset lithography and digital web animation—I have often been both writer and designer on projects, bringing a poet’s ability to sense the core of an idea, rendering it in written or graphic form, depending on the context.

My husband and partner, Paulo Ferreira, in addition to his art training and practice, has experience in publishing, theater management, and set design. We tend to think of practical applications for our art. Colored Horse Studios is essentially our own personal masters’ program or laboratory for applied arts, applied poetics.

After fifteen years, this premise has not only worked well for us and our clients, but is beginning to lead us full circle. We are increasingly involved in cultural projects, whether writing and designing an estate book on a winery’s historical legacy, being part of a museum exhibit based on glass plate negatives, or wrapping a scrimshaw illustration around a whale tooth sculpture for a tap handle.

Our lives have always been full of travel, and we take this laboratory with us wherever we go. We have found inspiration for our fleur de equus logo and mission statement in Paulo’s native Portugal, paid homage to the delicate coffee flowers of Kona, slept in the Sylvia Beach Memorial Library upstairs from Shakespeare & Company in Paris, waking to a view of Notre Dame across the Seine.

So this web log serves as a way to document and explore our thoughts on the edge between commercialillustration and fine art, between poetry and copywriting, and the literate letterpress aesthetic that knits all of this together.

– Theresa Whitehill, Colored Horse Studios, 25 January 2009
To see the graphic design portfolio of Colored Horse Studios: http://www.coloredhorse.com/

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