Frank Olinsky via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Frank Olinsky:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Frank Olinsky
- City: New York City
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
I was born in New York City and grew up in Huntington, New York. As a kid I secretly wanted to be a rock musician, but I had no musical ability whatsoever. At the time, I figured the next best thing would be to design album covers – to my surprise, that’s what I ended up doing.
I studied drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, filmmaking, and animation at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After graduation I did editorial illustration for New York Magazine, Esquire, The New York Times, The Whole Earth Review, and Ms. Magazine, among other publications. I entered the world of graphic design through economic necessity – starting at the bottom, with paste-up and typesetting.
A staff job at the Arica Institute ended when the art department was dissolved, and my two fellow designers (Pat Gorman and Patti Rogoff) were convinced we should start our own studio. I was reluctant but feared a real job more than the unknown.
We rented a tiny corner in the back of The School of T’ai Chi in Greenwich Village and filled it with drafting tables, a photostat camera, and other equipment purchased from Arica. We named our studio Manhattan Design, and began with nothing but faith and innocence. We explored our youthful creativity, loved and almost killed each other, and made a living. We learned a lot, worked real hard, got taken advantage of, and met some cool people. We had our own way – one of my partners used to say that we weren’t housebroken. Most of our work was for the music and entertainment industry, and our most famous creation was the chameleonlike logo and original “look” of MTV; Music Television.
During this time I began teaching illustration at Parsons School of Design and came up with the idea for What The Songs Look Like: Contemporary Artists Interpret Talking Heads Songs, the book I put together with David Byrne. I also became the founding art director of Tricycle: the Buddhist Review.
After 12 years, Manhattan Design was dissolved. I was creatively burned out and emotionally drained. I needed a break and took a short trip to India. When I returned I had absolutely no plans. Almost immediately some former clients began calling me at home offering me design work. Since then I have worked independently.
For the past twenty-one years, I have continued to design CD packaging and have worked on all sorts of other things including my second book, Buddha Book: A Meeting of Images.
This website shows the range of my work. I am always interested in new and challenging projects. Please contact me at folinsky@aol.com for further information or requests.
Contact Information
- Email: folinsky@aol.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Website: http://frankolinsky.com
More
- Quotes, Notes & Etc. Art Director, Graphic Designer, Illustrator. Formerly: Co-Founder/Partner Manhattan Design. Co-creator of the cameleonlike logo and original look of MTV. Designer of album packages for The Smashing Pumpkins, Talking Heads, R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, Sonic Youth, Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet and many others. Founding art director of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Books published: What The Songs Look Like: Contemporary Artists Interpret Talking Heads Lyrics and Buddha Book: A Meeting of Images. Awards include: CLIO, Print, Society of Illustrators. Featured: Time, NY Times, Graphis, Rolling Stone, American Illustration.
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
