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Justin Deister

Justin Deister
Justin Deister

Mixed Media Artist

Website

justin@uppercasedesign.us

303-665-7542

When I asked about a career in biology, my 8th grade teacher said I’d have to learn the Latin names for grasshoppers and study the digestive systems of every animal – which pretty much ruined the whole biology thing.

As a college freshman, I wandered by a lecture on design one day and changed my major the next day to art and design.  I studied “order out of chaos” and discovered “obsession from too much order”.  I saw how “less is more” can be “less is a bore”.

I learned the rules, how to use them and how to break them.  There were manifestos for color, form, everything centered and not, the parts and the sum of parts, the vertical and horizontal, windows and no windows.

I began to feel like I needed to know myself – who am I, and what did I want?

I love history, the rise and fall, the good, the bad, the ugly, the knowledge gained and lost.
I love the design in nature that we discover and the design of the things we make, discard and rediscover.
I love the cultures that generated images that helped them to make sense of their world.
I love signs and symbols because of their subjectivity and power to reach deep within us across time and space.

For me nearly nothing is black and white. I prefer the gray, the myth and legend, the blurred erasures.
I see more similarities than differences, even though I love the differences.
I love a good story that makes be think and love and dread and angry and cry for happiness.

So when I make something, I am creating relationships among the things I know and the va