Canadian illustrator and designer Sara Tyson makes the commonplace monumental, abstracting the forms of her subjects into multi-planed geometric solids and rendering them with colors and textures that give them the weight of planets.
She appears to take her influences form 20th century modernism, particularly Picasso’s brand of cubism, Greek sculpture and decorative arts, and 12th and 13th Century European art, as it emerged from the geometric patterns of decoration into figurative realism.
Into this interesting stew she stirs her conceptual editorial approach and produces distinctive illustrations for clients like The Washington Post, CA magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Progressive and others.
Tyson is skilled as a graphic designer as well as an illustrator and that skill is evident in the strength of her compositions, in which the shapes read as strongly as design elements as they do as representational forms.
