Icelandic illustrator/artist/graphic designer Siggi Eggertsson has the most interesting work I’ve seen recently. A “post-modern impressionist”, his work has a maturity beyond his age (24). In 2006, Print Magazine named him as one of the brightest design stars under 30. He already has a formidable client list including Nike, H&M, and Coca Cola, to name a few.

Most interesting to me, his work is underwritten by formal rules and systems, which is more common in graphic design than illustration. I have just asked him if he feels graphic design has influenced his work as an illustrator, but he said that he doesn’t like to categorise his work as “art”, “illustration”, or “graphic design”.

So, I’m going to leave it there, and share a few cool pieces of his work that I particularly like:

Right now, websites are the domain of the graphic designer. I’m not sure why the web hasn’t been leapt upon by modern fine artists as an exciting new canvas and set of media. Video can be fine art. Sculpture can be fine art. A banana dangling from a string attached to the ceiling can, apparently, be fine art.

Why not a website?

A webpage is a blank canvas. It’s been utilised well by writers and graphic designers, so why can’t artists use a webpage as a canvas? The obvious negative side to this approach is the fact webpages are unreliable, and typically look different depending on the technology of the viewer. A canvas is static, a webpage is scalable. (Surely, an artist could keep that in mind and accommodate this idea into the thesis behind the work?) I think it’s definitely something that could be experimented with.  You can make a mark on a webpage in lots of ways: HTML, CSS, images, text, space …

One of the things I’ve really wanted to do is to experiment with telling a story through a sequence of pictures. The pictures could be scrolled to or clicked through. I’d like to try doing something really unusual (and, of course, not functional, which is part of the beauty of it) with a webpage. Something that makes you stop and stare and paste the link to your friends. Something that breaks with all the convention of what we’ve seen visually on the web.