Nature of Sound V.1
When you’ve been in the creative industry for over 15 years like Rob Lowe has, you become a multi-hyphenate — in his case, an artist-graphic designer-typographer-illustrator-writer. You also earn a single name alias: "Supermundane." Most well-known for his love of lines and color, Lowe's drawings leave people mesmerized. “I like making the viewer interact with my artworks, so the pieces can often be appreciated purely as decorative, but the more time you spend looking at them, the more you will get out of them.”
Medium: Illustration
Location: San Francisco
Date: 2015
That same aesthetic can be seen in The Nature of Sound, which Lowe created for Dolby®: two original designs in his signature styles — geometric and colorful — that are meant to show the dynamic nature of sound without being representative. “I tried to visualize music in an abstract way, creating a linear mural that has movement from left to right, in a similar way to sound waves,” he explains. The basic construction of each mural is the same; they each work with the interaction of lines to create movement and depth. But the more organic style, which is hand drawn, is a newer approach that Lowe developed and refined over many years. The lines are simplified to create a much more geometric work, and color is introduced as a way of exaggerating depth. Both pieces live and communicate to each other on the marketing floor.
In much of Lowe’s work, as in his pieces here, he uses line for its own sake — meaning. “Rather than use it to draw something representational, it is the placement and the interaction between the line and the other lines around it that is important to me,” he says. And as a lifelong music fan, it’s perhaps no surprise that rhythm, movement, and composition are all important aspects of his art, as they are in music. “It felt like a good fit.”