Gotta Be

Title Gotta Be (What You Wanna Be)
Year 2010
Size H 1189 x W 841 mm
Technique 2 colour screenprint on 120 grams/m2 Natronkraft paper
Edition 20 signed and numbered prints out of 50 prints total


Print detail at 100%

Poster made for an outdoor exhibition at the Graphic Design Festival Breda 2010, themed ‘decoding’.

The ‘inktvis’ (literally ‘ink-fish’, Dutch for squid) is based on a 18th. century drawing taken from Richard Ellis’ fascinating book (The search for the) Giant Squid.


Richard Ellis, Giant Squid, 1998/ KiKiRiKi poster, 2005

The squid previously was used to fix a spelling error in a poster for the KiKiRiKi project, at the Festival Internationale de l’Affiche et des Arts Graphique de Chaumont 2005.

This time the ‘ink fish’ advertises some essential ‘tools of the trade’, like the versatile paletknife used for mixing inks, plus some of my personal values in life and work.


Hokusai, The fisherman’s wife dream, woodblock print, around 1820

Thinking of squid and print, there’s no way around some classic designs by Hokusai. The elegant floating vertical Japanese handwriting was mimicked by a beautiful unpublished brush stroke script found in David Bennewidth’s 2009 book about the work and life of the New Zealand type designer Joseph Churchward.


Joseph Churchward, FA Script 03


Gotta Be in Breda/ Gotta Be at the Rietveld Academie

May 8th, 2010
, Posted in Posters