24 Mar seeking inspiration for self-portraits – paula scher -ARD415

Paula Scher (born October 6, 1948, Washington, D.C.)

By day, Paula Scher is a partner at the top New York design firm Pentagram, where she not only created the logo for Citibank but also works on numerous projects for clients that include the Metropolitan Opera, Microsoft and Bloomberg. On the side, she has turned her aptitude for design into an artistic endeavour of a different sort. Scher uses her spare time to create paintings of maps. Not simply abstract works, but pieces full of information.

Scher first became interested in cartography at a young age, when her father first showed her full-colour US Geological Survey aerial photography maps of areas like the Rocky Mountains. ‘I thought these maps were art,’ says Scher. ‘Later I began to play with the language of them.’