Pavel Ripley’s creative process thrives on “controlled randomness”

Pavel Ripley is one of those creatives who has a bit of a hand in everything. Originally from Russia, the artist, designer and art director is currently based in Portugal and works across a variety of visual endeavours in art and design. Day-to-day he is one half of the multidisciplinary design studio Odd Works, specialising in creative direction, visual identities, book design, packaging and more, alongside Alex Pushkarev.

Pavel’s practice spans drawing, collage, painting, and sculpture and even ceramics, often combining analogue and digital techniques to achieve “layered, expressive results”, he says. All of this experimentation usually begins as quite a strict sketchbooking routine for the designer, as well as “creative warm-ups and meditative rituals”, a lot of which he documents on his Instagram page.

There’s an intuitiveness to his daily collages of colour but also a resourcefulness too. One of Pavel’s main sources of pattern and texture come from recycled materials, which come together to create what he calls ‘garbage art’. A recurring focus of his compositions is “microscopic imagery, data, and technical graphics”, he says, so visual systems like grids, barcodes and type often take centre stage. This image making process takes tips from Chris Ashworth’s raw print aesthetics and Han Gao’s conceptual experiments at Workbyworks studio, he tells us. Overall, Pavel shares, his work relies on “controlled randomness” and an embracing of “unpredictability and analogue imperfection”.