I love this powerful cover to The New Yorker by Eric Drooker.
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The ancient demon god Moloch sits astride the city for the New Yorker's annual "Money" issue. |
I love this powerful cover to The New Yorker by Eric Drooker.
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The ancient demon god Moloch sits astride the city for the New Yorker's annual "Money" issue. |
Fortunately, Maurice Sendak couldn't draw horses.
His contract required him to illustrate a children's book called Where the Wild Horses Are, but no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't draw horses well. Sendak struggled and struggled, then in one creative leap he substituted wild things for wild horses, and the story took off from there.
Where the Wild Things Are became a landmark in the history of children's literature, a seminal work that inspired an opera and a feature film and sold over 20 million copies around the world. It made Sendak's legacy.
The artist Jackson Pollock couldn't draw horses either.
Pollock wanted to be a representational painter. He struggled to paint horses but could never get them quite right.
In 1947 Pollock told a friend, artist Harry Jackson, that he'd tried to paint a mural of stampeding horses to satisfy an important commission but lacked the discipline or skill.
Finally “he got mad,” Harry recalled Pollock saying, “and started to sling the paint onto the canvas to create the driving, swirling action and thrust the composition and the heroic size demanded.” Pollock's frustration over his inability to paint horses fueled a creative leap to one of the first important abstract expressionist paintings. He abandoned horses altogether and pioneered a new kind of art with all of the energy but none of the representational constraints.
Pollock's mural gave the art world a jolt. The art critic Clement Greenberg wrote: "I took one look at it and I thought, 'Now that's great art,' and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced."Susan Rothenberg couldn't draw horses either, but by that time nobody gave a damn.
Rothenberg painted in an era when artists no longer needed to feel shame. She painted horses like this and she painted them real big, with oversized confidence:
[T]he effect of the horse paintings that Rothenberg sprang on the world in 1975... was like an asteroid impact....her huge paintings in acrylics made some of us laugh with sheer wonderment....The works conveyed anger, exaltation, and self-abandoning intrepidity.
Sendak and Pollock recognized that their inability to draw horses was a serious problem. If they did a crappy job, it would be widely recognized as such, so they twisted and turned and used their imaginations to explore creative, unorthodox alternatives.
Rothenberg was not flogged to higher creativity by a similar sense of shame or self-doubt, and her work reflects it.
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Paul Newman as Green Lantern |
The illustrator A.B. Frost drew with a marvelous line. He had a special knack for infusing animals with character:
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I love the powerful shadows under the man's arm, under the flaps of his jacket, and on his ankle. Those shoes are sheer poetry! |
In recent weeks, I've received an increasing percentage of comments criticizing pictures for featuring "ugly" people or "evil" themes, rather than for being "poorly drawn" or "badly painted" or "unimaginative."
The direction of these comments surprises me; there's plenty of beautiful art about ugly subjects. Just ask Shakespeare.
My own test for Cuneo's drawings was never, "Would I invite this woman to the prom?" Rather, I feel his drawings are beautiful because their line work is sensitive, complex, thoughtful, probing and intelligent:
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Details of Cuneo drawings |
Readers who sneer at drawings of "flabby" people may be troubled by this picture, but I personally consider it a masterpiece of good drawing: well conceived and designed, with those crisp dark accents shaping and containing that billowing flesh. Fluharty threw away the anatomy book and drew this with his eyes opened, the way good artists are supposed to. He was never tempted to let symmetry do half of his work for him. At the risk of further shocking readers, I would defend this drawing to anyone as "beautiful."
Next, there's artist David Levine, who walked right past the academic models to draw what he called the "shmata queens," the heavy, ungainly women who hung out on a nearby beach. Levine said he was interested in...Again and again Levine drew and painted these women on the beach. I'm sure if you asked whether he thought they were "ugly" he'd be puzzled by the question. Certainly they aren't ugly in any sense that should be relevant here.
a dwindling group of elderly women: Shmata Queens of Coney. The "shmata," or "rag," not only refers to the head cloth, but also to the bathing suits - faded and misshapen by molding to aged and deformed bodies that have been out under the sun.... Once, as I was finishing a drawing, my model said, "Dere is vun ting you kent ketch about us." When I inquired what that might be, she answered, "How much ve eat."We have to be careful about judging art based on the morals of the people depicted, or whether a character has a wart on her nose, or whether the colors are pretty. Those are all relevant considerations when it comes to deciding whether you should hang a picture in your breakfast nook, but the important aspects of art run a whole lot deeper than that.
(continuing a series)
I love this drawing of a horseman by Rodin:
Over the years he evolved from meticulous drawings (usually drawn from plaster casts or classical prints) to loose, fluid drawings where expressiveness was more important than anatomical proportion. He decided that many of the details he originally labored over were trivial. He became more interested in "large, rhythmical contours," which were often little more than wispy sketches. As his drawings became simpler and more abstract they sometimes gained in power.
Rodin drew as simply and naturally as he was able. Interestingly, as Rodin became more famous and his drawings became simpler, numerous counterfeiters and fakers tried to imitate his work. There have been museum exhibitions dedicated to distinguishing Rodin's "authentic" loose, airy drawings from the numerous counterfeit loose, airy drawings-- a challenging task.
I just received my copy of the new book by John Cuneo, Good Intentions.
For decades, scientists have searched for a deep salt mine in a remote location where they might safely store weapons-grade plutonium. Cuneo packages it in tiny spider web lines.
Despite his mostly dark and trenchant observations, there's even a "yes" to be found in this book.