I've had some unkind things to say about illustration in the New York Times in recent years. I felt that the Times had lost its taste for traditional drawing, and its replacements-- digital collages, naive scrawls, and postmodern mewlings-- were unworthy of the Times. I suggested the Times had succumbed to the "I'm-so-smart-I don't-have-to-draw-well" attitude that infected too many other publications. Some of its digital illustrations in recent years demonstrated a young medium with potential but even then, much of it substituted flash and gimmickry for genuine substance. One step across a two-step ditch.
So perhaps I've been remiss in not commenting on a regular source of pure joy for me in the pages of the Times: Bill Mayer's regular contributions to the "NYT For Kids" section:
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Detail |
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Note the skin textures |
Artists have been drawing funny creatures with wacky expressions for millennia; the ground is well trodden and formulaic. But it's a measure of Mayer's great ability that his creatures remain fresh and funny.
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Illustration for another client |
27 comments:
I concur. Mayer with his exceptional, creativity and attention to detail does bring us joy to see. More please.
The Shark is great would make for a wonderful PIXAR film.
Love these!
He is brilliant. And as kind and playful and decent as his work. Love love.
I've known Bill for 42 years. He is a genius.
Kev Ferrara-- That "porcelain" effect has been a thread through 20th century illustration; Dean Cornwell, Leyendecker, Doug Johnson... heck, Malcolm Liepke nearly beat it to death single handedly. I always assumed it was part of a 20th century streamlined/deco/polished/synthetic materials aesthetic. You even see it echoed in Jeff Koons' shiny reflective surfaces.
To Mayer's credit, he applies that technique mostly to his big, shiny children's illustrations. It's the perfect look for a combination goldfish / big puffed up inflatable toy. If you check out the adult paintings in the gallery on Mayer's website, you'll see very different approaches. I say bravo!
What is Bill like as a person? I'm nuts about his brilliant pictures but he seems to have a weird fixation on frogs and bugs. Is he an entomologist?
I don’t know Bill well, but I’ve interviewed him and spoken to him a number of times over the years. And I concur - a genius!
And if this is Rick Parker formerly of Marvel Comics, then I’d say it takes one to know one! 😀
My original love of Bill’s work goes back to his commercial stuff for Big League Chew (which I believe was brought good measure toward its initial success) and his creature work for Tangy Taffy (later Laffy Taffy) is pure energetic fun.
His contemporary work is the stuff of dreams, of course.
Well, I suppose they are better than the information graphic or faux naive (or just incompetent) styles that are commonplace in publications these days. But for me these fun bouncy castle optical rides are no more than the sum of their digitally generated parts - my eye bumps from one bubble-gum form to one similar, and then to another, and after four bounces it's had enough.
Offtopic, but the mention reminded me the Illustrated Press reissued their Leyendecker this week, in case it's of interest to anyone reading.
David: “…he applies that technique mostly to his big, shiny children's illustrations. It's the perfect look for a…“
Nah, David, I think kids deserve better things too. I grew up with hand drawn illustrations, stop motion animations and puppetry (TV cartoons like Pat & Mat). These works were made of real materials like paint and paper, wood, cloth and clay, and in elementary school, we had a mandatory subjects like arts, and crafts, where we had to draw and make toys out of wood. Even in the physics subject we had a chance to compete at the national level by making stuff like our solar system out of bearings, wires and painted balls. Visuals we were exposed to carried imperfections, textures, and warmth that comes from real materials, there is something tactile and human about hand made things. Now look at these - all are overly smooth, polished, plastic like, hyper clean, uniform and artificial, you can sense that this kind of approach trades organic quality for efficiency for production. So I agree with Chris and Kev, these images are sterile and boring (in the way that superficial flashy dynamic things become predictable and boring), nutritionally insufficient for kids.
Those dinosaur feet look and feel like plastic baloons with copy&pasted claws, while as a kid I was admiring Zdenek Burian’s images before I knew how to read well (there was no large production of new visuals to choose from, though; books were mostly passed down from parents to children). The most popular collectible stickers in chocolates, which we traded with classmates, had paintings of animals. Nowadays kids collect stickers with photos of animals or some generic stylized vectorized shit, which represents today's mass market illustration that seems locked into a corporate, algorithmic sameness.
Kids absorb the materiality of images, so the question is how does that influence their sensory development. Is tactile engagement with materials linked to cognitive and emotional growth in children? Is artificial, mechanical nature of these uniform, mass produced visuals perhaps making them more detached from the raw, handmade nature of real life creation, and does that distance them from the process of making? Does the nihilistic way these computer generated illustrations erase the human hand subtly shape their expectations of the world? We have to cultivate aesthetic sensibility, not desensitize kids to authentic beauty. Kev once mentioned that the word illustration shares a root with illustrious, a spiritual illumination (mid-15c.), an enlightening (Latin illustrationem) etc… so, what are we doing here with all these apathetic, sterile, flat zigzaggy gorillas and soulless, shiny inflatable dinos?
Very well put.
I'd agree, too, that the pictures are full of joy, and are among the best of this kind of stuff, but would gain so much more were they linked more to the hand (and eye, in memory or model) in their making.
Digital balloons for kids.
~ FV
Aleš-- I too enjoy, and am nostalgic for, the art forms you describe, and the "imperfections, textures, and warmth that comes from real materials," but I think it would be a mistake to let sentimentality control our taste. I fear that those who object to "overly smooth, polished, plastic like, hyper clean, uniform and artificial" images calcified their taste way back prior to the art deco / streamlined era. But art doesn't let us off the hook that easy. It demands fresh observation and exploration and invention, and it rewards curiosity.
I too loved those Zdenek Burian paintings and I grew up admiring the similar Charles Knight murals at the Natural History Museum in Chicago. I still love them, but of course they're no longer accurate. They've been superseded by science. So we keep them, but we open our eyes to the new as well.
If we want to credibly criticize "stickers with photos of animals or some generic stylized vectorized shit" or the even more odiferous polished shit from Jeff Koons and his ilk, I think our critique can't be based on our warm childhood memories. Every generation has their own childhood memories and plays with their own toys, some of which are now mass produced and plastic.
If we're willing to do the work, there are artists such as Mayer who are not afraid of the new tools, the new chemistry, and the new technologies. They embrace them with zest and creativity to make statements about the new world. In my experience, the good ones (such as Nathan Fowkes, Tom Fluharty, Denis Zilber, Ralph Eggleston and his Pixar Wall-E crew, etc.) mastered traditional media first and then plunged fearlessly into the new.
If I want to wean children from the rising tide of crummy junk, I'd do it by exposing them to more artists like Mayer.
I don't know what "overly smooth" means, but I enjoy the juicy, ripe soap bubble effects here. I enjoy the brilliant orange palette and it doesn't bother me that the pigments weren't ground from earth minerals by Chaldean priests. As I said in my post, I think these are joyful.
Hey Ales, your comment laid out and got to the base of what I think this is all about.
Visuals we were exposed to carried imperfections, textures, and warmth that comes from real materials, there is something tactile and human about hand made things. Now look at these - all are overly smooth, polished, plastic like, hyper clean, uniform and artificial, you can sense that this kind of approach trades organic quality for efficiency for production.
The artist, be they visual, literary of musical, is only profoundly effective when in deep relationship with their material, to the point of it being a love affair. It is their communion with it that is the soil from which the imagination finds root and grows. Consequently the 'style' of a true poet is not arbitrary but a consequence of the reciprocal nature of their imagination and their material. The heaven and the earth.
In my view, the relationship between a craftsman and a digital material, the simulacra of the real, is in essence, like kissing a sex robot.
Aleš-- If you think "kids deserve better things," I'd be curious to know what those things are, and where they might be found. Who would you recommend as an illustrator for children today? Tenniel doesn't count.
chris bennett-- People have all kinds of preferences for how an artist should get to a result, and even more theories about how that process affects that result. Sometimes viewers can't even tell from looking at the finished product whether it was done with gouache, digital tools or acrylic; they can't tell whether an artist used photo reference or a live model, etc. but somehow their opinion of the art is dependent on the answer. That make little sense to me. As I've said before, I think a quality image is self-legitimizing.
There are plenty of people who feel that your "love affair between an artist and their physical materials" is also artificial and plastic. They compare it to a love affair between organic human beings and laugh at art on a cold canvas as once removed from the primacy of experience. ("Culture is for old people. When you're young you have your body, and that's all you need." --John Currin ) They think your "tactile" relationship between a human and a pot of cold paint can't begin to rival the tactile relationship with living matter. (We discussed this long ago on this blog at https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2010/01/art-vs-life.html ).
So once we've established that there are people who look down on you for the same reason that you look down on others, doesn't everything become a lot more relative? For example, people can have a "love affair" with colors that don't come from a tube, or designs that aren't on a canvas. They may lose some qualities but gain others. People can have a love affair with art that moves on a screen or radiates light, even if they don't stir it in a watercolor tray. I guess I'd conclude that your personal preference for a particular kind of a relationship with physical material is fine but it doesn't seem to me to justify excluding all the others.
David: “ If we want to credibly criticize "stickers with photos of animals or some generic stylized vectorized shit" or the even more odiferous polished shit from Jeff Koons and his ilk, I think our critique can't be based on our warm childhood memories. “
Of course, my argument wasn’t about highlighting my memories. I mentioned memories to emphasize the contrast between how we grew up before Adobe’s products and what we are exposed to today, leading to the question of whether today's generations are missing out on something. My last paragraph was the main point of my comment - you can’t just ignore it and reduce my opinion to a mere description of “warm childhood memories”, which would, of course, be a dismissible quasi argument.
We credibly criticized photography many times on this blog. The fundamental point is that photography is not art and, therefore, serves poorly in educating people aesthetically. In the 19th century, the public was initially quick to notice and point out the mechanical distortion of nature in photographs, but over time, people acclimatized, and such criticisms became increasingly rare. People began to internalize the visual structure of mechanical photography (frozeness and sterility, it’s factual, apoetical nature), and it became their norm for how everything should look/feel. Half a century ago, Philip Rawson, commenting on the effects of instant advertising visuals, noted that "art galleries are always full of people walking past Rembrandts, Titians, and Rubens, giving each the same fleeting glance as they do to posters in the subway." Thirty years later (before smartphones and social media, which have completely fried our concentration), museum studies confirmed this - on average, visitors spent only 5-15 seconds looking at a painting. The population now has a big problem with aesthetic literacy.
And we had many debates about generic stylized vectorized crap, where there is a significant difference between how graphic designs and similar surface symbols tend to be cerebral, while true illustration builds its meaning through every sensitive mark and stroke, describing and expressing, as Kev would say, concentrated imaginative thought, a celebration of the depicted event, where picture is constructed like visual music with orchestration of values and colors and shapes and a joy of life.
I mentioned collectible stickers with paintings of animals to ask you whether collecting photographs/graphic designs of animals today is more suitable for developing a child's artistic perceptiveness. I wasn’t merely sharing my warm childhood memories.
I mentioned Zdenek Burian to point out that children don’t necessarily need dumbed down, oversaturated, bubblegum visuals to be inspired, and they can be raised on older visual materials that belonged to previous generations (but it's becoming increasingly difficult because we surround them with highly stimulating visualizations, which they become addicted to). Burian’s dinosaurs may have been “superseded by science,” as you say, but the latest scientific facts can be introduced to children later. I forgot all the facts anyway, I just remember how a giant dinosaur was roraring at the pterodactyle, as Calvin and Hobbes strip shows. Burian’s paintings (or those of other dinosaur illustrators like James Gurney, John Sibbick or Doug Henderson, and many others who are not paleoartis) can serve children by helping them appreciate real life handmade nature of craft and aesthetically formulated visualizal structures.
David: “I don't know what "overly smooth" means, but I enjoy the juicy, ripe soap bubble effects here. I enjoy the brilliant orange palette and it doesn't bother me that the pigments weren't ground from earth minerals by Chaldean priests. As I said in my post, I think these are joyful.”
OK, explain to me what’s so good about those - every bubble has the same white reflection, slightly reduced in size; every bubble is the same bubble, slightly resized; every group of bubbles is the same copy&pasted cluster repeated across the image. Can you explain the qualitative aspects of this uncreative nonsense? The reflections on the fish’s eyes are the same white dot, slightly rotated with a white Gradient Overlay or whatever digital layer style tool was used. Do the reflections even match the same light source? Every pupil is the same flat black circle, slightly stretched with a Free Transform tool. The same applies to the entire eye - each eye is just a yellow balloon pulled in this or that direction, with the pupil stretching along with it, like when you squeeze a balloon. If we agree that bubblegum isn’t a nutritious meal, why should we feed our children’s minds with such quick, cheap, lazy fakery? It’s all about quick money and attracting eyeballs, and in the end, kids grow up with the same naive, doll eyed, empty headed expression as those fish.
It’s all about being sharp, stylish, and trendy, with an eye grabbing, obnoxious color scheme and decorative arrangements. You said you find them “joyful” - I can only agree that they are superficially energetic and dynamic, visually striking, but ultimately empty and depressing. Beneath that derivative, distracting, addictive facade yawns a nihilistic void, all those clean digital marks make the visualization sterile, lacking the humanity of handcrafting, all those mechanical repetitions create a lack of sincerity and authenticity, all those easy technical solutions lead to emotional disconnect and a lack of substance, just like in every attractive, instant advertising visualization that doesn’t invite deeper engagement. Why would we feed our children with such nonsense?
David: “ … plunged fearlessly into the new.
This is one of the topics we haven’t been able to resolve here for 15 years - the difference between authentic novelty and progressiveness as virtue signaling. When you say “fresh observation and exploration and invention”, “we open our eyes to the new”, and “not afraid of the new tools”, you are not actually arguing what is good about those plastic, saturated, copy&pasted balloon fish, but rather making a value judgment about us - that we are outdated and resistant to progress or change, nostalgic for established ways of doing things, and naively romanticizing the past. We are simply not as good people because we hinder innovation and cultural advancement, while people like you, by breaking boundaries, are liberating society as a whole.
Is this a consequence of the industrial revolution (speed of innovation was seen as essential for social progress), modernism (artistic revolutions looked down on past/traditional forms of creation), and consumer culture (mass media and advertising presented new products and ideas as essential for a modern, progressive lifestyle) where now we have such a strong tendency to signal one’s values in society through the uncompromising glorification of novelty?
I don’t know how to approach this in a new way again. Most new stuff is forgettable garbage. Novelty is not a criterion for quality, as it can appear as an insignificant innovation, consumerist fashion, or camouflage for shallowness. So we need to apply some criteria to distinguish the good from the bad. I understand that you enjoy those bubbly things, and I’m fine with that, but I would like you to explain what exactly makes those digitally copy&pasted illustrations artistically valuable or preferable for kids. Just like you said that you enjoy the jagged angles shaping the gorilla’s head, but you never explained in what way that makes it good art. I reject it because it is insignificant and shallow, not because I would be afraid of the new. Suggesting that just because this kind of digital graphic approach is the newest, it automatically makes the artist more advanced and therefore the artwork of higher quality is nonsense. I don’t reject cameras or Vector Drawing Tool because I’m "afraid of the new tools", but because after engaging with them, I realized that their very nature limits some important aspects of art making.
Chris, I like what you said, true artistry emerges from a deep, almost sacred connection/dialogue between the artist and their material. In highly controlled and predictable digital approach, where material is largely removed or simulated, there is a lack of physical resistance and direct sensory relationship with the material, the medium doesn’t "talk back" or challenge the artist in the same way. I like the way paint’s characteristics like viscosity, the way granulation flows or drying time influence how the artist applies it, leading to certain brushstrokes and techniques that become part of his visual language. There are quirks, happy accidents and imperfections that force the artist to adapt and innovate and working with physical materials engages the artist’s entire body. There is reciprocal relationship between our imagination and the material, so many artists find traditional methods more intimate, fulfilling and meaningful.
David,
You seem to think my argument is a justification for a practice regardless of the result it produces. But it is quite the opposite: After many years of professional experience using real and unreal media it is the understanding I have come to as to why digital, that is to say limitlessly plastic simulacra of the physical material it re-presents, looks and feels the way it does.
Original guy with original chops.
Ales: “This is one of the topics we haven’t been able to resolve here for 15 years - the difference between authentic novelty and progressiveness as virtue signalling.”
I see a convergent cultural phenomena; the ‘woke / progressive’ mindset has exploded (late 1990s onward) at the same time that western art has been seriously running out of ideas.
The problem is that art DOES need to re-invent itself. You can’t do the same thing again and again and expect the same success. Artistic forms become played out, stale and exhausted.
The result of these two things is a deluge of ‘anything goes’ dross in the last 25 years or so, which wouldn’t have been acceptable in previous generations.
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