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.
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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.
10 comments:
I'd never heard of Susan Rothenberg before. Now I can see why.
Laurence John, the famous art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote that Rothenberg's "mere reference to something really existing was astonishing." I was tempted to use that quote but it was so ridiculous I was afraid readers would assume I was making it up and never take this blog seriously again.
Well, constraints are essential to the creation of language, because language is reflective of identity. Rules form the grammar of the sport within which its games are played, and on a deeper level the creation of an image, built up as it necessarily is, perception by perception, gesture by gesture, form by form to gather its multiplicity into a coherent oneness are the constraints upon its realisation necessary for it to evidence a reflection of our soul.
What I'm saying is that incompetence cannot be blamed on constraints. Throwing one’s racket into the net in anger at missing a shot is not an alternative form of tennis. Same goes for paint and art.
I guess the Rothenberg stinks. I mean, I'm sure it does.
But I'm so desperate to see real paint lately, that I almost like her picture. The Warhol too. These days, I'll take a piece of crap by Rothenberg made with real paint, over Nathan Fowkes masterpiece made in photoshop.
Maybe I’m wrong to enjoy it, she represents this horrible decline in art. But in 2025, I’ll take paint where I can get it.
I still have, since childhood, visions of the bedroom walls slowly disappearing revealing those jungle palms in Where the Wild Things Are. Weird how sticky that image sequence is.
As with so many of his Modernist ilk, from Rothko to Kandinsky, Pollock was not very talented as an artist. He couldn't draw because he fundamentally lacked an imagination. Which equals having a poor memory. So he became a designer. And the unlikely art hero of every elephant and monkey in faraway lands that slings pigment on command for tourists.
Both Mr. Pollock and Ms Rothenberger are not very smart about their drawing difficulties. All loyal readers of this blog know that you can become a right as rain drawer of horses (or anything else for that matter) if you just trace photos of them on to your canvas.
chris bennett-- I agree that incompetence cannot be blamed on constraints, although sometimes constraints are useful for identifying incompetences. At the risk of resurrecting the old debate over the legitimacy of abstract expressionism, I think the key point about Pollock is that we are allowed to choose our own constraints, and by our constraints we will be judged. Pollock left the land of tennis and lit out into the desert, not knowing whether he was headed for an oasis or a mirage. Yes, I'm sure there was some anger motivating him, but also creativity and a whole lot of courage.
We aren't locked into the constraints of John Singer Sargent.
Of course we're not. There were constraints on Mantegna, Michelangelo, Morris, Manet, Monet, Modigliani, Matisse and Mondrian, just to name the 'M's that come to mind. But constraints are not arbitrary. The question is whether a constraint or set of constraints can yield any worthwhile fruit. Most people would rather look at Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose or, more to your point, Monet's large scale waterlily paintings in the Musée de l'Orangerie than a roomful of Pollocks.
Part of the difference in approach might be that the first two worked when people mostly knew how a horse looks like. The later well might have been a monk illuminating a manuscript with a rhinoceros.
Horses are the hardest animal to draw, and I'd say it wasn't until photography was invented that we could see them painted or drawn accurately (think Remington, Charles Russell, etc). Before that, it was up to the artists' imagination. However, in sulptures kind of got it right. Leonardo da Vinci did sketches/studies of horses, although they are mostly in the same position.
At the turn of the 20 th century with the popularity of Western pulps, many illustrators, usually from New York, had no idea what horses looked like, so they hardly ever put them on the covers, or only drew part of it. However, some visited equestrian places to see what horses looked like (and some ven took horse-back riding lessons to see how it felt to be on a horse).
Argentinian comic artist Jose Luis Salinas, who drew the Cisco Kid comic strip probably drew the best horses in comics. He gre in the countryside at the turn of the century so he knew horses first hand. French comics artist Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) only got horses right on his Wesztern series 'Blueberry' after spending some years in Mexico, and then he really got the horses accurately.
So it's not strange that most artists can't draw horses. The horse's body is one of the strangest. Looked from the front they have thin legs and a fat belly, making them look awkward. In other words, for a horse to look "cool", you have to draw them from the side or profile, or at three-quarters from the front (and not the back, as they've got a huge rear-end). These apparent inconsistencies with the anmal make it really tough to draw.
I forgot to mention that Moebius spent time riding horses in Mexico, that's why he got good at drawing horses. He also saw the North American desert for the first time, and that's how he got his desert secnes in Blueberry to look so realistic.
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