TRIBUTE TO AN ILLUSTRATED BOOK, part 4

When I was a young boy, I discovered The Arabian Nights with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish in a dusty used bookstore.   The book itself seemed like an artifact of ancient Araby-- a heavy volume with tarnished gold letters and the heavenly fragrance of old paper.  But most of all I was bewitched by the illustrations.   

I purchased the book for 50 cents I'd earned from my paper route.  It was my introduction to Parrish, and his vivid images became my entryway to the Arabian Nights and other fairy tales and legends. 

Mothers used to place honey on the letters of the alphabet so their infants would come to associate the sweetness of honey with the sweetness of book learning.  For me, illustrations were that honey.

Today books are nearly impossible to justify from an efficiency perspective.  You can put a thousand books on a portable tablet with none of the costs or inconvenience of physical books.  Digital "pages" never tear or stain or fade; they weigh nothing and take no space, they come with a search function, and we can increase the size of the font to suit our eyesight.  They even give us the option of listening to audible books.

However, all these digital advantages come at the cost of stripping away the non-digital benefits.

Physical books have always been more than compilations of words.  They've been decorated with illuminations and calligraphy, distinctive papers and bindings that are central to the aesthetic experience. Non-digital elements not only create lovely physical objects, they transform writing into totem objects, symbols of cultural identity or spiritual icons.  Warriors carried miniature books in amulets into battle.  They engraved texts on their armor for divine protection.  Many cultures in many lands have physically eaten books as a way of ingesting their sacred revelations. 

I suspect anyone who tries to lick honey off their tablet may be in for a shock.

A FEW SLIGHTLY TILTED HEADS

 Look at this wonderful sketch by Harvey Dunn:

It's so broad and loose, it almost could've been painted with his elbows.  Yet look at the subtle way Dunn captures the tilt of the woman's head, leaning into the man.  She has no facial features but her hairline gives us all the information we need. 

Dunn strategically places both heads together at the horizon line, so the contrast against the white background leads us right to the heart of the painting.   Elbows or not, Dunn has performed microsurgery in this sketch.

Next, check out this sketch by Austin Briggs.

It might've been drawn with a cigar butt.  There are no details, no eyelashes or buttons or shoelaces yet Briggs has perfectly captured the hang of the man's head, and that's enough to shape the whole character of the drawing.

You'd need a micrometer to measure the swell of his cheek, yet Briggs has it absolutely perfect.

Below, Norman Rockwell tells a story using eleven bent necks and one that's ramrod straight:

 

For other examples of what Rockwell achieved with a mere tilt of the head, consider these two young girls:

On the way home from a birthday party, a girl senses that a boy is mustering the courage to sneak a first kiss.

 

When the Vedic deity Twashtri invented girls he combined the trembling of grass, the slenderness of the reed, the bloom of flowers, the glances of deer, and the gaiety of sunbeams. One gets the feeling Rockwell used a similar palette.

My point today is that we've lost some of the highs and lows in a draftsman's repertoire.  You'll often see today's artists depict necks as a simplistic, straight vertical platform for the head.  Sometimes they can't even manage to get the neck straight, with sternocleidomastoid muscles wandering off in orthogonal directions.

Artists may use a lot of fine lines rather than a crude broad brush,
but it won't save them from getting the neck horribly wrong.

In previous years we saw a subtle tilt of the head as one in a rich and complex field of communication tools.  

MIKE MIGNOLA SHOW AT THE PHILIPPE LABAUNE GALLERY

Renowned drawing teacher George Bridgman used to yell at students who tried to conceal weak drawing by applying color.  "Don't think color's going to do you any good," he barked,  "You can't paint a house until it's built!"

For many years, Mike Mignola has been building strong houses-- bold, well constructed compositions in black and white.  His powerful designs, built from the same materials as Stonehenge, have been a welcome respite from comic art trends of overworked drawings with fussy little lines.

Last week at the Mignola exhibition at the Philippe Labaune gallery in New York, I saw up close how (in the parlance of Bridgman) Mignola applies paint to his houses .  

Instead of Mignola's trademark high contrast, flat shapes, these pictures were rich with softer watercolor effects which added greater range, sensitivity and subtlety to his high contrast foundations. 

For example, Mignola has long been fond of using the shapes created by sharp silhouettes of fingers...

But in these paintings we repeatedly see those once stark silhouettes fade into muted colors:

I remain a fan of Mignola's black and white work.  In black and white there's no hiding whether the structure of a house is well built or not. We can tell when an artist is using heavy shadows as a cheap and easy path to melodrama, or as a crutch to avoid difficult drawing choices.  Mignola's use of black and white consistently showed he was the real McCoy.  

But I view his use of color in the current exhibition as a worthwhile advancement in the sophistication of his art. It's the kind of subtlety that benefits from being seen in the original.