VIVACIOUS WOMEN

 

In the years before Google searches, stock images and photo banks, every illustrator compiled their own personal collection of reference pictures.  They'd clip images they found useful or inspiring from magazines, newspapers and books-- good examples of hands or childrens' faces or dry brush technique or architectural perspective. 

Old timers lovingly collected tens of thousands of these pictures. They loaned them to friends for assignments.  Sometimes they left preliminary pencil sketches in the margins, or jotted down phone numbers on the back, or used the paper to blot excess casein from a paint brush.  These hard working images often ended up tattered, yellowed and crumbling. 

These collections were already obsolete by the time I came along.  Nobody had any use for the clippings anymore.  Nobody had much use for the retired illustrators either.  

But I met illustrators who couldn't bear to throw their collections in a dumpster before moving into a hospice. Their art careers were done but they remained fond of the files they'd curated over a lifetime.  Personally, I was curious about what these artists saw in the pictures they selected and how the pictures were used.  For example, below we see how cartoonist Leonard Starr borrowed an interior from an illustration by Robert Fawcett:

These artists were grateful they could extend the useful life of their clippings by handing them off to a younger person who still cared.  

When I opened the large boxes they shipped to me, clouds of studio dust and paper chips emerged, along with the intoxicating aroma of old paper.   Skimming through the pictures, decades of art flew by-- old Saturday Evening Post covers, art deco pictures, horribly racist illustrations, World War II pictures, 1950s glamour illustrations, 1960s bursts of psychedelic colors... it was like being in a time machine:

  

I encountered all kinds of micro trends or styles reflecting the popular taste of their time.  For example,  In the 1940s and early 1950s, there seemed to be a fashion where women were portrayed with insanely animated expressions on their faces-- their eyebrows raised, their eyes popping out of their heads.

  

To modern audiences this woman might seem like a psychopath who would slip rat poison
in your butter pecan ice cream, but 1940s audiences loved this look.

Norman Rockwell said one of his favorite models during this time was Mary Whalen, who “could... raise her eyebrows until they almost jumped over her head.”  He was known to apply tape to raise the eyebrows on other models.

These women were often portrayed in the throes of ecstasy over a new product such as a girdle or a Kelvinator appliance.

The art history books are silent on why 1940s audiences found raised eyebrows so appealing.  It's part of the cultural record that might go undetected by anyone who didn't happen to be sifting through an illustrator's clipping file and suddenly encounter the geological layer where women (never the men) all had raised eyebrows.

These pictures of vivacious women are just one among dozens of stylistic eccentricities that come and go in the historical clipping files of old illustrators.  Why did people like this style?  I can't explain it.  That's a chore for future art historians.

NEW FROM CARTER GOODRICH

 Carter Goodrich earned fame as a top character designer working on animated films such as Finding Nemo, Despicable Me, Ratatouille, Brave and Coco.  As someone noted when Goodrich was working on Prince of Egypt, he "designs characters from the inside out."  

Because the preliminary character designs for major motion pictures are often confidential and proprietary, much of the work seen by the general public has been his published magazine illustrations.  But now Goodrich has released two books of his animation characters in conjunction with an exhibition in Paris at the Daniel Maghen Gallery. One is a book of new works on the theme of the old west.  The other is a book of animation characters that he describes as "bad actors and ne'er do wells" who never made it into a final movie.                                                                                                                                                             

I get a big kick out of these drawings.

Note how Goodrich squeezes as much character into this tiny little wisp of a girl...

The crossed arms holding her books, the hunched posture of a prepubescent self-conscious girl shielding herself with her shoulders, the overbite, the spindly coltish legs, the tilt of her head, the thick glasses, goofy smile, the total absence of a chin... marvelous observations!

... as he puts into this immense wall of a character:

The characters that made their way into these two books are not the cutesy characters that might become profitable plush toys in the Disney stores.  Goodrich writes: "I have a tendency to skew a bit dark.... flawed characters are more true to me.  More interesting and relatable."

   

It's a delight to see excellent work, usually cloaked behind nondisclosure agreements with movie studios, set loose in the free air to be openly enjoyed.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 78

I love this illustration of Eurystheus being frightened by creatures from Hades.  It was drawn over 3,000 years ago by a Greek artist from a workshop in Caere.  

When have you seen a better illustration of "Yikes!" ?

I love the abstract conglomeration of snapping jaws and hissing snakes.  I love that Eurystheus has pathetically tried to find safety in a large urn. His eyes are popped wide, his arms thrown up in fright (notice how sensitively the ancient artist drew that vulnerable hand, menaced by that serpent), and his mouth is curled back in fear. 

The flesh tones are as modern as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon or Jenny Saville

3,000 years ago artists already understood the importance of design, apparently better than many professional artists working today:

The subsequent 3,000 years brought all the advantages this artist never had: vastly improved art tools,  digital or analog, delivered to his door; his global choice of art teachers accessible 24/7 through the internet; artificial light to expand his work day, air conditioning and a soft chair to enable him to work in comfort; a vast library of high resolution images to help him find inspiration in 3,000 years of precedents; regular meals to keep his belly full; glasses for when his eyes weakened and health care for when his hand began to shake. 

Yet, look at illustrations in today's publications and tell me what those 3,000 years of progress have added to the quality of our pictures.

THE END OF 2025

This year's "end" is a beautiful painting by the talented Greg Manchess

The end in both senses of the word

  

Greg's painting is about the commitment necessary to take meaningful creative risks.  

Greg observed, "If there’s no risk, the commitment weakens and ultimately doesn’t matter. There must be the risk of loss or failure, otherwise the challenge is minimal."  This picture is about taking that big leap, by an artist who has done so many times, and now counsels students over their own fear of hitting the ground.

Commitment is an important message for the end of the year (and for every year).   But I think this image summons additional power and profundity from the fact that it is an archetype. It spans a variety of human experiences and deals with the fear of losing our equilibrium in the broader sense. 

Stephen Crane wrote from a poet's perspective about dreading the possible meaninglessness of life:

If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant --
What then?

Freud offered a psychiatrist's perspective in his classic Interpretation of Dreams (1900): the universal dream of falling from great heights is our subconscious way of dealing with sexual excitement and release followed by the spectre of punishment by reality (the hard ground).

Today, modern psychologists have a different perspective, focusing on clinical cures for basophobia, the fear of falling. 

And this year in particular, many are concerned that the daily supports of civilization-- the rule of law, civil government, empirical science, democratic tolerance-- are being clawed away by rage, leaving society in free fall. 

Greg's great Archetype stretches across many human endeavors.  Some of them require a degree in psychiatry or auto mechanics.  Some require the skills of a poet or a taxidermist.  But dang if I don't love the way art spans them all, bringing them together in a single object of beauty.  

Happy new year to you all! 

RICHARD THOMPSON'S SANTA

 I love Richard Thompson's modern celebrity Santa.  

We never actually see Santa because he's always being hustled away by his keepers.  

Thompson was a brilliant, beautiful illustrator who died all too young.  His drawings were simultaneously wobbly yet precise.  They were naive yet sophisticated.  His humor was childish yet wise.  For me, he ranked among the best humorous illustrators of the 20th century.  

He left us too soon, before he had a chance to make full use of his great gifts but he left behind a bountiful legacy of marvelous drawings.

Some people re-read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol every Christmas.  Me, I dig out and take a fresh look at Richard's "Here Comes Santa Claus" cartoon.

SANTA: THE FASCIST YEARS

Disney's new animated film, Zootopia 2, is a marvel of computer animation.  Bright, colorful and imaginative, it took more than two years and cost over $150 million to make.  If you last all the way through the credits at the end, you'll see names of thousands of contributors performing tasks that didn't exist a few years ago.  It's difficult to identify the fingerprints of any individual contributor on the finished product.

Zootopia 2 represented a massive gamble of shareholder capital.  It required review and approval by dozens of check points along the way, from the bankers and lawyers to the accounting department and the marketing department.  The gamble paid off; the movie is a Christmas season smash hit, already rocketing past a box office gross of a billion dollars. 

If a creator had approached management with a proposal for a movie called "Santa: The Fascist Years," the bankers would've thrown him into the Sarlacc pit.  

That's why, when it came time for Bill Plympton to create Santa: The Fascist Years it was just Plympton and a pencil.

The 2008 movie reveals the secret files regarding Santa's stint with fascism in the 1930s and 40s.  It's weird, clever, funny and a good demonstration of why Plympton turned down a lucrative offer to work for Disney many years ago.  

The number of pencil drawings Plympton makes for his hand drawn movies is nothing short of  astonishing.  But what's even more impressive is that Plympton's affection for drawing seems to remain undiminished.  You can tell from his originals that he still enjoys drawing each individual picture.  

Santa's attack was called the "Blitzenkrieg"

I think these are really nice.  Each one has character.

A repentant Santa at the Nuremberg trials

From another movie, Cheatin'

From another movie, Idiots and Angels

If Plympton hadn't come up with the idea of Santa's fascist period, nobody else would've thought of it.  And if Plympton hadn't picked up a pencil, nobody would've ever seen it.

ARTHUR SZYK EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK

A rare exhibition of the pictures of Arthur Szyk has opened at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.  Szyk's jewel-like miniatures must be seen in person to be fully appreciated, and the opportunity doesn't come along very often.  It's worth a trip.

I've previously written about my great admiration for Szyk, who was an extraordinary artist and person in so many ways.  I know of no other artist who more passionately and persistently applied his gifts in the service of his social conscience.

Szyk's despairing painting of the Antichrist (detail) is
reminiscent of Bruegel's 1562 painting, The Triumph of Death 

I try to see Szyk exhibitions whenever they arise.  (The last one was years ago at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.)  The current one is unique in my experience because it includes early, preliminary and unfinished work.

A draft of a young Jewish boy threatened by a Nazi luger

Detail from an early work 

Here is a substantially enlarged drawing, blown up so you can see Szyk's details:

In an era when many artists are struggling with the relationship between art and politics, trying to understand the dividing line between art and propaganda, and most of all trying to put their art in the service of their morality, Szyk is an important precedent, more relevant today than ever.