ART FROM THE COMPOST HEAP

"See what forest has arisen from the rot."  -- Susan Barba

The Roman Colosseum was designed for the most brutal entertainments. 

Ancient Romans were thrilled to see victims ripped to shreds by lions and tigers.  The more fortunate victims were permitted to fight back (damnatio ad bestias or "condemnation to beasts").  The less fortunate were left naked and defenseless to be devoured (obicĕre bestiis or "to throw to beasts").

Centuries later, stones from the blood soaked Colosseum were taken down, polished, and used to build the beautiful Basilica of St. Peter:

But the corkscrew had one more twist: in order to raise money to build the Basilica, the church sold forgiveness to sinners.  Martin Luther, in his Ninety-Five Theses, blasted the church for selling "indulgences" enabling sinners to buy their way into heaven. 

That's the way the world goes. Again and again, terrible things somehow morph into things pure and beautiful.

For centuries, sugarcane plantations were among the worst abusers of slave labor.  Artist James Gillray drew the mistreated slaves who were forced to cut and press sugarcane in deadly heat, then boil the crop in hellish furnaces (below left).  Many perished in the process. The result: delightfully sweet sugar. 

Commenters on this blog have decried the disintegration of our culture.  The fine arts have become puerile and decadent; standards have declined; the absence of boundaries have rendered us shapeless;  digital theft, appropriation art, auto-toning and plagiarism run rampant; the odor of postmodern nihilism pervades; economics create all the worst incentives.  

Alarmed voices demand: "once our creative muscles have atrophied, our cognitive functions have been reduced, and our taste has been softened by subjectivity, how can we ever go back?  How can standards regain any authority once they've been trampled?  How can innocence, once lost, be recovered?"

No one can say for sure, but on the subject of hope I often turn the great Walt Whitman who mused about the purity and renewal of common grass:

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day...

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
....
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

If there is to be a renewal in the arts, what form will it take? We can't just unlearn what we've learned.  We can't reverse course to Rembrandt or Howard Pyle.  All I can do is direct you-- once again-- to the wisdom of the ancients.  In 700 BC, Archilochus had already discovered that no outcome should be beyond expectations:

Henceforth nothing is certain:

one may expect everything,

and none among you should be astonished to see,

one day, the deer, preferring the sonorous tides of the sea to the land,

borrow from the dolphins their sea pasture,

while the latter plunge into the mountains.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 79

 In 1966, The Cartoonist Cookbook published a drawing and recipe from each of 45 popular comic strip artists.  

The book reminds us about the snappy draftsmanship on the comics pages in those days.

For example, the talented Leonard Starr contributed this drawing of his wife trying to trick him into eating tuna fish, which he'd told her he hated:

Stan Drake contributed this sparkly drawing of his character Eve Jones:

There's no artist on the newspaper comic pages today that comes within ten miles of these draftsmen.

 

Even the most simplified strips such as Johnny Hart's BC could demonstrate observational powers and drawing skills.

But among all the drawings in The Cartoonist Cookbook,  the one with the real Frim Fram Sauce and shafafa on the side, is the contribution from young Neal Adams: 

Adams was a mere stripling at the time, young lean and out to conquer the world.

Bio from The Cartoonists Cookbook

Even at that young age he exhibited the fearlessness with ink which later became his trademark: 

The astonishing variety in the width of his line is not something found in nature; it is purely an invention of Adams, something he forced into the picture to great artistic effect.

The precocious Adams already had the courage and the range of a more mature talent.  Look at the range of marks he employed in this one small drawing.   

Flipping through the pages of the 1966 book full of talented cartoonists, this one lovely drawing stood out.  It must've been obvious back then that the boy cartoonist was destined for greatness... and indeed he was.

 

TRIBUTE TO AN ILLUSTRATED BOOK, part 1

Harold von Schmidt's illustrations for Death Comes for the Archbishop were greatly admired when they first appeared in 1927. 

Von Schmidt was ideally suited to illustrate Willa Cather's tale of the southwestern desert.  He grew up in that land, roughing it on cattle drives, wrangling horses and riding the buffalo trails.  He got to know and love the desert by contemplating vast landscapes of clouds and rocks under an intense sun.  

The desert, rather than the human characters, became the center of his big, bold illustrations for this book.  This type of illustration is more than just a visual recital of the author's text.  The term "Illustration" comes from the Latin lustrare, "to make bright, illuminate" and pictures like these are intended to achieve that by complementing the text, expanding and adding depth.  After many centuries this remains one of the highest roles for illustration.

Von Schmidt chose to paint his pictures with black tempera on white board, ten times(!) larger than the final published image. 

The potency of his illustrations was recognized and commented upon in arts magazines (which in those days paid close attention to important developments in the illustration world).

Von Schmidt did over 60 illustrations for the book, and they are artfully interspersed with the text to create a book that is itself an aesthetic object.

We have a few years left before books become obsolete, but the telltale signs are already here.  As books are gradually replaced by more effective and convenient means of ingesting content, we'll lose the qualities that make this book such a fine experience.  Generations raised on scrolling electrons on computer monitors won't miss the aroma of old paper, the feel of fine bindings, and especially the delight of images crafted by hand on the basis of long observation.  

This is the first in a series of posts in which I plan to pay tribute to special books that aren't discussed much anymore but which I think were especially well illustrated. 

MORE FIGURE STUDIES FROM DANIEL SCHWARTZ

 I previously posted a series of life drawings by illustrator Daniel Schwartz.  In addition to pencil drawings, Schwartz regularly painted from the model with watercolors.

Schwartz was a highly respected illustrator, winner of eleven gold medals from the Society of Illustrators, yet every week he went back to study from the model.  

It seems clear that Schwartz wasn't doing this to learn anatomy.  He already understood bone and muscle structure.  But long and close observation of the human figure can be an introduction to the greater world of natural forms.  It rewards our discipline with enhanced perceptions of wider truths.

Some of the best draftsmen I know, including Robert Fawcett, Bernie Fuchs and Pat Oliphant, underwent rigorous training drawing from the figure early in their careers, yet continued to find fresh discoveries and substantial value by continuing the process late in their careers.

I fear that the current generation of illustrators, with so many convenient shortcuts for figure drawing, may never understand the nature of the deep investment, and never reap the return on that investment. 

NEW EXHIBITION OF THE WORK OF CARTER GOODRICH

 If you like good drawing and you're in the vicinity of New York City, it would be hard to do better than the Carter Goodrich retrospective at the Philippe Labaune Gallery.  If you're not in the vicinity,  the show is worth a trip.

The exhibition includes an excellent cross section of Goodrich's art, including His New Yorker covers, his magazine and book illustrations, and his character designs for major animated films.  It's a rare opportunity to study his beautiful originals up close.

Note the vapor from the nostrils of the reindeer, the treatment of the boy's hair, the line of the tree. 

Even better from my perspective, it's a chance to view preliminary drawings and loose sketches which so often are the best way to see what an artist has.

Smart, funny, creative and beautifully crafted, Goodrich's New Yorker covers in this show remind us of a better era for the New Yorker, when its covers offered more charm, aesthetic grace and humanity.  

A prescient baby new year for the new millennium, made all the more relevant in our year of AI

The show also includes a number of proposals for New Yorker covers which, for some reason, were not accepted. If I were the art director of the New Yorker I'd show up at the gallery and see whether it's too late to retroactively accept proposals I'd rejected.  

Taking the plunge

I can't recommend this show highly enough.

The Labaune Gallery has become a gallery to watch for people with a serious interest in illustration. It has recently exhibited work by artists such as Peter de Seve, Mike Mignola, Moebius, Dave McKean and Frank Miller.

Owner Philippe Labaune has a somewhat unconventional background for the art world. He began his career in finance but had been a dedicated collector of narrative art for many years.  His formative influences included Moebius and Hergé.  He founded the gallery to fill what he perceived as a gap in American galleries presenting narrative art with seriousness and focus, emphasizing both its artistic significance and its narrative power. In the future, he says, the gallery wants to elevate the medium across borders.

ONE REASON I ADMIRED GARY KELLEY

Gary Kelley, illustrator extraordinaire, passed away yesterday.  I had the pleasure of meeting Gary in my younger years, and later interviewed him for my column about him ("The Artist Who Paints Music" in The Saturday Evening Post).

Gary was a remarkable talent, and was recognized by his peers as such.  Artist Greg Manchess said, "My own career was set afire by his influence and guidance. He is a North Star in my life as an artist." Gary was awarded 28 gold and silver medals from the Society of Illustrators and was elected to the Society's Hall of Fame in 2007. There are tributes popping up from many people who knew him better and are better qualified to speak than I. But I wanted to share one reason (among many) why I admired him.

Gary understood when to hang on and when to keep moving. When other illustrators were relocating for their work, moving to urban areas where artists and clients congregate and dressing differently, Gary resolved to remain in small town Iowa here he enjoyed the quality of life.  He believed that he could build a thriving career living where he wanted, and he was right. 

The cool thing was that living in Cedar Falls, Iowa (not far from Wild Horse Ridge in Black Hawk County) didn't constrain Gary's ability to come up with the most sophisticated, gritty noir illustrations of urban scenes or allegorical pictures of the cosmos.  

He was not just painting folksy pictures of the corner barber shop.  His imagination was unbounded.

Gary stubbornly remained in Cedar Falls, yet when the traditional illustration field began changing, he was nimble about pulling up stakes and moving on. As illustrated magazines began drying up, Kelley created huge murals and wrote and illustrated graphic novels and painted pictures that were projected above a symphony orchestra as they played classical music.  

He was welcomed in all these venues because he was recognized everywhere as a picture maker to be taken seriously.

Gary Kelley, a man who knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff, will be sorely missed.