WORSHIPING THREE GODDESSES IN THE ABSTRACT

I love this ancient figurine of three goddesses.

It was sculpted in the early bronze age, circa 2500 BCE, in the city of Kanesh, a trading hub of the ancient Mesopotamian empire.  I encountered it at the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

It's strikingly abstract, a work of conceptual art nearly 5,000 years old. 

Today some people criticize abstract art, along with its cousins conceptual art and postmodernism, as signs of the decline of modern civilization. But I've repeatedly been impressed by ancient and even prehistoric art that looks as new as the most avant garde work. 

2,000 years after the three goddesses of Kanesh, the ancient Greeks took another crack at sculpting three goddesses, this time for the east pediment of the Parthenon.  My, how styles can change in a mere 2,000 years!

The Greeks and the people of Kanesh celebrated their gods with different kinds of art. 

The Greek sculptures, with their realistic folds and accurate bodies, were a loving tribute to natural beauty. The sacredness of their goddesses is revealed in representational forms.  The goddesses of Kanesh, on the other hand, look more like tokens for intangible forces.  In Kanesh and Mesopotamia, the deities tended to represent forces such as the wind or a storm or a mountain.  Perhaps it's fitting that these goddesses took the shapes of arrows and circles. 

Their eerie, wide eyes bug out of their empyreal pointer heads and they have no mouths. I'd hate to meet these three in a dark alley in Kanesh.  Also, the Mesopotamian gods were said to radiate melam, a substance which "covered them in terrifying splendor."

I like that the goddesses wear their hair braided down their backs:

When I turned a corner in the Spurlock Museum and came across the abstract little sculpture in a display case, I first wondered whether I'd crossed over into a modern art museum by mistake.  Then I remembered the quote attributed to the great Ralph Waldo Emerson:"Excellence is the new forever."

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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.

LEST WE FORGET

Every year on this date I think back on Bernie Fuchs, a wonderful illustrator who left us too soon.  As time passes I'm even more impressed with his accomplishments.

Like all illustrators, Fuchs received his share of perfunctory assignments.  For example, illustrating a magazine article about a golf match; how much potential is there for glamour and excitement and creativity in pictures of middle aged men standing around on a golf course?  

The answer is: plenty, if you're the right kind of artist.

Fuchs' illustrations pulled readers into the article.  They gave the text significance, and added not a small amount of magic.  

That's a big reason why people once felt illustrations made an important contribution.   Today, if I sometimes seem to fault illustrations for falling short of their potential, for being uninspired or unambitious or cheesy, it's partially because of my memories of how Bernie approached new assignments.  

I'm not suggesting that Bernie's style from 50 years ago is a suitable style today.  I'm suggesting that regardless of style, his ambition for each new picture-- the inspiration that he felt for the project, and tried to instill in readers-- were part of what once gave illustration its greatness.

KUDOS TO THE NEW YORKER

Congratulations to The New Yorker for its compassion in supporting people with disabilities.  The art direction responsibilities of the magazine are now being performed by the blind. 

Artistic selections are now being made using braille.

ADVANCE TOUR OF THE NEW LUCAS MUSEUM

 I've just staggered home from a preview of the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, which is scheduled to open to the public on September 22.  Within the first 15 minutes I was already weak in the knees, and I still had an hour and 45 minutes to go.

The Lucas collection on display is astonishing.  It contains major galleries of some of the best work by Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Frank Frazetta and many others. 

Here are some of my favorites from the Parrish gallery:

This is the main Rockwell gallery, although there are many other examples of Rockwell's work scattered throughout the museum:  

The museum owns works  by Wyeth, Alphonse Mucha, Leyendecker,  and many other famous narrative artists.  

N,C. Wyeth

Alphonse Mucha

Leyendecker

Frazetta

Frazetta 

Winsor McCay's Little Nemo

Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon

George Lucas made some remarks during the tour.  He said that, throughout his career he had worked with talented artists whose work would never end up in a museum as a result of factors totally unrelated to quality.  So he resolved to build a platform worthy of the art, one that would cause people to stop and regard this art with the kind of respect that it deserved.  The result is the eye-popping, innovative, billion dollar museum soon opening in Los Angeles.

I heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in this type of art, or any type of art.