This full-page illustration from a recent issue of the
New York Times Magazine required the combined talents of four different creators plus a computer
:
The New York Times separately credits the photographer of the tower, the photographer of the trees and the photographer of the vulture, as well as the "illustrator" who glued them all together on a colored background.
Let's face it, this picture required only limited artistic choices: which photo of a vulture to pick from the internet? Whether to paste that cupola a little further to the
left or the right? How far to push the color balance slider? These are the art choices of decoupage.
I welcome the computer as an artistic tool when it enhances an artist's expressive range. Even added efficiency is a welcome contribution. But that's not what's happening here. A capable illustrator using traditional materials could've completed this job in a day.
Why is so much illustration like this today? It fills its allotted space just fine, but what is there to admire about the talents required for this kind of image? Are we seeing creative responses to genuine artistic challenges? Are we witnessing the quirks or eccentricities of the human imagination? Are there any manifestations of admirable manual skill or dexterity or taste?
The golden age of illustration-- a glorious century in the history of art-- was only made possible by new technologies, but ultimately the age was ushered out again by newer technologies, more efficient but less hospitable to the artistic imagination.
The golden age began when high quality reproduction, new
kinds of paper, better methods of printing and distribution encouraged unprecedented enthusiasm for images. These innovations spawned a veritable Cambrian explosion, with hundreds of glossy full
color magazines creating an unprecedented platform for illustrations. On this new platform, artistic quality was still tested by what I consider a higher set of artistic challenges:
- Artists had to master the hydrology of liquid media (learning to control liquid, but not too much).
- Artists had to take tincture from minerals in the ground and wrestle with their obdurate molecules to transform them into the appearance of totally unlike substances: water, clouds, organic matter, light
- Artists had to master the physical gestures of art-- impulses that started with the human nervous system and found expression through the wrist, elbow or even
the shoulder (as opposed to the touchpad or keyboard).
- Because they were wrestling with physical media in the physical world, artists had to risk starting over if a picture didn't work out because the
consequences of a failure couldn't be contained in a separate Photoshop layer. This
gives different meaning to an artist's willingness to gamble and to the psychology of maintaining high standards.
It's no wonder that these artists-- Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, Charles Dana Gibson, Maxfield Parrish, Frederic Remington, James Montgomery Flagg, and many others-- were folk heroes in ways that today's "photo-illustrators" can never be. For all the gross inefficiencies and manual labor involved in working with physical media in the physical world, creativity seems to come out of constrained circumstances. If you compare the images from these different periods in the history of illustration, it would appear that the process of wrestling with the angel summoned a grander set of choices and commitments.
