Once upon a time, a single line drawing could dominate a full page of the New York Times.
They took a pen and ink drawing by the great Ronald Searle, enlarged it several times and cleared the decks. The result was the most compelling page in the entire newspaper on March 1, 1970. Probably the whole month of March.
What art director today has the courage to rely on a line drawing to fill such a role? What illustrator today has the talent to fill such a role?
Searle was such a pro-- look at the way he claims that real estate. He confidently captures the height by stretching those legs, one flung high and one flung low. All he needed was a single crude line. He captures the width with a long cane on one side and flapping coattails on the other side. He's in full command, and no one could dare push back against his use of that space.
Fearless!
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Also: what art director today would know how to reproduce a B/W line drawing enlarged several times to full-page broadsheet size, without fuzzy edges or loss of definition - or have access to the tools that can do it? (the repro cameras that every newspaper had up to a few decades ago)
Well, art directors above the age of 50 might know about it. The others might not even understand what the problem is about.
Nice post David!
Apart from how wonderful the drawings of Ronald Searle are, for me, a fellow native of these fair isles, their jagged yet somehow diffident lines, apparent fumbles, blotches and insouciant splatters of ink building the shirt-hanging-out-of-the-trousers scruffy forms that conjure up his characters and their world is the graphic expression a particular embodiment of England and Englishness.
Which reminds me of a quote from William Coldstream concerning attitudes to the creation of art: 'The Americans take the professional approach, but we British like coming to it by mistake.'
Something like that anyway.
Searle’s got a slovenly mocking take on everyone and everything including drawing itself. In his world, there is no beauty except the sunrise, no pure joy but pure color and wild flea-ridden lines.
Every pretty girl is a tart. Every high-born man’s pants bunches up at the crotch. The venerable dame’s hair is frizzy, her mink stole ratty, and all her ornamental furniture is busy and crazy.
In fact all ornament is trash, all flamboyance risible, all ostentatious wealth is clutter. Every hairstyle is stupid and embarrassing. Cats are fat scraggly hair balls. Children are mean and snarling. Every flower put out to enliven an occasion is already drooping and dying. Every nice old lady has a sagging face and a humpback. Feet are lumpy unless stuffed into pinched black shoes. Light has no beauty, barely exists, and every shadow look like shmutz. Just zero charity the whole way through.
Formally, in this particular picture, I find it interesting that the high-kicked leg has thinner outlines than the arm directly behind it; inverting the usual inking formula for setting elements in depth. (Showing that hierarchy of line-thickness as taught ain’t necessarily so.)
I'm not very into musical comedy lore, the joke here is that he is in a moulin-rouge-esque pose? If it is so, the funniest part is his side eye, he HATES what they make him do.
Anonymous-- interesting point. We see that newspapers have become so much more accomplished at printing color images (I love the work of Bill Mayer, whose full page color images occasionally appear in the New York Times: https://www.thebillmayer.com/blog/2024/goldfish-invasion ) but we don't focus on the fact that the black and white images may be degraded, or that the paper is less substantial and more impermanent.
chris bennett-- "Apparent fumbles" is absolutely right. Those rough lines scratched out with a bamboo stick and those spatters that look like they inadvertently dropped from a brush while Searle was working rapidly are in reality quite conscious, deliberate and beautiful. Searle was such an astonishing talent, I can't think of a more influential pen and ink artist in the second half of the 20th century. So many talented artists, including Oliphant, MacNelly, Drucker, and Richard Thompson can trace their styles directly back to him.
kev ferrara-- All those attributes that you describe are so conducive to treatment with black ink-- scritchy, sloppy, vindictive, judgmental. Your comment about the sunrise reminds me of his famous New Yorker cover where the sunrise (or sunset) is pure watercolor, while the the amateur painter, hopelessly outmatched by the vista, is drawn solely in black and white, a shamble of spatters and haphazard lines.
Oh, before I forget, there's this blog, http://hollydgilliam.blogspot.com/ . It looks around for Searles.
>>>Oh, before I forget, there's this blog, http://hollydgilliam.blogspot.com/ . It looks around for Searles.
Don't see any. Did you copy the wrong url address?
~ FV
Oh yes I did indeed. I meant https://ronaldsearle.blogspot.com/
All those attributes that you describe are so conducive to treatment with black ink-- scritchy, sloppy, vindictive, judgmental.
I agree. It is hard to imagine the kind of vicious exaggeration that a hasty scratched line allows having parallels in oil paint, watercolor, or airbrush. Line and cartooning can completely abstract, de-anatomize, and depersonalize a character. So that, ultimately a figure is drawn entirely of mocking marks; having no other reality. By his interest in naturalistic representation alone, even Sebastian Kruger's nastiest work has the feeling of humane contemplation.
xopxe,
Thanks for that link; that's a good site.
Kev: "Line and cartooning can completely abstract, de-anatomize, and depersonalize a character.”
I call this ‘breaking from the wireframe’.
I call this ‘breaking from the wireframe’.
Can you explain your expression further? What does "the wireframe" refer to?
Kev,
‘Wireframe’ borrowed from the rotatable 3-D build stage of a CG figure or object.
In painting or drawing; the invisible 3D understructure that the artist imagines, and which the marks broadly describe and map onto, that give the feeling of ‘correct’ 3D-ness to the final form and space, in a ‘realistic’ image.
The more an artist uses gestural marks, flattened forms, deliberate wonkiness, odd scale, graphic simplification etc, that AREN'T faithful to an invisible 3D understructure, the more they have ‘broken from the wireframe’ (I use variations of the phrase such as ‘departing from’ or 'detaching from’).
And consequently, the less an actual 3-D, CG rotatable wireframe can be imagined / built of the final drawn figure or object.
Thanks. That's very good Laurence; a very evocative way of thinking about it. It immediately put me in mind of Richard Williams' The Thief and The Cobbler where characters slip in and out of 'wireframe' depending on the situation. ("Slipping" or "Escaping" the wireframe might be still other ways of putting it.)
It turns out to be difficult to think of another way of saying it without referencing computer modeling software. 'Wireframe' is more evocative than, say, 'armature' or 'constructive anatomy.'
It is also difficult to conceive of your same point positively (as doing something rather than getting away from something). "Cartooning" seems inadequate, given the boundless distortions available once 'the wireframe' has been abandoned.
"Cartooning" seems inadequate, given the boundless distortions available once 'the wireframe' has been abandoned.”
Indeed, but not only that; ‘cartooning’ doesn’t require slipping the wireframe. Much ‘cartooning’ is done in correct 3-D sculptural form.
"It is also difficult to conceive of your same point positively (as doing something rather than getting away from something"
I tend to think of the movement from visualising something as a 3-D rotatable, sculptural form to something comprised of flattened marks (which don’t quite coalesce to form an illusion of correct 3-D) as ’graphic thinking’ but I realise that the word ‘graphic’ is very general and has many other connotations, aside from this use.
Surface graphics? A nearby constellation is graphic design.
Yes, graphics doesn't quite cover it either. Graphic means blatant, which includes the idea of surfaced. But also has the connotation of being neat and orderly.
If it were speech that does not coalesce in sense, it would be blather, or prattle, or gibberish. But the abstract semi-rendering is often understood, even though it isn't actually sensible at the level of structure. I used the term "jazzed up lines" previously to discuss how 50s-70s tracers were electrifying their otherwise sterile work. It is a kind of jazz or visual improvisation that is often more exciting than good. Maybe 'Linear Suggestion'? Or 'Linear Rendering'?
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