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.
