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.
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| You'd need a micrometer to measure the swell of his cheek, yet Briggs has it absolutely perfect. |
For other examples of what Rockwell achieved with a mere tilt of the head, consider these two young girls:
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| On the way home from a birthday party, a girl senses that a boy is mustering the courage to sneak a first kiss. |
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.
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| 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.
One unforgivable crime is when illustrators have to draw a full figure using someone's likeness and rely on a photo reference for the head, but the body doesn't quite match. The neck always gives the game away.
ReplyDeleteThank you for such a nice, thoughtful and reflective post David.
ReplyDeleteThe neck is of course what connects the head to the rest of the body and is the literal and metaphorical path by which cognitive attention transmits to embodied action. Carry this relationship into the surroundings, as so marvelously happens in the Harvey Dunn 'sketch', and you have a meaningful, beautiful painting.
The 'Eleven Angry Men and One Self-reliant Young Woman' Rockwell painting is a real treat to look at BTW.
ReplyDeleteGood old Aretha. She had her skin flayed from her face but kept on singing.
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DeleteIs she supposed to have vinyl record muscles? (Serious question)
DeleteNo, this was the artist's 'style' for a while (she seems to have moved away from it more recently)
Deletehttps://www.juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/behind-the-cover-toyin-ojih-odutola/
"Good old Aretha. She had her skin flayed from her face but kept on singing."
ReplyDeleteAretha Fascia
Another example of becoming so involved in a technique that one loses sight entirely of the sense of the image, as with the recent Dolly Parton hair-as-the-whole-point-of-the-artwork debacle. Though the Times' artist claimed that the ballpoint pen technique she was implementing was somehow expressing Aretha's great performative singing. Where was the AD?
Speaking of the Golden Age, Joseph Clement Coll and Arthur I. Keller were particularly attuned to the import of head-orienting and situating in their works. Neal Adams brought the same expressive integrity to comics, with the additional factor of extreme closeups.
There's seemingly an inexhaustible supply of different angles, attitudes, lighting, styles, and approaches one may take to bring unique noggen emotion to bear on a picture. The neck can twist from any which way into any particular orientation of the head. And just by that fact a single head oriented just so can be the capper to a hundred different body poses. So much opportunity for expression through anatomy that to ignore it seems an artistic dereliction. Every muscle evidences a command of the mind.
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Not a fan of that Rockwell, which now resides at the Lucas. In my opinion, it is too clinically rendered from overposed photos to an unnaturally frozen state of finish. I don't believe the imploring outstretched arm pose at all, given how expressionless all the faces. (It looks like he's asking her to spit out her gum.) Even the smoky "atmosphere" is dropped in as a kind of convention. It is all so very literal. Which is weird because the same year 1959 is when he made that family tree ode to Howard Pyle.
"One unforgivable crime is when illustrators have to draw a full figure using someone's likeness and rely on a photo reference for the head, but the body doesn't quite match. The neck always gives the game away."
If you can't make a good mind-body connection, Jean-Gabriel Domergue is the necks best thing.
Kev: "I don't believe the imploring outstretched arm pose at all, given how expressionless all the faces”
DeleteMe neither. Of all the things that I could criticise in the painting; the almost Renaissance-like too-perfect-to-be-possible blocking, the slightly too much fill-light, the slightly too tight rendering, the only one that really niggles me enough to be distracting is the unnatural gesture of the hand.
That Harvey Dunn is incredible.
ReplyDeleteKev Ferrara and Laurence John-- while that Rockwell painting of the jury room isn't his most artistic work, I view it as a master class in staging a narrative. Look at the myriad tools he uses to direct our eyes: he uses high contrast (her stark white against solid black), he uses sharp angles (her 90 degree, straight backbone as opposed to the curves and soft angles of the group encircling her), the lines of the composition all subliminally steering us (that table top leads us straight to her, as do the lines of those folding chairs, and every other line, including yes, that starkly silhouetted arm reaching out to her), the eyes of every face in the room (except the sleeping man) are looking at her, she is the yin surrounded by yang, etc. etc.
ReplyDeleteIs the rendering too tight for its own good? Probably, although we can point to a hundred paintings where he has proven he is sensitive to the difference. Does the cigarette smoke look artificial? Maybe, but that's not the focus; as an academic study in orchestration, it's great to watch Rockwell flex all those muscles.
"I view it as a master class in staging a narrative."
DeleteIt is like a class in "staging a narrative." "Academic", as you said. It is a conventionalized intellectual exercise that puts everything on the surface for demonstration purposes, blocked like a 50s stage play, and makes it simple, surfaced and clear so students (and visiting continuing-ed folk) can easily "understand."
It reminds me of a composition teaching demo that made the rounds a few years ago, where all compositional ideas fell into two categories; pointing or framing. So; pointing at the main figure/s or framing the main figure/s. So easy!
It also reminds me of Steve Huston's book where he taught that whatever is in the focal center, everything around it is the opposite. In this case, she's ramrod straight, morally upright, head in the light, young female, and self-possessed. Versus everybody around her; gestured, older male, head dimmed and oblique to the viewer, morally exhausted, and in some way affected by or trying to affect her.
The very problem with the picture is that it is constructed of just such schooly ideas. A host of individual thoughts. Easily check-boxed during inspection. Which means; He didn't imagine it wholesale, he built it piecemeal from knowledge. Even the coloring and values show Rockwell's applied intelligence and experience with picture making protocols. But as Pyle taught from the very start of the Golden Age, knowledge is only good to correct with. You can't make a picture out of it.
Rockwell was a genius, with countless wonderful, culture-shaping images to his credit; and obviously knew better. Just not that week, on that deadline.
I want to add that; yes of course I know how well it is painted. And that in this era of Manga and Ai and Photoshop, such real skill is gold in the mountain. I well appreciate that fact.
DeleteRichard-- I'm glad you agree. And it's a beauty because of, not in spite of, its speed and loose quality.
ReplyDeleteThat Aretha portrait is pure shite next to the five earlier pictures. No wonder illustration is in disrepute today.
ReplyDeleteThe Aretha cowpat is pure shite even without the other five pictures next to it!
Delete>>>>>>"Speaking of the Golden Age, Joseph Clement Coll and Arthur I. Keller were particularly attuned to the import of head-orienting and situating in their works. "
ReplyDeleteEverett Shinn too.
~ FV
Harvey Dunn vs some random Instagramite, I get. It’s a lazy way to get pretty much any point across. Funny thing happens when you add Rockwell to the table of comparison, though. The tricks and glamour of mimesis is undone, and the true nature revealed, plain for all to see.
ReplyDeletePure kitsch.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
"The tricks and glamour of mimesis is undone, and the true nature revealed, plain for all to see. Pure kitsch."
DeleteWhat's your definition or criteria for "Kitsch" and how would Rockwell's picture qualify or meet those deficiencies?
Postmodern Anonymouse-- can you say more about this?
DeleteWell, the seemingly flayed Franklin is immediately more interesting (even if entirely due to the friction of the piece!) than the Rockwells, which are prettier, but come served entirely predigested. Beyond the surface lookalikeliness, they offer the same subtlety and complexity as storytime with a flannelgraph. Comparing both artists with the Dunn draws attention to the amateurishness of the flayed woman, but also to the banality of Rockwell, as Dunn is vastly superior in complexity of expression and suggestion.
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Postmodern Anonymouse