THE END OF 2025

This year's "end" is a beautiful painting by the talented Greg Manchess

The end in both senses of the word

  

Greg's painting is about the commitment necessary to take meaningful creative risks.  

Greg observed, "If there’s no risk, the commitment weakens and ultimately doesn’t matter. There must be the risk of loss or failure, otherwise the challenge is minimal."  This picture is about taking that big leap, by an artist who has done so many times, and now counsels students over their own fear of hitting the ground.

Commitment is an important message for the end of the year (and for every year).   But I think this image summons additional power and profundity from the fact that it is an archetype. It spans a variety of human experiences and deals with the fear of losing our equilibrium in the broader sense. 

Stephen Crane wrote from a poet's perspective about dreading the possible meaninglessness of life:

If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant --
What then?

Freud offered a psychiatrist's perspective in his classic Interpretation of Dreams (1900): the universal dream of falling from great heights is our subconscious way of dealing with sexual excitement and release followed by the spectre of punishment by reality (the hard ground).

Today, modern psychologists have a different perspective, focusing on clinical cures for basophobia, the fear of falling. 

And this year in particular, many are concerned that the daily supports of civilization-- the rule of law, civil government, empirical science, democratic tolerance-- are being clawed away by rage, leaving society in free fall. 

Greg's great Archetype stretches across many human endeavors.  Some of them require a degree in psychiatry or auto mechanics.  Some require the skills of a poet or a taxidermist.  But dang if I don't love the way art spans them all, bringing them together in a single object of beauty.  

Happy new year to you all! 

RICHARD THOMPSON'S SANTA

 I love Richard Thompson's modern celebrity Santa.  

We never actually see Santa because he's always being hustled away by his keepers.  

Thompson was a brilliant, beautiful illustrator who died all too young.  His drawings were simultaneously wobbly yet precise.  They were naive yet sophisticated.  His humor was childish yet wise.  For me, he ranked among the best humorous illustrators of the 20th century.  

He left us all too soon, before he had a chance to make full use of his great gifts but he left behind a bountiful legacy of marvelous drawings.

Some people re-read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol every Christmas.  Me, I dig out and take a fresh look at Richard's "Here Comes Santa Claus" cartoon.

SANTA: THE FASCIST YEARS

Disney's new animated film, Zootopia 2, is a marvel of computer animation.  Bright, colorful and imaginative, it took more than two years and cost over $150 million to make.  If you last all the way through the credits at the end, you'll see names of thousands of contributors performing tasks that didn't exist a few years ago.  It's difficult to identify the fingerprints of any individual contributor on the finished product.

Zootopia 2 represented a massive gamble of shareholder capital.  It required review and approval by dozens of check points along the way, from the bankers and lawyers to the accounting department and the marketing department.  The gamble paid off; the movie is a Christmas season smash hit, already rocketing past a box office gross of a billion dollars. 

If a creator had approached management with a proposal for a movie called "Santa: The Fascist Years," the bankers would've thrown him into the Sarlacc pit.  

That's why, when it came time for Bill Plympton to create Santa: The Fascist Years it was just Plympton and a pencil.

The 2008 movie reveals the secret files regarding Santa's stint with fascism in the 1930s and 40s.  It's weird, clever, funny and a good demonstration of why Plympton turned down a lucrative offer to work for Disney many years ago.  

The number of pencil drawings Plympton makes for his hand drawn movies is nothing short of  astonishing.  But what's even more impressive is that Plympton's affection for drawing seems to remain undiminished.  You can tell from his originals that he still enjoys drawing each individual picture.  

Santa's attack was called the "Blitzenkrieg"

I think these are really nice.  Each one has character.

A repentant Santa at the Nuremberg trials

From another movie, Cheatin'

From another movie, Idiots and Angels

If Plympton hadn't come up with the idea of Santa's fascist period, nobody else would've thought of it.  And if Plympton hadn't picked up a pencil, nobody would've ever seen it.

ARTHUR SZYK EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK

A rare exhibition of the pictures of Arthur Szyk has opened at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.  Szyk's jewel-like miniatures must be seen in person to be fully appreciated, and the opportunity doesn't come along very often.  It's worth a trip.

I've previously written about my great admiration for Szyk, who was an extraordinary artist and person in so many ways.  I know of no other artist who more passionately and persistently applied his gifts in the service of his social conscience.

Szyk's despairing painting of the Antichrist (detail) is
reminiscent of Bruegel's 1562 painting, The Triumph of Death 

I try to see Szyk exhibitions whenever they arise.  (The last one was years ago at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.)  The current one is unique in my experience because it includes early, preliminary and unfinished work.

A draft of a young Jewish boy threatened by a Nazi luger

Detail from an early work 

Here is a substantially enlarged drawing, blown up so you can see Szyk's details:

In an era when many artists are struggling with the relationship between art and politics, trying to understand the dividing line between art and propaganda, and most of all trying to put their art in the service of their morality, Szyk is an important precedent, more relevant today than ever.

EMBRACING COLLISION

This illustration by Jon Whitcomb contrasts a creamy, flawless figure with a violent, abstract background.

Similarly, this illustration by Piotr Leśniak frames a meticulous drawing with a chaotic background:

Vivian Dehning's recent "photo illustration" in the New York Times covers a photograph of a woman with a wild crayon scribble.  

Normally the elements of a picture are expected to work together, rather than clash in contumacious oppugnancy. 

There are limitless ways for artists to combine opposites so that they work together to add useful contrast:

Norman Rockwell

Austin Briggs

Hard black line contrasted with soft watercolor can often be a productive combination of extremes.

  

Note how the color is flat but the line contributes volume

Sempé uses black line sparingly in fields of pastel color

However, sometimes the two extremes just sit side by side, yelling at each other.  They aren't glued together by form, content or any of art's other epoxies.  The artist just seems to enjoy the collision.

One of my cranky friends derides this kind of contrast as "empty" because he finds it devoid of purpose.  Without a discernible expressive intent, he finds the contrast to be neither significant nor interesting.

The purpose of the random scribble in Vivian Dehning's "photo illustration," above, might be construed  as a comment on the mistreatment of women in the photograph.  This purpose, however, is hardly enough to save such a ridiculous image.  

I don't claim to be ecstatic about either the Leśniak or the Whitcomb examples.  Still I think it's worth considering the notion of "collision" as an aesthetic concept in and of itself.  Abstract expressionism proved that not all collisions require an "intent" to be interesting.

Placing realism and abstraction side by side may make an unruly mess, but there is often "intent" to be found, even in purely abstract forms.  Could placing freedom and control next to each other be viewed as a way of challenging the reason of each for being?  Could their juxtaposition  be a reminder that the realistic, controlled three dimensional portion is still, after all, just an illusion, a two dimensional fake no more trustworthy than the adjacent random mess?  Or could the collision of the two extremes be a way of dissing the hard labor of the skillful extreme?  A postmodernist attack on obsolete talents?  An attempt to blow up conventional taste?  It's worth looking for potential for artistic value, even in collisions. 

MILTON GLASER DRAWS LIKE A DESIGNER

 I love this drawing by Milton Glaser.  It's an illustration for a record by classical guitarist Linda Cohen.

Glaser was internationally renowned as a graphic designer, an intellectual and an all-around fount of creativity.  I interviewed him in his office before he died, and discovered he was still overflowing with ideas.  He's also responsible for a quote I've used several times on this blog:

There is no instrument more direct than a pencil and paper for the expression of ideas. Everything else that interferes with that direct relationship with the eyes, the mind, the arm and the hand causes a loss of fidelity.... I like the idea that this ultimate reductive simplicity is the way to elicit the most extraordinary functions of the brain.

Glaser was not, however, first and foremost a draftsman.  An observer might comment that the wings are awkward and the body is not in a natural posture.  And where the heck is that light source?

Glaser borrowed the figure from one of the slaves in Giulio Aristide Sartorio's allegorical painting, Diana of Ephesus and the slaves:  

It's not clear why Glaser chose that particular figure, since the anatomy or the skin tones or the perspective seemed of little interest to him.  His only cryptic remark at the time: "angels probably don't have behinds."

But he transformed the figure in a magical and lyrical landscape. 

What's the meaning of the falling star and the beam of light shining down on the rock cliff?

Why does that ear glow red? The whole palette is quite eerie, combining dark subtleties and vivid contrasts. 

While most of the drawing has been greatly simplified, the lateral spines on the feathers
in the wings have been individually drawn.

What does it all mean? This drawing opens a lot of questions for us but answers none.  I can't imagine how it is related to its subject record album, or how it could help sell the client's product.  What kind of instruction could the art director possibly have given to produce this result? 

I suppose the answer is the same as it has always been: when you're that good, and that strong headed, and your designs are that powerful, you can pretty much do what you want.   

WINSOR McCAY HAD AN OPINION ON TARIFFS

Today the Supreme Court listened to heated legal arguments about the tariffs recently imposed by the US.  But the arguments over tariff policy have been going on for a long time.  

Over a century ago, Winsor McCay, the creator of Little Nemo, drew the following political cartoon about the effect of tariffs:

In my view, today's political cartoonists haven't learned much from the past century.

On the other hand, neither have today's politicians.