THE REVENGE OF THE TITANIC

The mighty Titanic ruled the seas for almost four whole days before it struck an iceberg and sank without a trace in the black waters of the northern Atlantic.


A souvenir postcard from the Titanic, found in the coat pocket of Edith Brown, a small girl lowered into a lifeboat just before the great ship sank.

The lesson of the Titanic was obvious: humans had lost perspective about their place in the universe. Their insignificant little inventions had made them vain. Ancient Greek tragedies repeatedly warned about the folly of such hubris.

The icebergs must have had a good laugh over our "unsinkable" little boat.

The iceberg that sunk the Titanic, photographed by the captain of the Leyland Line steamer S. S. Etonian

Yet, less than a century later, icebergs are getting their asses kicked by global warming from our inventions. Fifty percent of the glaciers have vanished from the earth. Looks like we humans have scored a TKO in the second round. Who's laughing now?

I was thinking about this recently when I beta tested a movie studio's prototype for the next generation of digital drawing tool. The advancements, and the potential, were really quite spectacular.

I am one of those who believes that art has some core attributes that are timeless and immutable, and probably grounded in the designs inherent in nature. Sure, electrical engineering has provided us with dazzling alternatives to a pen or brush for making marks on a surface, but in my view such tools so far merely skitter along the surface of art, with no transformative effect on those immutable underlying values of art. Digital art competes in a race where the rules have been established by traditional art. It attempts to satisfy the same standards of design and composition developed by traditional art. As a technique for making marks, digital media are being judged by the same eternal criteria as the marks left by Rembrandt, Michelangelo, or the first cave painters 35,000 years ago.

But as those smug icebergs learned, eternal truths don't last nearly as long as they once did.

Consider how quickly and pervasively digital media have conquered the world; in most places they are more accessible than a brush and paint.

More pervasive than museums or galleries.

Becoming more pervasive than books.

Consider, too, how talents that once commanded respect in the arts because they were difficult and rare (such as the ability to achieve a good likeness, or the ability to master the color wheel) are no longer difficult or rare. Chaucer once lamented the burdens of an artist:

The lyf so short, the craft so long to learne,
Th' assay so hard, so sharp the conquerage

Today, when any high school student can photoshop a likeness or rotate through color alternatives with the click of a mouse, can these artistic talents possibly command the same respect? At the same time certain talents are being devalued, different talents have taken on new significance. Digital media have provided drawing with new criteria for excellence such as motion, lighting variations, integrated media (interweaving drawing with sound, narratives, etc.) and a variety of other time-factoring qualities.

The yearning to make static drawings move is not new. Some artists achieved it with blurring or speed lines or other illusions of movement. Some did it using sequential images. As a young boy before the era of animation, the great illustrator Al Parker hit upon the idea of drawing pictures on the paper rolls that operated the keys on his family's old player piano. When his family sat in their parlor listening to the piano, the boy was able to watch his pictures roll by:

Cuddlin' and cooin' with Mary Lou in cherry blossom time

Contrast Parker's early primitive yearnings with the ways Steve Brodner is able to use digital medium to make his pictures move. Here, he paints icebergs but weaves a narrative into an accelerated painting process and ends with animation:



Here is another enterprising combination of conventional drawing and the potential of digital media:

Efforts such as the above are faltering first steps, but the devaluation of traditional talents, the rise of new capabilities, and the broad, grass roots accessibility of digital media may be combining to transform those once-immutable artistic standards. Just as the Titanic got the last laugh, digital media may be the catalyst for an epochal change in art-- as significant as the transition from magical thinking (when animism and totemism ruled art) to viewing art as a physical object. As significant as the transition from representational images to symbolic images. As significant as the invention of writing.

Is that the slow dripping of melting icebergs I hear?

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY TO ALL!

WILLIAM HATHERELL (1855-1928)

William Hatherell was a Victorian era illustrator who worked for magazines such as The Graphic, Harpers, Scribner's and the Century. Today he is mostly remembered for crudely printed images such as these:





The printing technology in Hatherell's day was pretty primitive. Combined with cheap paper stock, it stripped Hatherell's work of much of its sensitivity and expressiveness. Of course, like all resourceful artists Hatherell made the best of his limitations; he emphasized strong compositions and high contrasts that could survive the publication process.

But he did more.

Hatherell might easily have used the disadvantages of his medium as an excuse for dashing off fast, limited work. Many artists did. In fact, his employers encouraged him to do so, in order to increase productivity and profits. Instead, Hatherell worked carefully and deliberately, crafting sensitive pictures with subtle features that were undetectable to his larger audience. As one contemporary noted, Hatherell stubbornly refused to lower his standards:

Hatherell became noted for his refusal to be pressured into hasty work. For illustrating current events, for instance, he used models, often carefully posed in his backyard....

When you go back and look at Hatherell's original pictures, you can see the extra effort he put into touches such as subtle shading and expressive faces and gestures:




Lovely!

These delicate touches were difficult and time consuming. Many of them would be undetectable by the reading public. Why did he do all that extra work trying to get it right? Perhaps he shared the view of Robert Fawcett, which I have previously cited on this blog:

The argument that "it won't be appreciated anyway" may be true, but in the end this attitude does infinitely more harm to the artist than to his client.

Easy to say for one picture. Hard to sustain for a career.




Note how well Hatherell handles the positions of the fingers, or the definition of the flowers which would be lost in the printed version.



Hatherell toiled his entire life accepting that publication would degrade the quality of his pictures. He had no defense to this handicap except his wits and his personal integrity. Of course, today almost any artist can publish sharp, high resolution images to the world at the push of a button. We tend to underestimate the competitive advantage that this gives our work over the work of our talented predecessors such as Hatherell.

Hatherell and some of his peers were a lot better than we remember them today, based on their published work. Now that it is possible to recapture the true quality of their original pictures, we owe it to them to honor all those long afternoons they put into trying to get it right when they thought no one might ever know the difference.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 30

I love this sweet combination of art and science:

Henry Hexham illustration forThe Principles of the Art Militaire, 1637

For me this drawing combines the beauty of the physical world (that funky little cannon could've been drawn by R. Crumb or George Herriman) with the beauty of the mathematical principles underlying that world. The artist who drew this had to labor under two sets of laws: the laws of perspective and the laws of physics. I respect the discipline required to make such pictures.

As far as we know, Pythagoras of Samos was the first human being to recognize the connection between mathematics and the design of the world, 2500 years ago. Arthur Koestler wrote about the awesome significance of that moment:

[Pythagoras'] influence on the ideas, and thereby on the destiny of the human race was probably greater than that of any single man before or after him.... [His] was the first successful reduction of quality to quantity, the first step towards the mathematization of human experience-- and therefore the beginning of science. Pythagoras discovered that the pitch of a note depends on the length of the string which produces it, and that concordant intervals in the scale are produced by simple numerical ratios.

Pythagoras took his new way of ordering the world and proceeded to go nuts with it, even using it to calculate what he believed would be the "music of the spheres"-- the musical hum of the planets in their orbit. (OK, OK, so not every new application was successful, but Pythagoras definitely set human science on its path.)

Bertrand Russell claimed, "Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover."

Russell may have been one heck of a mathematician, and he was certainly correct that quantifiable discoveries can be pure and true and beautiful, but his position reveals that he was no artist. An artist would've understood that art enables us to discover properties even beyond what math can confirm.

We have previously talked on this blog about the beauty inherent in the rigorous craftsmanship of car illustrators who painted cars to satisfy not just the artistic taste of art directors but also the humorless committees of car company engineers, who rigorously inspected every detail of an illustration to make sure it conformed to the car's schematic diagrams. It was the job of these illustrators to combine math and art, and find the poetry in geometry.

Today, the processing powers of supercomputers have enabled us to merge numbers with shapes and colors in ways Pythagoras never dreamed of. The T square and triangle, primitive tools we employed for centuries, have been replaced by software. Cars, space ships and a wide variety of other images are now composed using CAD and CGI. But no matter how art and math have merged, always-- always-- the artist needs to be listening for that music of the spheres.

WILLIAM COTTON (1880-1958)

William Cotton trained as a fine artist at the Academie Julien in Paris. He exhibited at the Luxembourg Museum and other esteemed institutions, such as the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago.

But Cotton's gallery paintings-- consistent with the fashion of his day-- often looked like sappy Victorian Valentines. They are mercifully forgotten today.



In the 1930s, Cotton turned from gallery painting to illustration and began doing caricatures of Broadway stars, writers and politicians for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. For the first time, Cotton was forced to accept the subjects that editors assigned to him. He was forced to work on deadline. He no longer had the luxury of unlimited space to paint fancy lace collars and detailed fabric. Instead, he was forced to cut to the essentials, and simplify his images for reproduction on a small magazine page. The result was a long series of really neat, beautifully colored caricatures:









Cotton quickly became one of the most famous caricaturists of the 1930s. His artwork was seen by tens of thousands of people. Eleanor Roosevelt called his Vanity Fair portrait of her, "my favorite character picture."

I love the colors and bold simplification of forms in these pictures. For me, they are far superior to Cotton's gallery work. The relentless efficiency of the marketplace scrubbed away a lot of frills and pretensions, leaving Cotton's work clear, robust and decisive.

We love to be outraged when tasteless commercial sponsors impose restrictions on talented artists. Yet, nobody talks about the other side of the coin: artists whose mediocre "fine" art was improved by the challenges and limitations of commercial media and commercial audiences. It does happen, and we should keep our eyes and our minds open for it.

Those cold blooded market forces do a lot of damage, but there can also be value in keeping art employed in the service of commerce (just as the very first art was employed in the service of the hunt, back in the Cromagnon era). Art that serves no purpose other than to hang as an object on a museum wall often suffers because it is not integrated into daily life. That's one reason I have such a soft spot in my heart for illustration.

ART vs. LIFE

Art is a double edged sword. It enhances our experience of life, but also obstructs and diminishes it.

We spend most of our time here at the good ol' Illustration Art blog focusing on that enhancement part, but today as a special public service we offer some thoughts on that dark side of art-- the part they never mentioned in your Art Appreciation class.

Goethe believed the arts make us more sensitive. In The Sorrows of Young Werther he described a cultured young couple in love:

We went to the window. It was still thundering at a distance: a soft rain was pouring down over the country, and filled the air around us with delicious odours. Charlotte leaned forward on her arm; her eyes wandered over the scene; she raised them to the sky, and then turned them upon me; they were moistened with tears; she placed her hand on mine and said, “Klopstock!”

The mere mention of the poet Friedrich Gottfried Klopstock (1724-1803) caused our hero to quiver with emotion:

At once I remembered the magnificent ode which was in her thoughts: I felt oppressed with the weight of my sensations, and sank under them. It was more than I could bear. I bent over her hand, kissed it in a stream of delicious tears, and again looked up to her eyes. Divine Klopstock!

Now, I'm a fan of sensitivity just as much as the next guy, but when it is left to run rampant, sensitivity can be downright debilitating. Goethe's couple leaves me gasping for air.

There's no shortage of examples of art getting in the way of life. Consider those young males who fixate on fantasy pictures of naked space vixens in garter belts and spiked heels. They collect such images in magazines, art portfolios and limited edition giclee prints.   They play with such images in graphic computer games.  But after a point, such images distract young men from real life relationships. If we let fantasy art distort our taste and values and expectations, we may find ourselves with only deluxe coated archival paper stock to fondle. Art can lure us away from Ruskin's principle that "the only wealth is life."

This did not escape the attention of Walt Whitman, who asked: "Have you reckon'd that the landscape took substance and form that it might be painted in a picture?"

Here, Ronald Searle shows us someone who apparently got the answer wrong:



It seems to me that there is a bargain between art and life. To derive the most from art, we should keep the trade offs of that bargain freshly in mind:

• Art robs us of time, but with the promise that it will pay us back by saving us time later. In theory, art will mature us, enrich us, and educate us faster than we could ever experience just by living our solitary lives. It will expose us to a wider range of perspectives than we could ever experience in real time.


• Art comes between us and the immediacy of experience, but with the promise that its filters will enrich the way we perceive those experiences.

• Art tells us lies (often starting with the illusion of 3D on a 2D surface) with the promise that those lies will eventually help us see the truth more clearly.

• Art is supposed to sensitize us, but as Werther demonstrated, it's possible to become too sensitive. There are a lot of complex, high strung people out there whose refined palates do them no good at all. They have trouble getting pleasure out of life or having good relationships; you see them picking at everything, having lost the ability to take pleasure in the merely nice.

If you weigh everything we surrender to art in exchange for the good things we receive from it, it is easy to see how art could become the enemy of life. In my view, maintaining a proper balance between art and life is a major part of the challenge of appreciating art.

I try to keep in mind the wise philosophy of Lionello Venturi, who wrote:

What ultimately matters in art is not the canvas, the hue of oil or tempera, the anatomical structure and all the other measurable items, but its contribution to our life, its suggestions to our sensations, feeling and imagination.

FRANK BRANGWYN (1867-1956)

Frank Brangwyn had a special talent for depicting grand structures such as cathedrals, bridges and ships.





He drew individual human beings the same way, as if they were monumental structures. He posed and rendered them with the kind of weight, grandeur and dignity he would have applied to a cathedral:









Brangwyn had an excellent eye for the glories of the secular world; he was able to show the magnificence-- and even the divinity-- of laborers working in a shipyard. That's part of what made his work so appealing to the public. However, he did not lead a particularly religious life.

Then, while he was still at he peak of his powers, Brangwyn became more interested in formal religion, and from the 1930's on, "devoted himself to religious art."

Biographer Libby Horner offered one explanation for Brangwyn's transformation:

As the artist grew older and faced mortality he produced more religious works in which he frequently included his own image as if he feared retribition for having been a "bad lot" and, in his own superstitous manner, was hoping to redeem himself.

I was reminded of Brangwyn when I received the new portfolio of his illustrations of the Stations of the Cross from Auad Publishing (the publisher responsible for the forthcoming book on the illustrator Robert Fawcett).



As you can see from the drawings in the Auad portfolio, Brangwyn never lost his gift for classical staging of figures:







The newly religious Brangwyn drew himself into a number of these drawings. Clearly he was wrestling with a lot of issues.



Brangwyn was internationally famous during his lifetime, but as he aged, the modern art world passed him by. Scholars will tell you that modern artists and writers became embittered by the horrors of World War I and the hard lesson that modern science would not necessarily be a tool for progress. Brangwyn's triumphal style gave way to abstraction and art that questioned fundamental principles of western civilization.

The once gregarious artist, who had found such glory in the secular world, led an increasingly reclusive and superstitious life and died in 1956.

EVERY TRIANGLE HAS A THOUSAND ANGLES

Civilizations can be judged by how their illustrators portray the story of St. George and the Dragon.

The basic facts of the eternal triangle between man, woman and dragon are well known. But while the facts don't change, the artist's interpretation changes dramatically through the ages. Contrast these four wonderful pictures of St. George and the dragon:

First is a breathtakingly beautiful painting created circa 1438 by the Catalan master Bernardo Martorell:



This painting was created in an age of unshakeable faith in right and wrong, a world of absolutes-- the virginal purity of the damsel, the evil of the dragon and the virtue of the knight. You will also note that the picture doesn't contain a whole lot of perspective (both literally and metaphorically):


I ask you: what dragon-- or knight-- could possibly resist such an esculent little tea cake?

500 years later, when the days of religious certainty and absolute principles had subsided a bit, Al Williamson offered a very different perspective in the classic EC Weird Fantasy story, By George!!



Here, we learn that the "dragon" is merely a lost and confused alien child who is tricked and slaughtered by the ruthless St. George. We now have to ask ourselves, "who is the real monster?"

A few decades later, William Steig offered yet another perspective on the relationship. Here, the damsel is frightened more by the martial clanking of the knight than by the dragon.



In both form and content, Steig's approach is light yet insightful.

Later, Jeff Jones offers us a completely different (and hotter) perspective on the triangle:



Martorell would not have recognized his damsel.

It is fun to play with how these interpretations have changed through the years. Life obviously got harder for St. George as the world became more complex. He evolves from saint to villain to resentful cuckold. The damsel changes from a decorative ornament passively awaiting her rescuer to an active participant, and then ultimately to the wanton master of the situation. Even the dragon fits in roles as a villain, a helpless victim and a hero.

Look at how much richness we gain as these four different artists use standard characters to triangulate the complexity of love. Has our loyalty shifted away from knights and towards dragons? Do we know more today about what lurks in the hearts of damsels?

The difference between an illustrator and a geometry teacher is that the geometry teacher believes there are only three angles in a triangle. As we look ahead on the shiny new year of 2010, it seems rich with potential for those who embrace the complexities of the world and put them together in fresh combinations.

"It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy. Let's go exploring."

.

ON THE DIFFICULTY OF DRAWING WOMEN'S FACES

One could easily devote a long and joyful lifetime to cataloging the differences between men and women without ever pausing to consider the higher significance of those differences. That is certainly the safest approach.

But as the astute Goethe noted, "Nothing is harder to take than a succession of fair days," and every once in a while (usually at the end of a year in which one hasn't met his full quota of foolhardy behavior) a person will deliberately risk life and limb by exploring the significance of those differences out loud.

It is in that spirit that I set out today to consider why it is more difficult to draw women's faces than men's faces.

Artists quickly learn that men's faces are easier to draw because men have bone structures and muscle groupings that are more pronounced than women's. Male heads are generally more blocky and angular; they tend to have stronger jaws, square chins and prominent brows. These features provide artists with easy opportunities to employ distinctive lines, strong shadows and recognizable shapes to achieve a resemblance.


From the Famous Artists School course materials, "Constructing the Head and Hands."

Women's faces, on the other hand, tend to be smoother and softer, with rounder shapes and subtler, more delicate features which require greater restraint.

Another difference that makes men's faces easier to draw is that, "as the man matures he develops larger, deeper wrinkles while the woman develops smaller ones because her skin is finer textured and her bones and muscles are less prominent." If an artist wants to capture a likeness using lines, it is much easier if the subject has lines that were already mapped by nature.

Note in the following examples how men's sharper angles, prominent facial muscles and deeper wrinkles have provided artists with more tools for describing a form.


Here, Mort Drucker sculpts the male face, but on the woman's face he stops with just the outline. Her features can't be rendered effectively using the same kind of approach, and must be implied instead.


Here, Leonard Starr puts a strong chin, nose, cheekbones and brow on the man (while making it clear from facial expressions that the woman has the stronger mind).


Here, Norman Lindsay tries to deal with the difference between men and women by using small dots to convey the woman's features, while using lines for the man.

The special challenge of a woman's face is that it compels artists to describe subtler forms with fewer lines and less obvious shapes, depriving artists of some of the most fundamental tools in their tool kit. In the following image, Leonard Starr limits himself to little more than an outline of the face but nevertheless gives us important information about the contour of her cheek simply by leaning more heavily on his brush on portions of the right side of her face.



So what is the larger significance of these observations about the differences in drawing the faces of men and women?

Part of the magical power of drawing is that it can lead us unexpectedly to larger truths. The principles we encounter in drawing the faces of men and women often seem rooted in fundamental realities about the sexes:

Like their faces, men's personalities are more easily reduced to a line than women's personalities. Like their facial features, men tend to be more obvious than women. (Artists frequently bear witness to such triumphs of physiognomy!)

Women, on the other hand, are sometimes best understood implicitly and indirectly; the discipline of describing form without heavy reliance on lines requires subtlety, appreciation and restraint but you can sometimes achieve a far better likeness that way.

Regardless of whether these larger principles resonate with you, I am sure we can all agree that if an artist lacks the patience for the complexity of ambiguity, you can't compensate for that lack by substituting more (or more emphatic) lines of the type that you use for a man's face. In such situations, "more" will invariably turn out to be "less."

HENRY PATRICK RALEIGH (1880-1944)

The illustrator Henry Raleigh started and ended life in poverty and despair. But in between, he spent decades painting high society pictures and living the opulent life of one of the best paid illustrators in the country.



Born into a broken and destitute family, Raleigh began working at age 9 to support his mother and sisters. By the age of 12, he quit school altogether and found work on the docks of San Francisco, processing shipments of coffee beans from South America. Here, rough sailors and roustabouts filled his head with colorful and bawdy stories of life in far off places. At age 17, his knack for drawing landed him a job as a newspaper artist for the San Francisco Bulletin where he was assigned to some of the most seamy and gruesome aspects of the city, including executions, fires and fatal accidents. He later recalled learning a lot about human anatomy at the morgue sketching "promising looking corpses."

Raleigh's work soon attracted the attention of art directors and publishers who offered him better assignments. He moved to New York where he gradually progressed from newspapers to top magazines such as Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, Colliers and Saturday Evening Post. Surprisingly, his trademark became his pictures of glittering parties and fashionable society life. He was sought after by some of the greatest writers of his day, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote a fan letter saying, "Honestly, I think they're the best illustrations I've ever seen!"

At his peak, Raleigh was able to make enough money from just three or four months of work to enable him to spend the balance of the year traveling abroad with family and friends. American Artist magazine later wrote:

With distinction came affluence. In his best years his annual take was in the neighborhood of $100,000. Considering the then value of the dollar and the relatively insignificant tax on income, Raleigh probably had more cash in hand at the end of the year than any other illustrator before or since.

But Raleigh also spent money freely. He gave away thousands of dollars to friends, traveled lavishly, maintained a yacht, owned a mansion and kept a large studio in downtown Manhattan.

Unfortunately, styles changed (along with social values and taste in art) and his work dried up. Raleigh could not adapt; bankrupt and bitter, he committed suicide in 1944 by jumping out of the window of a sleazy hotel in Times Square.

One of the things that I find most interesting about Raleigh's approach is the way he often surrounds a core of careful drawing with a flurry of loose scribbles, repetitive lines and stray marks. My initial reaction to his work was frustration with what seemed like a lot of superfluous, fluttery lines. But I learned more about his objectives when I read a 1923 interview:

the most beautiful picture is one which the observer is left free to complete for himself. The illustrator should be able to select the essential elements in any subject which will convey to the layman the entire scene in the simplest and most direct way, avoiding mere details which tend to cause either monotony or confusion.

And indeed, the focal point of Raleigh's illustration often consists of a few sensitive, well placed lines to define the "essential elements" (proving he can indeed draw), encircled by increasingly loose and broad marks that create a general tone but offer few competing details.


Note how quickly Raleigh retreats from his careful handling of the central figures to the stray, wispy lines of the background couple (above) or the loose treatment of the balustrade (below).


Similarly, in the following illustration...



contrast Raleigh's careful treatment of the exchange between the two main characters:



With the loose, flowing treatment of the rest of the picture:


The majority of this picture seems to be made up of the chaos and scribbles you might expect from an abstract painter:


Finally, in the following detail, contrast the delicate linework in the faces at the top of the picture with the broad, rough treatment of the balance of the image:



I admire the fluid, seemingly effortless way that Raleigh was able to combine two very disparate ingredients in his art. If he had been able to accomplish the same thing with the disparate sides of his life, he might have had a chance at happiness.