GEORGE BRIDGMAN'S ART CLASS

These are original student drawings from the 1911 class of the famous art teacher, George Bridgman.

Bridgman, constantly inebriated and chewing on a large black cigar, would rail at his students about the importance of mastering anatomy: "Don't think color's going to do you any good. Or lovely compositions. You can't paint a house until it's built." His students adored him and vied for his approval.

Some of the students in this class would grow up to be stars, such as Norman Rockwell, Mclelland Barclay or E.F. Ward. But in 1911 they were still ambitious teenagers dreaming of the future and striving to develop the kind of academic drawing skill that many illustrators today consider irrelevant.

The crowded classroom was warmed by the stench of tobacco, charcoal, perspiration and turpentine.

Many of the models were girls who had come to the city to work in department stores during a peak holiday season and were laid off after the holidays.  Desperate for money, they would apply for modeling work but once in the classroom some couldn't bring themselves to take their clothes off. Sometimes a young woman would attempt to pose in her slip and stockings, but she would be asked to leave. Recalled one of Bridgman's students, "she'd begin to cry and say she needed the money and what was she going to do."

These girls and their personal anguish are now just ghosts on crumbling paper.  All that remains of them are the images that shamed them.

Bridgman was a highly critical taskmaster, teaching as he did before our era of false praise. At the end of each class, he would designate one student's work as number 1. (You can still see Bridgman's notation, "1st" on E.F. Ward's drawing of the man's back, above.) But Norman Rockwell recalled a story that Bridgman would tell the class whenever he sensed that students were getting cocky about their grades:

Boys, a queer thing happened to me after I left the class last Tuesday. There was a coal wagon backed up onto the sidewalk on 48th street shooting coal into a cellar. As I passed by a fellow stuck his head, all begrimed with coal, out of the cellar and said "hello Mr. Bridgman." I said, "why hello there who are you?" Oh, the fellow said, don't you remember me? I was number one in your class last year.... The story varied; sometimes it was an iceman or a voice from a manhole.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 32

I love Thomas Fluharty's working drawing of Hugh Hefner:



The purpose of this drawing was to capture the information Fluharty needed for an oil portrait. This could never be achieved merely by tracing liver spots. Look at the vigor and character of his line:



Robert Fawcett once wrote, "A design started tentatively rarely gains in vigor later on. In anticipation of the dilution... the first rough draft [is often] put down with an almost savage intensity...." The personality that Fluharty squeezed into this drawing will survive conversion to painted shapes followed by several phases of refinement and blending.

Despite the obvious energy and speed of his drawing, he has not sacrificed acuity. Note how sharply he records the eyes, never resting with an easy symmetry:



Best of all, as he digests information Fluharty infuses it with strong opinions. Here Fluharty takes liberties with Hefner's ear, treating it like the gnarly horn of a grizzled old satyr:



















One of the things I love most about good drawing is the way opinions and judgments emerge in the evaluation process.

Fluharty teaches a superb course on oil painting in the tradition of the Dutch and Flemish masters.

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part 17

Many of Frank Frazetta's fans had trouble understanding why the "master of fantasy" couldn't fantasize a better lifestyle than a home in the suburbs with a wife and kids.

Frazetta was able to conjure up vivid worlds of savage barbarians and wild harem girls. He painted eyewitness accounts of magic spells on alien planets and colossal battles with dinosaurs.



How could such an imagination possibly be satisfied with middle class domestic life?

But Frazetta made no apologies for his choice, shrugging, "I got married, had kids, did my thing."

Frazetta said he picked his wife Ellie over all the other girls because "I sensed that she would be forever loyal and I never had that feeling about any other girl I'd been involved with." Apparently her ability to pilot a space ship was not even a consideration.



They started out with very little money, but you don't need much when you're young and hot blooded. Ellie recalled that when they moved into a small apartment in Brooklyn,

we used to have water pistol fights in our apartment in the dark. Have you ever been squirted with water in a pitch black room? Oh, it's creepy! We did all sorts of silly things when we were young. I had to clean up the mess in the morning, but so what? We had fun and it didn't cost a dime.

Years later, a more matronly Ellie tried to keep the evidence of their early frolics under wraps, saying "I don't want my grandkids to see their grandmother like that."



As the couple matured, Ellie primly scolded Frazetta for paintings she now considered "too sexy" or "sacrilegious."


"I really didn't care for... the alien crucifixion.... when you start messing with people's core beliefs, that's when the joke's gone way too far." --Ellie

In a recent blog post about Frazetta, a friend describes Frazetta's frustration when Ellie stopped posing for him:

[O]ne time I really did want to use her and she said a flat "no". I had an idea to do a follow-up book to that book of monsters I did for Danzig. It would be in different types of pencil, all nudes, all using Ellie, and using very different types of really dramatic lighting. Ellie would have been my life model. She said "no". She said she was too busy with the business and the kids. I dropped the whole thing.

 When his art offended her, she threatened to destroy it. She pestered him into altering a painting when she thought a woman's rump was too large. To please her, he would paint pictures of Jesus.

Frazetta fans watched aghast: would married life tame their hero?

Outsiders can't always appreciate how marriage provides its own version of magic spells and alien planets. Marriage can introduce you to the true meaning of life-or-death stakes; you think a giant lizard with a ray gun is daunting? Try bringing new life trembling into the world, and taking permanent responsibility for it.

And of course, marriage also provides you with an opportunity to do your own version of that barbarian-and-harem-girl thing.

A couple must get beyond what poet Eavan Boland calls "the easy graces and sensuality of the body" and face life's true challenges before they understand "what there is between a man and a woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved."

The Frazettas stayed together through thick and thin, through lean years when assignments were hard to find, through vicious quarrels and illness and a stroke. Frazetta grumbled that he should have divorced Ellie long ago, but he was "too lazy."

After Ellie died, Frazetta's publisher J. David Spurlock visited him alone in his studio. Spurlock discovered that Frazetta had taken down his world famous illustrations from the walls and replaced them with pictures he had painted of Ellie over the years.



Spurlock reported that even when the face wasn't an exact likeness, it was obvious that Ellie had been the inspiration for each picture Frank selected.



In case there was any lingering doubt about the role Frazetta's marriage played in his work, Spurlock spotted Frazetta's famous painting, "Adventure," on his drawing board.



Frazetta was carefully repainting the face on the girl as the face of his late wife.

COMIC-CON 2010 (conclusion)

[This is the last installment of my field report on my expedition through darkest Comic-Con with gun and camera. Special thanks to those who have managed to remain awake.]

It seems that every year, Comic-Con gets larger and louder.

As Nell Minow observed, Comic-Con has evolved into "the Iowa caucuses of popular culture," the trial balloon for movies, television series, books, computer games and music in addition to comics. Film studios now erect statues of cyborgs, rocket ships and cartoon characters that tower over the exhibition hall. Rival fusillades of Dolby sound thunder back and forth across the convention center, each heralding the birth of the next great superhero legend.

It's not surprising that so much of Comic-Con centers around themes of extraordinary power. Power has been the focus of myth and legend since ancient times (Simone Weil famously noted that, "The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force.")

I was among those who went to Comic-Con to enjoy its power, but not in the sense of high decibel levels or great speed. I am not one of those who is easily awed by armies of trolls or muscle bound super heroes.

If you want to see my concept of strength, take a look at these tiny pencil drawings by Noel Sickles which I discovered in the back of the Comic-Con booth of our old friends at Illustration House.



These are modest spot illustrations from a long-forgotten 1960s article about Russian spies. To me, they are smart, powerful and utterly persuasive.



I saw a lot of meticulous art at Comic-Con depicting shoe laces, fingernails and strands of hair in sharp detail. But ultimately I agree with Balzac: “Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.” For me, these drawings strike true.



Note how the only part of this hotel bar scene in sharp focus is the hand holding the drink.


The remainder of the drawing, including the drinker's other hand, merges into abstraction. Sickles had clear priorities in his drawings and made no secret of them.

And while we're on the subject of hands, note in this next detail how Sickles conveys these hands tearing up documents:



Sickles has already proven that he knows how to draw hands accurately, but here he has employed stark orthogonal lines to show the tension of opposable thumbs at work.

Or in this next detail, note how even at this miniature size, Sickles' sparse line conveys an understanding of the folds in that jacket sleeve.



Amidst all of the booming sound effects and flashing lights of Comic-Con, there is also a lot of power in the more meaningful sense of "striking true." That's why I go back.

COMIC-CON 2010 (part 4)

At Comic-Con, artist Neal Adams defined a comic book artist as:

someone you put in a closet with a drawing table, a lamp, a radio, art supplies and you slide paper under the door and he'll keep filling it up -- just so he can get new paper to draw more.

There must have been a thousand artists at Comic-Con who fit that description. Some of them were still blinking as their eyes adjusted to being out in the light. At tables on "artist's alley," in booths and leaning up against fire hydrants, you saw them inking highly detailed backgrounds and individual strands of hair. They didn't seem to be weighing the costs and benefits of their actions, the way sensible people would. They drew unfazed by the economics or the logistics of what they were doing.

There must have been 423 of them specializing in slick, polished images of huge breasted barbarian women in leather and chain mail bodices. (Question: if there are only 360 degrees in a full circle, how is it possible that there are an infinite number of angles from which to draw barbarian women bending over?)

Most of these pictures were keyed to grab at your attention -- every muscle flexed to the max, every gun blazing, every body extended mid-leap. Walking down a corridor of such overwrought images was exhausting.

Most of these pictures were technically accomplished. The artists had clearly sacrificed huge chunks of their lives to acquire technical skills. Some of the art-- a very small percentage-- was even excellent.

I would not live my life the way these artists do, but from a safe distance I can admire their willful disregard for actuarial tables. I am reminded of Archy and Mehitabel's famous Lesson of the Moth, in which Archy asked the moths why they continued to bang their heads against an electric light bulb in an effort to fry themselves in the beautiful fire. He asks one, "have you no sense?"

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it

As Archy returned to his rational life, he remarked,

i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

COMIC-CON 2010 (part 3)

Comic-Con provides a unique vantage point on the digital future of the popular arts.

The invention of digital media had an obvious quantitative impact on art, but I always listen at Comic-Con for early evidence of a qualitative impact.

Everybody knows the quantitative benefits: computers enhance the efficiency, speed and precision of the creation and distribution of images. They permit sharper, more consistent pictures than traditional tools can. They expand the range of possible subject matters by overcoming previous limitations on scale. For example, animators today have the ability to show individual strands of hair, or flowers in a field, or faces in a crowd that once would have been economically impossible to convey.

Yet, it is not clear that any of these miracles crosses the line between quantitative and qualitative change.

Contrast digital art with the invention of oil paint, for example. Many historians believe the invention of oil paint transformed the nature of art qualitatively. It gave artists versatility and sensitivity to create rich, glowing surfaces (such as polished marble, radiant jewels and-- most importantly-- human flesh).



This is supposed to have helped inspire the transition from the medieval obsession with the afterlife...



to the Renaissance focus on the human body and our physical world.

For me, the most fascinating question about the future of digital art is whether HCI (human-computer interaction) has the potential to trigger a similar kind of change.

Can it help make our images more sensitive? Better designed? Can it lead to better compositions? More poignant or evocative or profound images? Can it help make artists visually smarter, or perhaps release some primal aspect of aesthetic communication that has been straightjacketed so long by the limitations of earlier media we're not even aware of it?

One of the more promising areas discussed at Comic-Con emerged in a presentation by USC professor Henry Jenkins on "Transmedia," which he defined as:

The systematic dispersion across multiple platforms of a unified and coordinated entertainment experience, with each platform making its own contribution.

While in many respects transmedia is a marketing concept, it can also alter our experience of creative content by mixing genres together in what seems to be a new and potentially rich way. Digitalization enables people to become part of a movie, or to experience the movie through multiple points of view; to immerse themselves in a story and to later extract parts of it to take back to their own world; to incorporate the content in their own play (think of people using youtube to adapt and perform their own versions of the songs they see on Glee); to move the content from one medium to another, the way bees cross-pollenate. Jenkins impressed me as smart and disciplined.

It's too early to tell, but this strikes me as a variation on the creative experience worth thinking about as we shape our stories and other creative content.

COMIC-CON 2010 (part 2)

John Henry said to his captain,
"Well a man ain't nothin but a man,
But before I let that steam drill beat me down,
Lawd, Lawd, I'll die with that hammer in my hand."

Tim Lewis 2000

We have had several discussions on this blog about the expanding role of software in the creation of art. I have argued that programs such as Painter and Photoshop allow people to purchase a level of talent that previous generations had to struggle for years to master. Others have responded that you can't hide bad digital painting/drawing in Corel Painter or bad character animation in Maya any more than you can hide bad oil painting.

Our discussions have ranged across a wide variety of theoretical scenarios. But in the words of the great Yogi Berra,

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

One of the great things about Comic-Con is the opportunity to watch experts perform live demonstrations of the latest art software. After watching the current software in action, I have no question that it artificially provides a user with a remarkable level of technical skill to draw and paint.

I was particularly impressed with a demonstration of Z Brush. I watched the demonstrator use a scanned photograph to establish the topology of a face and then choose from seemingly endless options to customize the face into the image she wanted, selecting not just the skin tone, but how shiny or textured the skin would be, or even how conspicuous the pores would be. When it came to creating the hair, she pulled up a hair cap from a sphere, selected whether she wanted the "hair" or "fur" option, and then simply pulled the hair down to the desired length and cut and combed it the way she wanted. The computer placed her at a level that it would have taken a traditional artist many years to master.

I later looked at the demonstrator's drawings created without the benefit of a computer. They were not nearly as sophisticated or technically skilled.

The benefits of the computer were truly amazing, but I'll tell you something else that I found even more impressive. The demonstrator shyly revealed that she had just resigned from a plum position with the acclaimed computer animation and graphics studio Blur to take classes at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art. The audience gasped. But she said, "I go home at night and I draw and paint, and I feel so happy!"

COMIC-CON 2010 (part 1)

The ancient marketplace of Byzantium swarmed with traders, cutthroats, fishermen and merchants selling spices, livestock, textiles and goods from all across the known world. Its crowded stalls and narrow streets reeked with exotic smells and clamored with a dozen languages. When normal language failed, the vocabulary of commerce always prevailed.

[I just returned from the world famous San Diego Comic-Con-- always a mind-altering experience. This week I am posting a series of observations about my experiences there.]

The exhibition hall at Comic-Con is an airplane hangar sized petrie dish, where the conversion rate between artistic talent and cash is renegotiated thousands of times each minute. Art is bought and sold in every form, both as originals and in all manner of tangible and intangible reproductions. Oil paintings from the past are marketed alongside vapor ware from the future. The tools for making the next generation of art-- magic brush pens from Faber-Castell, Tombow and Prismacolor, or software from Z brush-- are marketed like the magic wands in Harry Potter.

For me, one noteworthy story about the value of art comes from these beautifully painted animation backgrounds which could be purchased by the fistful on the last day for $10 apiece.





Original paintings produced by skillful artists cost less than a printed poster.





Walking the exhibition hall, you developed an appreciation for the fact that the price of art is tied less to its quality than to its function. No matter how talented the artist, or how these images look, they were produced on an assembly line for high volume use, and the artists had already been paid once by their corporate employer.

The price of these paintings was discounted far below their inherent quality because the pictures had already served their primary function.



The same observation can sometimes be made about the price of illustration art generally. It often sells for less than its artistic quality would justify when compared to gallery art, because the primary cost of creating the art has already been covered by its initial commercial sponsor. Once an illustration has fulfilled its primary function, the secondary collector can sometimes purchase the work of a talented artist who in a rational world might be unaffordable.

PANMIXIA ON THE DRAWING BOARD

English illlustrator W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944) was hardly an adventurous guy. Meek and withdrawn, he loved to stay at home surrounded by his books. For excitement he puttered in his garden.



In just about every way you can imagine-- his wardrobe, his manners, his relationships, the food he ate, his morals-- Robinson lived a cloistered life. He courted his future bride on Sunday afternoons dressed in a top hat, frock coat and high collar. Even after he mustered the courage to propose marriage, their engagement lasted for nearly five years (he didn't believe in acting impetuously).

Yet, Robinson fell instantly in love with Japanese woodblock prints-- an exotic art form that had newly arrived in England by way of Paris.



He loved their flat decorative patterns, their asymmetrical and diagonal compositions, their creative use of high viewpoint, and their stark use of negative space. He was smitten by the clean, simplified line and highly stylized designs of Utamaro, Hiroshige and Hokusai.

Robinson adapted these qualities to his own work. He went from drawing in the conventional style of English illustrators of his day:



...to drawing with a cleaner line, using checkerboard and other decorative patterns to enhance his designs:









Note that Robinson didn't plagiarize Japanese images. This is not a story of cultural theft. Instead, it is a story of the wonderful panmixia that characterizes the language of forms. Robinson combined the abstract qualities of Japanese prints with his own style to come up with a genuine hybrid approach. (He was not alone-- the arrival of Japanese woodblock prints in Europe also came as an inspiration to artists from Aubrey Beardsley to Van Gogh).











I especially like the fact that Robinson, who was a cultural hermit in every other respect, immediately understood and appreciated the intentions of artists who were geographically, culturally and socioeconomically on the opposite side of the planet.

Robinson had never traveled, spoke no foreign languages and had no exposure to different cultures and styles. But geographic boundaries and language restrictions are no barrier to the appreciation of forms. Forms travel without a passport and communicate instantly in a global language.

This kind of cross-fertilization continues today in the work of illustrators such as Yuko Shimizu, who are far more open to the potential of other cultures than Robinson was:





Technology also facilitates this cross fertilization of images and styles. When you think how long it took for that first steam ship to introduce exported prints from Japan to European audiences, our own advantages in this area seem overwhelming today.