Drawing Post

Sunday, May 18, 2014

Artist Of The Day - Smithe [feedly]

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Artist Of The Day - Smithe
// PROTEUS MAG

See more at - smitheone.tumblr.com

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Ideas vs.Skills [feedly]

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Ideas vs.Skills
// Muddy Colors

-By Howard Lyon

What is more important to you, great ideas or killer skills? I am not saying that it is either/or, or that you shouldn't aim for both, but asking you to consider that if at the end of your career, if you had to choose, would you rather be known for expressing profound and compelling ideas, or painting with incredible skill and dexterity?

It is hard to imagine a great piece of art without a large measure of both, but I have pieces that I admire more for one than the other and will present some of those later in this post.

While I don't subscribe to the thought that if someone says it is art that I have to agree, there are pieces that I admire more for the idea than the skill involved in the creation. The overall quality of a piece of art is also a little slippery to quantify due to the subjective aspects of art. There is no scale upon which measure the 'artiness' of a piece. So, keep in mind that I will be offering my opinions and asking for feedback to help round out my thoughts.

Ideas

I would say that "found object" art can be purely 'idea' art. Marcel Duchamp's "ready-mades" were pieces that Duchamp took and declared were art. There was not any personal execution of skill involved on the part of Duchamp, other than maybe arrangement, just his attempt to change perception and pose an idea.

I am not particularly fed by Duchamp's Fountain. I like my art with a little more skill and less urine stains.

Just today I saw a post about Jeff Koons copying a Dark Horse figure of Popeye, but making it shiny and rebranding it as high art. He had permission to copy it. I am sure there was some real expertise involved in getting casting the figurine, though not as much skill as the original sculptor. He took something that existed and reformulated it. By the way, he sold it for $28 million dollars... I wonder how much the original sculptor made? Here is the story. I see this as the selling of an idea, not skill.

Skills

On the other end of the spectrum, I would place work done solely for beauty's sake. Paintings that are purely done as an exhibition of skill, done to such a degree that the patron admires it regardless of what it may or may not be expressing. It is hard to say that there is no 'idea' or 'concept' being expressed, but I think it is fair to say that some paintings the idea definitely takes a distant back seat to the execution.

Above is a Godward painting titled "A Grecian Lovely". This is not one of my favorite paintings by him but I chose it because I think it is a piece that doesn't have a big concept behind it, but lives essentially on the merits of how skillfully it is painted. I am not aware of any great symbolism here, or underlying motif, just a well painted "lovely". While I admire this painting, I do find myself wanting a little more from art.

I think that as artists, and especially illustrators, we are inclined to appreciate paintings that exhibit technical skill. We can appreciate the effort that went into the painting, even if it doesn't connect to us. I also find that most artists wince a little at the feedback of "this looks like a photograph!" I enjoy any compliment, my ego loves a good meal, but I think my most successful paintings are those that connect with the viewer through the concept or meaning first and then the technique.

Skills and Ideas

Much of the 20th century was spent beating skill out of the art schools. In my college experience the illustration students had separate classes from the fine art students. We both took life drawing but the goals stated were completely different. The illustration students were trying to learn accuracy and refining observation while the fine art students were all about expressing an idea, drawing inspiration from the model in front of them. It was even referred to as 'conceptual figure drawing.'

I was talking just a month ago to one of my professors and he said that he was in a class of one of the other teachers. This was on the board:

Art should not exhibit:
1. Skill
2. Emotion

I find that rather shocking and disheartening. The art I love has a lot of at least one of those things, and often a good dose of both!

There has been a resurgence of academic training with great schools like Grand Central Academy and The Florence Academy of Art. Artists can once again find the rigorous training and similar structure to that which produced so many great artists in the past. However, the ability to render accurately will not produce a Rubens or Waterhouse alone.

Walking through galleries I see many incredible paintings with a similar theme "figure with fabric". I admire them, and they have a valuable place in any artists work, but I hope that we soon see a bigger emphasis on expressing a bigger idea or narrative.

*side note: James Gurney accurately states that "narrative" is not a very good term because a narrative needs a sequence of events. He suggests that Detective Storytelling is a more descriptive term. I like it.

That thought is alive and well in the illustration world. It is what we are asked to do with most commissions. It is expected that illustrators have skill but also be able to express concepts. It is why I am proud to call myself an illustrator. If you read about the Prix de Rome contests held in the French Academy, you will see that the winner was expected to express both a clear and impactful idea but also paint with exceptional skill. It was a brutal process, putting students through a series of exercises intended to extract the very most out of each entrant.

I was talking about this last week with Peter Mohrbacher and Samuel Flegal on their webcast One Fantastic Week. Pete and Sam had some good thoughts. You can watch the video here: One Fantastic Week, episode 25. If you want to skip to the part where we talk about this subject, jump to the 48 minute mark.

Starting out

For me, a moving and powerful painting exhibiting skill and technique.

The Captive Slave by John Philip Simpson

As a student, I think it is important to focus on skill. I am going to call on William Bouguereau to back me up. Here is a quote:

"Theory has no place in an artist's basic education. It is the eye and the hand that should be exercised during the impressionable years of youth. It is always possible to later acquire the accessory knowledge involved in the production of a work of art, but never -- and I want to stress that point -- never can the will, perseverance, and tenacity of a mature man make up for insufficient practice. And can there be such anguish compared to that felt by the artist who sees the realization of his dream compromised by weak execution?"

I agree, but I think that at some point in a students education, we need to learn how to inject ideas in our work. Without it, I think a piece can be artistic fast food, quickly consumed without lasting intellectual nutrition.

Moving forward

Detail of The Captive Slave

image courtesy of Juan J. Ramirez

So why did I write this post? I feel like my primary focus has been developing my skills thus far. Each morning I wake up, I ask myself "what am I going to do today to improve." I currently preparing work for a gallery show. I am still in the sketch stage, working out ideas. There is no commission, no brief, just my ideas. Ideas ideas... This topic has been at the forefront for me lately. Do I want to aim solely for beauty, trying to sell on technical merit, or tell a story or inspire with some grand thought?

I don't have a definitive answer to my initial question of skills vs. ideas. I don't know that there needs to be an answer, but I think that asking yourself, what do I want others to get out of my work, is a very valuable question that only you can answer.

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Artist of the Month: Paul Klee [feedly]

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Artist of the Month: Paul Klee
// Muddy Colors

William O'Connor

Paul Klee, 'Maibild', 1925

Sometimes we are as influenced and informed by the things we dislike as much as the things we like. I realized that all of my Artist of the Months have been regarding artists that have positively influenced my career and work, but have never mentioned the other side of the coin, the painters I dislike, and when it comes to painters I dislike, the first that springs to mind is Paul Klee (1879-1940). Now don't get ahead of me, there's a story.

In 1987 I was a 16 year old high school student studying art at a private academy. Our instructor was a brilliant man who had studied art in the 1940's, gone off to fight in WWII, then came home and became the creative director for an advertising firm on Madison Avenue all through the 1950's and 60's, and I'm convinced was the inspiration for Don Draper on Mad Men. He was also a sculptor, in the vein of Henry Moore and David Smith. Mid century modern was his style, Even his 19th century mansion was painted stark white with white shag carpet, modern furniture and abstract sculptures everywhere. By the mid '70's he sold his share in the firm, settled down to an early retirement with his wife and opened an art school.

Twittering Machine, 1922

Around the Fish, 1926

Now, as a young 16 year old artist it was my responsibility and obligation to rebel against the generation before me. This was the spring of 1987 and post modernism was swinging into the popular zeitgeist with artist like Baselitz and Schnabel filling the galleries of New York with Neo Expressionist works and electrifying young painters. At the same time The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was putting on a retrospective of Paul Klee, and our teacher insisted that we must go and see his work, because he was the greatest artist of the 20th century. So one Saturday, my friends and I dutifully trundled into NYC, stood in line, paid the admission, and saw the Paul Klee retrospective. I have never been so underwhelmed by art in my life. Perhaps I had prejudiced myself to dislike it simply because I was told it was great, but I like to think that I had an open mind. I didn't mind that it was abstract and modern, there were many of Klee's contemporaries that I admired, but this was just boring. There was no soul, no heart. Cute, silly paintings that looked like they were rendered by a childish machine. When I returned to the academy the next week, I told my teacher in no uncertain terms that I disliked it. He tried to explain, tried to educate, but I refused. I didn't like it, and there was nothing he could say that would change my mind. Finally he told me, "When you're older, you'll understand it." That dismissive comment really burned me and I was more determined not to like Klee's work.

1987 Catalog for Paul Klee Retrospective at MOMA

Head of Man, 1922

Its now almost thirty years later, and I routinely run into Paul Klee works in magazines and museums and constantly see his childlike stick renderings show up influencing children's book illustrators. I have to admit, that I dislike his work just as much today as I did in 1987. No other artist has the same visceral dislike in me as Klee does. I understand his work, I appreciate his work, studied it in school and his influence on other artists, but I still can't stand it.

Whatever the reason, this is a case of a negative reaction having a formative creative influence on my life. As I recoiled from Klee and his abstract surrealism, I moved toward realism, expressionism and the new post modernism. It was the first in a long series of similar encounters. Throughout college ALL of my teachers were modernists, having gone to school in the mid to late 20th century and I had to fight with each of them on why figurative art was not Evil. So I have Paul Klee to thank for beginning my push away from modernism and toward my 21st century career. My personal reaction does not make Klee's work bad or inconsequential, and in no way diminishes his position in the canon of art history, but sometimes knowing what you dislike, and why, is as important as what you like.

Enjoy, go forth and learn!

Pavillion, 1927

Cat and Bird, 1928

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Brosmind Creates Globe-Headed Unicorns And People Made Of Books And Balloons

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Sophia Foster-Dimino Art

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Thursday, May 15, 2014

Our Friend the Atom: Disney’s 1956 Illustrated Propaganda for Nuclear Energy | Brain Pickings

www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/18/our-friend-the-atom-disney

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Whitman Illuminated: “Song of Myself,” in Breathtaking Illustrations by Artist Allen Crawford [feedly]

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Whitman Illuminated: "Song of Myself," in Breathtaking Illustrations by Artist Allen Crawford
// Brain Pickings

"He exalted the nature around and within us. His work is an expression of primal joy: He celebrated our animal senses, and the pleasures of being alive."

Visual artists have long been drawn to the literary classics, producing such masterful homages as William Blake's paintings for Milton's Paradise Lost and for Dante's Divine Comedy, Picasso's drawings for a naughty ancient Greek comedy, Matisse's etchings for Ulysses, John Vernon Lord's illustrations for Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Salvador Dalí's prolific illustrations for Don Quixote in 1946, the essays of Montaigne in 1947, The Divine Comedy in 1957, Alice in Wonderland in 1969, and Romeo and Juliet in 1975.

In Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself (public library), artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman's undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art. His elegant, lyrical play of text size and orientation layers over Whitman's poem a kind of visual rhythm that not only harmonizes with the original verses but enriches them and gives them uncommon dimension.

Crawford, who lives in the outskirts of Philadelphia where Whitman settled at the end of his life, writes in the foreword:

Whitman wanted to create a new form of verse, one that was indigenous to America. He wanted to break free not only in form but also in content: He sought complete candor, not allegory or symbolism. His sensibility was American: exuberant, rough, and wild. He reveled in the vitality and sublimity of the physical. He exalted the nature around and within us. His work is an expression of primal joy: He celebrated our animal senses, and the pleasures of being alive.

[…]

With this book, I've tried to make the vigor of "Song of Myself" tangible. I've attempted to liberate the words from their blocks of verse, and allow the lines to flow freely about the page, like a stream or a bustling city crowd. The text and imagery in this book are intended to be in keeping with Whitman's unfurnished sensibility.

[…]

I found that in order to add anything at all to Whitman's panorama of people and places, I had to add a dimension of my own. Events in my daily life affected my approach to each spread, and the Philadelphia of today seeped into the Philadelphia of Whitman's day. Thus, you'll find a variety of contemporary or near-contemporary images in this book. Not doing so would have been a disservice to Whitman's work, which attempts to create a new form of verse for The Here and The Now.

Crawford, who lists among his inspirations artist Matt Kish's illustrations for Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness, labored over Whitman's magnum opus in his basement for a year, working well into the night and spending 8–10 hours on each illustrated spread for a total of 2,560 hours by his own rough estimate. On particularly cold winter days, he logged his hours clad in multiple layers of house robes and a Russian fur hat.

Especially enchanting is Crawford's heavy use of science-inspired imagery in his contemporary version of the illuminated manuscript, a medieval medium of religion.

All 256 pages between the beautifully fabric-bound covers of Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself are imbued with pure magic, the kind that takes you by the soul-strings and plays you like a billowing ballad.

Illustrations courtesy of Tin House Books; photographs my own

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The Original Cartoon Canon of Cat Memes: Legendary British Artist Ronald Searle’s 1960s Drawings [feedly]

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The Original Cartoon Canon of Cat Memes: Legendary British Artist Ronald Searle's 1960s Drawings
// Brain Pickings

Caricaturing our human struggles, insecurities, and social anxieties through facetious felines.

Ronald Searle was not only one of the greatest satirical cartoonists of the 20th century, but also a man of extraordinary sensitivity who, when his wife was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer, made for her the most moving love letter imaginable, which helped her persevere. But Searle's sensitivity extended beyond his closest human, beyond humans in general, and into the animal world — he was an extraordinary cat aficionado, as evidenced by his contributions to the terrific Big New Yorker Book of Cats, and created the feline counterpart to Ralph Steadman's delightful dog drawings. Nearly half a century before the I Can Has Cheezburger meme, Searle began drawing quirky, impossibly charming, exuberantly expressive cartoons and caricatures of cats, collected in Searle's Cats (public library) — the original cartoon canon of cats, published in 1967 and reprinted in 2005. His unmistakable ink drawings of cats are coupled with wryly witty, brandishingly British captions that wink at our everyday human struggles, insecurities, and social anxieties, inviting us to laugh at those felines follies as we laugh at ourselves.