Visual Metaphor

I've written about visual metaphor and the use of rhetoric in pictures before. In particular, an unpublished column in the aftermath of the Danish Cartoons disaster of 2006, and a brief set of examples of last year for a student project. It's a demanding craft, practiced by illustrators for many years, but especially refined from the 1970s on.

Above, Seymour Chwast fuses two culturally embedded images. Chrysler Building + fountain pen = writing in New York. But the process actually requires two steps. There are two pairs, each of which makes use of metonymy, or a substitution of terms. First, the Chrysler Building represents New York. Second, a writing implement stands in for the practice of writing itself. The combination of the two gives the concept form, via the use of a visual pun, based on the similarity of form between the two objects, albeit at vastly different scales.

Keep in mind, of course, that Mr. Chwast did not make a logical diagram as a recipe. He did cast about for ideas, by looking for associative material. He would have scribbled Chrysler Building among symbols or images which we associate with New York, and he might well have found the form of the pen in the building itself. Alternatively, he doodled a pen and discovered an opportunity to suggest the iconic skyscraper, perhaps by superimposing semicircular bands and radiating lines on the neck of the pen. That is, he combined associative reasoning and visual form-making to discover an opportunity, which he subsequently refined.


As a practical matter, these practices are (and have been, since the American Civil War era, at least) connected to publishing and mass communication broadly speaking. That is, people don't generally make freestanding rhetorical images; typically they are tied to another piece of content with a message. Even more practically, they serve to make the page or screen on which they appear more hospitable to the eye. These images have been characterized, along with visually appealing display type, as self-advertising, or extra-textual information. But I am skeptical of such interpretations, which privilege prose text over other forms of elucidation.


For those interested in a systematic discussion of visual rhetoric in design processes, I recommend Hanno Ehses' "Representing Macbeth: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric" in Design Issues, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1984. pp. 53-63. MIT Press, Cambridge. I met Mr. Ehses many years ago when I was a visiting scholar at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, in Halifax. He led the Design Division at the school for many years until his retirement in 2009.

Images: Seymour Chwast, cover illustration, The Writer's New York City Source Book, date unavailable; Allan Sanders, Electronic Bureaucrat cover illustration, The Economist, February 16th, 20o8; my colleague John Hendrix, Supernova, editorial illustration New York Times, data unavailable.

In Honor of Leap Day

Bufo Americanus. Gouache and prismacolor. From the MySci Project, a few years back. (2005).

Onward into March.

Teddy Roosevelt as a Cheshire Cat

A rare thing these days: a smiling Republican.

I am listening to Rick Santorum speak after losing the Michigan primary. (Why?)

It is possible that I will plunge an icepick into my eyeball before he is finished.

It is also possible I deserve this fate, since I am an elitist professor, and likely a snob. Though I teach, write and practice illustration, which seems pretty snob-proof.

The New Journalism & Illustration

The much ballyhooed New Journalism of the 196os and 70s featured writers like Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. Wolfe made a career of it, partly by solidifying his own myth in telling the tale. In Drawing Conclusions this week we are reading sources from the period, pro and con.


But the visual practitioners of the New Journalism–in particular, the illustrators who operated as correspondents on assignment–have been left out of the story. Publications like Esquire, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and New York Magazine commissioned such projects.


Readers of this blog may recall the pivotal role that the illustrator Robert Weaver played in these developments.

In 1969, Weaver produced such an essay for Fortune magazine, a top-to-bottom account of work in the Woolworth Company. A set of images from this project was recently posted in the pictorials section of the Melton Prior Institute website. (The Melton Prior is devoted to the study and promotion of the tradition of reportage drawing. It's located in Dusseldorf. I haven't been yet, but plan to visit in the next year or so.)

I'm posting a few images from their display.


The line drawings and the color finishes cast interesting light on each other.


In most cases, I prefer the line study.

Images: Robert Weaver, suite of images from What's Come Over Old Woolworth?, Fortune Magazine, January 1969; Photographer credit unavailable, Photograph of Tom Wolfe, cover, New York Magazine, February 14, 1972.

Facts, Truth, Art, Gall

Recently we have explored questions raised by the history of visual journalism. Of primary concern has been the relationship between "the facts" and "the story"; or more precisely, the way certain facts lead in the direction of–or are selected so as to construct–one story versus another.

The lead article in today's New York Times Book Review (alertly flagged by a student before I'd managed to reach that section this morning) concerns The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal. The book consists of a series of exchanges between the authors: D'Agata, who was working on a nonfiction piece for the Believer, and Fingal, the fact-checker charged by the Believer to vet the article. Their exchanges were difficult, even unpleasant.

The article in question was an essay about a boy named Levi Presley who jumped to his death from a hotel in Las Vegas in 2002. To simplify (but not a great deal): D'Agata took liberties with facts in the service of Art.

Jennifer B. McDonald's review demonstrates her deep impatience with D'Agata's stance. In her rendering, it seems difficult to imagine credible counterargument. Her review is so effective that I found myself wondering whether she'd eliminated available nuance to make her points. (But I do enjoy reading irritated [good] writers.)

"D’Agata argues... his duty is not to accuracy, nor to Levi. His duty is to Truth. And when an artist works in service of Truth, fidelity to fact is irrelevant."

Lest we harrumph too quickly, no less a personage than Aristotle has made the same argument. In the Poetics, Aristotle marks a bright line between poetry and history. The poet worries about form; the historian, accuracy. We have discussed these very issues in recent weeks in our Drawing Conclusions seminar.


Quoting Murray Krieger in "Fiction, History and Reality" (1978):

"What the Aristotelian poet does is to transform the empirical world's casual into art's causal (and what new worlds are opened up by the simple transposition of the "su" of casual into causal!). He marks off what, from history's viewpoint, may seem like a mere line segment, plucks it out of its empirical sequence, away from what comes before and goes after, and turns it into all the time there is or has been or even can be. In effect, he bends the line segment into a circle, a mutually dependent merger of all beginnings, middles, and ends; and the self-sufficient world of his poem is enclosed by it. We can never be further from the literal imitation of history, from the dependence of internal sequence upon external sequence, than Aristotle is here."

So is D'Agata an Aristotelian? Perhaps. These are weighty questions, in the abstract. But this case is this case. For my money, McDonald's points resonate. Oedipus Rex did not run in a newspaper or magazine as a nonfiction story. The particularities of Levi Presley's death are knowable; willful amendment to the factual context (which Jim Fingal establishes) in a publication (The Believer) which announces to readers that it does not publish fiction seems less like Art than Vanity.

As McDonald notes, aesthetics and nonfiction need not be strangers, and aren't in the best hands.

I recommend reading the whole of her essay.

Images: Henrik Kubel & A2/SW/HK (a London design shop), Fact, typographic illustration, New York Times Book Review, February 26, 2012; Illustrator credit unavailable, Falling Burglar, Le Petit Journal Illustrated Supplement, Paris, Sunday May 14, 1899.

Drawing Meets Design: Line & Shape

What is the relationship between drawing and design? The Renaissance term disegno binds them together as a kind of thinking-through-drawing.

My students are working with just such a drawing/design problem right now. The project sheet has informed them that the distribution of line, shape, tone and pattern are primary. But what does it mean? "The distribution of line, shape, tone and pattern are primary." It sounds like Beginning-Design-Class pablum. Which it can be. (Zzzzz.)

It sez here: the language of forms rewards investigation.

The Seymour Chwast ink drawing from Pushpin #21 (above) integrates strong black shape and a husky brushed line to hold the page. But the angular rhythm of those legs makes the thing work, by preventing the white/black, white/black, white/black march of the costumes from becoming insistent. That and the visual syncopation of the last black shape; it works off the dotted half note of the second black figure. The image fuses description and form.


In some cases, well-used contour line and a strong sense of shape is enough to generate interest. Ed Benedict's character sheet is a study in drawing and design. Look at the geometry of the second figure from the left. Check out the pinwheel created by the forward edge of his hat, right jowl and chin. Ponder the elegance of the shape of his hat brim--like a response to Noguchi or Calder. Below, a series of shapes I isolated from that pencil in Illustrator.

Below, another piece of cartoon language with surprising design sense.

Mostly line, but for the black pants-legs-feet-shoes. Note that the information for all that is compressed into one exquisitely elaborated positive shape that activates negative space all around it. And the second line color adds interest but also keeps things under control. Nice pattern, too.


Just in case you're thinking this is about "style", think again. Above, an ink drawing by Eulalie Banks reproduced with machine-shaded screentone passages. The line does 90 percent of the work. She creates interest through distinct passages offset by negative space: the birdcage; the windowpanes; the curtains; woodgrain on the table; the gathered cloth below the waistband on the apron; the dots in the hat; the banding on the bowl, the stonework along the right edge. Etcetera.

Here's a case where line and pattern are used within a defined format to create positive and negative form. Within the rules of the depiction and the limits of the medium (woodcut), no opportunity is wasted. To wit: the profile of the horseshoes and metalwork on the hooves; the attenuated triangles on the right figure's stockings above the knee; the diagonal gesture of the scabbard that breaks the negative space between the same figure's legs. In general, look at all the negative spaces; that's where the money is, so to speak.


A contemporary cousin of those playing cards, by Toby Thane Neighbors.



Above, with details below, an allegorical panel by Karel Spillar in Gerlach's Allegories. (That's Music, Poetry, Painting). Most edifying. Here some lovely line has been reinforced by "coloring in" the negative space. Works just fine.


Please note two things: first, how about the active use of the figure to build composition, especially Tambourine Girl at left, and second, consider the role that non-figurative elements play in building form. The tree and the foliage are major structural pieces of the puzzle.


Gesture + props + setting elements + foliage = positive/negative composite.



While we're thinking about black and white (which helps to isolate these questions) here's a purely tonal vocabulary that exploits negative space delightfully. There's no box as a container for the picture; the edge of the format is created optically.

And then there's the relationship between line and supplementary shape. This mother hen is mine, a spot illustration for a book project from last year. I include it in this set because of the simple relationship between the black line and three sets of shapes: blue, white and black. The blue and white collaborate to create a set of supporting shapes that add interest and body to the image: the blue mass of the bird; the white breast and face detailing; the intimation of a white butt. That the blue is a low chroma, middle value is important; it balances the light and dark.


Here are some character studies in a sketchbook painting from a few years ago. The question of what's a line and what's an edge is critical, as is the issue of adjacency: what value is next to what other value?

Below, an Alex Steinweiss record album cover from 1946. Here's a case where the line/shape relationship takes a different turn.


The shapes are superimposed on networks of line: sometimes to complete a shape suggested by those lines (the pine trees) and sometimes to establish a contrasting form which is more or less indifferent to the linework.


The application of the shape and the color is seemingly casual in both cases. (But only seemingly. The disegno has a rakish touch.)


And sometimes, there are scarcely any lines at all.

These are all edge. We group things together through association, especially the pieces of the prone boy leaning on his elbows in number 2.

Above and below, color maquettes or design comps (short for design comprehensives, which nobody ever says) by the Swedish graphic designer Olle Eksell for a children's book with a title that I can't read, either in Swedish or in the Japanese caption provided by the publisher (Pie Books, Tokyo). 1958.


How smart and confident!


See above. She would be easy to dismiss. But not to the discerning formalist. Check out the subtle "lace" linear gesture above the Dutch Girl's right (rear) foot, and the way that it's echoed by the scalloped edge of her apron. Or the way that the calligraphic contour line that describes her shoes bows out in spots, leaving orange access to yellow.


Finally, two examples in which shape and edge are used to establish characters and forms, but within which line and supplementary shape articulate interior information. Above, Harry Beckhoff, and below, Jim Flora.


Images: Seymour Chwast, illustration in Pushpin #21, 1959; Ed Benedict, character sheet for Deputy Droopy, MGM Animation directed by Tex Avery, 1955; Designer unknown, Marty Mayrose advertising character for Mayrose Meats, circa 1967; Eulalie Banks, Chicken Little in the children's book of the same name, for Platt and Munk, 1932; Jehan Volay, publisher, Playing Cards with Spanish Suits, 18th century (reproduced in the Dover book Antique Playing Cards, 1996); Toby Thane Neighbors, illustration for Faesthetic No. 13; Karel Spillar, Music, Poetry, Painting in Gerlach's Allegorien, 1898; Ruth Chrisman Gannett, illustration for My Father's Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett, 1948; D.B. Dowd, Mother Hen, from In Pursuit of God's Kingdom, by the Rev. James F. Dowd [my uncle] 2011; Dowd, Characters Waiting, sketchbook painting, 2009; Alex Steinweiss, album cover design for Respighi: The Pines of Rome, conducted by Eugene Ormandy, Columbia Records, 1946; Olle Eksell, children's book design comps, 1958; Designer unknown, Dutch Girl advertising character, 1956; Harry Beckhoff, You must take this thing out of here, fiction illustration for Collier's June 12, 1941; Jim Flora, album cover design for Redskin Romp, Charlie Barnet and his Orchestra, RCA Victor, 1946.

Calendar Geekery

I have written before about my calendar challenges. I can't really explain why I so dislike pre-printed personal calendars, but I do. It's a forced order, I guess. Since I am modern human operating in a professional culture, I must track my appointments. Over time, I have developed a regime that I can own.


I have to make my calendars. I've tried a variety of blank books; mostly Moleskins, which have worked well, but this year I wanted an actual hardback book with just a little heavier paper. I lurked around a few bookstores looking for the right thing, which ultimately I found at Artmart, a locally-owned art + craft + stationery place. I love the book I bought. Clothbound, nice heft. It's a Trav-e-logue Watercolor Journal by Hand-Book.


My basic format has stayed pretty consistent, shown in a number of these examples. Seven columns, a week at a time.


Typically I have used prismacolor colored pencils and a ruler. This year I decided to draw it all with a brush, looser, no ruler. A little water woke up the gouache remnants I have sitting around in my studio on about a dozen little plates. (These are the palettes from Spartan Holiday No. 1.)


I use the headings as an excuse to goof around with lettering. I vary the color on a (more or less) monthly basis to keep myself interested.

I'm not disciplined enough about writing things down (which might be characterized as passive resistance). I am however compulsive about recording my swim workouts. I track yardage, intervals and times. Honestly, I've gotten much much geekier over time.


My original post on this subject really had to do with dailiness of making crap, and the way in which "the offhand thing" offers important evidence about one's concerns. I still think that's true.


Last time I wrote about this I got a nice comment from Klaus von Mirbach, a bookbinder and artist's book maker. I dropped by his blog this morning and enjoyed looking at spreads from this book.