Graphic Tales

Coming This Week

2012-01-30T10:20:00.004-06:00

I am several days away from putting up a revised Spartan Holiday site with ordering machinery. Once that's up the mag will begin to appear in stores. Distribution is evolving.

There's plenty of excitement in my house about the enterprise. To be frank, I've struggled to find the right format for my work for a number of years now. In 2008 I made a turn toward reportage, having very rarely ever maintained a sketchbook. I couldn't say why it happened, and I didn't know what to make of it at the time, but I started sitting in the waiting areas in shopping malls, among the bored boyfriends.

It all felt–and looked–so provisional. But I kept at it, having nothing better to do.

Early on I wrote:

I am learning, or trying to learn, to shut up. I have gone back to drawing the world... The act of showing up, of looking and listening, has been revealed to me as a wonderment. I expect to enjoy what comes next. I don’t know what it will be, of course. But I do know what it’ll be built out of. This. Now. Here.. I don’t need a studio. I need a sketchbook, pencils and brushes, and patience. A kitchen table. A sink...

But it turned out I did need a studio.

Of necessity I put it all in mothballs for about a year and half as we worked our way toward selling a condominium and buying a house. The sketchbook work stayed provisional under those terms. But when we moved into our new place just over two years ago, I began to feel more grounded. I began to project a future for my reportage work. I can't say I was extremely confident about it, but at least I could name it, in a way.

I think I wrote the name Spartan Holiday in a sketchbook for the first time at some point in 2009. The words captured something modest and serious and fun; they evoked the spirit of something-from-nothing that I recall from childhood.

I began to write this blog in 2007. I had a decent sense of what I wanted to do with it from the beginning. The informally serious style–which I associate with the form–came rather easily to me. My combined efforts in criticism, curating and drawing converged in the blog, though the relationship between my studio postings and the material I otherwise wrote about often seemed unresolved to me.

The insight that turned Spartan Holiday from awkward dream into fluid reality was the integration of the sketchbook work and the voice of the blog. All I had to do, I suddenly realized, was to write as if I were writing Graphic Tales. The rest would take care of itself. And it has. The visual vocabulary of Spartan Holiday in the early going includes brush-and-ink drawing, gouache painting, some digital color, monochromatic photography, machine type and hand drawn lettering.

I had the great good fortune of working with graphic designer Scott Gericke to develop the typographic approach, as well as the wordmark and identity.

Excited to have the publication out on the market, and even more excited to get No. 2 ready (summer 2012).

As soon as the site is up and taking orders, I'll announce it here.

Images: D.B. Dowd, Eventually the air cleared, Spartan Holiday No. 1: Shanghai Pictorial, February 2012. Dowd, Cosmetics Counter, pencil and gouache, 2008; Dowd, The paradoxes are everywhere, Spartan Holiday No. 1.

Perilous "Fun Facts"

2012-01-29T23:00:00.000-06:00

Back in the classroom, leading a project in informational illustration in Word & Image 2. I debuted this project last year. I wrote then that I had assigned a "dream project":

...to design-slash-illustrate a pictorial display to accompany an explanation of a scientific concept to young people. I say dream project because it combines picture-making with serious visual thinking: from my perspective, fun as can be.

The given texts appear in The Question and Answer Book of Everyday Science, by Ruth A. Sonneborn with illustrations by Robert J. Lee. (Random House, 1961.) I love this stuff. As shown below, the example demonstrates clarity, using a plastic arrangement of pictorial content and well-chosen labels to get the material across. If you want to read the text that accompanies this image, the post I wrote then provides it.

But we don't always get great texts, or useful assignments.

I spent some time looking around in my surprisingly large collection of books with explanatory illustration. Many of them were written in the decades following World War Two, when a) publishers saw an expanding educational market b) science enjoyed tremendous prestige, and c) modernist graphic design and illustration styles adapted to convey informational content. Lots of very snappy diagrammatic explanations of jet engines.

For some reason I was unable to find a really good example at the time I needed it. The disarray in my studio may have played a part here. And my copy of Our Friend the Atom (Disney, 1957, a companion to a film of the same name) was back at my office, which certainly would have sufficed.

So I went to the bookshelf and pulled out a random volume of the 1964 World Book Encyclopedia (issued just as the fifties really ended, when the Beatles showed up).

I picked H, and began flipping through it. I landed on a long article addressing the human heart (the organ, not the symbol of sentiment). In terms of visual range, the page spread devoted to Wonders of the Heart seemed promising, at least initially. Some comparative cross-sections delivered useful information.

The black-and-white halftone images plus the red-and-blue spot color capture a period style. The content is not simple stuff. I can say so, having worked on a cardiac education project; explaining how a heart works is a great deal more complicated than one might think.

But the more I looked at that World Book spread, the dopier it got. First, the conceit of the page is a giveaway that we're headed for distraction. The Wonders of the Heart serves up the heinous Fun Fact Fallacy. Pointlessly colorful statements of fact do not aid, focus or deepen our understanding. Explanations of how a thing works or why it matters will rise and fall on the quality of the writing and the art direction in the service of that content. Being told that a human being's blood vessels laid end to end would go from New York to Sydney and back five times (five times!!) accomplishes very little. Okay, so there are a lot of them. And they cover a lot of ground. But what's the difference between saying five time or two times? Round trip from New York to Sydney is a long freaking way. So twice (two times!!) sounds like really a lot. But we're talking, in that case, of a 150 percent error. What is the point? Really a lot versus really really really a lot?

How does a picture of a Valentine's Day heart holding up a tank car add to my understanding? Why not a box car? Why not seventeen elephants? And how is the fact that a tank car holds liquid relevant? Is there blood in the tank? Are we talking industrial vampirism? Why doesn't the heart have biceps, or eyeballs, or an antic personality?

Seriously? Clockwise from three o'clock? And milk bottles? The vampire thing is out of control at this point.

A quivering, meaty old heart in a dish that sends–wait–radio signals across deep time?

So it's dopey. But it's not the illustrator/designer's fault. The content itself is faulty; you can't punch it up into anything useful.

So back to the project at hand for our Word and Image 2 students. Please suppress all urges to come up with, then decorate, fun facts.

Staggering out of the Garage, Squinting...

2012-01-04T00:48:00.005-06:00

I have posted little in recent months. During the second half of this year I made a clear-minded decision to dial back the blogging to put my head down and focus on executing the first issue of Spartan Holiday. No. 1 is at the printers as I type. There's much to say about it, and I will offer more before long. I'm very excited about the project, in both the present and future tenses. The cover for the first issue appears above. Shanghai Pictorial is the first of two issues that address my adventures in China in 2011.

Spartan Holiday will appear twice a year, possibly with a supplement now and then. Let's call it graphic nonfiction, with an orientation to travel, street reportage and visual culture. The reading experience is coherent, informative and even funny in spots. 40 pages, including a self-cover. Nice stock. It's a substantial thing. (Retail price $12.95 U.S.) I am looking to place it in independent bookstores and comic book stores here and abroad. If you write or report on contemporary visual culture and would like an advance copy for review, please contact me.

Again, more soon. Sorry for the lessened production, but there's a reason I've been quiet...

Context is Everything

2011-12-03T08:35:00.003-06:00

On the drive east to see my folks for Thanksgiving, we stopped to refuel off Highway 70 near London, Ohio. I had several pressing concerns at the time, like Are we out of corn nuts?! and other sundries. Given my rate of coffee consumption, it also felt as if a rhinocerous was sitting on my bladder. And then I was confronted by the sentiment shown above:

LIFE: measured by the...moments...that...take our breath...away

with the word spacing provided by grout and a particularly aggressive form of justification.

My breath was taken away indeed.

The intersection of folk and commercial speech. Totally fabulous, if bonkers.

Sorry about the focus. It was a busy room!

Let's Tell a Story

2011-11-09T10:39:00.004-06:00

Sitting in a hotel room in Baltimore, having forgotten to charge my phone before heading out. So I’ll kill two birds as I wait for the battery icon to get all happy and green.

In my talk last night at MICA, Whitney Sherman asked a question about the relationship between midcentury design and the work I had presented.

Certainly I have spent plenty of time with material from that period over the last ten years, beginning with our acquisition of the Al Parker collection. I responded to that effect. But, I added, my affection for such work goes beyond postwar nostalgia. As a designer, I think that the economic limitations imposed by printing budgets, etc., created useful constraints. The two-color problem is a gift from God.

Without much comment, I offer a few images of an ensemble of Harry Beckhoff original illustrations published in Redbook in 1949. For present purposes, the period gender politics are not of concern; I’m focused on the carpentry of the images and the narrative they deliver.

Wit + economy + grace + discipline = something special.

On Shedding Light

2011-11-06T22:24:00.004-06:00

I spoke with the graduate students at MICA last week about the marginalized position of illustration and cartooning in the cultural precincts of high art. I’ve commented on the phenomenon before. But since that time I have generated a data set and evaluated the question empirically. (A formal presentation of this material is slated for release as an essay, date uncertain. For now, you’ll have to take my word on it.) I crunched numbers for leading art history departments, museums and art publishers for a recent calendar year, taking as data points each course, exhibition and publication. I got over 5000 data points.

At what rate did illustration show up? In calculation A, If the material mentioned word-image relationships, illustrations, comics, anything, I counted it. In calculation B, I kept to a stricter definition, with credit restricted to exhibitions, etc., that addressed illustration explicitly, and to some degree on its own terms.

The generous reckoning came in just below 4 percent. The stricter standard tipped the scales at under 2 percent. Such scores make plain that illustration does not rise to the level of art as measured by those tasked with defining and regulating the meaning of that term. That’s an empirical reality.

Moreover, when illustration does make the paper, it’s because somehow the individual case has transcended illustration.

We did a quick tour through Kant and disinterest theory, which helped to create the modern conception of an art object. The cultivation of taste requires that aesthetic judgments be free of entanglements. If I’m trying to sell you a Greek statue, my opinion on the question of its beauty is of no value. Fair enough. But a parallel difficulty emerges in the aesthetic consideration of useful things. How can we judge beauty when utility dictates form?

There are sound philosophical reasons for why illustration is a poor fit for the halls of art. To fight those arguments–let alone their cultural momentum, now two centuries and change later–is to tilt at windmills. No–worse. It is to pine for a status best unsought.

Illustration “as” Art, I concluded, is like sitting in bad seats and eating cold food at a beautiful dinner party.

So: to hell with the need to transcend illustration. Let’s embrace it for what it is, a tradition of illumination, of shedding light; an ideology of nonfiction, a commitment to veracity. The cultural act of illustrating a text (or representing a body of knowledge, or giving form to a viewpoint) is an altogether different game than snapping the suspenders of the bourgeoisie.

Illustration and cartooning, the two great families of purposive (or useful) images, comprise a vast corpus of cultural material. This stuff goes unlooked at and unpondered to our detriment. I showed the students a selection of images from the visual history of Jim Crow and asked, why haven’t educated people in a pluralistic society looked at these things? Because they’re not art?

Really?

It sez here: we are in need of an increasingly curious and grounded view of visual culture which addresses the functional, captures the embedded, explores the vernacular, describes the technological, engages the commercial, values but contextualizes the aesthetic, and finally, identifies and interprets the visual rhetoric used in modern communication.

And so I pose the question to the Marylanders (and others perhaps): having begun the day as a heroic artist, independent, expressive, essential; having been informed in the hours following lunch that rather, you are a light-shedding illustrator, contingent, interpretive, in-relation-to:

Do you accept your demotion?

Discuss.

Baltimore Lecture Nov. 8

2011-11-05T10:59:00.005-05:00

I will be speaking this coming Tuesday, November 8 at the Maryland Institute College of Art. The talk is a companion piece to the graduate seminar I'm teaching at the school to the new MFA students in Illustration Practice, which I mentioned in my last post.

I'll be talking about the history of illustration, and specifically the reportage tradition. But I will also–really primarily–be discussing my new Spartan Holiday project, now weeks away from availability. The poster at the top of this post, designed by Bryn Freeman, includes an image from Issue No. 1, Shanghai Pictorial. (The same image is shown below, sans text.)

The talk is scheduled for 7:00 pm on Tuesday the 8th. It will take place in the Main Building Room 110. If you're in the Baltimore area, please stop by!

Blinkered?

2011-11-03T23:56:00.008-05:00

I am midway through an as-yet unmentioned moonlighting operation. This fall semester, the Maryland Institute College of Art has launched an MFA program in Illustration Practice. The program, organized to address illustration as an expanded field, is being led by Whitney Sherman. Whitney invited me to take a stint in the Critical Issues seminar this fall, joining Stephanie Plunkett and Joyce Schiller as sequential guest hosts. I’m batting third. So I’m flying to Baltimore and back four Tuesdays in a row. (Yes, that’s a long day.)

As readers of GT know, I have invested in working out critical approaches to purposive images. I’m committed to the humanist enterprise, and I value clear thinking. Illustration (especially) and cartooning (to a degree) are signficant but under-theorized cultural forms. The invisible-in-plain-sight quality of the non-conversation plain bugs me. So I was eager to find a way to respond to Whitney’s invitation with a yes.

My sense of mission in the enterprise has been confirmed by early results.

In advance of my first session, I wrote to the group: We work in a fascinating field. We get to make things–draw them, write them, paint them, stage them–that comprise the very culture we live in. Together, we produce the creative tissue of our own times. Those things that we make represent us. They make an argument for certain values. And when I say values I don’t mean morals; I mean assertions of priority and relative worth, of some things being more important than others. What things are important to you? More importantly, what does your work say is important to you? As you begin to explore these questions, ideally you move into a position that enables you to plant your flag, so to speak; to identify your position in a creative landscape.

Then I made a specific request: Here’s what I’d like you to do for Tuesday’s class. I’d like you to bring several items. One, a representative work of your own that you’ve made somewhat recently; two, a work you admire and find relevant that was produced before 1900; three, a work that you admire and find relevant that was produced between 1900 and 1950; and four, a work that you admire and find relevant that was produced after 1950. So something of your own and three historical works. These works can be paintings, prints, drawings; magazine or book illustrations; cartoons or comic strips; stills from animated films. Your call. Print them out at sufficient size so that we can look at them easily.

Going back to reread that letter just now stunned me, because what rolled in suggested a response to a very different prompt.

I won’t bog us down in particulars, but approximately 90 percent of the material presented consisted of standard issue (mostly) European art history, or slightly more “liberal” variants of same. Almost everything was a painting. Representative examples: an Abrecht Durer self-portrait; Frieda Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey (1938); Odilon Redon’s Ophelia (1902), Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907-08), a couple of Modiglianis, an Edward Hopper, Hokusai’s Wave (where are those royalties, a colleague asked the other day); a creepy Balthus (is there any other kind?), a Degas, a Monet, etc., etc.

What is there to say about this corpus of material, under the circumstances? First, we can identify all of it as academically-approved product. The students saw those slides go clicking by in somebody’s art history course. Second, the geography. I have not yet noted the fact that a number of students are Asian (as in, from Asia, not “ABCs” or American-born Chinese). There are students from China and Korea.

While everybody took a break, I wrote these headings on the board: United States; Europe; Asia. Then I started writing names under those headings. There were a few under the first one: Hopper and Jacob Lawrence, who also made an appearance (shown here, The Builders, 1947). We had to add a category for Mexico: Kahlo. There was a giant clot under Europe, and a solitary entry under Asia, a Japanese. I asked how this could be.

(As an aside, I will note that many of the images, though art-historically sanctioned, were among the more accessible artworks. Hopper was an illustrator before he began making illustrative paintings; Klimt has a pop dimension (Byzantium for posters); Kahlo has become a pop personality; Modigliani buffed a style with more fervor than many illustrators. I could go on, but I’ll stop.)

There were a few contemporary illustrator types in the data set, and Aubrey Beardsley made the cut, but aside from those, the traditions of illustration and cartooning were absent. Assesment: to now-apparent geographical bias, we added a blinkered view of visual culture. I started filling in names in a second color, denoting a different tradition: McCay, Outcault, Messmer, Disney; Pyle, Wyeth, Parrish, Leyendecker; singularities like Rockwell, Tezuka, Posada. Dot dot dot!
I asked the students to take another crack at the problem this week. They made an altogether different run at it, to positive effect. They seemed much more at ease. Their natural affinities and affections had been validated.

How Things Look, Not What They Mean

2011-10-19T09:09:00.007-05:00

Many years ago, when trying to figure out how to teach two-dimensional design (a subject, like most I profess, I never studied in school) I became convinced that cognition can be an obstacle to seeing. I recognize that such a statement is probably physiologically nonsensical, so let me explain. We are so eager to figure out what things mean that we ignore other things in the visual field. Makes sense if you are trying to avoid being eaten by a tiger or hit by a bus. But it works against you if you are trying to assemble a whole system–a visual image or arrangement of elements. Which is too bad, because the way things are put together is a critical part of what they mean. Hierarchies and contrasts can and should be seen independent of content–e.g., by squinting–because then and only then is it possible to see how formal relationships work. The tyrant cognition suppresses vision. If the king goes unchallenged, he will make mistakes.

At the top of this post: a classic example of such an error, aided and abetted by the pretending prince of the real, photography.

I took this photograph at a Phillips 66 gas station near my home. It's an oval-shaped sticker slapped on the gasoline pump, presumably printed in a run of thousands. It seeks to warn us of dangers associated with static electricity, though it doesn't exactly say that. Rather we receive two instructions: 1) touch some metal thing other than the pump before grabbing it, and 2) don't get back in the car after you've started, because that could produce undesirable electricity. If I don't do 1 or I do do 2, will I blow up? Not sure.

Of course, the dominant message is BE SAFE WHEN FUELING, which isn't so much an instruction as an exhortation. And the goof-ass centered type that rolls around the perimeter of the oval is hard to gather into a reading experience.

In short: the copywriting, design and typsetting are awful. But that's not why I noticed the sticker in the first place, nor why I whipped out my phone to "snap" (quaint verb) the photograph.

No, I documented the sticker because of the picture within the upper portion of the oval.

One day, following a planning session for Static Electricity Liability Week, whoever art directed this thing tapped a pencil against his head and said, "We need a picture of a hand putting gas in a car." Soon after that, such a photograph was produced, possibly by the very same art director, who in all likelihood was the one guy in the office who had used Photoshop. And because he knew that was what he had done, and because he could see the picture right there, he popped that photo into a semicircular hole and called that sucker done.

Alas. The fact is, he didn't really see the photograph. He looked at it, but he didn't see it. Because the visual image shows something that is considerably less than clear. At the left side of the image we see an arm/hand holding a metallic hose-looking thing. But halfway across the format, the form of the hand abuts a dark value mass. The dark mass has a few lighter passages, most notably an elliptical light spot that reads like a cartoon nose.

It takes sustained effort to make out that the dark mass consists of black and dark blue elements. Once we figure that out, we can reason our way to a conclusion that hand is holding a black nozzle, and the dark blue must be the side of a vehicle being fueled. But that's like perceiving a toad on the brown mottled ground. If we're not looking for it, we won't see it. (If the car had been light blue or tan or red, we'd have gotten separation between the parts of the visual field: arm/hand, hose, nozzle, car, non-stuff).

A safety message has been fatally undermined by a failure to contemplate how something looks independent of what it means. Which takes me back to my original point. You can't design if you can't stop thinking about what things mean, because then you can't focus on how things look.

Informational pictures must be lucid. There's much to be said about them, including how things can be broken into parts, how space can be manipulated, how contrast can be managed, how attributes of pictures and charts can be combined successfully as well as less so.

I have been writing on informational images since I started this blog. Because our students are at work on a problem that requires them to construct such things, I've assembled a set of prior posts below.

On the basic attributes of informational pictures, see my first post on the subject, from 2007. Here, a reflection on the pleasures of lucidity. Here some writing on maps as images, and representations of processes. On making informational images as a way to gather information, an account of star-watching in the Utah desert. And finally, a set of images that present data in comparable ways, from Matisse to Chrysler.

Spartan Holiday Wordmark

2011-10-14T01:18:00.004-05:00

A few months ago I posted on the topic of wordmarks for periodicals. At the time I was deep into the design process for my own project, Spartan Holiday. I have been loath to mention it, wanting to roll it out once the print copies were in hand. But I am in striking distance of finishing, and I have a splash page up at spartanholiday.com that I would like to show up on Google searches. At the moment, you get 300 spoofs and Christmastime at Michigan State.

There's much more to come. I am extremely excited about this project, which represents an integration of longstanding interests within a durable format. The identity was inspired by mid-century package design, and was a collaborative project between Scott Gericke and me. I'm working with Scott on the design standards for the journal, and pretty intensively on the first issue. I won't publish any images from the mag until it's out, but I can say that the image in the banner above is a crop from a page in No. 1.

The identity is designed as variable two-color system. The palette at the top is the Richard Petty version.

For now, do me a small favor and click over to Spartan Holiday to goose the search numbers as we near the release date (sometime in November). The page gives some sense of what we're up to. Thanks in advance for the click.

Sucks for Southern Europe

2011-10-14T01:09:00.004-05:00

Courtesy of one of my favorite blogs, Mondorama 2000. Somehow I suspect this would qualify as a negative event most everywhere: having a balled-up elephant the size of the former Yugoslavia land in precisely that place. Bottoms up!

Periodicals and the History of Illustration

2011-10-10T01:10:00.011-05:00

I am teaching a group of senior illustrators and cartoonists in the Communication Design major. The class, Visual Worlds, is really a methods course in drawing. A series of “diagnostic” problems, followed by a individual tutorials played out within a group. The critical question: how and under what circumstances do I, the student, put things together well? followed by a second: how does the answer to that question help me choose what to make and with which tools? and then a third: given all that, how shall I build a direction that I own?

One of the ways to get access to a student’s predilections involves seeing through their eyes, on the basis of what they collect. We ask them to build clip files of things they love, no matter what they are. It’s quite helpful: of all the images floating around in digital ether, which ones does the student choose? There are always clues to that student’s way of seeing embedded in that set, though typically they escape her understanding at first. (I am speaking especially of the pictorial carpentry, less than an editorial p.o.v. While the latter is important, it’s more obvious; the former is more technical and harder to see, but–strictly speaking–more useful.)

From whence do these images come? Nowadays, from the interwebs; typically via Google, which offers plenty to the poser of narrow questions, less to one pursuing broader ones. (Try entering “visual art” in a search engine and see what you get.) Plus, those images arrive sans context, sans grounding of any kind, a perfect postmodern blizzard of rootless pixels.

It requires at least some background to know what to search for, whether in a library or a on a search engine. These students have taken an art history survey and a required modern art course, plus other bits of this or that art historical period. On the basis of these experiences, they know zilch of the history of illustration and cartooning, save for a brush with Daumier. Some have taken my commercial modernism course, and have a basic familiarity with their tradition, but half have not, and don’t.

As these students’ primary visual concerns are beginning to emerge, it becomes increasingly important for them to have a cultural context. To which creative strands or traditions might they belong?

Which brings me to my problem: how to provide a history of illustration in an afternoon? To be clear, I am mostly disinclined to construct such a thing, as it threatens to devolve into poor man’s art history. The narrative of Significance and Influence sets up a frame for looking at artifacts that directs attention away from the cultural transaction. I have neither space nor time to develop that theme to an appropriate degree, so it will have to wait for another day. But in an underdeveloped field, it likely that a canon will be necessary, at least as a start. Yet I stressed to my students that even as I prepared to run them through a set of things that attach to Significant Practitioners, I did so doubtfully.

As a hedge–maybe better than that–I constructed the narrative as a tale of industry: American periodical publishing. For the geeks out there: can you write a (versus the) plausible narrative of American illustration using these seven magazine covers as data points?

We could do the same with a set of advertisements or book illustrations, which would make for interesting parallel problems. In any case, in my view it's folly to look at the history of illustration as a freestanding narrative of aesthetic achievement. Rather, these images occur at the intersection of technology, commerce and social history. Aesthetics is a small part of that equation.

Images: designer unknown, ornamental typographic cover design, St. Nicholas, November 1875 (the issue in which Howard Pyle's first published illustration appeared); Jessie Willcox Smith, Mother and Child with Easter Lily, cover illustration for Collier’s, 1904; F.X. Leyendecker (troubled brother of J.C.), The Flapper, cover illustration of Life Magazine, 1922; Norman Rockwell, The Double Take, cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post, March 1, 1941; Al Parker, Groucho Marx, cover illustration for TV Guide; April 27, 1957; George Lois, art director, Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian, cover photograph for Esquire, April 1968.

John Porcellino in Town

2011-10-03T10:32:00.010-05:00

This will be hurried. Although I will be unable to attend, I am pleased to say that the cartoon Dadaist/not-really-naif/visionary depressive/DIY pioneer John Porcellino will be appearing this evening at Subterranean Books, along with St. Louis' own Tim Lane. Porcellino created King-Cat Comix in the late 1980s pretty much with a felt-tip pen and a Xerox machine. I reproduced an early (if memory serves, the first) King-Cat page in Strips Toons and Bluesies. Though I have never met Mr. Porcellino, I admire his work, which helped establish an alternative way of being in the world as a cartoonist. He has written and drawn very perceptively on subtle topics. His new book, if I understand, is a comic-format interview with suicide attempt survivors.

The talk and book-signing will be at 7:00pm.

Students with an interest in writing, cartooning or text-image relationships: if at all possible, go to this!

There is much more to say about Tim Lane, too, but that deserves its own post. Below, the cover from his terrific visual essay for the Riverfront Times on St. Louis' homeless tent city.

Fantagraphics issued a big, thick compilation of King-Cat a few years ago. These images are taken from that volume.

Above, the endpapers for that book.

If anybody goes, please send me your impressions as a comment. I would love to hear about the event.

Jaleen Grove on Robert Weaver: Sept 29

2011-09-26T08:24:00.005-05:00

The discipline of art history has paid modest (scant?) attention to the history of illustration. For the most part, illustration is used as a backdrop: a cultural grounding and visual context for the real art. There's plenty to say about that. Unlike many I tend to see the ideological territory of non-art as quite interesting. Another day.

I'm pleased to say that one of the rising stars of illustration studies is coming to Washington University to speak this Thursday, September 29. Jaleen Grove is a doctoral candidate at SUNY Stonybrook, researching 20th century Canadian illustrators in the American print market as well as other topics. Jaleen has been active as an illustrator as well as an illustration historian, continuing a long tradition of practitioner-historian-theorists in the under-considered fields of cartooning and illustration. (See: examples from Frank King to Art Spiegelman to Seth, illustrated by the the Gasoline Alley strip below, which "cites" Winsor McCay's Little Nemo strip by convention.)

Jaleen will be speaking at Olin Library at 4:30pm this Thursday. (All of my students will be in attendance. Capiche?) Her topic will be the Robert Weaver show curated by Skye Lacerte that I mentioned last week. Anyone with a passing interest in illustration history in the St. Louis region should be there. Jaleen will address Weaver's thoughts on illustration versus fine art in the 1960s. Weaver was a passionate artist who embraced and thought clearly about illustration, yet resisted its ghettoization in visual culture.

Looking forward to seeing Jaleen, and to hearing her talk!

Images: Robert Weaver, spread from Brief Lives, circa 1970; Frank King, Gasoline Alley, circa 1920.

Sequential Narrative

2011-09-24T01:23:00.000-05:00

UPDATE: I have embedded a video in this post via vimeo. One of the machines I use in my studio is a lumbering, Pre-Columbian Power PC unit, on which I cannot install an up-to-date super-groovy Intel-based Flash video player. Please note that if you are using an older computer, you may encounter a blank space about halfway down this post, followed by a link to vimeo. Just follow the link to vimeo, then come on back to us.

ALSO, regular GT readers: it is unusual for me to address a post directly to students, as I do below, bypassing you. Please know that you are implicitly considered. Ultimately, we are all in the same boat.

Dear Seniors: since our session today was taken up entirely by critique, I was not able to screen some of the material I had planned to show.

As I indicated in the few minutes we had at the end of class, your next problem is the creation of a modestly-scaled visual story, to be delivered solely through images. That is, your story cannot have dialogue. You can't narrate it. We must be able to track what happens from frame to frame, panel to panel, beat to beat.

You are to deliver your narrative in either of two forms: a miniature film (iMovie is fine) or a sustained comic narrative. If you make the film, it should run 30 to 45 seconds; if the comic, a four-pager. But in either case, make it your own; turn the problem to your own ends.

Here are your prompts:

Jackpot
Elevator
Duel
Fishing
Eclipse

Choose one, define your action and get to work on a storyboard. Ultimately, these should provide a decent level of finish art, but we'll discuss that on a case-by-case basis, and after we're well underway. This will be a two week project.

Countdown - HD from Desrumaux Celine on Vimeo.

This film by French animator Céline Desrumaux recapitulates some of our received imagery for rocket launches. You've seen some of this before. But the image construction, intercutting and timing are lovely, and I show it here because it delivers a straightforward tale of preparation and payoff. We prepare the rocket, we prepare the astronauts, we launch. Finis. Although your project won't be nearly so long, the film provides an excellent example of what I'm asking you to produce: a wordless narrative. Audio makes a contribution, but primarily through pacing and atmosphere. If I turn the sound off, I still track the action.

And thanks to friend and colleague John Hendrix for tipping me off to Desrumaux's film.

I have written on cinematic storyboarding before. Review here if necessary. Remember: each "shot" performs one task.

Ms. Desrumaux cites Chris Ware as one of her influences, and it's possible to see the connection. But it had been my intention to show these pages from Acme Novelty Library No. 18 (2007 ) since I spent time with them last summer. These big, silent cinema pages punctuate denser, wordier sequences. They're narrative tone poems.

Have a productive week, and I'll see you Wednesday.

Drawing Lines––Robert Weaver at Olin LIbrary

2011-09-21T22:53:00.011-05:00

Our juniors are beginning a reportage project on Friday. For starters, we visited an exhibition curated by Skye Lacerte on the work of illustrator Robert Weaver, presented in the cases outside special collections in Olin Library (on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis). Documented here via several crappy iPhone photos.

Longtime readers of this blog know that Weaver's work lives in the Modern Graphic History Library at Washington University. I've written often about Weaver, whose work set the standard for an engaged–activist–journalistic illustration practice in the shifting editorial landscape of the late 1950s and 60s. Particularly relevant posts are viewable here and here.

Skye's exhibition does an excellent job of capturing Weaver's highly formal informality. She's also excavated some of the New York Magazine tearsheets for projects I hadn't seen in context.

There's a great deal more to be written, but for now suffice to say: a treat, and up through September 30. Stay tuned for a special event associated with the exhibition, planned for September 29...

Here, a glimpse of an extremely influential illustrator being influenced: the touch of Ben Shahn is quite apparent in this drawing, and in several other pieces, too.

Congratulations, Skye, on a great show!

Juniors, we'll be taking the train on our own urban explorations come Friday. Remember to pick up your Metrolink passes tomorrow!

Our friend Miroslav Sasek shows the way, from This is London (1959). It's important to stress as we begin that there are lots of ways to report from the world, not just Weaver's...

Letters, Words, Pictures

2011-09-07T12:32:00.014-05:00

Classes have resumed here in our little niche of the ivory tower. I'm teaching two studio courses this fall, same as a year ago: Word & Image 1, team taught with Heather Corcoran, and Visual Worlds: Image Development for Illustrators and Cartoonists, solo. To juniors and seniors, respectively, both courses for majors in the Communication Design area.

Our first project in W & I 1 involves the use of a single alphabetic character as a prompt, to generate a suite of images and letterforms in response. This pile of stuff becomes a data set of sorts, to draw from in the development of a second stage of the project. Last year, when Professor Corcoran was on leave, I posted some examples of letterforms for students (from my admittedly illustrative point-of-view). Heather has posted an excellent set of ABCs over at her blog, Corcoran for Design.

On Heather's suggestion, we added a wrinkle to the project this time out.

In addition to letters

and pictures

we're also asking for settings of words which begin with the assigned letter.

The words open up some fun territory.

Thinking about this led me to posters. Particularly, WPA posters. About a year ago I picked up a great book documenting WPA posters. I've been meaning to post on the subject for some time, but haven't quite gotten around to it. So I dug out some of the images we scanned for a rainy day, looking for examples that seemed relevant to this discussion. At the top, a theater poster for a marionette version of the Czech play (presumably in translation) R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots. Poster is probably 1943.

Then, one of a zillion WPA posters promoting national parks. The treatments of "National" and "Parks" caught my eye for present purposes.

I love this map, which acquires the status of an object and an abstraction, seemingly at once. The big rounded characters on the "travel guide" passage have an undeniable hand-lettered charm that seems to soften their art deco geometry. I'm also fond of the word "vacationist", which communicates a stronger sense of purpose, not to mention grace, than "vacationer".

The WPA posters shown above are reproduced in the book Posters for the People by Ennis Carter and Christopher DeNoon. I recommend it heartily. Meanwhile the project has acquired an online existence, including an inventory of more than 1500 WPA posters available in reproduction. I haven't explored the site--just found it while reminding myself of the book's authors--but it looks like a wonderful research tool. I'm away from my books at the moment so I don't have the caption information. I'll update this post later with as much detail as I can harvest from the book.

Ali Ferzat

2011-08-26T00:42:00.010-05:00

It's been a rough decade or so for cartoonists. The Danish cartoon riots of 2005 led to the deaths of more than 300 people. Several of the cartoonists for Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that commissioned the satirical drawings of the Prophet, were attacked; all were forced underground. Then Molly Norris, a Seattle cartoonist, came up with "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" (May 20, 2010) then dissociated herself from it. Credible death threats forced her–on the advice of the FBI–to change her name and drop out of sight.

Intolerant religionists had seemingly cornered the market on threatening cartoonists. Now word has come that Ali Ferzat–Syrian cartoonist, Arab cultural luminary, increasingly direct critic of the Bashir Assad regime–was abducted in Damascus by four goons and beaten within an inch of his life. His assailants made a special effort to break his hands.

Ferzat's work has long been widely syndicated in the Arab press. Recently he composed a cartoon which compared Assad to Col Kaddafi, the recently deposed Libyan dictator. That, apparently, was a drawing of a bridge too far.

I've posted several of Ferzat's editorial cartoons here. Above, "Reform Operation", a medical procedure with grisly results. (Click for a better view.)

The incident reminds me of an unhappy event in the life of Tilman Reimenschneider (1460-1531) a breathtakingly talented German woodcarver who built a career producing religious altarpieces. He developed Lutheran sympathies in the overheated atmosphere of the early Reformation.

When Reimenschnieder became a burgher of his town late in his career–a place in contested territory–he cast a vote which angered the Catholic hierarchy. Just like Ferzat, he too was badly beaten; special malevolence was reserved for his hands and fingers.

Quick recovery wishes to Mr. Ferzat. May he and his countrymen prevail over the badly isolated, increasingly monstrous Assad regime.

A Divine Project

2011-08-15T22:12:00.012-05:00

Seldom have I gone so long without posting. I've been busy working on several projects, and I made a fairly conscious decision to dial back the blogging in order to stay focused in the studio. Which I have, more or less.

I've spent a good bit of time this summer wrapping up a family project. My father, David Dowd Jr., is the oldest of three brothers. His brothers Jack and Jim came along next. When Jack passed away seven years ago my dad decided to produce a memorial to him.

Dad wrote a biographical appreciation and I art directed Jack Dowd: A Remembrance, a book that was distributed within the family. We printed about 30 copies. (I had a strong hand in Jack's project, but the book was really designed by a combination, sequentially, of Joe Sullivan and Amy Olert. They did a great job.)

David and Jack both attended the College of Wooster and the University of Michigan Law School. Jim, the youngest, went to Cornell. He ended up at Yale Divinity School and was ordained a Presbyterian pastor in the days before much of American Protestantism had dumbed down to present levels. Jim led a number of large churches, including the Church of the Covenant on University Circle in Cleveland and First Presbyterian in Urbana, Illinois.

It was concluded that Jack's book should have a companion on the shelf. The family developed a book project designed to highlight and preserve a set of Jim Dowd's sermons. Over time we whittled the number of sermons down to 20, to be accompanied by Jim's brief autobiography in the back of the book. I proposed to produce a spot illustration for every sermon, as well as the cover. (Of course I grossly underestimated how long that would actually take in the context of my other responsibilities.) Susie Ellsworth worked with me on the book.

The lovely type treatments in the book are all Susie. I wanted to have the lectionary passages appear on the page along with the sermon text, and she developed a very satisfying approach to that challenge. When life intervened and Susie relocated with the book 90% done, I muddled through with the expert guidance of colleague Heather Corcoran. My summer intern Dave Maupin worked the details and helped with production.
The basic creative problem was this: how do you organize a set of sermons? They're brief and dense, and are designed to be listened to, not read on a page. In a way, they're sort of like poems, in that you are likely to read only one or two at a time. Each sermon should feel like a new thing, and reward a brief encounter. The image above shows a sample first page for a sermon.

The illustrations had to respond to the stateliness of the Joanna type, but they also had to bring a little tooth, a little texture. I settled on a methodology of brush drawing in black ink, supported by tonal passages in grayish blue.
In Notes on the Book, a narrative colophon, I wrote that I've "long been inspired by my Uncle Jim’s work. From early in my life, his sermons established a standard for thoughtful, faithful preaching. On this project we have not sought to interpret his words. We designed a dramatic typesetting for the beginning of each sermon and selected concrete images to provide thematic cues for the reader."

The angel image at the top of this post is from a lovely piece of funerary statuary in historic Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. It turned out to be an extra illustration, so I used it for the colophon.

The book includes a number of chapters or groups of sermons. One of these is a series of sermons Jim gave on the beatitudes. On reflection, I chose to use a series of plants and flowers to cue the qualities Jesus lists as "the blesseds" in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:3-12. Jim and Betty helped identity a list of plants I sort of riffed off of, as I wanted to work from actual objects. (Jim's preaching is learned, but also concrete.) Betty proposed daisies for "Blessed are the Peacemakers", which I converted to mums, because I could find them in my supermarket's florist section.
Nothing like a straightforward challenge: make a two-color illustration of flower x. Be descriptive and engaging, but not cloying. I actually enjoyed making these quite a bit.

I'll post a few more illustrations from the project before long. As I swing into gear for the academic year, and the heavier blogging I tend to do for students...

July 20: A Red Letter Day!

2011-07-20T23:44:00.005-05:00

For many, the date of July 20 recollects the Apollo 11 moon landing, which took place in 1969. Neil Armstrong's famous "small steps for a man, a giant leap for mankind" occurred six hours later, on the 21st according to Greenwich Mean Time. I remember staying up late for the landing, but it must have been the moonwalk, which in the Eastern United States would have taken place between 10 and 11 pm. I was seven-and-a-half.

Personally speaking, the bigger significance of July 20 dates to 1932, which is my mother's birthday. She turned 79 today, and remains a vital, even formidable presence in an understated way.

Above, her wedding day in 1953. She still looks like this, if a little gray; the smile is just the same. Ideally, I'd show a picture from earlier in her life. I sorely wish I had a copy of a particular photograph taken when she was a girl. It reveals her to be the cutest little girl in the history of little girls. She's standing with her dad Cy, mom Olive and sister Judy on the docks in Fort Lauderdale (or Boca Raton, I can't remember) with a giant fish. The old man is grinning over the catch, Olive is stylishly deflecting, and smiling Joyce Carol Bevan is an electric little thing.

In the absence of that photograph, here's a differently notable image (and an index of how topsy-turvy things were in 1932): the March issue of Fortune with a cover illustration by Diego Rivera, of Red Square no less! I got this cover in an antique store in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. (Based on the prices I've seen online, I did well.) In the brittle politics of today, this is utterly unimaginable.

Here's hoping that her day has been out of this world. Happy birthday, Mom! Keep exploring!

Images: Moon Explorer, tin toy by Yonezawa, 1960s; and Capsule 6, tin toy by Masudaya, 1960s; both photographs by Yukio Shimizu, reproduced in Robots, Spaceships and Other Tin Toys, Taschen, 2006 (first edition 1996).

Bizarre Visual Artifact of the Week

2011-06-23T19:27:00.006-05:00

Here's a moment in advertising history that beggars belief. Behold, gracing a Coca-Cola advertisement in the Ladies Home Journal: Stonewall Jackson pausing for a moment of refreshment. 1931. I kid you not. In this sesquicentennial year of the Civil War, here's some evidence of the domestication of that conflict, then seventy years after the fact. The romance of the Lost Cause, with a little soda pop to wash it down. Holy Crap.

(My memory of this image includes the copy below, curiously cut off in this particular scan. I'll dig it up--the copy only makes it weirder. The two-color printing [red and green!] is something else, too.)

Check out the soda jerk's hands in the strip on the right edge of the format. An extremely strange spatial discontinuity, seemingly just tossed off.

That would be a super-groovy device when James Rosenquist used it in Pop Art paintings thirty years later. Advertising is the research and development arm of modern visual culture.

Haddon Sundblom developed a great many memorable adverstising images, chief among them the Santa Claus Coca-Cola ads. According to the company website, Sundblom was signed to work on Coke campaigns in '31, so the genre scene from the War of Northern Aggression would have one of his earliest projects for them. (It may come as a surprise, but I did not find Stonewall Jackson on the Coca-Cola site. And yes, I know that Coca-Cola is based in Atlanta.)

And of course, Sundblom had a birthday on the 22nd of June (1899-1976). Which would be yesterday. Still running a teensy bit behind.

Images: Haddon Sundblom, Stonewall Jackson on the march...ready for a fresh start after a short rest period, Coca-Cola ad, Ladies Home Journal, October 1931; James Rosenquist, I Love You With My Ford, 1961; Haddon Sundblom, For Sparkling Holidays, Coca-Cola ad, circa 1935.

Rockwell Kent

2011-06-22T18:15:00.014-05:00

I am working up to a series of posts on the neglected subject of the history of illustration. I'm toiling away on a diverse set of projects at the moment–excited about 'em all–so can't guarantee the timeliness of those posts, but I'm thinking about it quite a bit.

Last week I hit on the idea of using birthdays to prod me to post bits of things here and there. I flagged Flagg on this basis (see previous post).

Next up on the calendar is the ever-surprising Rockwell Kent. The engraver-painter-writer-political agitator entered the world on the summer solstice, or yesterday. To be specific, June 21, 1882. (See what I mean about timeliness?)

I won't attempt to encapsulate the career, which was a complicated affair. But his book illustrations played a big part in that career, including having a hand in Moby-Dick's re-emergence in American letters.

A few years ago I picked up an estate sale copy of Kent's Paul Bunyan, which features full-page illustrations. But the initial caps he created for the chapter beginnings are really something. On the spectrum between letter form and picture they hang out decidedly toward the latter.

There are a ton of them, and some strain to be understood. But the best of them are fabulous, including the "S" shown above.

They're ingenious, and appropriate to the content.

When I imagine having to design and execute these things, it makes me tired. Thinking them up sounds fun, but banging them out must have been a chore!

Visually speaking I have tended to associate Paul Bunyan with the Disney short of the same name, primarly due to the backgrounds, some by the great Eyvind Earle. This slide courtesy of Dave Maupin, a student in my Commercial Modernism class last semester who's also interning for me this summer. So Dave dug out the Disney slide for a research report last April, and also scanned some of these Rockwell Kent images less than a week ago. I have the Bunyan short on a DVD. As I recall the short is a bit boring, but a great deal of fun to look at. Maybe we'll dig it out this summer and get some screen caps.

Here's another Earle background from that film.

More to come...

Images: Rockwell Kent, selected illustrations and initial capitals, Paul Bunyan, by Esther Shepard and designed by Rockwell Kent, Harcourt Brace, 1924; Kent, Early November: North Greenland, oil on canvas, 1933; Eyvind Earle, backgrounds for Paul Bunyan, animated short, Walt Disney Studios, 1958.

James Montgomery Flagg Turns 134

2011-06-18T21:29:00.018-05:00

James Montgomery Flagg was born on this day in 1877 in Pelham Manor, New York. Flagg drew from the moment he'd left his crib, and by the age of fifteen had joined the staff of Judge Magazine, for whom he worked for many years, while doing a great many other things as well. Above, Flagg horsing around with a studio aid of sorts. Somehow funny and creepy at the same time, the picture captures his rakish temperament.

Flagg's early work made use of the high contrast vocabulary of pen and ink, made possible by photoengraving technology in the era just after the technical regime of wood engraving.

Flagg mimicked Charles Dana Gibson, ten years his senior, until he'd outgrown the influence. But like Gibson, Flagg traded in images of lovely ladies–the hotties of the aughts, as it were. Presumably his consort above is a nod to his reputation.

I can remember someone saying "She's a dish," in reference to a comely woman, but this would seem rather literal, wouldn't it? For the time, this is pretty racy stuff.

I got these images from an oversize album of pictures published by Judge in 1907. Presumably these were all reprints from the magazine, which after a sputtering start in the 1880s was doing quite well in the first decade of the 20th century. Flagg's work figures prominently in the book.

As Flagg matured, so did the technical innovation of the half-tone screen. Halftones made it possible to photograph a piece of source art–say, an inkwash drawing–and reproduce those tones mechanically, by shooting through a screen or scrim which separated tonal passages into dots of greater and lesser densities. A big deal, that, as it eliminated the tradesman who otherwise would have had to manage that translation.

Here are a series of details to show increasing levels of magnification.

The inkwash drawing from which this image was reproduced relies on gestural strokes that remain quite visible in the halftone version. Flagg was a bravura paint-flicker, sort of a pop version of John Singer Sargent.

These screens were an improvement on early commercial versions in the 1890s, though they still hadn't gotten to the point of being able to reproduce the hottest whites photomechanically.

Hence the light gray tone which overlays the entire image.

James Montgomery Flagg is best remembered for his propaganda posters from World War One, including the instantaneous visual cliche, Uncle Sam wants YOU for the U.S. Army (which had been published on July 6, 1916–with a different caption–on the cover of Leslie's Weekly). Above, a poster from 1917.

These images represent a small slice of Flagg's diverse and voluminous output. He's worthy of further study.

But in the meantime: Happy Birthday, Monty Flagg.

Images: James Montgomery Flagg with female dummy, photograph, published by Bain News Service, April 26, 1913, from the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress; Flagg, Kitty Cobb, pen and ink, 1912; Flagg, Good Enough to Eat, inkwash reprinted in "Yours Truly" and 100 Other Original Drawings, published by Judge Company, 1908; Flagg, Woman (who looks like a young Angela Lansbury), 1902; series of halftone screen details; Flagg, Civilization Calls Every Man, Woman and Child, World War One recruitment poster, 1917;

Serials & Wordmarks

2011-06-08T16:29:00.032-05:00

I have been talking with a friend and collaborator about a project.

The discussion has included an appreciation of wordmarks that announce publications, especially serials. How does a magazine or a comic or other serial make and then keep a promise to its readers? The answer of course is both verbal and visual, in a number of ways. But from the earliest moment, the wordmark is part of the implicit contract.

Since I look at comics and pulp covers and magazines pretty often to begin with, these are obvious sources.

I’m also attracted to particular corporate logotypes, especially from the pre-international style period.

Package designs, too, especially one- and two-color jobs: soda bottles, caps, matchbooks, ashtrays, etc.

There’s much to be said for classical simplicity: the mark that works in a single color, again and again and again.

A Vogue Turkey cover, courtesy of coverjunkie.

But there’s also fun to be had with variable color, especially as a way of creating variety in the context of continuity. Crime Does Not Pay, a classic of the genre, helped inspire a backlash against such comics in the mid 1950s.

Holiday Magazine used a single color wordmark, except when it didn’t.

These two George Giusti covers, seven years apart, use an alternating two-color palette that responds to the rest of the cover.
I used a variation of this approach on the Ulcer City logotype, modified here for publishing purposes.

Another variation, using variable color and typographic vocabularies, by the great Olle Eskell.

Chris Ware draws and designs with a unified sensibility. Above, a typographic flourish from a Rusty Brown narrative from 2006.

I bought the book because of the cover, in a bookstore in Moab, Utah that no longer exists. (I was just there, and made a beeline for the store, but it had been replaced by a "Old-Time Photography" studio. Arrgh.) The design and production reference debossed, richly colored book covers from the Childcraft series.

The original Childcraft covers are totally killer artifacts. White, blue and black inks stamped on red leather. ("Leather.")

Of course Alex Steinweiss belongs in this conversation, even though his album cover designs were, by definition, one-offs; they had to make a visual promise that somehow connected to the music on the recording. In this particular case I’m focused on the visual unit of the clarinet and the word “Mozart,” including, especially, the secondary level of internal articulation on the instrument, with the contrast level expertly controlled.

The cruder pulp cover workmarks have their charms. I love the Super Science mark from the top of this post. The Rangeland Romance mark brings a little less to the party. But the vernacular energy of the pulps is undeniable. Typically they feel composed by sign-painters, not designers.

I admire both, the folk version and the professional; intuitively I work to fuse them in my own projects.

The pulps and adventure comics are truest to the spirit of the serial, as a cultural matter. The saga. Finally, two last examples.

A theatrical serial, born on the comics pages, transplanted onto movie screens: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. (A little grandiloquent?!)

And of course, the hand-drawn wordmark for Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates.

Images: Designer unknown, Super Science wordmark, A Popular Publication, 1943; Robert O. Reid, cover illustration, Collier's, August 3, 1940; designer unknown, wordmark for Zenith Radio, circa 1925; designer unknown, bottle cap designs, Ritz Grapefruit and Jurk Lemon soda, mid-twentieth century; designer unattributed (though somebody has to know this–a little help?), Vogue Magazine wordmark; Cuneyt Akeroglu, cover photograph, Vogue Turkey, 2010; designer unknown, wordmark for Lev Gleason’s Crime Does Not Pay, early 1950s, with various color treatments; George Giusti, cover designs for Holiday Magazine, 1957 and 1965, respectively; D.B. Dowd and Melanie Reinert, Ulcer City wordmark, 2004, modified 2009; Olle Eskell, Mord i Pingst wordmark, 1953; Chris Ware, wordmark for Rusty Brown, from Acme Novelty Library, 2006; Ware, cover design for the Acme Novelty Library based on midcentury Childcraft book covers, 2006; Milo Winter (speculative), cover design for Childcraft Books Volume 14, Science and Industry, Field Enterprises, 1949; Alex Steinweiss, Mozart: Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in A Major, record jacket design, Columbia Records, 1947; designer unknown, wordmark for Rangeland Romance, a Popular Publication, January 1948; designer unknown, title slate, Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, Universal Pictures, 1940, based on Alex Raymond's adventure strip Flash Gordon; finally, Milton Caniff, wordmark for Terry and the Pirates, 1944 (that is, this particular strip is 1944; an earlier form of the mark appeared in 1934, when the strip debuted).

Memorial Day

2011-05-30T22:23:00.003-05:00

Last year on Memorial Day I went with my wife Lori to visit the Jefferson Barracks Cemetery in South St. Louis, where 182,000 American soldiers have been buried since the Civil War. I made a variety of drawings, few of which turned out, but the day served as a worthwhile scouting session. Some day I'll go back with a camera and a sketchbook, and something more significant will come of it.

A funny thing: in almost all cases, I make useful things on the second or third trip to a given location, and very rarely the first. Fact is, my experience of the place is more important than what it looks like, even though the latter matters plenty.

The drawing at the top of this post was made as folding chairs and the full complement of state flags were being taken down, after the ceremony.

More soon.

Benefits of the Back Row

2011-05-28T13:45:00.002-05:00

Commencement took place a week ago, marking the end of the academic year. My colleague Stan Strembicki snapped this photograph of me as I plugged away at a New York Times crossword (it was a Tuesday puzzle, which made it doable) during the conferring of degrees. I do not know the woman on the left, who is a faculty member elsewhere in the university.

For the record, I paid attention during the speeches, including the address by Elie Wiesel, which I enjoyed, though he was intermittently difficult to hear.

I have not blogged in some time, and have acquired a backlog of material in the meantime. I pledge to post with some regularity in coming days and weeks, just to whittle the pile, and to get a few things off my chest.

Have a lovely Memorial Day weekend.

Oh Sallie!

2011-04-28T14:36:00.003-05:00

Quiet lately. Today I gave the final exam in my Commercial Modernism class. I asked three bonus questions, one of which was, "Who was Sallie Gardner?"

As this image reveals, Sallie Gardner was a subject of Eadward Muybridge's famous high speed photography session which proved that all four of a horse's hooves leave the ground at the same time at a gallop.

That is, Sallie was a horse.

I showed the slide and included it in a pdf of that day's lecture, but it's hardly surprising if noboby noticed the horse's name. We'll see if anybody got it right when I grade the exam...

Stony Saints, in Copenhagen

2011-04-09T23:19:00.009-05:00

Several weeks ago, over spring break I traveled to Copenhagen to look at a study abroad program at the Danish Institute of Foreign Study. A totally charming city; an impressive organization. I have every intention of returning. The Danes enjoyed their Renaissance in the late 16th century, while the rest of Europe was ripping itself apart in the religious wars which characterized that unhappy century. The exuberance of the southern Baroque seems tempered by reforming restraint, producing an admirable architectural equipoise which nonetheless (here and there) erupts into giddiness. More on that some other time.

My colleague Belinda Lee and I spent a few hours walking the city one day, early on stopping in the Cathedral of Copenhagen, a Lutheran outfit. The Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) presents a severe exterior, fronted by a Doric temple facade. The nave of that church is lined on both sides by larger-than-life statues of the apostles. Belinda and I each had brought sketch pads, which we promptly whipped out and put to use while a magnificent pipe organ rehearsal accompanied us. A wonderful interlude.

The only drawing instrument I could find in my bag was a ball-point pen, hardly a favored tool. I adapted.

My sketchbook was a hand-made affair, produced by my former student Molly Brooks, who had very kindly sent me several of them a few months before. I love the size, small, which fits in my jacket pocket easily and lends itself to drawing and making notes onsite.

I scanned a few of the drawings I made that day. Gospel writers and disciples. Thanks, Molly, for the excellent sketchbook!

Grocery Game

2011-04-07T21:32:00.003-05:00

My fellow estate sale stalker Linda Solovic scored a crazy grocery store board game a few weeks ago. She was kind enough give me these cards, which are the size of postage stamps: tiny little things. I post them here for the edification of all.

Colorful Comic Detective

2011-04-07T00:18:00.017-05:00

I am up to my eyeballs in curriculum reform and other academic duties, but I am chugging along in the classroom (and in the studio, if in a holding pattern sort of way for the next few weeks). My Commercial Modernism course has moved into cartooning and animation, which provides a nice complement to the history of illustration.

The digital projector bulb in my classroom is an underperformer, shall we say. Vivid colors sour into dark patches. Vexing. Hence I'm using this format to show a set of stills from Warren Beatty's film Dick Tracy (1990), which is characterized by nothing if not vivid color. The palette of the film is extremely self-conscious, an explicit attempt to capture the garish signature of the Sunday supplement in days of yore.

The film also makes use of highly schematic spatial compositions, juxtaposing a figurative pairing in the middle ground with an object in extreme close up.

These cinematic devices dominate the experience of watching the film, which is visually engaging but emotionally distant. A certain methodism dogs the project. Nonetheless I am fond of it.

Beatty honors the spirit of the strip in many ways, including a loving assembly of Gould's crazy ensemble of villains. For example, The Brow (above, in a strip; below, played by Chuck Hicks)

and Flattop, in a strip

and in the film, played by William Forsythe.

My affections are tied to the ghastly-goofy foam rubber villain makeup. I love these guys for three reasons: 1) they bring campy pre-digital physicality to the film, 2) they embody the crypto-moral imagination of Chester Gould, the comic strip's creator, and 3) fine actors inhabit them, including Al Pacino, the late Paul Sorvino, Dustin Hoffman, and others. Below, Little Face (Lawrence Steven Myers). Toward the top of this post, Pruneface (R.G. Armstrong).

Litigation pitting Beatty against the Tribune Company (owners of the Chicago Trib; the LA Times; and Tribune Media Services, the syndicate that distributed Gould's strip) was only recently concluded. Tribune had claimed that Beatty did not jump through the proper hoops to retain rights to the character for a long-planned sequel.

Recent press reports show that late last month, Beatty won.

Will the crime-fighting Man in the Yellow Hat return? Given Tracy's durability as a character and a property, the answer is almost certainly yes, whether or not Beatty is involved...

The Travel Agent

2011-03-29T08:23:00.004-05:00

This one, a self-portrait from the discarded set of prints that preceded Mohicanland. As if I were a giant kid playing with airplanes. Which seems reasonable enough. How 'bout that phone? Also recovered from "the basement tapes," or my magic flat files. Also printed by Betsy Ruppa. 1995.

Kevin, Meet Myron

2011-03-28T07:51:00.009-05:00

Spent some of my weekend trying to clear the clutter out of my studio. I'd taken a bunch of stuff out of flat files to reach something a few weeks ago, and had never gotten back to it. I had, in part, an archival challenge: putting things back with a little more forethought than the last time I dealt with my flat files, when we moved into the house, now about 16 months ago.

In the process I came across a set of prints I made years ago, in a first pass at the project that became Mohicanland. I finished three of these and had a fourth underway when I decided that both the palette and the pictorial logic were wrong for the project. The yellow for Mohicanland went ochre, as opposed to this fairly screaming yellow-orange, and the characters were presented in a more simplified, almost cartoon sort of way.

My old friend Kevin Garber sat for Myron. I miss the pair, Kevin and Kathy, who took off for parts east a few years ago, and seem happy. Kevin's new work, wooden signal flags, is reminiscent of his love affair with wooden boats, circa 1986 or 87, as well as the beautiful sport of barroom tabletop shuffleboard.

I had forgotten how observed these portraits were, especially this one. Truth be told, I had forgotten that this print existed at all.

Likewise I did not recall my nearly scholastic investment in these calligraphic passages and brush marks, visible in a detail.

These prints date to 1995. The sentence which includes "I am an exile from my own biography" was the first uttterance of the project. I wrote it in a ruled composition book while camping out for coffee at a Greek restaurant in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1994.

Tonight I'm thinking of Kevin and Kathy, as well as Mike Javernick, Patrick Renschen and my old printer pal Betsy Ruppa, all of whom enjoyed hanging out in our group studio in the Leather Trades Building in St. Louis during those years.

Betsy printed these images, the only explanation for the excellent registration...

Rhetorical Pictures

2011-03-26T08:27:00.009-05:00

It’s been quiet in this space the last few weeks. Work and travel have slowed me down. The business of the day is conceptual illustration. Our Word & Image 2 class is at work on an editorial project, based on an Economist article from last week on the possible effects of North African Turmoil on oil prices and the world economy.

As I was suggesting yesterday morning in class, the problem is really a rhetorical one. How can figurative devices be used to create visual ideas, as opposed to verbal ones?

These things are easier to show than explain, so here are a few examples. At the top of this post, Brian Cronin solves the problem of diabetes by using a visual pun of the bite mark to double things up. As the diner consumes his unhealthy food, he himself is consumed.

Above, a classic from the great-granddady of them all: Thomas Nast. The virulently anti-catholic Nast fuses a bishop’s mitre and alligator jaws to produce an ecclesiastical menace in the American River Ganges. He found a similarity of form and built a potent metaphor from it.

Next, a Craig Frazier illustration designed to communicate an increase in power. A simple scale shift (rhetorically, hyperbole) produces a striking contrast and potent image. We absorb the image as an idea, not a seascape.

And David Suter, a mainstay of the Times op-ed page in recent years, offers an elegant image from the days after 9-11, accompanying an op-ed by then-president George W. Bush. I suspect that the illustration will survive the text. (“Freedom” is one of those words nearly ruined by stentorian employment in the intervening years.)

Here’s a typographic solution: Christoph Niemann’s Risk builds a picture out of dimensional letterforms to dramatic effect.

Finally, an offering of my own, from some years back. The phrase “boots on the ground” literalized into an image. (Technically, this employs synecdoche, the use of a part for a whole.) I’m not particularly good at this work myself. I don’t pursue it, preferring reportage to pictorial metaphor-making. But it’s a great discipline, and an admirable craft.

Class, have at it. I’m already looking forward to Monday!

Images: Brian Cronin, 2002; Thomas Nast, 1876; Craig Frazier, 2002; David Suter, 2001; Christoph Niemann, 2004; D.B. Dowd, 2003.

Pump It Up

2011-03-08T21:45:00.009-06:00

Visual Geekdom, Chapter 99: I love wooden puzzles of the sort designed and manufactured by Playskool and Sifo during the middle decades of the 20th century. My friend and colleague Linda Solovic tracked this one down for me as a 50th birthday present late last year. Linda has a nose for these things, and a sure sense of my taste, closely related to hers, but heavier on boy items, like vehicles.

I love this thing: the color, the beautifully controlled value progression, the play of edge and line, the chunky but self-aware drawing.

Linda sniffed out the Lotto game I posted about last fall, too. (Below.)

The Playskool garage puzzle suggests a relationship with one of my heroes, the redoubtable Stuart Davis. I am thinking of the edge/line investigation especially, but the puzzle also puts me in mind of the painter's seeming fixation with gasoline pumps in many of his works from the 1930s. New York–Paris No.3 (1931) provides an example.

Note the gas pumps center–left. Quite vertical, attenuated profile, ball or fattened disk shape on top (I remember these, vaguely, from the end of that era.) A detail of the left pump:

Now, a comparison with the wooden puzzle gasoline pumps:

Squatter, to be sure, but the glass globes (the round things that say "gas") are emphasized. Here's an example of a milk-glass globe from an estate in Oklahoma.

Anyway, I love my Playskool puzzle. Thanks, Linda!

The Colonel Gets the Boot?

2011-03-01T21:51:00.004-06:00

A quickie follow-up to the other day's musings about visual (and audiovisual) reportage from the Civil War on, which cited Al Jazeera English coverage about the Libyan revolt. I pulled this off a February 28 Huffington Post story about the opposition to Gaddafi. I could not find a photographer credit, nor one for the cartoonist-painter. Love the foot sticking out of Libya, not unlike the "foot" of a mollusk emerging from its shell. Of course the booting shoe signals deep contempt in this context, echoing the shaking of shoes at the despot's latest unhinged rant. The only citation available is that teeny little "AP" lower right.

Solid work. Love the juxtaposition of the quasi-modeled yellow-orange blast with the more calligraphic line and flat color. As an object, an unusual instance of a muralist's cartoon. (Vaguely reminiscent of passages in Orozco's Dartmouth murals, commented upon here.)

If anybody sees a photo or cartoonist's credit for this work, please let me know.

Visual News of the World: Flaneur No. 2

2011-02-27T21:55:00.013-06:00

UPDATED February 28.

My last post on Baudelaire and his reflections on Guys the illustrator as observer-reporter left off at the Spanish-American War. The turn of the 20th century coincides with widespread adoption of the halftone screen as a method for photo-mechanically rendering a continuous tone image for reproduction purposes. Practically speaking, this development brought an end to the era of the illustrator as reporter. Once it became possible to print photographic images at low cost and high speed, illustrators would not again be needed as visual stenographers.

Reportage drawing would not die out, however; it would shift in emphasis, intriguingly so. That's for another time.

But today I'm interested in what happened, culturally and technologically, to the visual news-of-the-world.

In Alfred Waud's day, Harper's or the London Illustrated News provided the technological means and the cultural frame for presenting visual reportage. A wood-engraved translation of the drawing below, of wounded soldiers at the Battle of the Wilderness threatened by a burning forest, was presented to the reading public in May 1864. The authority of the publication and the authority of the image were mutually reinforcing.

In subsequent decades, new technologies of production and display would provide new temporal and spatial contexts for consumers of news. World War Two newsreels were viewed in movie theaters. Castle Films' U.S. Carrier Fights for Life, about "Carrier X" (the U.S.S. Yorktown) did much the same job as an Alfred Waud field sketch in Harper's from the American Civil War, except that the newsreel adds the elements sound and motion. (A video file of the whole reel is available here) The attack on the ship by Japanese bombers feels quite immediate; I imagine it would have been distressing to watch at the time. The first half of 1942 was rough in the Pacific; people sitting in those theater seats would have been eager for good news. As it happened, the Yorktown survived the attack but was sunk in the Battle of Midway a few months later (in an otherwise decisive victory for American forces.)

The script for the newsreel reads a little like overheated sportswriting:

An enemy plane is spotted swooping down on the mighty flattop. Anti-aircraft guns mark their warning, but the Nipponese airman throws caution to the wind. There's a hit on the afterdeck, port side. A bomb blasts through...Under clouds of black smoke, two Jap planes dive to a smoldering, watery end... As another dawn breaks through the tropical skies, Carrier X again gives battle. Again the Japs swoop down from the clouds, again our anti-aircraft guns pepper the sky with tracer bullets, each carrying bad news for the invaders...Uncle Sam's gunners are straight shooters. The Japs find that out in this fight to the finish.

The newsreel brought propaganda-inflected reportage to the public space of movie theaters in the World War Two era. Military censors shielded the public from the most ghastly combat images. The newsreels simultaneously provided a technologically current format for updates and a device to keep people focused on the task at hand, which was winning the war. Twenty years later, television brought the Civil Rights struggle and the Vietnam War into people's living rooms. The medium of television moved at new speeds. In part for this reason, in Vietnam the press was able to play an editorial role which challenged authority of the government.

Cable TV accelerated the reach and pace of broadcast news coverage in the 1990s.

Today, events in North Africa are adding a new chapter to the story. Accounts from Libya suggest that the footprint of the Gaddafi regime has shrunk to areas in and around Tripoli.

Consider the cultural frame provided by the image at the top of this post, a screen shot from a broadcast segment on Al Jazeera English posted to YouTube. This is the already-classic Gaddafi rant from the golf cart with the umbrella. The AJE report goes on to note that the rant has been bracketed by footage from what looks like a Libyan Lawrence Welk hour (directly above) utterly unconnected from the ongoing collapse of the regime. Ponder the frame-within-a-frame conceit of Libyan State TV showing a governmental absurdity, self-consciously [and disapprovingly] bracketed by AJE, subsequently bracketed by YouTube.

An aside: how about that guy in the yellow suit? Has he misplaced his hat? Is he looking for a curious monkey?

Images: Citations forthcoming.

Flaneurs @War No. 1

2011-02-24T14:38:00.034-06:00

Today in Commercial Modernism we explored shifting cultural and technological frames for visual reportage. Civil War illustrator-correspondent Alfred Waud produced onsite sketches close to the action. Above, a Waud sketch from the first day at Gettysburg, on brown paper in pencil with Chinese white. Waud also produced written accounts to support the illustrations he sent back to the shop:

CULPEPPER, Friday, September 18. Your artist was the only person connected with newspapers permitted to go upon the recent advance to the Rapidan. An order of General Meade’s sent all the reporters back. It was a very wet and uncomfortable trip part of the time. I did not get dry for two days; and was shot at into the bargain, at Raccoon Ford, where I unconsciously left the cover and became a target for about twenty of the sharpshooters...

Above, Waud captures a cavalry unit on reconnaissance at Raccoon Ford. His written account (cited above and below) and the wood engraved translation of his sketch appeared in the October 3, 1863 edition of Harper’s.

The caption below the illustration reads, “Army of the Potomac–General Buford Attacked the Enemy at Raccoon Ford, September 14, 1863–Sketched by A. R. Waud.”

On Sunday, September 13, 1863, soon after our troops advanced from the Rappahannock, they became engaged with the enemy....General Buford made an attack to unmask their force at Raccoon Ford, while another cavalry division was doing the same at Somerville Ford; since which time shelling and sharp-shooting has been constantly kept up on the river banks. General Custer charged right up a hill to the enemy's battery, taking three guns and a number of artillerymen...

The cannon group that dominates the sketch appears bottom left on the printed page.

Wars and conflicts generally mean good business for publications and outlets like these. Above, an auspicious launch for DianShiZhai Huabao, a Shanghai pictorial (previously discussed) which in its first issue (1884) describes a battle in the Sino-French War, then raging; a matter of pronounced public interest.

The Japanese version of war "reportage" wedded the international vogue for illustrated newspapering with the craft tradition of Ukioy-e woodcuts to produce dramatic images of naval battles in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. (When in Shanghai looking through pictorial coverage in FeiYingGe Huabao for 1895, I was curious to see if that conflict–a disaster for China–showed up in its pages. A cursory review suggested no. But I did not have the chance to look through DSZHB in search of the same information.)

The class had been assigned Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life as a reading. That essay, written in 1860 and published in 1863, pairs nicely with Manet's Olympia (1863), as the painting captures the frank engagement with the present for which the poet called, and was experienced as such an affront to the civilizing pretensions of art.

But Baudelaire's putative subject was the unnamed illustrator Constantin Guys, who did significant work for the London Illustrated News, particularly in Crimea. The essayist is less concerned with military reportage than with the immediacy and the evanescence of a cultural moment. Of Guys he writes:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd: For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world–such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito...

"Any man," he said one day, in the course of one of those conversations which he illumines with burning glance and evocative gesture, "any man who is not crushed by one of those griefs whose nature is too real not to monopolize all his capacities, and who can yet be bored in the heart of the multitude, is a blockhead! a blockhead! and I despise him!"

This imperative–to engage what is, who is, how things look–suggests journalistic output. But other modes emerged, too. There are connections to be drawn between American illustrators and American painter-reporters of the Ashcan School, for example in the person of William Glackens. Glackens traveled to Cuba to cover the Spanish American War for McClure's in 1898; later he focused on his painting career, but not without an editorial edge. The Shoppers (1907) above, suggests a point of view on the Gilded Age.

John Sloan, another of the Ashcan Clan, worked for Philadelphia papers but painted New York.

Sloan's political interests led him to work as the art director at The Masses, a socialist publication. His Ludlow Massacre cover is among his best known works.

But let's come back to Baudelaire and Guys. Baudelaire credits the illustrator with prodigious powers of observation, thoroughly attuned to his modern moment.

By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. Every old master has had his own modernity; the great majority of fine portraits that have come down to us from former generations are clothed in the costume of their own period...This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with.

Toward the end of class we posed questions of our own period. What would the Constantin Guys of our time notice? Which customs and costumes, which artifacts, what speech, what ways of holding oneself, which contemporary textures, would our illustrator note and record? The beginning of that discussion focused particularly on technology: its manifestations and uses. Such an observation might have credibly been offered in any of the last 100 years. Which technology, what manifestations, and which influences upon contemporary life?

Secondly: what's behind the half-and-half formulation of the now and the ancient, the "contingent" versus the "immutable"? How shall we parse that equation in today's terms?

I invite comment on these questions. With more time to reflect, what do you really think about this? What might be the difference between a superficial answer–iPhones!–versus a more searching one?

Presently, a second installment which extends the technological and cultural dimensions of our discussion of visual reporting, from Alfred Waud to YouTube.

Images: Alfred Waud, Attack of the Louisiana Tigers on a Battery of the 11th Corps at Gettysburg, (July 1, 1863) ink and Chinese white on brown paper; Waud, Reconnoisance [sic.] by Buford’s Calvary Towards the Rapidan River, ink and china white on brown paper; Waud, Army of the Potomac–General Buford Attacked the Enemy at Raccoon Ford, September 14, 1863, wood engraving in Harper’s Weekly, October 3, 1863; Wu Youru, Forceful Attack at Bac Ninh, DSZHB No. 1, 1884; Nakamura Shuko, Great Japanese Naval Victory off Haiyang Island, woodblock print, 1894; Edouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1863; Constantin Guys, Reviewing the Regiment, inkwash illustration, n.d.; William Glackens, The Shoppers, oil on canvas, 1907; William Glackens, Loading Horses on the Transports at Port Tampa, Inkwash and Chinese white, field sketch on assignment for McClure’s Magazine, 1898; John Sloan, McSorley's Bar, oil on canvas, 1912; John Sloan, Ludlow Massacre, magazine cover for The Masses, June 1914.

Trippy Shanghai

2011-02-22T23:56:00.008-06:00

I'm struggling to find the time to catalog my experience in Shanghai last month, in both w0rd and image. Working on drawings, paintings and textual notations; confident of a good product in coming months, but also desirous of capturing the experience in parallel forms, too. I shoot photographs for a variety of purposes, as I have reflected previously. January in Shanghai in a cold winter–high 30s Fahrenheit, unheated buildings, people in 9 layers of clothing, visible breath indoors–is not, to say the least, an ideal environment for onsite drawing, not to mention the gawk factor of the +6 footer redhead thing–heightened my reliance on photography as a recording tool.

These photographs were all taken on a cold-ass night along the Bund, the European-inflected promenade in Shanghai, captured in art deco architecture, which gazes across the Huangpu River at Pudong, formerly an encampment of whorehouses and poverty, razed circa 1990 and replaced by Jetsons architecture and a Disney sensibility, most prominently captured by the Pearl TV Tower, shown at the top of this post in poor focus. (Diagram that sentence.) Somehow the blur captured the weirdness better than proper pictures.

What a crazy place. The river traffic on the Huangpu, especially for a denizen of St. Louis, suggested a 21st century Huck Finn view of China, barges three abreast in both directions, replaced after dark by wacky sightseeing boats wrapped in neon.

The spectacle of buildings-as-screens (Indy cars and tropical fish zoomed and swam, respectively, across this building, alternating with bizarre, infantilizing graphic elements like the happy symbol-TV shown here, 40 or 60 stories tall) stupefies in two senses: as pure advanced opticality, and a contrast with underwear and blankets draped over clotheslines to dry on city streets. A common spectacle of a different sort altogether. Again, a crazy place...

Malady de Schnozz

2011-02-21T22:25:00.008-06:00

Woke up today with approximately six pounds of snot in my noggin. Kapow! a head cold. Have been blowing my nose for hours on end; a reddened schnozz, with heightened self-awareness of same. Geppetto lurks.

Did the only sensible thing. Got home from work (and a cardiologist's appointment following) and prepared a martini the size of a four door sedan. Thinking of you, Dino!

Images: Walt Disney Studios, Pinocchio, 1940; Dean Martin and (I think) Eve Meyer in Artists and Models, Frank Tashlin, director, 1955. Someday I'll write more about A & M as well as Tashlin; I am an aficionado of both, though the former is largely unwatchable for stretches.

St. Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T19:21:00.008-06:00

Today's New York Times features a cupid-themed Op-Art by Ji Lee. Seeing it reminded me of a project I started a few years back but never got around to finishing: a deck of fortune telling cards based on a Whitman Publishing product from 1936. (My deck was to be a contemporified version, designed for iPhone distribution. I kicked it around with some friends, but we didn't manage to find the right combination of people, time and expertise.) Anyway, it was ton of fun to come up with ideas for cards and design them. This cupid card was one of my favorites, a riff on the original.

Ji Lee's cupids are a witty bunch.

Since romance is in the air, I thought I'd salute an affair to remember: Bugs Bunny in drag with a credulous Elmer Fudd in the Warner Brothers short "Rabbit Seasoning" (1952).

Finally, a discreet shot of the valentine I made for my wife last night. (Those are her hands.) A little gouache on the black paper Arches uses to cover fresh watercolor blocks. Honestly, the handmade valentine thing never gets old...

Science Problem

2011-02-14T01:30:00.006-06:00

I have assigned a dream project in Word & Image 2: design-slash-illustrate a pictorial display to accompany an explanation of a scientific concept to young people. I say "dream project" because it combines picture-making with serious visual thinking: from my perspective, fun as can be.

As promised, here's an example. This picture accompanies a text in The Question and Answer Book of Everyday Science, crisply and thoughtfully written by Ruth A. Sonneborn with terrific illustrations by Robert J. Lee. (Random House, 1961.) These things are so smart. Agreeable, clear, well-selected strategies for what to show and what to let the text do.

Here’s the copy:

Where does electricity come from?

Electricity for your house comes to you from a big power station. In the power station there is a huge piece of machinery called a generator. And inside the generator is an electromagnet. This is an iron core with wires which coil around it but do not touch it.

In a circle around the magnet–but also not touching it–there are other coils of wire. Power, usually from steam or falling water, makes the electromagnet whirl rapidly inside the coil. And this produces electricity, electric current in the outer circle of wire.

The electric current flows from the generator into cables that run sometimes underground and sometimes high up on poles. They carry the current everywhere it is needed. A special cable brings it into your house. When you flip a light switch or turn on your television set, you bring the electric current into your room.

Note that Lee does not bother with the electromagnet, which would be too much. He goes for a gestalt view of landscape with stuff in it. He chooses falling water as the power source and shows the power lines above ground. Both of which lend themselves to display. He shows the generator and the house as insets. Judicious use of labels, too.

A related note: for geeky informational pictures with a certain je ne sais quois, check out Mondorama 2000. Kooky-great illustrations from French encyclopedias, circa 1970. The headline for this image is Equipement de protection individuel.

Notes on Platemaking and Printing

2011-02-10T23:58:00.012-06:00

I am teaching a course called Commercial Modernism in America 1865-1965 this semester. It’s a class I first offered two years ago, and I’m happy to be back at it, tinkering with the content, materials and readings.

Today in class we explored the history of platemaking and printing technologies in the West between 1450 to 1850. In platemaking we covered woodcut, metal engraving, etching, and wood engraving; in printing we examined relief and intaglio printing processes. And then we ran out of time.

If the course and the history just described seem like a mismatch, it's a warm up for thinking about the industrial production of popular materials.

Before I pick up the narrative, I’d like to stress again how important these technologies are to understanding how prints look, the speed and volume at which they could be produced, and the uses to which they were put. It never hurts to be reminded that the central significance of printed pictures in human history has precious little to do with art and aesthetics, and much to do with the dissemination of valuable information: botanical, mechanical and cultural. For a bracing review of important developments with a strong point of view, consult grumpy old William M. Ivins Jr.’s excellent book, How Prints Look, issued by Harvard in the mid-fifties and reprinted by MIT more recently.

I mentioned the problem of optical gray as it presents itself to the printmaker. You get one color of ink–black–but you have to make it look like several different values of gray. It’s a density problem.

This print of the martyrdom of St. Erasmus provides naught but contour lines. The black works like a linear fence, dividing up a field of white. (Most unpleasant way to go, having one’s intestines spooled out by a crank.)

By contrast, this detail from an Albrecht Dürer Apocalypse woodcut shows white and black shapes collaborating to establish optical tones when viewed from further back. The red rectangle highlights the area shown a greater magnification below.

The closer you get, the more analytical and abstract it gets.

I mentioned the problem of translation. In both of the prints above the draw-er and the cutter are different people. That makes for more jobs, but it interposes a layer in the process, too. The visual middleman isn’t actually the problem; it’s the step itself. How to produce a printed picture that preserves the initial mark? Secondly, how to produce an optical gray that’s less analytical?

I mentioned the important figure of Thomas Bewicke, who figured out how to flip a plank on its end to get a far harder end-grain block, thereby launching the wood engraving boom of the nineteenth century. But at almost exactly the same time, Alois Senefelder made the unlikely discovery that a particular grade of Bavarian limestone was equally receptive to both grease and water, leading directly to the magic of lithography.

Recall, class, that both relief and intaglio printing methods rely on a system of divots in a plane: the ink goes on top in relief, and gets smashed below, into the divots, for intaglio. These methods are called physiographic, because they rely on physical relationships.

Lithography is a different affair altogether. Lithography (literally, stone picture) depends upon chemical relationships. Specifically, it uses the mutual antipathy of grease and water to create ink-loving areas and ink-repelling areas. Lithography is a planographic process, because everything happens on the same plane.

The Daumier lithograph below showcases the tonal range and sense of touch that the medium supports.

To produce a lithograph, an illustrator draws on a stone slab with a grease crayon or pencil. The stone surface has a slight tooth, to which particles of the pigmented grease adhere. By using light pressure, the illustrator produces a light gray passage with a velvety surface; by using gradually more pressure, she fills the spaces between the tooth. This is still an optical gray, in so far as white and black spots in close quarters produce it. Washes are possible in lithography; in that case the dispersal of pigment in solution creates the tone. Once the drawing is finished, the stone is sensitized to ink and water through the use of gum arabic and asphaltum.

Significantly, lithography is an autographic process; it does not require a translating step by a cutter or engraver, as do woodcut and wood engraving. The mark you make is the mark you get.

Finally, between 1800 and 1900 wood engraving and increasingly photomechanical platemaking processes for letterpress (relief) printing were the dominant matrixes for industrial scale printing in black and white. Chromolithography (multi-stone color images) was used for color printing and packaging, especially high-end stuff. (See chickens above.)

Scores of variations on platemaking emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, about which another day.

Combined with what we covered in class, this should prepare you to look at the printed samples at Olin Library Special Collections next Tuesday. This will be but our first installment of platemaking and printing in this course. See you then!

Images: The Sion Textile, North Italian (probably Venetian) woodcut on linen depicting the Legend of Oedipus, oldest extant printed textile in Europe, second half of the 14th century; The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, an unattributed early German woodcut, likely Bavaria, 1400-1450; Albrecht Dürer, details from Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, woodcut, circa 1497-98; Honoré Daumier, Les 100 Robert Macaire, lithograph, 1838; illustrator uncredited, Hühner (Chicken Breeds), Meyers Lexicon, 1894

Is You Is or Is You Ain't my Artwork

2011-02-09T17:16:00.017-06:00

I was trained as a fine artist, which necessitates using a malingering modifier–fine–for purely conventional purposes. This term retains its meaning, despite the fact that it seems like a Beaux-Arts anachronism, as tired as plaster casts of Greek statuary. Ideologically speaking, I dislike the term, and the view of culture it propounds. Especially inasmuch as it aligns itself with a vaguely progressive view of human affairs, according to which all persons move toward greater self-realization and just rewards for their labors. Yet such rewards, often taking the form of simple credit, routinely do not accrue to producers of meaner cultural works. I speak generally of the decorative, industrial and communication arts, but especially graphic works in popular circulation. I’ve opined on this before. The Robert O. Reid illustration below was a subject of such a discussion.

This state of affairs prevails because, according to habits of mind in high cultural precincts, such works are not made by individual people, but rather by “the culture.” Which legitimizes their theft sans attribution. Money is a different subject, into which I shall not wander.
Case in point: the drastically different fates of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic panel paintings, and the printed materials from which they were largely copied. The former have been subject to inflationary bloat for some time, while the latter have been systematically de-emphasized–effectively suppressed–by otherwise freedom-loving officialdom d’art.

The detective work performed by David Barsalou has shown the clear relationship between comic book panel designs by Irv Nowick, Jack Kirby, et. al on the one hand, and on the other, Lichtenstein’s large scale copies of them presented as his own. Sure, we can call this the cutting edge of appropriation circa 1962, but show me the justification for failing to credit the blatant and by now firmly established relationship between them.

Thankfully, Barsalou has been on the case for some time now. He’s tracked down hundreds of panels and matched them with Lichtenstein’s copies. His work has gotten a bump in attention in the last few weeks on comics blogs. Brian Childs provides a roundup at Comics Alliance, including a snippet from kirbymuseum.org that–stunningly–describes a historical relationship between Irv Novick and Roy Lichtenstein.

Matt Duarte picks up the thread at Weekly Crisis, and provides an account of a visit to the Tate Modern, where Lichtenstein’s WHAAM–a copy of Novick’s original panel–hangs. I’ve posted Duarte’s photo of the painting in situ.

The New York Times provided another angle of vision on this discussion just last week. Judith H. Dobrzynsky’s article on the newly re-installed American Indian galleries at the Denver Art Museum explores a fascinating parallel. I am a fan of this museum, particularly its American Indian collections. (The departmental structure of museum itself presents a fascinating set of taxonomic questions, but that’s for another day.) The article focused on the curatorial work of Nancy Blomberg, who I interviewed several years ago on a research trip for a book I’m working on. Blomberg and her colleagues have re-contextualized works previously designated only by tribe with artist’s credits when possible, and Anonymous when not.

Dobrzynsky writes of the installation, “For the first time many of the works on display are attributed to individual artists instead of just their tribes. It is a revolution in museum practice that many scholars hope will spread, raising the stature of American Indian artists and elevating their work from the category of artifacts to the more exalted realm of art.”

Aaarrrrrgh!

I applaud the attribution, for exactly the reasons outlined above. An overdue adjustment, by any stretch. But the goal ought not be the fabulous power of Art. Our aim should be a fulsome multidimensional reflection on humans and what they produce. I am unenthusiastic about “elevating” items into “exalted realm of art.” For God's sake, people, lose the vertical axis! All things that people make are artifacts. The categorical exemption that works of art effectively enjoy from this reality is not to be extended or expanded, but shrunk!

A line-up of selected works on the Denver Art Museum website chosen to represent the collection raises a question or two. The annotations do not include dates, and the dread word "masterpiece" makes an appearance. Temporal reality still matters. Beware the dangers of over-correction. (The DAM site includes a stern warning about image use. Below, a drawing I made in their galleries in the summer of 2008. Never inked it. But I might yet.)

To think about an object contextually–how was it used, by whom, how much did it cost, how was it distributed, how was it made?–is to think about things in a social world. You can ask these questions of paintings just as you can ask them of Northwest Indian masks or comic books. Or amalgams of all three (see top).

Whatever else they are, paintings by blue-chip artists are high-end retail products. Lichtenstein’s estate is no friend of David Barsalou, because quotations of authorless comics are less a threat to prestige–and price structures–than panels by identifiable people. On the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation WHAAM page, the very comic is cited, but without a creator. Robert Kanigher, the editor shows up. But Irv went poof.

I suspect that Irv's revenge will come in future decades. When it does it will probably take the form of deflated values.

But beware claims of singular genius in the source material, too. The comic book business was–is–a workshop industry. Ever since Siegel and Shuster sued over the rights to Superman, the division of labor between writers and artists, pencilers and inkers and letterers, has made ownership a matter of diffusion, aesthetically as well as legally. The company owned the intellectual property; the team owned the bragging rights. In a way, Lichtenstein’s theft of these images just makes the circle a little larger.

Finally, I think I’d like to start a stupid contest. Who can find the goofiest claim for a work of art? I can’t very well enter my own contest, but I can provide an example. I set this aside when I first read it because I thought it represented a monumental misreading of material facts. In last September 23’s New York Times, Roberta Smith (an interesting critic when looking at the right art) wrote the following in a review of Lichtenstein’s drawings:

Lichtenstein’s art forms an ode to the Americana of comic books and commercial art, but it has about it a brisk cosmopolitanism that is also New York at its most New York, which is in the fall. The closest analogy may be musical: the songs of Broadway composers like Cole Porter, which radiate the energy of vernacular language being put in perfect working order.

So: Cole Porter wrote Autumn in New York? Wait, no, that was Vernon Duke! I guess Cole reinscribed the melody on a new sheet of paper, just a lot bigger.

Images: Janet Smalley, Southwest American Indian paper dolls, Jack and Jill Magazine, August 1950; Robert O. Reid, periodical illustration, circa 1940; Irv Novick, air combat comic panel, All-American Men at War #89, January-February 1962; Roy Lichtenstein, WHAAM, magna on canvas, 1963, photograph by Matt Duarte, 2010(?); D.B. Dowd, Northwest American Indian Gallery, Denver Art Museum, pencil drawing on sketchbook spread, 2008; Joe Shuster, cover illustration, Action Comics #22, March 1940.

News From Abroad: Trainwreck!

2011-02-01T22:51:00.007-06:00

Struggling, a little, to get caught up and squared away with the new semester and current projects. But a word on Shanghai and my curatorial exploits.

I traveled to China for two reasons, professionally speaking: 1) to investigate the reportage drawing tradition in that country, especially as it relates to journalism, as the term is commonly understood, and 2) to draw and photograph in expectation of producing the first issue of a new serial I will begin publishing this year, called Spartan Holiday.

My curiosity about the illustrated press in China emerges from a subject interest, not an independently cultural one, which is to say that I had not been a student of Chinese civilization prior to my preparation for this trip. I don’t speak or read Mandarin, not by a long shot (though my son Danny is an avid student of the language). My move, then, was lateral, pursuing a subject interest across geographical and temporal borders. I am at work on an international exhibition project called Drawing Conclusions: The Illustrator as Reporter, projected for 2014. (Details to follow another time, but contact me if you have an interest in the subject.)

Relevant Shanghai historical narrative, to the extent that I have been able to understand it: the late Qing dynasty (1644-1912) was beset by serious problems, including encroaching European powers–the British Empire, primarily–and an insurrection of stupefying scale, the Taiping Rebellion. (In an example of the differences of scale in things Chinese from a Western perspective, the Taiping Rebellion is estimated to have cost 20 to 30 million lives. In the 19th century.) The first Opium War–the unhappy resolution of which contributed to abovementioned paroxysm–pitted China against the British, who practiced a particularly vehement form of free-traderism which lay at the heart of the matter. (Imagine Mexico launching a war against the United States to preserve the cocaine trade, despite the illegality of the product north of the border.) The war lasted from 1839 to 1842; the locals lost. The Treaty of Nanjing forced an unpleasant settlement on the Chinese, who agreed to open five ports and grant foreign settlement rights to the British. Subsequent arrangements of this kind were made with other foreign powers, including France, Japan, and the United States. (Somehow the Germans played a role, too, but I’m sketchy on that.)

Below, a shot of the Bund, a promenade with impressive-looking European buildings that runs along the Huangpu River (and looks across at the architectural Disneyland of Pudong).

These settlements, known as “concessions,” were defined as extraterritorial districts: they were, in effect, gigantic embassies, each with its own police force and court system. However galling to the Chinese, the system bore fruit of a kind: an emerging commercial culture transformed Shanghai from a provincial place into a thriving international city, and in effect helped to launch Chinese modernity from that spot.

The Japanese invasion in 1937 was the beginning of the end for the European presence in Shanghai.

A savvy set of Brits led by one Ernest Major created a partnership to enter the printing and publishing business. In 1872 the group commenced publication of a Chinese daily newspaper, Shenbao. Major ran the operation, and seems to have been a genuine admirer of Chinese culture. He hired Chinese reporters, editors, illustrators and printers. The paper did well, and subsequently in 1884–after a few experiments–Shenbao launched an illustrated supplement, Dianshizhai Huabao. Huabao has been translated as “Pictorial.”

My curatorial work in China involved tracking down a run of DSZHB as well as a second pictorial, Feiyingge Huabao. The image just above shows a bound set of the full run of DSZHB at a teahouse owned by the collector who'd bought them from the dealer who became my intercessor. Got that?

I’ll write about these pictorials, and the process of gaining access to them, in a coming post. Below, a characteristic image of the pictorial news from the huabaos: a visual description of a trainwreck, reported to have occurred in America.

Illustration by Wu Youru, the most able and prolific of the artists associated with the pictorials in the late Qing. Feiyingge Huabao. September 1890. A detail of this image is shown at the top of the post. Note the contrasting visual languages of traditional Chinese painting and wood engraved illustrations of the London Illustrated News and its ilk.

Through the Looking-Glass: China

2011-01-21T11:10:00.005-06:00

Last night I returned from two and a half weeks in Shanghai, where I was conducting research.

I would have posted earlier, but The Great Firewall blocks all blogs published on blogspot.com. My attempts to access the site were marked by long delays followed by a "page has been reset" message, which suggests to the user in country that the problem is on the other end. Clever; the censorship is concealed by apparent foreign incompetence.

It was a fascinating experience. More to come.

Above, a shot from inside the twelfth century Beisi Pagoda, in Suzhou.

Happy New Year, Folks!

2010-12-31T23:51:00.004-06:00

Minutes before the end of the year. It would have been nice to write some annual wrap-up, but it wasn't in the cards. It's been a good year, and I'm especially fired up for the coming one. I will be otherwise occupied for much of January 2011, but will be back with words and pictures soon enough. In the meantime, Happy New Year from the man who gave us the New Year's Baby, J.C. Leyendecker!

0.5 Centuries

2010-12-17T14:20:00.004-06:00

Turned 50 yesterday. A friend with an iPhone (equipped with groovy new app called Pocketbooth) snapped some pics of the wif et moi. I had hoped to draw a self-portrait yesterday to celebrate, but no time. This works for now, especially since she's way cuter than me.

Got the northern mammal beard growing in for winter. Settling in with a little Vince Guaraldi and a sweater...

November Contest

2010-12-09T10:20:00.004-06:00

Last week I went back to an old sketchbook to find something to use for a demonstration drawing for juniors on the properties of gouache. Found a pencil from a November 2008 high school football game between Clayton and Jennings. I think it was the final game of the season. My friend Kenny Shapiro is holding the down marker.

Operator? Operator!

2010-12-08T01:24:00.002-06:00

Went to the Cherokee Print Sale last weekend and purchased this excellent Dan Zettwoch comic, explaining the inner workings and intramural scams of the AT&T (then Bell) plant in Louisville, Kentucky. Had jonesed this item online at Dan's blog. Typical Zettwoch: loaded to the gills with information, with characterization and setting to satisfy all comers. Written by his Dad. Love the cover. Printed on a punchcard from the plant in question.

I was in Louisville recently. (Swam in a meet.) Believe it or not, there is a facility in the city called the KFC YUM! Center. Wow. Really. Really.

We Could Name Heroes

2010-12-06T09:19:00.019-06:00

The other day, I posed the following question to a group of senior students: What is your tribe?

Response: puzzlement.

I was not asking for affiliations by blood. Nor did I seek the name of a cult.

I went on to explain thusly: in about six months, you will no longer be surrounded by people who are exactly your age, who hail from your social class, who are interested in all the same things you are. There will no longer be a group of professional experts who are paid to be interested in you. You will be on your own, and you will have to construct meaning from your own resources until you find or construct another community.
How will you sustain yourself? I asked. Where will you find nourishment?

If you aspire to be a producer of culture, you must also be a passionate participant in it. But culture is a big word. We plug into it selectively, in accordance with our own predilections. In the age of the interwebs, you can find digital encampments of many varieties. At the heart of my question, however, lives something deeper. I am really asking: To whom will you turn? This is not the same as With whom will you chat? Whose tweets will you follow?

Typically, the people to whom I turn are dead. Meaning: museums and libraries are sources of nourishment, too. And you can belong to a tradition, an approach, a certain variety of impatience, and be sustained by it.

I think about influences quite a bit. There are many people I admire. Many came up in my last post: Milt Caniff, DS Martin, Harry Beckhoff. Add Al Parker. On reflection, however, I recognize that what I admire about all four is draftsmanship and a sense of design. Important stuff, but not quite on the level of the tribe, as I see it. My attachment to their work isn’t tied to content; in three out of the four, my attachment formed despite the content of their work. Milt Caniff made up adventure stories for newspaper readers; Beckhoff drew fiction illustrations of guys in suits and statuesque women--drawing room scenes, mostly; Al Parker did fiction work for romance stories. All three transcend their material, Parker especially, but they’re still attached to it. (DSM drew Jazz musicians and did his bit to establish the territory of the album cover; sturdier somehow, and plenty honorable.)

Yet when I ask where are my deepest connections--who, maybe I should phrase it, are my heroes?–I get a different set of people.

I have come to realize that all of my most significant work engages the social landscape in some basic way. Many of my major projects have all been about places: Mustardville, Mohicanland, Starkdale. (Gallery for same here.) The project I am preparing for 2011 is a cousin to these. Even when the places have been fictional, they’ve all been grounded in observation. I mean that physically and culturally. (I am a cultural empiricist!)

Three artists who come to mind immediately for me: Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Philip Guston (1913-1980) and Robert Weaver (1924-1994). All were readers of social landscapes, if in wildly different ways. Davis integrated cubism, commercial design and the American scene, forging a language grounded in observation and based on form. Guston built a circular career that began in the WPA, moved into the refinement of abstract expressionism, and culminated in a grubby embrace of the everyday. And Robert Weaver drove the journalistic imperative in American illustration from the mid 1950s into the 1980s. I have presented lots of Weaver in this space before, notably, here and here.

In addition, I feel substantial connections to certain interpretive artists: the jazz singer Cassandra Wilson comes to mind. The interpretive question is a fascinating one, for another day.

I identify with the novelist Richard Ford, another social landscapist, and his novel The Sportswriter.

The topic deserves more writing and thought, but this is not the format for it. For the benefit of demonstration for my puzzled seniors: over the course of writing this miniature essay, I think I might have named my tribe: social landscapists. For me, the social landscape is built out of human artifacts.

I did not know that, exactly, when I started to type. Which is why writing is an important act, even for artists.

Images: Stuart Davis, Variation on Little Giant Still Life, 1964; D.B. Dowd, Frances Yvette! Plate No. 4 from Cry Mustardville, 1995; Philip Guston, Gliders, circa 1943; Guston, Friend–To M.F., 1978; Guston, Pyramid and Shoe, 1977; Dowd, Elk in Cityscape, animation still, Scenes from Starkdale, Ohio, 2006; Davis, The Paris Bit, 1959; Davis, Egg Beater No. 5, 1930; Jimmy Katz, Cassandra Wilson, photograph, 2002; design credit unavailable, Vintage Contemporaries cover design for The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford; Dowd, So Pump it Yourself, from Visit Mohicanland, 200o.

Key Plates, Key Figures, Key Questions

2010-12-01T21:14:00.026-06:00

I have been trying to get this post written for days. It's grown to sprawling size, but the content is relevant for several audiences. It covers the Beaux-Arts drawing hangover, the relevance of printing as a way to look at the act of drawing, and questions of visual handling in figurative work.

Recent efforts in the classroom have been focused on staging. My last post mentioned the problem of verbs; anybody who shows up in a narrative illustration had better have one. Energy has been devoted to "directing" the scene in question. Many thumbnails; many workups of those sketches into more informative drawings. It's striking how many students will try to freight such images with extra information or bonus complexity, when composing and executing a well-considered figurative group is hard enough, thank you very much. And deeply satisfying when brought off, too.

Below, one of Harry Beckhoff's legendarily teeny but shockingly informative thumbnails. Scan courtesy of Roger Reed at Illustration House in New York, where I once ogled a stack of these. Believe it or not, this drawing is about the size of large postage stamp.

But enough of the prepping; on to the problem of realizing those figures. Which brings us to a conversation about drawing. Once we've figured out what we want to make, how are we to make it? It might seem like a funny question. The issues in play matter a lot. At least to me. Three-plus years ago, in one of my first posts in this blog, I wrote:

I have taught a lot of beginning drawing in my career. One of the most basic precepts of Beaux-Arts drawing study involves close observation of the thing at hand, often a nude model. It is axiomatic that one draws what one sees in this setting, and for good reason—learning how to look at something for what it really is, not what one imagines or remembers it to be, requires perception-altering doggedness. As a byproduct, the student often retains an unspoken authoritarian dictum to obey a monocular point of view on all things. That is, 1) if I can’t see it from here, it must not exist, 2) if I can see it, I must draw it, and 3) all true drawings are made with charcoal or conte crayon.

These dicta often persist, as educational afterimages. They float before the composer and narrow her choices. So charcoal pops up as a likely media choice, because the student has experience with it, and also because it bears the imprimatur of an approved art material. In practice, charcoal means tonal drawing. Light. Volume. The simulated immanence of painting, delivered in monochrome. Which calls to mind images like this one, a Fredric Gruger illustration from 1930.

But arguably the signature element of drawing–tied to its ancient roots in symbolic communication and proto-writing–is line, not tone. The history of printing certainly captures the yes/no (mark/not mark) of drawing, heightened through technological transferrence. Woodcut and relief printing (see top of post) isolate this phenomenon, which is as old as pictograms and petroglyphs.

Printing provides a handy entry point to thinking about drawing in such contexts. In a color printing job (four-color process [CMYK] or multiplate spot color work) there is a thing known as the key plate. The key plate is printed black or the darkest color of a given palette. Before the key plate is printed, the image does not cohere: it's an indistinct mass. The last color pulls it all together and provides the visual structure.

Here's an example from a commercial printing manual published in 1922. The two color duotype features an orange pass and a black one, with the black exposure burned back a little to let the orange breathe through the finished print.

In drawn imagery the key plate comes from a key drawing. That is, the visual architecture is built from line and shape in black or other dark color. A particularly good place to isolate key drawings is in comics. Below, a daily strip of Milt Caniff's Terry and the Pirates. As a daily, the strip had to succeed in black and white; only the Sunday strips were printed in color. Notice the heavy use of black shape to ground the sequence formally.

Below, a single frame taken from a Sunday strip of the same period. Still plenty of black. But the color adds a great deal, both to our spatial understanding and the narrative: the shadowed Japanese are close to us, in hiding, dark; the ambushed Yankees are walking through the light, fatally exposed. The flying hat is a nice touch. The killers get their comeuppance the following week, through an ingenious American ruse.

In comics, key drawings can be tyrannical. Their control of shape and color can be total. Consider the David Stone Martin album cover below.

Have a good look. Now, consider the image as juxtaposed with the Caniff panel.

The two images use the same palette: black, blue, yellow. Both aspire to capture light and shadow through the temperature of the palette. But the Caniff is dominated by the black (and owes something to film noir visual techniques). By contrast, the DSM feels bathed in light and space. But for the moment, the crucial passage that captures the play of light in the album cover is the direct access afforded yellow to blue in the shadowed head of the waiting trumpeter. That is, no black line has been asked to chaperone yellow and blue; their edges meet in an evocative transition. This only works because everywhere else, black line is used to establish contours. The passage is unique in the drawing (though repeated in the type ROY).

Okay, I'll admit it: I'm a formalist geek. I can get huge satisfaction out of passages like the one I just pointed out, and the comparisons which can be made between one approach and another. I love how things look, and I get a thrill when a recognition of same is conveyed by simple graphic means. In this case, rough, knowing elegance.

We've established the relevance of a key drawing for work of this kind. If the key drawing provides a graphic container for visual contents, we are free to see the image in radically two-dimensional form. We need not be concerned with questions of volume or light unless they provide opportunities: illusion is less important than clarity of communication. Which takes me back to another bit from that early post at GT:

One must often take a plastic approach to spatial construction and the arrangement of form. (I am sometimes asked what I teach: the best, simplest answer I can give is “Advanced Pictionary.”) But it can take forever to retrain the mind to get past the Beaux-Arts drawing thing, even as the echo of that observational rigor retains its value. Making things up out of thin air typically produces maddening levels of vagueness (not ambiguity, a different thing altogether); dutifully rendering a subject generally yields a snoozeable result. But the integration of observation with a willingness to manipulate as required or desired offers real opportunity...

Which brings us directly to questions of style. Above and below I've posted details from a piece of concept art for the UPA feature The Four Poster, directed by John Hubley in 1952. The concept work was by Lew Keller, an unjustly obscure, excellent production designer. (Other work by Keller viewable here on the blog Cartoon Modern, in support of the wonderful book of the same name.) The drawing works to communicate character, setting and atmosphere. Its casual handling can mask just how informative the image is. Each character is sharply drawn, even when minimal. The drawing betrays knowledge of gesture, weight, mass, and volume, even as it abbreviates. It is exactly this abbreviation (e.g., the male dancer's feet, above) that characterizes the best cartooning. Such work amounts to a distillation of knowledge, which is greatly to be distinguished from vamping to fill its absence. Look at the woman with the shot glass below. Hers a precise characterization–girlish and haggard at once. The secondary tone is applied as a gestural support–not slavish, but not willful either.

Recently I mentioned the work of Lowell Hess, a cartoonist and illustrator who worked in a variety of contexts in the mid-twentieth century. For the two-color dimension of the work at hand (speaking to you, juniors), Hess uses a blend of key drawing and spot color to deliver his fundamental form. Hence the poison gun, hair ribbon and apron are all defined by an orange edge. Here too there is abbreviation and distillation.

Below, the endlessly stylish Harry Beckhoff, converting one of his microscopic thumbnails into a comic tableau for Collier's. Here again, style emerges from the distillation of knowledge, matched to an eye and hand and brain.

Another album cover by David Stone Martin, one of the great calligraphic draftsmen of all time. Look at the control of line weight, density, and flat black shapes! What character and rhythm. An essay on density. The only odd note being that goofy numeral 2 in the lower left corner. Would have preferred another typographic counterpoint, as in the JAM and SESSION at top.

Finally, a few samples from the work of Rea Irvin, the graphic sophisticate who gave us Eustace Tilley, the New Yorker magazine dandy. These are book illustrations from Snoot if You Must, a compilation of comic essays by Lucius Beebe. These drawings are supported by tonal passages of screentone dots, which create an optical gray value from black ink. We're close enough to this one to see the actual dots. The composition would not cohere without them.

And one more, with an atmospheric use of that screen tone.

All of the preceding images operate on the principle of a key drawing. None of them use "shading," a naive term for the application of value to show volume. All use drawing styles that tend toward simplification and abbreviation, in the manner of cartoons. And all of them would be acceptable approaches for realizing the junior illustration problem. Which is to say: the use of reference and the acquisition of knowledge do not determine approach. The needs of the picture and the goals and sensibilities of the maker do.

Images: Mass of St. Gregory, hand-colored woodcut; South German, 1420-1430; Harry Beckhoff, Thumbnail Sketch, magazine illustration circa 1940; Frederic Gruger, Saturday Evening Post, December 13, 1930; Moab Man, Fremont Culture Petroglyph, circa 1000 CE, Moab, Utah, photograph by DB Dowd, 2008; Explanation of Duotype, Commercial Engraving and Printing; A Manual of Practical Instruction, by Charles Hackleman, published by Commercial Engraving Publishing Company, Indianapolis; Milton Caniff, Terry and the Pirates, daily comic strip, November 22, 1937; Caniff, Terry, single panel from Sunday strip published on September 10, 1944; David Stone Martin, Roy Eldridge Collates, album cover illustration, Mercury/Clef Records, 1952; Lew Keller, Concept Art, The Four Poster, United Productions of America, directed by John Hubley, 1952; Lowell Hess, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Bug! interior magazine spread illustration, Every Woman Magazine, 1961; Harry Beckhoff, Slowly the Clawlike Blades Closed Over the Package of Cigarettes, interior magazine illustration, Collier's, January 29, 1938; Martin, Jam Session #2, album cover illustration, Mercury/Clef Records, 1953 (?); Rea Irvin, book illustrations from Snoot If You Must, by Lucius Beebe; D. Appleton-Century Company, New York. 1943.

What's My Verb?

2010-11-18T15:50:00.006-06:00

Tomorrow I head over to the Modern Graphic History Library with my juniors to look at periodical illustration. We're doing so as background to the Two-Color Figurative Suite project. A wonderful, challenging problem. How do you arrange figures to tell a story?

On Monday we cleared out a big space in the room and "directed" scenes with students as actors: a sentry stopping would-be pedestrians; two women at a bar, one of them tipsy and flirting with the barkeep, the other trying to get her out of there; a trial and a jury box. We spent a lot of time talking about verbs. Every character gets a verb. Forget adjectives. What are each of them trying to do? (communicate interest in him; hustle her out; get her number)

Students, here is the Halloween Party illustration (and Freudian bonanza) I mentioned the other day.

Check out this post for reproductions and some of the cultural background on midcentury periodical illustration, most of it for women's magazines. These illustrators became experts at narrative built from arrangements of figures. And why not? They did it week in and week out, for good money, too. But Al Parker added a level of intelligence and finish that few others could.

Images: Al Parker, Government Girl, goauche on board in the collection of the Modern Graphic History Library at Washington University (and courtesy of Kit and Donna Parker), Ladies Home Journal, 1943); Al Parker, "Frankenbunny" (or so I call it), 1960.

Alex Eben Meyer

2010-11-10T08:36:00.004-06:00

As a teacher, one of my favorite experiences is the discovery of great work by former students, especially when encountered through the random bounces of consumerdom. Today I opened my copy of the New York Times to discover a great half page illustration by Alex Eben Meyer in the Dining Section. Alex graduated from the Illustration Program at Washington University in the late 90s, when I was transitioning from the Core program, which I'd been hired to lead on my way into the institution. Alex was a student of Jeff Pike's, primarily; I taught a methods studio for seniors in that first year, which methinks was 97-98, and worked with him then. Anyway, I claim no credit, but it sure brightened my day. Thanks, Alex!

Stories & Artifacts

2010-11-07T10:28:00.007-06:00

I have been exploring ways to dovetail the documentary methodology I've been using for the past several years with concept-driven projects. The other day I mentioned that Dan Zettwoch's Famous Fictional show provided an opportunity.

Here are several spreads from an upcoming zine/serial project I'm working on that I devoted to Dan's show, two an Old MacDonald riff and one (at the top of this post) self-evidently a Simple Simon thing. The Simple Simon sources are a Botero sculpture in Clayton, Missouri, near our old condo and the Federhofer Bakery sign on Gravois in St. Louis, a subject I worked with once before. The critters directly above were taken from the 2nd Presbyterian nursery/play area for children, which I work in every fourth Sunday (yes, I'll take them back!). All, that is, except the Chinese Allosaur, which is a remnant of our boys' childhoods. Even the goofy farm picture with the horse from the earlier post was seen, on a reference drive north and west of St. Louis a month or so ago.

I posted a version of this awhile ago, but reworked the color and added the vehicles in the background to establish the space more effectively.

Comment welcome–I'm pumped about these things, but curious about how they come across.

Yellow Kids and Anonymity

2010-11-07T08:56:00.011-06:00

Richard Felton Outcault (1863-1928; published as R.F.) is a major figure in the history of American cartooning as well as a commerical innovator, specifically in the development of licensing of visual properties.

Outcault created the extravagantly illustrated feature Hogan’s Alley in 1895 for the New York World. The lead character of the feature was “the Yellow Kid,” otherwise known as Mickey Dugan, an Irish tenement dweller. (There is much to say about the feature itself, but space will not permit today.) Outcault was hired away from Joseph Pulitzer’s World to join Hearst’s New York Journal, where the feature was retitled The Yellow Kid (1896-1898). The Journal's version was drawn by George Luks, a future member of the Ashcan School and confederate of William Glackens, who also worked for the papers and would go on to prominence as a member of The Eight.

For his part, Outcault went on to produce Buster Brown (1902-1910). Having been burned by copyright restrictions from realizing licensing income from the Kid, Outcault copyrighted Buster Brown before the feature ever appeared in print, and went on to create licensing deals for his character in a wide variety of product categories. The one we remember today is Buster Brown shoes (manufactured by the Brown Shoe Company, which was owned by a real and not fictional Brown).

The Yellow Kid is considered an important starting point for the development of American comics, though its previously attributed status as the first real comic strip has been disputed by recent scholarship.

The Yellow Kid also gave his name to yellow journalism.

All of which is background to the following observation. I have spent the last several days in Washington D.C. doing research on an exhibition several years in the future. Spent Friday in the Library of Congress looking at Civil War drawings (and a few of William Glackens' very striking Spanish American War drawings from on location in Cuba). Subsequently I went with a colleague to the Newseum, a pulsating temple of infotainment which did not much satisfy this visitor.

I documented a thing or two with my iPhone.

On the fifth level there is an overwhelming accretion and arrangment of historical items and placards which aspire to tell the history of the news business. While the objects are interesting, they are so numerous and tacked-together that an orderly absorption of their content does not seem possible.

The Yellow Kid makes several appearances among this mish-mash. But scandalously, R.F. Outcault's is never mentioned! Nor, for that matter, is George Luks! Why? Mind you that the heroic reporters and photographers are credited. So if the articles don't write themselves, and the photographs don't orchestrate their own existence, why suggest illustrations are not made by actual persons with names and histories?

From this we learn yet again that ignorance of functional and commercial traditions of image-making are absolutely standard, even among well-educated people. Art is made by individuals; illustrations and cartoons are made by "the culture." Galls the hell out of me. More reason to continue to bang away on the limitations of art history, and to advocate for alternative, parallel histories of visual culture.

Image: R.F. Outcault, "What they did to the Dogcatcher in Hogan's Alley," New York World, September 20, 1896. Published shortly before Hearst hired him away from Pulitzer in October of that year.

Old Macdonald Had a Show

2010-11-05T07:28:00.004-05:00

The indefatigable Dan Zettwoch is at it again. His third Famous Fictional show opens tonight at the Mad Art Gallery in St. Louis. This one required people to create work that addressed two characters: one from poetry, and one from song. I chose Old MacDonald and Simple Simon, on an experimental basis: could I apply the documentary methodology I've been using to solve such a problem? More soon...

R.A. Parker Meets Mary Shelley

2010-10-26T12:21:00.010-05:00

I mentioned in my last post that Robert Andrew Parker's Frankenstein was among my favorite projects of his. I dug a few scans out of the archives, which I offer here largely without comment, save wow. How can such a light touch pack such power?

OMG! OMG!

The arc of that torch captures the miracle of Parker's work for me. It's mystifyingly precise; it's flamboyant (I apologize for the etymological pun, but it's the word I mean); it propels the story with crude yet witty force. "Crude" also and especially applying to the monster.

Finally: how does he insert creepy comedy into the story?

Hats off, RAP.

Robert Andrew Parker

2010-10-26T08:35:00.005-05:00

Robert Andrew Parker (not to be confused with another distinguished Parker) will be feted here in St. Louis on Thursday, October 28 at the Modern Graphic History Library at Washington University. Mr. Parker, whose career began in the 1950s, is still at work today. He produced illustrated travelogues for Fortune magazine (reporting on the oil industry, as I recall) early on; played the part of Kirk Douglas's–Vincent Van Gogh's hands and produced the fakes for Lust for Life (1956); generated many illustrated books for children and young people (most notably for me, an edition of Frankenstein); continues to lead a jazz quartet of significant quality; and remains a charming, garrulous, flinty figure.

I had the extreme good fortune to meet him and visit his studio in Connecticut when we were in discussions with him about donating his commercial work to the Modern Graphic History Library. Which he did. And for which we are extraordinarily grateful.

Thursday's event is a celebration of the completion of the cataloguing of that work at the MGHL, paired with an exhibition.

If you're in town and interested in the field of illustration, please come by and join us for an excellent event. RSVP info above.

Terra Incognita

2010-10-21T15:47:00.003-05:00

We took our students in Word & Image 1 to the Saint Louis Zoo on Monday to begin a project which calls for students to create map of something. We've done a variation on this project many times, and I love working on it. It opens up new territory, if you'll pardon the pun, in visual relationships for most students. Above, a digital image of Victoria Crater on Mars, courtesy of NASA, tracking the daily treks of one of the two Mars rovers. Each white dot is a day's end. How about that for time and space?

Here are four links to relevant posts: first, representations of data courtesy of Heather Corcoran; second, more pictorial approaches I pulled together last year; third, continuing the outer space theme, a representation of all NASA missions courtesy of Bob Flynn; and finally, a cool set of seemingly unrelated tabular images which surprise upon reflection.

On Drawing and Citizenship

2010-10-21T15:22:00.006-05:00

From its beginning in 2007, this blog has attempted to

frame some thoughts about modern graphic culture that...will help to clarify terminology, establish commonalities, sharpen distinctions, and otherwise bring some analytical rigor to a subject that suffers from 1) an excess of enthusiasm and 2) longstanding aesthetic dismissal. (Aspirations and Intentions, July 2007.)

I have tended to avoid general pronouncements on the political culture of our era, except as it impinges on the practices of cartooning and illustration, most notably in the presidential campaign of 2008. Examples here and here. But the midterm campaign and the Apotheosis of the Dumb Ass (see: United States Senate races in Alaska, Delaware and Nevada) have pushed me over the edge. The Know-Nothingism of the 21st century revels in its distate for “elites;” celebrates an ahistorical view of the Constitution according to which Philadelphia has been relocated to Mt. Sinai; ignores and even mocks basic standards of evidence in economics, biology, and physics; has constructed a completely fantastic view of Barack Obama as a crypto-Marxist anti-colonialist; and promotes a view of our civic life worthy of a 200-foot concrete Jesus on the Washington Mall.

Most of my writing addresses things made for and by members of the middle classes, so I don’t think I exactly qualify as some effete Brahman. But by the standards of Tea Party darlings, it doesn’t take much to qualify as inauthentic, un-“real” American. What a load of crap. Enough already. Things are bad enough without picking at ancient faux-populist scabs.

I readily admit that the ugly, captivating huckster is a quintessentially American figure. Radio birthed many such people. (Isn’t it weird that talk radio still really matters on the American right, when the act of listening to the radio at all seems almost quaint to many of us? I guess I own a radio, but I only actually use the clock it’s built into. Okay, so I still sometimes listen to a radio in my car. Even that, not so much.) So I reserve the right to be fascinated and repulsed. Mostly, just now, it’s the latter.

Which brings me to a question: what is the antidote for this malady? I have been pondering it.

I gave a talk last evening at Christan Brothers College High School, having been invited by Bill Canavan, who runs their honors program. I did not imagine that a group of high school students would find what I do all that interesting, so I tried to tease out a few thoughts–admonitions, pieces of advice–for being a citizen of our culture today. I grounded those thoughts in my practice for the sake of examples, but the talk was directed to the boys. How to be a citizen of the present?

My six admonitions:

1. Read primary sources: textually, musically, materially
2. Cultivate your powers of observation; pay attention
3. Learn to write clearly
4. Look for structures and processes; be skeptical of surfaces
5. Make things well (I make pictures; we all make something)
6. Love something, and pursue it fervently

I had the impression that the boys found the talk passably entertaining. There maybe 200 of them, plus some faculty and parents. I got some good questions, and some excellently firm handshakes and eye contact following. I showed some work and screened Scenes from Starkdale, Ohio, my animated film from 2006-07. (Under make things well, in case you’re wondering.)

I’ve been thinking a quite a bit about the first point. In one sense I was referring to the superficialities of Wikipedia glosses. Why read Reflections on the Revolution in France when you can Google Burke and get the gist?

Primary texts take many forms. The image at the top of this post was drawn from the Farmer Fred sculpture and signage array at the Sappington Farmers Market in St. Louis. The material form of the goofy statue is a primary source: it addresses a tradition of roadside commerical figures, images of farm families in American life, and nostalgic constructions of a(n imagined) bucolic past. The fragmentary bits of text on the sign provide evidence of market commodities, textual forms of promotion, and technologies of presentation.

All of which is to say: we live in a particular moment in history. We pump out products, we push dirt around and build things, we sell things to each other, we manifest our thoughts in material form. The objects, structures and communication experiences which surround us are the primary texts of our civilization. Ditto for things that people do, what they wear, what they say to each other on their cell phones.

Recently: “I’m cool with you, but no–not Dave. No! Dave is an asshole.”

As a visual reporter I draw on the authority of the concrete, in two senses: I draw from, and I draw upon. What is happening here? Which elements from the visual-spatial field emerge? Where are the visual rhymes, the narrative inflections? Reportage drawings (and other forms of non-fiction) are grounded in fact. But they’re not transcriptions, either.

Careful looking is a prerequisite for discernment. Which–to return to where we started–is not a word you’re likely to hear on cable news...

Thickets, Screens, Scrims

2010-09-30T23:09:00.011-05:00

Proposition: things are located in places, but places are not made of things.

I have been stressing to our juniors: think a little less about looking at things than trying to see through them. At heart this advice gets at questions of place. Places reveal themselves in layers.

Here are three illustrations, all from Cosmopolitan, which create interest through a use of layers. At top, a piece by Robert Weaver depicting a man fleeing through a city park at dusk. (1962.) A row of orange buildings suggests the sunset which must have recently passed. The rising moon is untouched by color, a wink at a third moment in time. The trees in the foreground dominate the picture, even as we look immediately through/past them to gather the information we need to decipher the image. Take the trees out, and the image loses much of its force. Above, a second Weaver (1958). Here he uses a reflection on a storefront window to provide information about what's across the street, even as a shadowy scene takes place behind it at left. The monochrome color provides tonal levels and atmosphere. Finally, below, a Bob Peak image (also 1958) describing a stakeout of some sort. The sense of inside and outside are strongly established through the use of color and value to create transparent scrims.

Valuable examples. Enjoy. (Curated from Leif Peng's amazing Flickr set of mid-20th century illustrators and illustrations.)

On the Scene; Points of View

2010-09-29T16:42:00.012-05:00

Two images from the airport in Islip, New York, to which we fled some months back when the metropolitan NYC airports shut down. A nor'easter had put the region out of commission. Since the system has so many fewer flights in it these days, if you miss your flight you're often out of luck, because following flights are already full. Trying to get back to St. Louis took an additional day, and a late night trek 90 miles east across Long Island in sheets of rain.

The juniors are at work on a reportage project. This time out we are perhaps less invested in pithy summaries of the local than 1) a serious investigation of media and 2) the presentation of varied pictorial spaces. These pencils report visual phenomena without much adjustment, save for subtraction; the man waiting at the gate (will our plane ever come?) overlaps the tailfin which rises over the tarmac outside, because he blocked my view of it. But nothing would have prevented me from manipulating the space to tip it up, ever flatter, so the man would appear at the bottom of the image, and the fin at the top.

Such spatial maneuvers are common in modernist painting. Observe: two German Expressionists take a whack at tipped-up ground planes. The first, by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, View from a Window (1914) profits from the altitude afforded by his perch. But care is taken to push the plane down in front, to heighten the effect–both literally and figuratively. A more radical approach is apparent in Erick Heckel's Bathers (1912-13) which combines a topographic p.o.v. with a theatrical presentation of many figures in profile. The two views–aerial and intimate–are presented with total aplomb, becoming one in the process.

Both of these paintings are in the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, which as it happens is brimming with Germans, including the enigmatic Herr Beckmann, whose roomful of paintings justify a visit to the place all by itself.

I have written about spatial plasticity before, particularly in the context of learned behavior in beginning drawing courses. It can be difficult to give oneself permission to treat space like taffy, but there are good reasons for doing so from time to time. And here, an essay on pictorial display for narrative and informational purposes.

Finally, to follow up our discussion of photography as a tool, here is a reflection on same and the sketchbook painting below. (More aviation!)

Students, follow the links for additional material.

Ink as Architecture

2010-09-22T21:12:00.018-05:00

I have been working with seniors on the Picture Lotto project I mentioned last week. Several have made solid efforts at black line & shape combinations for description. Looking at their work I've thought of the 1 and 2-color line art from the middle of the last century. A favorite subject of mine: the stuff produced by designers and illustrators for inexpensive interior magazine spreads and throwaway collateral items, like paper cups and wrappers. Those images are the 15th century woodcuts of the modern period. I love them. (When I have time, I'll compose a little reflection on why they're often very good, in dramatic contrast to the throwaway visual crap of the current moment, which really is crappy.)

A month or so ago, I received a note from Sunil Manchikanti, a former student and designer/illustrator living in Brooklyn. I saw Sunil at ICON6, and enjoyed catching up. Sunil sent me a link to a valuable research tool, the stunningly comprehensive Flickr set of mid-20th century illustrators compiled by the invaluable Leif Peng. Suffice to say, it's a guaranteed visual treat to work your way through that material. It's also a sort of philosophical test: why is much of it so wonderful, and other of it such dreck? Discuss.

A few days ago, in search of fresh examples of reportage drawing to show juniors, I parachuted into Peng's archive, and came across his contemporary reclamation of the work of Lowell Hess. I had been unaware of Hess's work, about which there is much to say, because it is so diverse. Mr. Hess is still alive, and still at it creatively speaking.

My interest here and now is to show some of Hess's two-color work for Collier's, which in my view had extremely interesting art direction from the late 30s into the early 50s. Hess did some covers for Colliers, but he also had a regular gig illustrating the humor column of the magazine. These are classic examples of visual economy and verve in a two color setting. They are also cousin to Rea Irvin's illustration work from ten years earlier in Snoot If You Must, by Lucius Beebe. (1943).

But a pair of examples from Hess's work go right to the heart of two issues we talked about today. The first is a long horizontal line drawing in black with additions in red and blue. The relevant aspects of this drawing have to do with 1) the variation in line density as way to create interest; 2) the use of black solids [e.g., pants and dress shapes] to anchor what would otherwise be a weightless tangle of lines (also true of the Irvin example, above); and 3) the use of secondary tone/color to create an additional set of shapes.

I regret the scale of this image, which was quite small in print, because it would help to be able to zoom in and see the specifics of the red shapes. But even from helicopter height, you can see the variation in density; the use of red shape and pattern to create secondary emphases and rhythms. Consider the group standing in line on the right. Figures 1, 5 and 8 receive red pattern to contrast with the red and black shapes which characterize figures 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7. Meanwhile the building gets no red at all, to help separate it from the figures.

It's easier to see some of the same issues (and more) on this spread from Every Woman Magazine in June 1951. The lady of the house gets down to the task of killing bugs with the kind of chemical spray pump that was standard issue in the world of Wile E. Coyote.

First, see how the orange sherbet color is used to create new shapes. Without those stripes on the apron, her figure would be less interesting. The stripes are not chaperoned by a black contour line. In some of the work I saw today, equivalent passages were dominated by black line, leaving no communicative work to be performed by the second color. If so, why include the second color at all?

Second, look at the negative line used to describe interior information on the black bugs. The negative contour permits black to be used as a fill color on the bugs; the resulting visual weight nails down the perimeter of the spread and keeps the whole thing from disintegrating into a spindly mass of line.

Thanks, Mr. Hess, for the design lesson. And thanks to Sunil for the tip, and Mr. Peng for the monumental Flickr set!

Environmental Narratives

2010-09-16T19:13:00.010-05:00

By contrast to the Picture Lotto problem, which is all about the creation of isolated unitary forms–visual integers–the alternative project for seniors this week and next will be a narrative which is dominated by a sense of place or environment. As a point of reference, I am posting a few examples. For starters:

from Peasant Paintings from Huhsien County. Compiled by the Fine Arts Collection Section of the Cultural Group Under the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. Published by the People’s Fine Art Publishing House, Peking. [Beijing.] 1974.

This book is a compilation of Communist Party propaganda paintings, which are purported in the introductory text to have been produced by agricultural workers who work part-time as artists, “so as never to be separated from...the great revolutionary struggle.” Some of the paintings are unintentionally hilarious, but they are certainly not the work of amateurs. And very many are quite striking. These artists are illustrators. They are required to respond in alignment with a governmental text. And the assignment is pretty tough: make agriculture look wonderful, heroic, well- organized, and really fun.

For our purposes, what's notable is the plasticity of the spaces used to establish environmental information. The image above is reminiscent of the space-bending landscapes of Wayne Thiebaud, although in this comparison the figures seem to have been replaced by automobiles.

To take quite a different example, here is a Winsor McCay Little Nemo in Slumberland (I do not have the precise citation handy; circa 1905) in which characters play out a narrative in a mushroom-marked world. Here the control of emphasis is managed through a shifting frame that slowly reveals aspects of the environment to the viewer.

So in light of all of the above, those of you who want to build on the Galleria experience: I would counsel you to use that environment, but in an aggressive way, to make its presence felt on the action (however small that action might be–I'm thinking of the passing janitor image from Wednesday past.) If you eschew the shoppping mall, okay, but choose an environment that marks the space and the action of your tale.

See you tomorrow!

Picture Lotto!

2010-09-16T12:28:00.016-05:00

I am teaching a methods course this fall to illustrators and cartoonists ("Visual Worlds", about which I have written before here and here.) The first portion of the class is straightforwardly diagnostic. In the first week, I sent the group out to make something based on observation and reportage, using the St. Louis Galleria as the generic subject, including inside, outside, parking lot. Back came a variety of things, all interiors. Last week I handed out a set of four sheets, each of which included six boxes labeled with a noun or verb, like so:

making a total of 24 drawings to be required. When 10 students did the project, it produced 240 drawings, which is a decent data set for reflection. We looked at them yesterday. A significant variety, as one might expect: but also, shifting conventions and forms of visual logic within the same student's group of works. A valuable question: are these a meaningful set? Do they cohere, visually and/or conceptually? The project was not couched in those terms: rather it was presented in a very matter-of-fact way: please fill in the boxes. The range of responses extended from the symbolic to the concrete, with explicit or implied narratives making necessary appearances as required (e.g., amputate).

These images are reminiscent of simple identifying pictures, as in flash cards or a midcentury visual game, picture lotto. The pink-field illustrations above and below are picture lotto cards, akin to a bingo card, used for collecting game pieces. The images in both cases are credited, incompletely, to one C. Clement, noted on the box cover (not shown). My friend and colleague Linda Solovic found them at a flea market this summer; she took the box and the game pieces, I got these. The game was produced by Samuel Gabriel and Sons Company, circa 1950.

Another version of the game was produced by the folks at Golden Funtime Punchout Books, a heavy-stock department at Golden Press, all part of the genius outfit of Western Publishing in Racine, Wisconsin. They made punch-out card things. As this scan shows, this game was manufactured in 1962.

The Golden Funtime version makes explicit what the Samuel Gabriel game leaves implicit: categories of things. The collection cards for the former organize the material into five groupings: Travel, Pets, People, Toys and Things We Use.

Here's evidence that people at these firms looked at each other's work. In both cases, the image for television features a console TV set with a puppet show playing.

The puppets in both cases suggest European Punch and Judy marionettes. And Howdy Doody was a marionette. But the most influential television show involving puppets from the time period was the brilliant Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which debuted in the late 1940s. Presumably the Punch and Judy profiles had more generic value to these illustrators in 1950, though by 1960 the same approach seems likely to have been a teeny bit dated. KFO went off the air in 1957, but Fran Allison and her pals enjoyed a long career in varying formats after that. I remember seeing KFO reruns as a child.

Okay, students: for those of you who will be taking the second project to finish, I want you to make your project a contemporary version of Picture Lotto: choose two of the above categories, with a sixth option included in your menu: Things We Fear. You choose the items within the categories. I want to see 12 pieces, six per card, with typography integrated into the solution. Keep the color to a limited palette: no more than three colors, plus white. Have a blast.

For those of you who will be pursuing the first project to finish, for the sake of contrast I am going to be asking you to revisit the problem with an emphasis on character and environment, more stress on the latter. More coming. Stay tuned...

Forgivable, Even Lovable, Goofiness

2010-09-13T23:38:00.003-05:00

A modest thought, as I am wrapped up in bureaucratic tasks and cannot write reflectively at the moment. I finished this piece last week. I had imagined that it would be headed somewhere, but I think not. A one-off, but a warm up, too, for something else. This guy is an actual figure (with an actual clone-child next to him) who stands awkwardly on Watson Road in St. Louis, in front of the Sappington Farmer's Market. I have more drawings of him. (Dan Zettwoch tipped me off to the weird interior of the same location, similarly themed, which is part of General Grant Centre, a strip mall with historical pretensions.) This is our culture's replacement for large scale figurative sculpture: goofy commercial effigies. They have a certain folk integrity which far outranks the Gee-I-so-wish-it were-still-the-19th-century ghastly mock Winslow Homers--life-size bronze children playing "snap the whip", that sort of thing. Give me Farmer Fred any day of the week over earnest metallic urchins.

Forgot One

2010-09-08T22:44:00.004-05:00

Another example of drawn letterforms relevant for the consonant project in Word & Image. The hand-drawn title legend for Milton Caniff's great adventure comic strip... From 1944.

Fancy Type & Imagey Letterforms

2010-09-07T23:41:00.017-05:00

Imagey is objectionable, I know. Sue me.

My long stretch of light blogging may be coming to a close. The academic year is kicking off. It's time to get back at it, at least in the teaching tool department. I write in this space for pedagogical purposes quite a bit.

Which brings me to our topic. The fresh-faced juniors in Word & Image 1 are hard at work on the introductory problem for the semester. We labored for several years to find the right equation for the first project, and I think this one works pretty well for now. The Consonant project asks the student to produce/collect a stack of (at least) 50 (non-Googled) type specimens and images that communicate, Sesame Street-style, the letter in question. Which has been pulled out of a fishbowl at the very start of the festivities. We work our way down to a satisfying set of contrasting examples, after which other activities commence on a TBA basis.

Brielle (Killip; my teaching partner, a graphic designer) and I presented the project a week ago Friday. After we did so I got to thinking that I might have stressed the image piece a bit heavily, and failed to emphasize the typography and lettering dimension of the problem.

So at this juncture I turn to our students to make the point: in addition to everything we talked about last class, don't forget to look in old type specimen books or ancient Sears catalogs for examples of individual letterforms that might broaden your set beyond typing your letter ad infinitum and switching out typefaces on your computer. The idea of creative research–to review–is to collide with items, images, whatnot you wouldn't otherwise encounter. It's more like browsing, even trolling, than other forms of research.

At the top of this post, a specimen from Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas' Handy Book of Artistic Printing, a compendium of charming, occasionally oddball letterpress specimens published by Princeton Architectural Press last year. It's a hoot; if you're a graphicophile, I recommend it. Below, an array of individual letterforms and words.

And a second set, from pages 42-43.

Sprinkled throughout this post, a variety of hand lettered sources, from comic strip title panels to logotypes. My selections are heavy on the image side, as would be expected from an illustrator.

I have gotten away from detailed citations for the things I post, and have resolved to improve in that department. When I've done it in the past, I've always been pleased later to have the bibliographic data close at hand. Details below.

Images: Stark Brothers, Clerical Taylors, printed by John Baxter & Son, Artistic Printers, Edinburgh, Scotland; letterpress-printed advertisement 1882, reprinted in The Handy Book of Artistic Printing by Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009; Seymour Chwast, Bestial Bold, from "Push Pin Graphic No. 83" issued 1980, reproduced in the Chronicle Books compilation, The Push Pin Graphic, published in 2004, written by Chwast and edited by Steve Heller and Martin Venezky; David Hockney, "The Letter N" from Hockney's Alphabet, published in 1991 by Random House in association with the American Friends of the Aids Crisis Trust; Morton Goldsholl and John Weber of Goldsholl Associates, Holiday Delight Baking Company Logotype, 1965, reproduced in American Trademark Designs by Barbara Baer Capitman, published by Dover Books, 1976; Fancy Typefaces, 1878-1895, Artistic Printing; Revolutionary Era Question and Answer Cards, French, reproduced in Antique Playing Cards; A Pictorial Treasury, by Henry Rene D'Allemange, first published in 1906 and reissued by Dover in 1996; Mark Todd, Bad Asses book cover design, Blue Q, 2007.

Vegas, Nebraska-Style

2010-08-26T00:58:00.004-05:00

Still grinding out the last of summer projects, particularly longer form writing. In the meantime, here's a photo I took a few years back, of a rent-to-own outfit on O Street in Lincoln, Nebraska. Have been pondering Venturi and Scott Brown's Learning From Las Vegas (1967) in the context of contemporary developments.

Ahoy, Flora!

2010-08-11T18:38:00.003-05:00

Nothing much to report. Trying to keep my head down, finishing off summer projects as best I can before the academic machine whirrs to life. But I've got some goodies/oddities to post as time permits. Today, a great find in Cape Girardeau, Missouri from last spring: Jim Flora's Fortune cover from May 1952. No, the promised paintings of merchant ships weren't by Flora. They had been removed, but seemed likely to have been pretty straightforward depictions. Unlike what graces the cover. As usual, Flora delivers a caprice on what, in other hands, might have been a dull affair: commercial shipping.

And no, they're not moored in the Gulf of Mexico. That black is figurative, doncha know.

Later, I'll get back to you with tips on How To Be An Employee when I get the article read.

Tyrannosaur

2010-07-30T22:32:00.003-05:00

I've picked up some juicy estate sale stuff in recent weeks, some of which I'll put up soon. In the meantime, here's one of the newer pieces from my reportage portfolio, drawn at the top of an escalator looking down at this jerking, growling mechanical lizard at the St. Louis Science Center. A two-page spread. I want to go back and draw the Devonian diorama with the six foot dragonflies suspended from wires...

An Exchange

2010-07-27T22:10:00.005-05:00

My friend R. is a journalist of repute, an old hand, a wry spirit. Among other things, we share a cardiologist. We had agreed to meet today for barbecue, possibly to kick around project ideas. Late last night I realized that I would have to bail on lunch. Before turning in I wrote to R:

I apologize, but I am running badly behind on a project and must postpone lunch tomorrow. If possible, I'd like to reschedule in a few weeks, if that works for you.

Early this morning I find R.'s response in my inbox:

I know you hate me. Everyone does. I am alone, friendless and as of noon hungry too. This is horrible. You must organize your time better. As Dr. N_______ says, a disorganized man is not a heart healthy man. See you soon. I'm vamoosing a week from Saturday for two weeks in the wild west, but will write to figure out a rematch at Pappy's. I'll remind myself to call on 8/24 or thereabouts.

I reply:

You protest too much. No one who uses the verb "vamoose" can be unhappy. This is like a handwriting tic, or a chemical signature which reveals deep positivity. Have fun. See you soon.

R. volleys back:

I think you may have hit on a major mental-health discovery: Do you ever use the verb vamoose? ( ) Yes ( ) No

Respondents answering yes are not depressed to the point of exhaustion. Those answering no are ready for a deep-immersion Prozac bath. In addition to your expertise in the area of cardio-vascular research, you are also a skilled psychodynamic psychotherapist. I bow before your talents, and have a note to myself to call you in late August.

Then:

Dear R: Whilst you are gone I will be here, snorkeling in the Prozac bath.

R. gets the last line:

Name your dosage tenderfoot, and see you around.

Image: Ad for Deep Sea diving school in Popular Mechanics, August 1950, courtesy of the blog Modern Mechanics.

Dixon & Quatrano

2010-07-25T14:56:00.003-05:00

I have been working on a range of projects, both visual and written, and have fallen away from posting regularly. Insofar as I've been able to stay focused, that's a good thing. (God knows that Twitter is out of the question for me).

But I have missed the curatorial aspects of this activity. I'm going to work on getting more visual matter up and on view, in most cases to celebrate it, but not always.

The image at the top of this post is a book cover by Maynard Dixon. More than a year ago I assigned a student in my Commercial Modernism class, Sarah Quatrano, to research Dixon for a presentation. She did a nice job, and in response to my request, burned a disc of some of the Dixon material she found. In the crush of a home & studio move over the course of the last year, I misplaced that disc, then rediscovered it.

Dixon had a complicated career, blending commercial work with later Western landscape stuff for gallery contexts. He got his start doing Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy novels. He married several times, secondly to Dorothea Lange, of FSA photography fame. I'm offering neither narrative nor assessment here; primarily I wanted to post that great Cassidy cover, which at the moment serves as my mobile phone's wallpaper.

Sarah Quatrano has done some great work, notably a project called Deathnography, which I notice has not yet shown up on her blog or site. (Gentle nudge, Sarah...) Thanks for the disc, Ms. Quatrano.

New Essays Page

2010-07-23T08:59:00.002-05:00

Back from ICON 6, tying up some loose ends. I am working on an article version of my talk from the conference, entitled Illustration on Mars; Expedition to an Unseen World. When I have it ready, I'll post it.

In the meantime, I have been working on finishing out the new site I launched last week. One of the ideas I thought I'd try is to re-present some of the writing I do here in a topical format. (Blogs are fun, but the organizational format absent intervention is based on time, not content. The most significant fact about an essay is when it was written, not what it was about.)

On my studio site homepage, there is now a link to Essays on Graphic Culture, which (for now) features 8 Graphic Tales pieces, marked by title. You can access the essay on a page within the site by clicking on an icon. Links still appear within the body copy, so you're not imprisoned on the site. I am hoping that the page will make some of this material more approachable.

Bridge to the Future

2010-07-13T15:28:00.008-05:00

I head for California on Thursday, to participate in the ICON6 conference. More on that to come. But in the meantime, I have been working steadily to resolve and prepare the work I've been engaged in over the past few months. Which I recognize as a synthesis, even summation, of the last two years, from May 2008 to now.

Today we got a revised version of my website up, which suggests clarity about where I'm headed. I'll elaborate a few ideas on that front before long, I hope. For now, I'm putting it out there and emitting a sigh of relief to have gotten the job done.

At the top of this post, a reworked pencil from two years ago, of a highway overpass under construction. Above, a drawing from the Air Force Museum. And below, from a series of drawings I made at the Met last March.

I hope folks enjoy the new site.

More to come from California.

Pizza Oven

2010-06-25T11:50:00.004-05:00

I've been quiet, but not unproductive. In coming weeks I will be rolling out a bunch of new work and a revamped website. In the meantime, here's a sample. More coming...

Memorial Day

2010-05-31T11:29:00.004-05:00

Today is the last day of the month, and Memorial Day to boot. I haven't posted since late April, making this the longest break between posts from the time I started this project in the summer of 2007.

The end of the semester was a bit hairy, but interspersed between my academic duties I have been working in the studio. I'll report on several fronts before long.

In the meantime, here's a detail from a sketchbook painting. A predawn drawing in the St. Louis airport from our trip to NY in March. In pencil. Then a twist: I cut the pages out, spray-mounted them on a watercolor block, and worked up a black key drawing. Subsequently I produced the underpainting (which reads a little electrically here) on a different sheet and put them together.

More soon. I'm headed out to visit a veteran's cemetery, and to draw.

Embedded Pictures, and Writing About Same

2010-04-29T10:26:00.004-05:00

This post is addressed to my students in Postwar American Visual Culture class. They are working on web-delivered exhibition projects across a variety of subjects. Within two weeks, they should be up and available for review. When they go up I'll provide a link to them.

Gang: I am reviewing your exhibition drafts. Things are looking good--these are going to be interesting projects. Your interpretive writing on the artifacts is often strong and useful.

But I have been struck by how unmoored some of this writing can become. Unmoored, that is, from the material facts of the object. I know that we live in a postmodern moment, and a constant flutter of images is part of our experience. The instantaneous access to Google search results can make it seem as if images live in some metadata ether, forever hovering, at the ready, popping into view whenever and wherever we wish to view them.

With no assist from any search engine, the study of art history can in its way create the impression that images exist for primary purposes of admiration and intellectual decodification.

To review: the objects we have been studying were all created for particular cultural contexts. An animated television advertisement from 1955 was produced for a client (say, General Motors) under the direction of an advertising agency (say, Leo Burnett) by an animation house (say, UPA). The ad was then broadcast during a particular time slot to reach particular viewers, who viewed the ad in their homes.

Likewise, a fiction illustration that ran in the Ladies Home Journal appeared in a sequence of fiction story opening spreads, typically four or five, that referred a reader to the resumption of each story in the back of the magazine. The content of the story, the placement of the story, the juxtaposition of the text with particular advertisements in the second portion of the story, the domestic context of the reader, the spatial environment of reception (i.e., the new suburban landscape) all of these aspects of the artifact are relevant. Such images were commissioned by art directors, who contacted the illustrator or his representative to secure the slot in his schedule. What’s more, the particular look of many such images were determined to a significant degree by the technologies of photography and projection (the latter referring to the ubiquitous but always concealed lucidograph, a projection device used for tracing purposes).

We cannot credibly look at such things without addressing the material facts of production, the cultural claims of advertisers, the market contexts faced by publishers, and the choices available to consumers. The answers, moreover, are never static; the shifting circumstances of commercial culture are always tricky for all participants in such markets.

Bottom line, we must confront the embedded reality of the image itself, both physically and culturally.

Hence, your citations for every object you present must be complete. If a film, cite the studio, the director, and if relevant, the production designer. If a magazine illustration, cite the issue, the illustrator, the author, and if available the page number (and ideally what preceded and followed the spread).

Even more fundamentally, here is the rule: describe first, interpret second. Without description, your interpretations run the risk of analytical rootlessness. They float off, referring to themselves, calling into question their own relevance. Tie your interpretations to observable evidence.

See you later today!

Image: Camel Cigarette adverstisement, Collier’s, February 29, 1936. In addition to selling cigarettes, the ad provides cross-promotion for Camel Caravan, a variety show sponsored by Camel that ran on CBS Radio beginning in 1933, and survived in revised forms until 1954.

Poetic Reportage

2010-04-23T08:48:00.010-05:00

Last year I showed a few hazy reproductions of Meredith Nelson's drawings in Russia, captured on a digital camera. She came through town a while ago and I was able to see a few more. Now she has posted a full set of her Russian reportage work on Flickr, and it's a treat. The contrast is much clearer from the scans. Meredith began exploring this direction in a reportage seminar I taught during her final semester. The panorama below is from that body of work.

At first she balked at the idea that these marker "comps" she'd made could actually count as the real thing, but they had great presence and freshness. She persisted, and the work that emerged–of abandoned buildings in St. Louis–got her a travel scholarship to Russia. She intended to study abandoned Soviet sites. That proved a little difficult, so she settled in to do reportage in Moscow as well as a few other cities.

I found it quite difficult to select which images to show–the total set is quite winsome. The compositional economy and clarity of purpose (especially as expressed through color selection) are really great.

Many are exquisitely minimal. Bravo Ms. Nelson!