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LETTER TO A YOUNG COLLAGE ARTIST

Thursday, January 17, 2008

The year was 1997. I was 13 years old. Green Day was the coolest band in the world. Two years previous, they’d just put out their album, Insomniac, with an insane-looking cover. I checked out the liner notes, and found out it was done by a collage artist named Winston Smith:

I had a great art teacher, Robyn Helsel, who assigned us a project where we had to pick a contemporary artist and write to them. Most of the class picked their artists out of a catalog. I picked Winston. I used my dad’s e-mail account and sent probably half a dozen e-mails to a gallery curator I found online, asking for Winston’s home address. The curator finally replied: “Stop bugging me, kid. Here’s his address.” I sent Winston a two-page letter using a ransom note font in Microsoft Word, telling him about me and my band, asking him about his technique, his influences…I even had the audacity to include a sketch of an idea I had for a piece he might want to attempt. (I have the letter somewhere…but unfortunately, not the sketch!) A few months went by. As I remember it, nobody in the class heard back from their artist.

Then one day a huge, stuffed manila envelope came in the mail. I ran to the kitchen table, tore it open, and dumped out its contents. There was a 14-page hand-written note from Winston and probably 50 pages of color photocopies of his work and press clippings. I couldn’t believe it. An artist—a real artist!—had written me back!

To me, it was the equivalent of Rilke writing back to the young poet. He told me about his life and his methods. He urged me to always question authority, stay away from drugs, and keep getting straight As so one day I could pay the bills. (An artist—a real artist!—was telling me it was okay to get straight As!) I’d never heard anybody talk about the kind of things he wrote about—art, America, growing up in a small-town—it was like a time-bomb that went off in my brain.

The letter, and I’m not exaggerating, changed my life.

I wrote him back, and he wrote me back. We’ve kept up a casual correspondence since.

I was at my mom’s over the holidays, and decided to use her new scanner to
archive some papers I wanted to preserve for safe-keeping.

I’m not sure if it will interest anyone else, but I’m posting it here as a shining example of great generosity from an established artist to an aspiring artist. It’s one of my most treasured possessions, and I just really freaking love it and want to share it.

And so, with Winston’s permission, here it is. (Also: be sure to check out Winston’s work and buy some of his stuff!)

VIEW THE WHOLE LETTER AS A FLICKR SET

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ON SCHULZ AND PEANUTS BY DAVID MICHAELIS

Monday, January 14, 2008

Schulz: All of the things that you see in the strip, if you were to read it every day and study it, you would know me.

Rose: To read your characters is to know you.

Schulz: Isn’t that depressing?

—Charles Schulz on The Charlie Rose Show

Good grief. David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts. A grueling 565 pages of book that exhausted and disappointed me. So many details, so many of them not significant. I never get sick of Peanuts, but by the end of the book, I was sick of Charles Schulz.

Jeet Heer has written a really brilliant post about the strengths and flaws of the book, almost 100% of which I agree with. Jeannie Schulz and the Schulz kids have also been really outspoken about the fact that the book, in their opinion, is just downright wrong.

Whether it’s factually inaccurate or not, I didn’t find it to be a pleasant nor a particularly great read.

The major innovation of the book is the way Michaelis weaves examples of the strips into the autobiography. This works because—as Schulz said—to read the strip is to know him. It’s all there. This book would’ve been a helluva lot better if Michaelis ran with this technique, and just collaged the strips in a way that reflected the chronological order of Schulz’s life, stating the plain autobiographical facts alongside them, leaving out his psychological “insights.” Now THAT would be a cool book.

Here are some materials I recommend instead of the Michaelis book for those interested in Schulz and his work:

	Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography. Nobody seems to be interested in this book now that the Michaelis biography has come out, but I think it hits all the significant details and deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner. Plus, the writing is way better. Worth tracking down. (Great Amazon customer review.) Check out an excerpt from the book in my post, THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS.
	Peanuts: A Golden Celebration Probably the best introduction to the strip: contains, for better or worse, strips from all five decades, including commentary here and there by Schulz himself. It’s a big, coffee-table size book, and about 200 or so pages. You can get it used for dirt cheap. (Even better might be an earlier edition, Peanuts Jubilee, but I think it’s pretty hard to get a hold of…)
	Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz Chip Kidd designed this beautiful little book. It concentrates on the early part of the strip’s life and development, and contains numerous beautiful scans of actual newspaper clippings (a lot which come from the personal collections of Kidd and Chris Ware) and photographs of Schulz’s tools.
	ON THE CHARLIE ROSE SHOW This is a good interview with Schulz from near the end of his life, and you can watch the whole thing for free.
	Charles M. Schulz: Conversations This is a great book which includes Gary Groth’s excellent, 100+ page interview for the Comics Journal. A few more thoughts about the book.
	An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories This might seem like an odd choice, but Ivan Brunetti includes a whole slew of Peanuts tributes, including a piece penned by Schulz himself on how to be a cartoonist.
	THE COMPLETE PEANUTS Finally, if you really want to know the man, just read his strips. Fantagraphics has done an amazing job with these books — I’ve been slowly building my set. (And I’m hoping, hoping, hoping, that they will chose to release it on DVD at some point, a la The New Yorker.)

If any of you dear readers read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

MY READING YEAR, 2007

Saturday, January 12, 2008

10 good books that I read this year:

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy

My reaction was similar to James Kochalka’s.

Harry Potter 7
by J.K. Rowling

Always a fan of the movies, this year I let go of my HP snobbery, looked past the clunky prose, and let myself fall into the dream..

The Early Comic Strip
by David Kunzle

A long-out-of print collection of ancient precursors to the comic strip that I got my hands on through interlibrary loan.

Posts about the book:

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
by Anders Nilsen

Maybe my favorite book last year by my favorite contemporary cartoonist. My “review.”

The Political Brain
by Drew Westen

A book that got me interested in politics again.

My mindmap of the book.

Secret Knowledge
by David Hockney

A book about the use of optics in painting from the 1400s on, which changed a lot of my ideas about perspective, realism, comics, and collage.

King-Cat Classix
by John Porcellino

A retrospective collection of Porcellino’s King-Cat mini-comics. I also read his Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man and Perfect Example. Those clean, Zen lines!

The Gospel According to Jesus
by Stephen Mitchell

Reminded me how much I love the teachings of Jesus and how much I hate contemporary Christianity. A lovely book.

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations
by Joel Smith

This was the catalog of a gallery show we saw while we were on our honeymoon, and it kick-started the Year of Steinberg, in which I became obsessed with his work.

Posts about Steinberg from this year:

The Braindead Megaphone
by George Saunders

A collection of essays from my favorite living fiction writer. We got to meet Mr. Saunders twice this year: once at Oberlin College and once at the Texas Book Festival.

THE APRON STRINGS

Thursday, January 10, 2008

I’m so ashamed at the low output of this blog that I’m posting a couple of sketches, hoping they will somehow make up for it. (My Tumblelog has been bustling with activity, but it doesn’t really count.) The sketches are for a design to go on an apron that Meg wants to sew.

I’ve got a couple of posts in mind for next week, most notably my thoughts on David Michaelis‘s Schulz and Peanuts, which I’m finding to be an utterly exhausting read. I’ve got about 150 pages to go. Here’s the fine stack of books I’ve got waiting for me once I finish:

CUTTING AND PASTING THE GOSPELS

Friday, December 21, 2007

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate therefore the gold from the dross; restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples.”
—Thomas Jefferson

When, at the age of fifty, I first began to study the Gospels seriously, I found in them the spirit that animates all who are truly alive. But along with the flow of that pure, life-giving water, I perceived much mire and slime mingled with it; and this had prevented me from seeing the true, pure water. i found that, along with the lofty teaching of Jesus, there are teachings bound up which are repugnant and contrary to it. I thus felt myself in the position of a man to whom a sack of garbage is given, who, after long struggle and wearisome labor, discovers among the garbage a number of infinitely previous pearls.”
—Leo Tolstoy

In The Gospel According To Jesus, Stephen Mitchell sets out on the quest of Jefferson and Tolstoy: to separate the “diamonds” of Jesus’ teachings from the “dunghill” of the gospels (Jefferson’s words).

The resulting gospel is 25 pages long.

The rest of the book is a wonderful 100 page introduction, an exhaustive 140 page commentary, and a 25 page appendix of words on Jesus by Spinoza, Jefferson, Blake, Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Nitezsche, Gandhi, and more.

Of course, Jefferson himself produced a collaged gospel text, commonly known as The Jefferson Bible:

“During the evening hours of one winter month late in his first term as president, after the public business had been put to rest, he began to compile a version of the Gospels that would include only what he considered the authentic accounts and sayings of Jesus. These he snipped out of his King James Bible and pasted onto the pages of a blank book, in more-or-less chronological order. he took up the project again in 1816, when he was seventy-three…pasting in the Greek text as well, along with Latin and French translations, in parellel columns. The “wee little book,” which he entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” remained in his family until 1904, when it was published by order of the Fifty-seventh Congress and a copy given to each member of the House and Senate.”

Speaking of presidents, it was Bill Clinton who recommended reading this book…

More reading: