Search Results for: log book

SEEKING ALWAYS FOR THE PICTURE

Monday, December 17, 2007

…the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture…”
—Paul McHenry Roberts, How To Say Nothing in 500 Words

I need to write in a visual way… for example, with cut-out words.
—Julie Doucet

Once again, I have redesigned the blog. After talking smack about sidebars, I realized that, duh, they can be quite useful and add to the content—but only if they’re used in a dynamic way…if the content of the sidebar changes with whatever page you’re viewing. With the new design, you’ll notice that “meta” information appears in the sidebar next to the post. Making optimal use of the web browser’s real estate. (Can you tell I do web geekery for a living, now?) Clean white to remind me that it’s the actual content that makes a blog. No more lightning bolts or black.

Poke around, let me know what you think.

THE DRAWINGS OF GEORGE GROSZ

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Pimps of Death (1919)

“It was my first encounter with the works of the German artist George Grosz, when I was in my twenties, which showed me that drawing need not just be a space-filler in a newspaper: in the hands of an honest man, drawing could be a weapon against evil….Look at [his drawings] and you know the world is sick. You may say that he was sick too — but it is a common mistake to believe that sick drawings indicate a sick mind, rather than a reflective indictment of society. His drawings scream indelibly of human depravity; they are an eloquently barbaric response to life and death, right through the First World War and into the wild, helpless excesses of 1920s Berlin, which rotted away the lives of all those caught up in its suicidal glee.”
—Ralph Steadman

My first encounter with George Grosz (1893-1959) was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s glorious show, “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s,” which we happened to stumble upon during our honeymoon to New York last year. After seeing his work, it was unsurprising to learn that Grosz had a major influence on some of my drawing heroes, including R. Crumb and Ralph Steadman. In the past week I’ve been sifting through a fat stack of his books borrowed from the art library in the hopes of sharing some scans of my favorite drawings. Barring “Pimps of Death” (shown above), the rest of the drawings are presented in chronological order.

"Riot Of The Insane" by George Grosz, 1915

Riot of the Insane (1915)

“Riot of the Insane” might be familiar to anyone who has a copy of Ivan Brunetti’s Anthology of Graphic Fiction — in the introduction Brunetti analyzes the piece in terms of cartooning:

I have been struggling lately with how to depict space, and specifically, people in space. These drawings are amazing to me because they look like they were drawn by someone who knew the rules but didn’t care about them.

Family (1916)

“Family” might be my favorite. The way the baby swings with four legs, the flowers, the dogs, the man’s face (what is he doing there? is he spying? bringing a message?), the crosses, the windmill, the way it looks like the sun is setting over a horizon that is several thousand feet above where it “should” be. And where did that tree come from?

Suburb (1917)

Many of these drawings came from the collection, Ecce Homo, — the words come from the Latin that Pilate spoke while presenting Christ: “Behold the man.” Some artists in Grosz’s circle took this to mean “How pitiable is man”; others “What a beast man is.”

Friedrichstrass (1918)

Eva (1918)

The more I look at these drawings, the more they look less like drawings and more like collages. It’s no coincidence — Grosz collaborated with the famous anti-Nazi photomontage artist John Heartfield.

"The Guilty one remains unknown" by George Grosz, 1919

The Guilty One remains unknown (1919)

It’s impossible for me to look at “Cross Section” as just a drawing:

Cross Section (1920)

It’s a confection.

"Toads of property" by George Grosz, 1921

Toads of Property (1921)

From the beginning, the models he looked to were not the plaster casts of antique sculptures he was forced to draw when he studied in Dresden and Berlin; they were, rather, taken from the realm of popular imagery. The figures he admired were not the heroes of antiquity and history but those of dime novels. Grosz studied and collected children’s drawings and toilet graffiti. He was fascinated by garish pictures of horrifying atrocities and catastrophes of the sort displayed at carnivals and riflemen’s gatherings, and he loved the lurid illustrations in western novels and detective stories. And of course he knew the great caricaturists of the past: William Hogarth, whom he explicitly names as a model, Honore Daumier, Wilhelm Busch. Over the years he extracted from these widely divergent sources a unique and characteristic drawing style. With this style, he prowled the metropolis, studying its marginal districts, circling around such subjects as crime, nightclubs, bordellos. He was fascinated by the lower depths of society and of people.—Matthias Eberle

I Shall Exterminate Everything around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master by George Grosz

I Shall Exterminate Everything around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master (1921)

Further reading:

“One Day We’ll Get Even,” 57 drawings

George Grosz: An Autobiography

THE CHANNEL DRAGON (AND OTHER DRAWINGS)

Thursday, November 1, 2007

From my friend Tim (his daughter’s name is Jocie):

Do you take requests? Josie is writing a story that features a “channel dragon”. I had never heard of this, but she had written a handy definition in the footnotes (!) of the story: “Channel dragon: A nickname given to dragons from Venice. Don’t say it to their faces, though — they get mad.” If you could dash something off, maybe post it on your blog, that would be TEH AWESUM.

Do I take requests? I do when they involve dragons in Venice:

THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS

Monday, October 29, 2007

So-called creative people understand better than most that there is nothing new under the sun. Working with boulders of granite, with empty stages, with blank paper, they are credited with making something out of nothing, but that isn’t exactly what they do. All art is derived from what is in actuality a remarkably finite human experience. Whatever the medium, the creative person’s task is to interpret an essentially unchanging reality, a dog-eared reality pondered by Homer and Mel Brooks and everyone in between. The artist succeeds if he or she can present something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.”

— Rheta Grimsley Johnson

While everyone else is reading David Michaelis’s new biography, Schulz and Peanuts, I’ve decided to wait and ask for it for Christmas. Instead, I’m reading Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s underrated and unfortunately out-of-print 1989 “authorized” biography, Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz. People have called the book “innocuous” and “flattering”, but I think it deals with Schulz’s depression in a very straightforward and explicit manner, and the writing is really great. Worth tracking down.

Chapter 6 of the book is dedicated to Schulz’s “12 devices”—the twelve ideas that Schulz considered essential to the success of Peanuts:

1. The Kite-eating tree.

2. Schroeder’s music

I was looking through this book on music, and it showed a portion of Beethoven’s Ninth in it, so I drew a cartoon of Charlie Brown singing this. I thought it looked kind of neat, showing these complicated notes coming out of the mouth of this comic-strip character, and I thought about it some more, and then I thought, ‘Why not have one of the little kids play a toy piano?’

—Schulz

charlie brown and schroeder whistling

3. Linus’s blanket

4. Lucy’s psychiatry booth

5. Snoopy’s doghouse

In the beginning, Snoopy actually slept in his doghouse, and a three-quarter view that worked in perspective was the readers’ most familiar angle….The emergence of Snoopy’s doghouse as Grand Device centered not on actual depictions of the humble abode but on allusions to its fantastic contents…the only view the reader is ever given is a left side view. Yet as its graphic depiction became severely restricted, its function became limitless.

—R.G.J.

6. Snoopy himself

7. The Red Baron

8. Woodstock

9. The baseball games

10. The football episodes

Besides losing, the running (and falling) gag is a pure example of another element that has worked so well for Schulz: repetition…Nothing else in Peanuts is so mechanically repetitious as the football joke….One newspaper editor canceled Peanuts, complaining that the author did the same things over and over. He was forced to reinstate the comic strip, with an apology, when his readers set up a postal howl.

—R.G.J.

11. The Great Pumpkin

12. The little red-haired girl

Hank Williams’s plaintive ballad “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You” spurred the inclusion of the little red-haired girl in Peanuts. After listening to the song over and over again, Schulz was inspired to include in his cast of characters the unrequiting lover….The littler red-haired girl has never been depicted…and he believes she never will be.

—R.G.J.

TUMBLR

Friday, October 26, 2007

This weekend I started re-thinking how I blog and why I blog and whether I should be blogging at all. Here’s a snippet from an interview with Clive Thompson (his great blog is Collision Detection) that pretty much sums up my thoughts:

Some blogs exist solely for people who just surf all day long and they’re like, “Check this out, check this out, check this out.” They’ll post 20 things a day that are all one sentence long. And they’re really cool because they’re filtering the Internet for you. If you like their aesthetic, they’ll find things that are interesting and save you the work. They’re like a little concierge of culture and information.

Now I obviously like doing that, but I got busier when I went back to work, so I didn’t have as much time to blog. And I began to realize that what interested me more was posting about something that I’d discovered and no one else had. Or posting about something that other people were blogging about, but only if I had something interesting to say about it. So I blogged less frequently and I blogged longer little essays, things that were at least 500 words and sometimes up to 1000 words. Every posting became like a mini essay. And that’s the way I still write today.

…My goal is to find something thought provoking, offer people a new way to think about it, and let them check it out themselves. I sometimes just write something that I’m thinking about—there won’t be a link to anything, but that’s rare. Or if there’s something that’s really big on the blogosphere, I’ll try to find an unusual take on it.

I found a post from February where I wrote this: “I’m trying to make this thing as much like a virtual sketchbook/scrapbook/notebook as I can, and avoid the regular trappings of blogging…” What I found out though, is that I want two blogs: 1) the virtual sketchbook/notebook I was writing about and 2) the scrapbook where I just paste random crap from the web that I come across that is cool and interesting but doesn’t deserve much commentary.

So from now on, there will be a blog and a ~~scrapblog~~tumblelog. Now, I’m going to quit messing around on the internet and go draw something that’s actually worth posting.