At the Mexic-Arte Museum this afternoon I came across this 1905 broadsheet with José Guadalupe Posada woodcuts. The skull in the bowtie immediately reminded me of the creepy capitalists in George Grosz’s work. (See the detail below from his 1921 drawing, I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master.)
Artisanal
Clayton Cubitt: “Once you see that ‘artisanal’ actually spells ‘art is anal’ you can’t unsee it.”
Museum club
“I never went to an art school. I failed the art courses that I did take in school. I just looked at a lot of things. And that’s how I learnt about art, by looking at it.”
—Jean-Michel Basquiat
My favorite part of the documentary Basquiat: Rage to Riches is Fab 5 Freddy recalling how he and Basquiat started a “museum club”: every week or so they would cab up to The Met and walk around with sketch pads, pretending to be art students, looking at the paintings.
Here’s a clip of Freddy joking about how they thought Carvaggio was “gangster” for carrying a sword:
He also points out how white artists were inspired by black culture — Pollock listening to jazz while doing his improvisational drawings, Picasso stealing from African masks — and how Basquiat took their influence and reclaimed it back into his work.
It’s a good watch. If you can, though, check out Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child, which I think dives a little deeper into his influences.
For example, in that documentary you’ll learn that Basquiat loved to have a bunch of books around when he painted. Above are two comparison screenshots, one showing a page from Gray’s Anatomy (his mother gave him a copy as a child after he got hit by a car) and one showing a page of hobo signs from Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook (a personal favorite of mine). He also had copies of Da Vinci’s Notebooks and Burchard Brentjes’ African Rock Art.
Here’s a bonus image from my Basquiat file: his hand-copied table of contents from Melville’s Moby-Dick.
The Scream (tracing an obsession)
My kids have obsessions. Deep, drawn-out obsessions. And sometimes, as with my 5-year-old and Kraftwerk, we get so far into the obsession that I can’t even remember when or how the obsession began.
Our 3-year-old’s latest obsession is drawing Edvard Munch’s The Scream. WTF?
It all began when he was inspecting Welcome to Mamoko and came across this picture of an art thief. (Oh, the irony of life.) he zoomed in and pointed it out to my wife. “Painting!”
So, my wife printed out a photo of the painting from the internet, and he immediately began copying it. (Copying is how we learn.) The above picture was drawn on June 15th.
Here’s a drawing from July 7th — four weeks later! He was still drawing the scream.
The next day, we took him to the Blanton Museum, thinking maybe we’d see some weird expressionist painting that would be a good substitute. No such luck.
But then we were walking past the window of the gift shop and he stops and shouts, “Mama!” What does he point to? A frickin’ finger puppet of The Scream. In a huge pile of other finger puppets!
So the obsession continues. Who knows how long it will last?
Yesterday, I was lettering the cover for my next book, over and over again. I tried to channel Jules drawing The Scream.
I kept thinking about how much of my work is just being obsessed. Giving myself over to things that interest me, not just for a few days or a few weeks, but for months and for years.
It’s thrilling to watch my kids have the time and space for their obsessions. To see where they go. They keep teaching me how to learn.
I could do that
After I made this, I realized I was basically plagiarizing Craig Damrauer, who I quoted in Steal Like An Artist:
MODERN ART = I COULD DO THAT + YEAH, BUT YOU DIDN’T
More on the subject over at The Art Assignment.
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