Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Sunday, May 22nd, 2005
— BCA’s Frisco
makes me want to draw it as a comic strip, as Lisa did with Fortado. A while back I realized I’d have a difficult time creating a comic strip as a solo enterprise because, even though I could draw it, I knew I didn’t have the mind to develop dramatic or humorous ideas at the same level. And so I would require a partner, if I ever chose to fulfill the dream. It makes me think of some of the great collaborative efforts, like the strips created by Lee Falk (Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom) and, of course, Parker and Hart’s The Wizard of Id.
— Spent Friday morning compensating for the substandard transparency of the Tapley painting being featured within our Brass Band Festival poster design. It was a relief to know my teamwork with the printer’s pre-press technician achieved the anticipated result. All along, my goal has been to showcase a fabulous work of art without messing up, and having to take possession of the original and haul it around added a bit more stress to the process. Then we had lunch in Louisville with Bob the photographer and he pointed out that shooting a high-res digital could have avoided the entire ordeal of fixing a donated scan. No doubt, but that’s the sort of thing you get pulled into with a freebie project. There’s always time to salvage a botched plan, but never any money to do it correctly from the beginning.
— Within almost every “mandala” of friends there’s the individual or two who act as the “glue.” For a group that’s met twice a month for over a decade to experience “shared silence,” that primary person has been my friend Milton. He’s retiring from his long tenure at Centre College, and it was fun to “toast and roast” him at the cabin this morning. His energy, compassion, and “brutal” honesty has always been an inspiration. One of the harsh realizations of middle age has been to understand that one doesn’t know quite as much about quite as many subjects as it seems in youth. And special care should be taken when claiming any authority in the areas in which one has gained some depth of knowledge and expertise. For the most part, I learned this from Milton, a true scholar who knows how to keep things in perspective—that even though we all have our limitations as students of life, it need not inhibit our enthusiasm for learning, nor deter our quest for illumination.
— The remarkable recovery by Bruce continues as he enters his tenth week in the hospital. He had more surgery on Friday to take out tubes and is down to a single drain (which may come out tomorrow) and a line that delivers nutrition directly to the small intestine. Dana and I spent the afternoon with him yesterday. He did some hall walking and powered his own wheelchair for a while on a visit to the rose garden. He’s off antibiotics, keeps gaining strength, and can now concentrate on a little reading, which is one of the good signs I’ve been looking for. Nobody loved to read more than Bruce, and he’s surely on his way back to his former avocations. And yet I sense that the perilous chasm he traversed this spring is his portal to a new and different life that can be unlocked only by monumental perseverance.
V & S
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Tuesday, May 10th, 2005
Since I worked on this series last month, a few more early influences have come to mind, one by one. Joan reminded me of the illustrated dinosaur book with the green cover that she recalls me studying for hours. On Sunday I thought of another. During our trip back from Indy we stopped at the Speed Museum on UofL’s campus to see the Remington-Russell exhibition (typically, the last two hours of the final day, but thank God I didn’t miss it). I remembered the puzzles—a series of simple childen’s puzzles—that were all reproductions of Remington works. I’d forgotten about them, and how much I loved them! I doubt they lasted long in a household of youngsters. They were so powerfully evocative for me that I don’t think I even recognized them as art at the time, but thought of them as true representations of the far West. I’m sure that most of those specific images remain undiscovered to my adult eye, otherwise I would carry a stronger emotional connection to Remington. I came to Russell much later and felt a deeper identification with his sketch techniques and pictorial preferences. I’ve been especially drawn to his pen and wash style. His illustrated correspondence influenced me from the moment I first saw an example. Yes, I know there must be sophisticates who still don’t think he was one of the greats, but his work came to the Speed, dangit! If you don’t think he was a master, just try to copy his modest doodles. I’ve certainly tried and failed. There will never be another quite like him. Marty and I looked at his boyhood sketchbook in the gift shop. The drawings showed more potential for visual imagination than artistic achievement. “But he got good ’cause he never stopped,” I told the lad…and he understood.
Olden…
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Friday, May 6th, 2005
There’s a pattern that presents itself when I create one of my collage artworks, and it can be described something like this— As a concept gradually takes shape over a period of days, individual components are selected by contrast of color, size, and aesthetic associations, often involving the assembly of miniature configurations that will function as units. The formal compositional phase is then executed with intuitive dispatch within a concentrated block of time. After at least one night’s sleep, the third and final step is one of refinement, when the design is finessed with the placement of smaller elements to anchor the proper visual balance. Tonight I completed “act two” of the piece I’m donating to the Art-full Raffle (sponsored by the Arts Commission of Danville/Boyle County next week to raise funds for local arts scholarships).
Posted in Art, Community, Creativity, Time | Comments Closed
Saturday, April 30th, 2005
While out at midday on a five-miler, I was imagining what would happen if I took a collage miniature and enlarged it to gallery size after subjecting it to a mezzo-tone or stochastic conversion. I must have at least a dozen images that lend themselves to this graphic treatment, but when I consider time, materials and framing, I don’t see how I could finance it, not to mention the lack of anyone asking me to prepare such a large exhibition. I’d better start with just one and test the waters.
Posted in Art, Creativity, Exercise | Comments Closed
Friday, April 22nd, 2005
I haven’t been sure if I had any more “olden” entries in me, for now (because they might be something cathartic related to the past 4-5 weeks), but then I went to my Rotary lunch meeting today and heard a performance of the Boyle County Chamber Singers. These highschoolers are tackling Mozart’s Requiem and other pieces that would be considered advanced at the college level. To think that there are youngsters today with this kind of access to high-quality fine arts instruction at a local public school… well, it just might get me musing again about my own dearth of artistic mentorship and stir a few dying embers of resentment for your amusement.
Posted in Angst, Art, Community, Music | Comments Closed
Wednesday, April 20th, 2005
When I was a preteen, Dadbo brought home a carload of aerospace magazines from work. Did I cut out all the cool pictures of rockets and supersonic aircraft? No… I cut out and saved the marketing symbols and corporate trademarks. I can’t explain it, but I always had an affinity for letters and graphics (the GE emblem on the refrigerator intrigued the heck out of me), but I had no clear comprehension of either the fine or applied arts, any sense of the distinction, or what an artist actually did for a living, other than maybe draw cartoons, paint signs, or think up a few crazy advertising ideas like Darren Stevens. My junior high art teacher had worked as a commercial artist before switching to art education. She didn’t actually instruct me in any specific graphic arts techniques, but I did gain one valuable thing from her—she made sure I understood that commercial art was a viable aspiration for a talented person. But there was something else between the lines, as though it was our secret, this notion that commercial art wasn’t exactly noble, that it wasn’t real art. Hmmm, so what was real art? Didn’t have a clue. Norman Rockwell? For petesake I didn’t even realize who Bob Clampett and Ralph Bakshi were poking fun at when they created a cartoon character called Go Man Van Gogh (the wild beatnik artist on “Beany“). I just knew that I was fascinated by comics and advertising art and loved to study lettering and draw words as pictures. I remember painting the word “ICE” with watercolors, adding the archetypical mounds of snow and ice-cycles around the letters. It was almost a right of passage. Weird, eh? I had four different art teachers in four years of high school. I hate to be unkind but each one of them was worthless. I had talent, so there was no reason to spend time with me. It was more important to babysit the goof-offs who took art as a “cake” elective. No wonder I sent off for the Famous Artists home test. I don’t think I even realized how desperate I’d become. What others might have viewed as crass merchandising was a Godsend for me. The individual attention I got from instructors in far-off Connecticut was something I’d never experienced before. And even though the course introduced me to both the fine and applied arts, there was something about commercial art that made me feel at home. When I saw the classes offered by UC I didn’t get the same electricity from reading about figure drawing, painting, or printmaking like I did from discovering that I could take design fundamentals, typographics, photography and film/animation. I was pumped! I wanted to go to college so bad I turned cocky and couldn’t wait to blow my hometown and head for the big city…
Olden…
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Sunday, April 17th, 2005
You would have thought that I’d get at least one decent art teacher during my years in high school. No dice. And so I continued my bizarre attempt at artistic cultivation. I developed my own comic book characters, illustrated home-grown stories, and advanced my “Wanted Posters” into a state that was clearly an attempt at pushing my facial skills as far as I could handle without proper training. Nobody had ever told me about anatomy or life drawing. I absorbed the daily comics (I hated “Dondi” but studied the drawing). The unique intro to The Wild Wild West and the long-forgotten Lone Ranger animated series fascinated me. I became more and more interested in animation. I poured over the drawings of political artists—Herblock, Hugh Haynie, and Paul Conrad. I entertained the notion that I wanted to be an editorial cartoonist, and wrote letters to prominent exponents of the art form. But then something happened that would change everything. I saw an an advertisement from the Famous Artist School and responded. A representative actually paid a visit to our home and I begged my parents to let me give it a shot—the correspondence course that would give me the art instruction that I’d never managed to acquire. They said, “Okay,” and I will forever be grateful for this simple consent to expose me to legitimate art educators. I acknowledge now that the home-study “Course for Talent Young People” was an experiment, an attempt to market the successful adult course to a younger market. That meant nothing to me at the time. This was the school endorsed by Norman Rockwell! How could they deny me this opportunity? Well, they didn’t, even though my Mom had to cajole me into keeping up with the lessons. But a sea change had occurred. I was formally introduced to the world of art at last, fine and applied, and I was soon ready to make an informed decision about the direction of my artistic development. When my grandmother gave me a bulletin of classes from the University of Cincinnati, I was ready to choose a course of action—commericial art. No surprise. This was it! Everything else fell to the wayside…
Olden…
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Friday, April 15th, 2005
I don’t know if I really liked school as a kid, but rather accepted it as my fate. It did have one nice thing going for it—ample opportunity to draw. Because we were Catholics, we went to school six days a week, although the Saturday religious instruction (catechism) was only in the morning, which wasn’t so bad because we were used to it, and we got to hang out with our top chums, the Vagedes boys. But maybe the best thing about Saturday mornings was that we got a comic book. I didn’t know that Treasure Chest wasn’t “cool.” I looked forward to the wholesomely didactic magazine (given out one per family before we went home each Saturday morning) because it was a comic book. Super heroes would come later. “Treasure Chest” introduced me to the longer pictorial narrative form and the art of the visual cliffhanger. Looking back on it, the staff that produced it was clearly packed with talent. I never saw another issue of it after 1964. With the move to a new town, a few dimes to spend, and the proximity of my junior high school to a retail rack of Superman, Batman, and Aquaman, I made the seismic shift to the world of DC Comics. Other than being shown how to use pastel chalk by family friend Mr. Smalley, I still had received no direct exposure to fine arts instruction. I was almost a teen, and I’d had no educator who could demonstrate to me genuine artistic technique, even though I’d had a series of teachers who rather negligently but wholeheartedly supported my effort to become self-taught. And so I continued with my own strange mix of preferred influences: Reed Crandall, Doug Wildey, Bob Clampett, Alfred Andriola, Curt Swan, Bob Kane, and Frank Frazetta. Actually, I could have chosen much worse…
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Saturday, April 2nd, 2005
Although my mom provided a truly rich atmosphere for mental play and my dad revealed for me his familiar world of nature, I look back at times with wonder and some amusement that I ever arrived at any sort of creative legitimacy, given the odd character of my early visual stimuli. I always had chalk and my own blackboard, and was given free reign to inhabit the world of my own imagination, sharing it with a captive sibling audience. I suppose we were rather sheltered. It was no surprise they thought I was a real artist. I recall almost no access to books with “serious” artwork. A bound collection of Currier and Ives reproductions was about as close as it got. I don’t remember any childhood visits to art museums or even going to a library before attending school. There was really nothing about art to learn on television, except for the exposure to Walt Disney, or a glimpse of illustrations in the books read by Captain Kangaroo, or, eventually, Jon Gnagy’s “Learn to Draw.” At least I understood that Yogi Bear and the Flintstones wasn’t about art. We didn’t get a daily newspaper. And so it was a monumental event in my life when Uncle Art delivered a stack of Saturday Evening Post magazines and a year’s worth of old Sunday comics. I must not have had a bit of interest in anything else until it was fully absorbed. For a time, that was the pinnacle: Walt Kelly, Al Capp, Milton Caniff, and, of course, those magnificent Rockwell covers…
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Thursday, March 24th, 2005
— Now that the corner has been turned, and Bruce’s life has been preserved, he faces a difficult future, short- and long-term. A tough row to hoe, as they say. Today it appears as though the doc has given up on salvaging his transplanted kidney—too little function, too much chronic deterioration. This means more dialysis, a process which Bruce grew to loath, and will surely dread to accept back into his life on any regular basis. It may be several more hours before his awareness clears enough for him to evaluate his choices (or lack thereof). He’s being moved from intensive care to progressive care, and taken off anti-rejection drugs, narcotics, steroids, and sedatives, plus he’ll be down to a single tube—oxygen. One of the reasons they doped him is because he became combative and ripped out the nasal/gastric tube at least twice (as I might have, too, had I been in his situation). Or maybe I have that backwards (side effects of medication causing aggressive behavior and colorful use of language). In any case, the outlook is encouraging, but I’ll keep up my prayers. It’s likely that there will be more bumps in the road…
— If I came up with an idea for a new method of capital punishment—slow death by starvation—would it be declared cruel and unusual? If authorities came into your home and discovered all the pets were dead, would they say, “…within his rights—slow death by starvation.”? Sorry, just thinking rhetorically here. (Did I do the punctuation correctly on that?) “…I can’t imagine why, the world has time enough to cry.”
— As an avid watcher of Brian Lamb’s “Booknotes,” I was disappointed when he wrapped the 800-show series on C-SPAN. Listening to writers talk about writing makes me want to write. Listening to politicians talk about politics doesn’t make me want to run for office. Listening to artists talk about art definitely makes me want to make art. Now the only other good interview show with the classic all-black set is Charlie Rose. I think Rose is at his best when he’s talking to artists. Not that he doesn’t demonstrate the same level of skill when interviewing journalists and politicians, but I guess he tends to insert more opinions that sometimes irritate me. His recent conversation with Daniel Day-Lewis and his astonishingly brilliant and beautiful wife, Rebecca Miller (daughter of the late Arthur Miller), was just about as good as television ever gets. How in the world does he get these creative people to relax and describe the inexpressible aspects of their talent and craft? His style is totally different than Lamb’s, but they both make it look so easy. Not the performance (if that’s what you can call it), but the technique of coaxing the guest to say things that are genuinely interesting. I made the mistake of watching a perfunctory interview with Clint Eastwood, leading up to the Oscars, and the interviewer managed to avoid steering him to a single topic that was remotely enlightening… quite a feat, actually.
Posted in Art, Creativity, Current Events, Death, Family, Movies, Personalities, Pets, Political Affairs, Prayer, Television | Comments Closed
Wednesday, March 9th, 2005
The rhythmic perfection and exuberant athleticism of the KODO performance at Centre last night was powerful, mesmerizing, and deeply satisfying. I knew the word “Kodo” from my book by Kensho Furuya (Kodo: Ancient Ways— Lessons in the Spiritual Life of the Warrior/Martial Artist), but I wasn’t sure whether it literally meant “Ancient Ways.” The KODO artists boldly but reverently exalt “Taiko,” the traditional Japanese drum, which is the ancient symbol of rural Japan. Their musical interpretations connect at a fundamental human level that must be experienced to fully appreciate.
Trivia: What television theme features the Taiko? Answer.
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Friday, March 4th, 2005
Spent three hours today in front of a hot griddle at Kentucky School for the Deaf making pancakes for the Danville Rotary Club. Once a year I adopt my little-known identity as the greatest fried-foods artist since Neolithic times. Usually this annual fundraising event is scheduled around the middle of February, which enables me to show off by making heart-shaped pancakes. This year the timing was off, but did that stop me?
Modesty eludes me when it comes to my Rotary pancakes. I suppose they can only be described as perfect. Just ask any of my numerous pupils (the community’s best and brightest). That they hold me in total, ring-kissing awe on this particular day allows them to act like they don’t know me the rest of the year.
As far as Dana is concerned, it just makes me smell like grease.
Ah, the sorrow of genius…
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Sunday, February 27th, 2005
The realization hit only yesterday. There are four graduations in the Clan later this spring! Cosmosaics? Cosmoramas? More Grandy-bo variations? Something new? I’d better plan ahead this time…
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Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005
— Surprising as it might seem, I never read H.S. Thompson. Maybe it was because I had a back-stabbing co-worker in the 70s who carried on a lot about how great a writer Thompson was. Either that or I just couldn’t get past all the Ralph Steadman, which has been a bit of a mystery, since Steadman’s work was mildly influential for me at a certain point in my development as an illustrator (even though I found something fundamentally revolting about his style).
— Brendan’s new Idiotcam archive is positively super-dooper! Now I have only two major goals left in my life: building a home in the Knobs and making it into the exalted Plastic Mullet Series.
— Something about Mombo’s tribute has really sparked some childhood memories. For some reason I got to thinking about one of the most brattish (perhaps the most brattish) thing I ever did as a child. I was pretty young, so my recollection is rather hazy. I don’t think it was my birthday, so it must have taken place at Christmas. I do remember that I’d been agitating for the only toy I desperately wanted—a firetruck. My parents must have been anticipating the delight that would certainly result from their big surprise. Or maybe it was my Uncle Don who was behind it.
There it was! A bright red steel pedal-car-style fire engine complete with little wood ladders and a silver bell!
I threw a fit. Weeping dramatically, I let it be known that I was totally disappointed. How could somebody have gotten it so utterly wrong? That’s not what I wanted. What I wanted was a little firetruck that I could take out to the sand pile and play with! It was a bitter tragedy. No, it was the end of the world!
I don’t know how much longer it was before the replacement arrived, or what mixed emotions my tantrum must have triggered, but the Tonka fire engine eventually appeared, and it was a beauty. It even had a red hydrant that connected to the garden hose to supply a realistic fire-fighting stream. I have no recall as to what my reaction was. I hope I was appropriately grateful, but I may have just accepted it as merely just and overdue.
Both toys are long gone. Did the pedal car end up at the home of a cousin? Whatever became of the little fire engine? Either toy would be a valuable collector’s item today…
Posted in Angst, Art, Blogging, Brendan, Family, Gratitude, Mombo, Personalities, Playtime | Comments Closed
Thursday, February 17th, 2005
Aerial photography with a kite? Professor Charles C. Benton (College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley) has definitely got it down. Or should I say up? Check out his cool site.
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Friday, February 11th, 2005
That Arthur Miller was a great artist, there is no doubt. Great artists have the ability to touch countless lives far removed from their own circle. Miller’s enduring gift to me was creating the role of Abigail Williams when I was one year old, so that nearly 20 years later I would have my peak experience with live theater, as I watched my sister deliver her astonishing portrayal of the seventeen year-old Puritan girl on stage in Evanston, Illinois. Even now, I’m still thrilled by the memory.
Posted in Art, Family, Fiction, Personalities, Time | Comments Closed
Wednesday, February 9th, 2005
Danville lost another fine man this week, my friend Morse Marcum. If Dadbo had grown up in Kentucky, he would’ve known all the things Morse knew. We had many enjoyable lunchtime conversations about wildlife in the knobs, tobacco, timber, horses and mules… But there was one specific interest that only we seemed to share among locals: murals. Every time Morse would visit a town that had a mural he would bring his excitement to me and we would brainstorm about creating a mural in Boyle County. But we never found a patron. Rest easy, Morse. If I ever get to do another mural, I’ll surely dedicate it to you.
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Tuesday, February 1st, 2005
— Month of January workout totals: Swim-7; Bike-4; Run-3; Lift-6.
— Well, it’s the day to do that “first of the month” stuff: Total and evaluate the fitness workouts; adjust engine coolant and steering fluid levels; scan the hard drives; polish the cutlasses; check the hams.
— Bob and Meg sent me an article about John Evans (clipped from The New York Times) and his 37-year daily collage project. Synchronicity: Bob said that Meg had shown it to him on the same day he received my note about how I’d made the decision to gain control over my hand-made greeting card habit. At my 50th birthday party Bob suggested I scan my cards and publish a book. I’ve taken his advice on the scanning part. The article mentions that nobody was interested in doing a book on Evans because he wasn’t famous. After a publisher finally decided to produce one, he now admits it won’t make any money. Strange parallels. Like Evans, I’ve also had the recent urge to get rid of stuff, especially after helping to sort out some of the accumulation at the house that Joe Wood built. I might as well do it while I have the desire. It’s not my typical mode. But like Evans said, “What if my daughters and my wife had to deal with all this?”
— Josh has been staying in Kuwait and was scheduled to arrive in Iraq this week, so I wrote a note to him last night, thinking that he’d get it the first time he had a chance to check email after he got settled. My hope is that the atmosphere will have improved, now that the election has taken place, and that more Iraqi citizens will cooperate with the interim government and the coalition to provide information about extremists. Nevertheless, he’ll need to stay “on guard” for the duration of his deployment. I do look forward to hearing from him soon.
Posted in Art, Creativity, Current Events, Exercise, Family, Friends, Pirates, Political Affairs, Priorities, Time | Comments Closed
Monday, January 24th, 2005
After the open house for David’s retirement from National City, Dana and I had dinner at Freddie’s with David, Lee, Gary, and Trish. Afterwards we regrouped at the Town House for dessert, so I opened the 1997 bottle of Nichelini Cabernet, which had been waiting patiently for a celebration. My goodness, it was even better than I was expecting. RWB certainly knows his wine. We all enjoyed a welcome break from recent tensions. David asked me to show Gary and Trish my first wood engraving, and so I made my typical awkward attempt at juggling personal pride and sincere humility. You’d think that by now I’d feel more natural when it came to discussing my art.
Posted in Art, Dana, Family, Friends, Home, Wine | Comments Closed
Tuesday, January 18th, 2005
Today’s Anacrusis story made me think of seeing Ben Shahn’s work for the first time as a callow teenager, when I took the Famous Artists School’s home-study Course for Talented Young People and discovered the concept of creating artwork in service to the advancement of social justice. The whole idea seemed so phlegmatically self-evident at the time.
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