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Friday, June 27
LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE
by
Lloydville
on Fri 27 Jun 2008 03:00 AM PDT
Things just keep getting better and better for fans of classic American comic strips. Little Orphan Annie has just been added to the list of strips that are being reprinted in volumes that will eventually cover the entire runs of these comics.
The first volume is available now. It includes the first few years of the strip, beautifully reproduced, mostly from Harold Gray's original drawings or from the syndication proofs. In them, the plucky Annie knocks about America spreading kindness or kicking ass, as the situation requires.
Here's a philosophical question for you. Why was it that American popular culture, back in the darkest days of patriarchy, kept coming up with images of powerful little girls, like Annie and Dorothy of Kansas, who set off on their own on dangerous journeys and triumphed over all adversities by force of character . . . while in our own nominally feminist age the most prominent role models for young girls are sexually objectified teen tartlets?
There are now four volumes out of the early Dick Tracy strips, seven or eight of Krazy Kat, three of Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates, two books which contain complete runs of Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze and Dreams Of the Rarebit Fiend -- plus two huge volumes which reprint color Sunday pages from Gasoline Alley and Little Nemo In Slumberland. If you pile them all up beside your bed or easy chair and read a few strips or pages a day, you've got your own personal funny pages to hand, some compensation for the fact that modern newspapers have no space for popular art this brilliant and this entertaining.
Saturday, June 21
AN AMANDA VISELL FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 21 Jun 2008 02:11 AM PDT
The image above, Griffin Lava Breath, is from a new show by Amanda Visell opening today at the M Modern Gallery in Palm Springs, California. The show is called Tic Toc Apocalypse and features images of horror done in a cheerful cartoon-modern style. What fun!
Click here for a preview of the show.
Tuesday, June 3
A CALENDAR GIRL FOR JUNE
by
Lloydville
on Tue 03 Jun 2008 01:17 AM PDT
Surf's up . . . or not. Who cares?
By Al Moore, for Esquire. (With thanks to ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.)
Saturday, May 24
WILL ELDER
by
Lloydville
on Sat 24 May 2008 01:43 PM PDT
Will Elder died this month. He was one of the geniuses behind the miracle of Mad Magazine, working closely with its founder Harvey Kurtzman, turning Kurtzman's savage satires of American popular culture into amazing visual equivalents.
It's impossible to overstate the importance of Mad to the generations of kids who grew up in the Fifties and Sixties and found in it an antidote to the oppressive onslaught of the official corporate culture. I can still remember my first encounter with the magazine in the late Fifties, when I was eight or nine. The issue I saw featured an insert of full-color package labels that could be pasted over real package labels, turning a jar of baby food, for example, into a container for some sort of toxic waste.
Consumer culture in the Fifties had an aura of religious sanctity, identified with all that was good about America -- to savage it so mercilessly was to encourage an interior critique of that culture, to free the spirit from its spell. Mad Magazine didn't inspire laughter so much as exhilaration, the exhilaration of free thought. It was Mad Magazine that represented all that was truly good about America.
Elder's meticulous, obsessive attention to detail lifted Mad from the realm of mere sarcastic attitude into the realm of serious social criticism. Elder both loved and hated the official culture he mocked, and that gave his visions real power.
If you click on the image above (or here) you can see a larger version of it -- the better to appreciate its fanatical draftsmanship. Elder expended extraordinary energies of commitment and passion to shove his subversive visions in your face.
(With thanks to Potrzebie for the image, which is © 2008 EC Publications.)
Sunday, May 11
¡VIVA EL PELO!
by
Lloydville
on Sun 11 May 2008 02:53 AM PDT
I don't know how to translate the title of the above painting by Julio Romero de Torres -- every possible rendition of ¡Viva el Pelo! into English sounds silly -- but el pelo
means the hair, so you get the idea. The image reminds me of a line by the poet Robert
Duncan, "in the dark of the moon the hair rules". This in turn
reminds me of something the poet Robert Browning said about his wife
Elizabeth Barrett Browning after her death, when he was asked what it
was like being married to such a famous person (she was far more famous
than he was during her lifetime.) Yes, she was known to the
world, Browning admitted, "but I knew her on the dark side of the moon" --
the side of the moon the world never sees . . . where the hair rules.
Friday, May 9
A CALENDAR GIRL FOR MAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 09 May 2008 12:21 AM PDT
Hello?
By Al Moore, for Esquire, 1950. (With thanks to ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.)
Wednesday, April 30
JULIO ROMERO DE TORRES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 30 Apr 2008 02:58 AM PDT
This wonderful portrait, Carmen Of Cordova,
is by Julio Romero de Torres, a Spanish painter of the late Victorian
and early modern eras. His images are dark, earthy and
erotic, with a hint of the perverse.
He started out doing conventional Victorian narrative tableaux, like the one above -- titled Look How Beautiful She Was! -- but eventually developed a more eccentric vision. Below, a twist on a famous paiting by Velasquez:
Like any respectable Spaniard he both loved and feared women . . .
. . . and also tended to see them in a mystical light:
His sensibility represents an odd blend of the carnal and the spiritual
-- always in his work, however sensual, we can hear the Spanish saying
"Where the body goes, there goes death."
Above, the artist in his studio with a model and a visitor.
Romero de Torres was born and spent most of his life in Córdoba, taking
time out to serve as a pilot in WWI and to visit the Argentine, where
he got sick, returning to Córdoba to die at the age of 55. There
are no books in English which collect his work, although twelve more
books about the mildly amusing advertising artist Andy Warhol were
published last week.
Something is terribly wrong with our civilization -- but you knew that.
There is a museum in Córdoba which lovingly preserves his house and work, which you can visit virtually here.
Thanks, as so often, to Little Hokum Rag and Femme Femme Femme for pointing the way to this enchanting painter.
Tuesday, April 8
A BOUGUEREAU FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 08 Apr 2008 08:00 AM PDT
Once a poster boy for bourgeois bad taste, Bouguereau is starting to
look more and more radical -- certainly more and more bizarre.
The solidity of his angels here is uncanny. The wings of angels
in art are often merely symbolic -- in this image they
seem like practical appendages, as necessary to flight as a bird's
wings. They give these angels a monstrous quality, as though
they're the product of some unholy genetic experiment. On the
other hand, it may be that the sight of real angels would produce the
same impression and that real angels, if photographed, would look exactly as
they do above.
For a lengthier meditation on the work of this extraordinary artist, go here:
Bouguereau and the Über-Photograph
Wednesday, April 2
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE: A VICTORIAN ARTIST YOU SHOULD KNOW
by
Lloydville
on Wed 02 Apr 2008 02:48 AM PDT
Jules Bastien-Lepage died tragically young, in 1884, when he was in his late thirties. He painted one masterpiece, Joan Listening To the Voices (above),
which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It's impossible to describe the effect of this large canvas, with its
complex and convincing illusion of space, which Joan seems about to step out of,
prompted forward by her visions. It's an example of a
photo-realistic technique enlisted in the service of mystical drama.
Bastien-Lepage groped about a bit in his short career, with stylized
works of grandiose ambition that seem clumsy and pretentious and
modest genre paintings that seem trite, but his über-photographic style
could occasionally produce miracles, like this extraordinary portrait of Sarah Bernhardt,
which has the quality of a bas-relief:
No other evocation of Bernhardt, in literature, art or photography,
brings us as close as Bastien-Lepage's portrait does to the charisma of
the great artist. Nadar's photographs of the young actress
humanize her, touch the heart -- Bastien-Lepage's portrait records the
determined audacity of her genius. She seems powerful and
vulnerable at the same time, part of the alchemy of a star.
The American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens did a remarkable
bas-relief portrait of Bastien-Lepage in bronze, which makes a fine
pendant to Bastien-Lepage's portrait of Bernhardt -- both have a
tactile grace that takes the breath away, both summon their subjects into
our immediate presence, obliterating time and mortality:
Tuesday, March 11
AT SWIM TWO GIRLS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 11 Mar 2008 01:07 AM PDT
A lovely, mysterious image from Serbian artist Vladimir Dunjic (with thanks to Femme Femme Femme and apologies to Flann O'Brien.)
Monday, March 3
AN N. C. WYETH FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 03 Mar 2008 06:46 PM PST
The above is an illustration by N. C. Wyeth for the book Legends Of Charlemagne.
N. C. Wyeth, the father of Andrew, was the greatest of American book
illustrators and one of the greatest of American painters. His
influence on cinema, especially the work of John Ford, cannot be
overestimated.
[The image is courtesy of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, one of the most delightful sites on the Internet.]
Wednesday, February 27
UNSPEAKABLY COOL: DREAM OF THE RAREBIT FIEND
by
Lloydville
on Wed 27 Feb 2008 11:39 PM PST
The
fourth of the four coolest books published in the last few years, like
two of the others, collects the work of Winsor McCay -- in this case
the extraordinary strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend -- but unlike the other three wasn't put out by Sunday Press Books. Privately published by Ulrich Merkl, it
includes all of the strips from the series -- those not reproduced in
the book itself are supplied on a DVD that comes packaged with the book.
The book is gigantic and presents the strips, published between 1904
and 1913, in their original size. It also has a wealth of other
illustrative material showing McCay's sources and documenting the
enormous influence his images have had on America's visual culture,
especially that of the movies.
The draftsmanship of the strips is stunning, the visual imagination
exhilarating. Its central gag involves the dreams of people given
indigestion by eating Welsh Rarebit, making it a kind of run-up to
McCay's masterpiece strip Little Nemo In Slumberland, which illustrates the dreams of a restless little boy.
Merkl's book, published in a limited edition, is available at his web
site -- it's expensive but worth every penny. It lovingly documents a
brilliant and endlessly enchanting work of popular art.
Check out my reports on the other three coolest books of recent years:
Little Nemo
Little Sammy Sneeze
Walt and Skeezix
Thursday, February 21
PIERROT'S EMBRACE
by
Lloydville
on Thu 21 Feb 2008 08:23 PM PST
Guillaume Seignac
was a late Victorian painter (he died in 1924) who mostly turned out
undistinguished but sometimes amusing imitations of Bouguereau.
His draftsmanship could be flabby and his images didn't have the
über-photographic authority of his master.
The image above is different, though. It has an odd suggestive
power, almost perverse, that's rooted in theatrical gesture. I
find it haunting, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.
Wednesday, February 6
A PUNCHINELLO FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 06 Feb 2008 05:33 AM PST
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) was the son of the great painter and master of the fresco Giovanni
Battista Tiepolo. Domenico painted and did frescos as well, but
his most amazing work was series of drawings featuring the commedia dell'arte character Punchinello, done towards the end of his life.
The series comprised 104 pen and wash images which explored the
character in unexpected ways. Domenico showed him in childhood,
in the kitchen cooking polenta, imprisoned, and finally dead and buried
(see above.) Indeed, Domenico treated Punchinello as an early
version of Krusty the Clown, but with a depth of feeling that
transformed him from a stock figure of the comic stage into an image of
everyman, a clown of Shakespearean dimensions.
The drawings are free, almost casual, but incredibly beautiful.
The series was sold and dispersed in 1921 but in 1986 77 of them were
collected and superbly reproduced in a book, which is out of print but
still available, for a price, through online booksellers. It's
well worth tracking down.
Friday, February 1
FLETCHER HANKS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 01 Feb 2008 11:43 PM PST
Fletcher
Hanks is sometimes called, with a kind of affectionate awe, the worst
comic book artist of all time -- sort of the Ed Wood of the comic
book. Like Wood, he was bad in an earnest, reckless way that
grips the imagination.
Fletcher's drawing style was crude, his stories simple and
brutal. They have a way of penetrating straight to the unconscious.
Not much is known about him, except that he was an abusive drunk who
terrorized his family and then abandoned them in 1930, that he stopped
drawing comic books in 1941 and that he froze to death on a park bench
in New York City sometime in the 1970s.
But the work remains, saved by a few collectors of wildly obscure comics and now reprinted in a new book called I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! It is a cry from a twisted heart and in some weird, unfathomable way both brilliant and important.
Tuesday, January 15
FEMME FEMME FEMME
by
Lloydville
on Tue 15 Jan 2008 09:45 PM PST
Femme Femme Femme
is a cool web log dedicated to images of women in art. It ranges
admirably over eras and styles and does not neglect the 19th-Century
academic painters who created so many vexing portraits of women.
Check it out.
Friday, January 11
JAMES SHEEHAN PAINTING AT NIGHT
by
Lloydville
on Fri 11 Jan 2008 10:12 PM PST
My
sister Libba Marrian is making a documentary about the wonderful
painter James Sheehan. I've seen a rough assembly of part of it
and it's fascinating.
You can see a short sequence from the film, James Sheehan Painting At Night, on YouTube here. The painting and the images recording Sheehan at work on it are beautiful.
You can see more of Sheehan's work here.
Sunday, December 23
A NORMAN ROCKWELL FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 23 Dec 2007 12:49 AM PST
O. k., Norman Rockwell did sometimes push the cuteness factor a bit too
hard, especially in his advertising work. (The image above is
from a magazine ad -- the family is excited because dad is bringing
home a new Plymouth for Christmas.) The expression on the face of
the boy on the right is just a bit too orgasmic for the occasion.
The expression on the face of the dog makes up for this to a degree -- I get
a feeling he's looking forward to urinating on the Plymouth's new
tires. The self-absorption of the birds also makes for a nice
counterpoint to the ecstasy induced by conspicuous material consumption.
Yet for all that the image moves me. It sums up exactly how I felt in the Christmases of my youth, which is pretty much exactly
how I still feel at Christmas -- surprising considering how many
such seasons I have under my belt. Sometimes art isn't meant to
make us rethink how we feel about things -- sometimes it's meant to
remind us how we feel about things.
Remove the Plymouth from the equation -- imagine it's just dad, a
salesman perhaps, back from a long road trip in time for the
holidays. That works, too.
Sunday, December 16
BLACK COMEDY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 16 Dec 2007 12:35 AM PST
When
I discovered the work of Amy Crehore, via Boing Boing, I was particularly
struck by the image above, titled Black Comedy, and reproduced it at the head of my first
post about the artist. This holiday season someone gave me an
original limited-edition print of the image, which is not just striking
but ravishing, far beyond anything an Internet reproduction could
convey.
The odd tone of the scene is intensified in the print -- a dreamy, erotic
playfulness that has something to do with the theatricality of sex, or
the sexiness of theater, but floats mysteriously above any precise
interpretation.
Anyone looking for a special gift this Christmas could do worse than peruse the prints available at Crehore's web site.
The peek-a-boob joke in the painting puts me in mind of something that
happened to me recently here in Las Vegas. I'd just had a drink
at the Mirage with my friend the architect Deane Evans, in town for a
conference, and went out to pick up my car at the valet stand.
There were two guys in cowboy hats (the rodeo is also in town) and two
girls at the stand waiting for their truck. As I came up to them
one girl, very tall, very attractive and very drunk, turned to me and
opened the front of her blouse, flashing her very impressive
breasts. Then she broke up laughing. I didn't know how to
respond to this cheerful greeting and just said, with what was probably
a goofy smile, "Thank you."
The greeting wasn't personal -- the young lady was flashing her boobs
and laughing delightedly at any guy who came near her, including the attendant who delivered her
ride. They all responded with goofy smiles.
I now realize, given the season we're in, that I should have said, "Merry Christmas to you, too."
Wednesday, December 5
A GÉRÔME FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 05 Dec 2007 07:31 AM PST
Victorian academic painters loved doing scenes set in antique Roman or
Oriental baths -- it was a respectable way of showing lots of women in
various stages of undress. The casual, languorous poses of these
women would have seemed shocking in a modern setting or unseemly in
mythological or allegorical images. One of the things that was
radical about the Impressionists was their depiction of nudity in
naturalistic ways, in ordinary settings. The academics had it both
ways -- their settings could say, by implication, "Modern European
women don't look or act this way with their clothes off," but everyone
knew (or suspected, or hoped) differently. The hypocrisy added a little spice to the
proceedings -- wink, wink . . . nudge, nudge. It seems a bit
silly now, but a bit charming, too.
Friday, November 30
UNSPEAKABLY COOL: LITTLE SAMMY SNEEZE
by
Lloydville
on Fri 30 Nov 2007 01:26 AM PST
The third of the four coolest books published in the past few years is (I am compelled to report) also from Sunday Press Books -- a collection of Winsor McCay's pre-Nemo comic strip Little Sammy Sneeze.
This book is not a gigantic volume reproducing newspaper pages in full size,
simply because Little Sammy did not command a full page on
Sundays. It is, instead, a good-sized coffee-table book -- all
that's needed to reproduce McCay's color Sammy Sneeze strips almost exactly as they were originally published.
Sunday Press's philosophy in regard to reproducing old color strips is
very sensible. They use modern digital techniques to correct the
fading of colors and the yellowing of paper, but don't try to improve
on the colors as they would actually have appeared to a reader of the
time and don't try to eliminate minor characteristic printing
errors. What one sees in their books is thus a very close
approximation of the medium the comic strip artists composed for.
In Little Sammy Sneeze, McCay
took a very small idea and made something wonderful out of it.
The strips normally employ either six or eight panels, all showing the same location
and generally from the same point of view. Activity proceeds within the space
of the location as Little Sammy works himself up to a sneeze, which
usually produces catastrophic effects within the location and causes
Sammy to be ejected from it angrily. For some reason, this
mechanical formula produces endless delight -- much the way simple
variations on a musical theme can produce endless delight.
The drawing, of course, is brilliant, as you'd expect from McCay, and
the period detail within the mostly realistic settings has only grown
more magical with time. The strips are in part about time, of
course -- small segments of time in which many things happen.
Seeing the way static pictures on a page can evoke a sense of the
passage of time is intrinsically fascinating. It's like
deconstructing the process of cinema, with the illusion laid out
anatomically before you.
In one instance, McCay deconstructs his own medium, as Sammy's sneeze fractures the frame of the comic strip panel itself:
If the gag in the strip is always the same, or more or less the same,
it is nevertheless always surprising -- or perhaps one should say
always suspenseful. There's a psychological phenomenon involved
here that's at the core of any good joke, which can make you laugh even
if
you've heard it before. In part, it's the shape of the joke that
makes it work -- a tension is created that can only be resolved with
the release of a laugh. The same phenomenon is at work in all
stories, which is why it's possible to cry every time you read A Christmas Carol -- even if you know it almost by heart.
You can obtain Sammy's sneezes here.
Thursday, November 29
UNSPEAKABLY COOL: WALT AND SKEEZIX
by
Lloydville
on Thu 29 Nov 2007 12:39 AM PST
The second of the four coolest books published in the past few years is another oversized volume from Sunday Press Book -- Sundays With Walt and Skeezix. It collects a number of Sunday pages from Frank King's brilliant long-running strip Gasoline Alley,
one of the glories of American popular art. I've written before about the
series from Drawn and Quarterly Press which is reprinting the entire
run of the daily strip in a succession of handsome volumes -- but the Sunday
pages are something else again.
In the daily strip, King created a narrative masterpiece graced with
many flights of visual invention, but in the color Sunday pages his
visual imagination grew much bolder -- lyrical, almost abstract at
times. He looked at the Sunday page sometimes as an arena for the
wildest experimentation -- to see just how far the expressive potential
of a comic strip might reach.
In the Sunday Press collection we can see these Sunday strips almost as
their
first viewers did -- in the same colors and in the same size.
It's a measure of our culture's descent into mediocrity and triviality
that no work of such ambition and grace now accompanies any daily
newspaper in the land, and certainly no cable news channel. It
used to be assumed that the visions of great popular artists ought to
be part of every American's daily dose of media. Today only cheap
digital graphics and portentous musical jingles accompany the canned "news"
doled out by the major media outlets.
Americans have never liked being spoon fed "culture" -- meaning culture
that somebody decided was good for them. That was the beauty of
the comic strip -- it was an art form so unpretentious, so vernacular
and casual, that Americans could consume it over breakfast or before
dinner without a trace of self-consciousness or social anxiety. But its
expressive range was almost limitless. We know that from the work
of artists like Frank King, who in their own quiet but audacious ways
tested its limits to the full.
You could read through these comics and weep that stuff this great used
to be thrown up on the porches of millions of Americans by
paperboys every Sunday morning -- and isn't anymore. Or you could read through them
and take heart at the fact that stuff this great could ever have been part of
American popular culture -- and so might be again. Why not?
You can buy Sundays With Walt and Skeezix here.
Monday, November 26
A TISSOT FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 26 Nov 2007 11:22 AM PST
Tissot loved the Thames and its waterfronts -- which offered him
endless opportunities for the sort of spatial drama that he reveled
in. The example above is especially dynamic, with its small boat
moving forward into a space in front of the picture plane as the
taller ships lead our eye backward into the space of the painting, reinforcing the sense of
movement. The result is a highly cinematic image.
Saturday, November 17
AN IMAGE FROM THE WAR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 17 Nov 2007 12:33 AM PST
Ken Burns says this photograph is his favorite among all the still images used in his documentary The War.
It really is beautiful -- the composition, emphasizing the deep space,
reminds one of Victorian academic paintings. Tissot and
Alma-Tadema reveled in compositions like this:
Thursday, November 15
A ZORN FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 15 Nov 2007 12:21 PM PST
Like Renoir, Anders Zorn seemed to be intoxicated by female flesh --
the sensual surface of his canvases seems to be a sexual response to
the female nude, whose aura radiates outward to affect her
surroundings, which take on her sensual properties, as in the painting above. The whole
world seems made of flesh. Renoir said, "I paint with my penis,"
and the same can almost be said of Zorn.
Renoir's world sometimes seems about to melt in the sexual delirium but
Zorn
kept a stricter control over his draftsmanship and his sense of
modeling, of space -- he was more academic in that sense. The
tension between the sensual surface and the precise rendering of forms
makes Zorn's work more interesting to me than the late Renoir nudes,
which always seem to threaten to dissolve into goo (see above.)
They become
more and more about Renoir's mood and process, less and less about real
women.
Wednesday, November 14
WINSOR MCCAY AND THE CINEMA
by
Lloydville
on Wed 14 Nov 2007 11:05 AM PST
The
influence that went on, back and forth, between the cinema and other
visual arts has often been noticed but rarely studied in detail.
Writers on cinema have produced tome after tome about the influence of the
stage and literature on movies, but the visual side of things has
rarely been subjected to rigorous investigation.
Partly this is because the two principal visual influences on movies,
comic strips and Victorian academic painting, have had little prestige
in the scholarly culture, and partly it's because these two forms have
been hard to study themselves. First-rate reproductions of even
the most important comic strips have been difficult to come by, and
Victorian academic painting tends to languish in storage in museums, to
make room in the galleries for the junk creations of "modern art".
With respect to comic strips, things are changing. Splendid reproductions of seminal strips like Popeye, Gasoline Alley and Terry and the Pirates
are becoming available in ongoing series, and Winsor McCay is getting
spectacular treatment in large over-sized volumes which do full justice
to his amazing visions. (See here and here.)
New revelations about the connection between comic strips and movies should
follow. Here's a brief slideshow (via Boing Boing) created by a critic at the Boston Globe
which surveys some of the most obvious ways Winsor McCay's work has
influenced the iconography of movies. It's based on observations in a new collection of McCay's strip Dream Of the Rarebit Fiend. More complex issues of
narrative technique and composition will surely come to the fore in the
future. [McCay created some of the earliest animated cartoons, so
his influence on film animation has long been appreciated, but his
influence on movies in general was far more comprehensive, as the
slideshow suggests.]
If you want to contemplate the connection between cinema and Victorian
academic painting you will just have to settle at present for my
passing observations in the essays collected here.
Sunday, November 11
A NEW CREHORE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 11 Nov 2007 07:40 AM PST
This new painting, Deja Vu Waltz,
by Amy Crehore was just completed for a show at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa
Monica, California, opening on 17 November. If I were in the Los Angeles area I'd rush
right out to see it. It's awesome.
The devil would like to turn all this gossamer sensuality into
something else, but he can't -- he's under severe restraint. The
naughty dream will just go on and on.
Tuesday, October 30
A MCGINNIS FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 30 Oct 2007 01:56 AM PDT
The women on Robert McGinnis'
paperback covers were often scantily clad, looking as though they might
slip out of whatever they were wearing at any moment, but he also did
straight-ahead nudes. The modest parasol here, warding off the
sun's gaze, gives this example a certain teasing piquance.
Tuesday, October 23
A DEGAS FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 23 Oct 2007 10:38 AM PDT
Degas' work is an odd combination of academic and Impressionist
strategies. His draftsmanship tended to be rigorous, almost
photorealistic -- he often worked from photographs -- and he shared the
academic's preoccupation with the dramatic, expressive possibilities of
space. At the same time his surfaces shimmered with a life of
their own, in the Impressionist way, creating a powerful counter
tension.
The image above is very unusual. The design offers a bold
recession of spaces, in three dramatic stages, while the treatment of
the surface flattens it all out again, as in a Japanese print, also a
strong influence on Degas' style.
I can never feel comfortable calling Degas an Impressionist, but he wasn't an academic, either. He was just Degas.
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