MASTERS OF DESIGN

I have irritated some readers by criticizing popular illustrators such as Bama, Boris, Rowena or Vargas. These artists have good technical skills; they can paint realistically but they lack something far more important: a good design sense.

"What exactly is this design element you keep yapping about, and how can you claim to know which pictures have it and which don't?"

Like most glorious things, design eludes definition. It can be found in an infinite number of forms. But for those who want to observe it in action, I know of no more lucid distillation than in Japanese woodblock prints.



Look at the marvelous arrangement of shapes and patterns in the picture above, the artful negative space-- this is what I mean when I talk about design.







The great Japanese woodblock artists understood what Peter Behrens called "the fundamental principles of all form creating work."

APPLES, ORANGES AND ELEPHANTS

We've all been taught that you can't compare apples and oranges. They are as different as... well, a Rembrandt drawing and a Disney cartoon.

Some of those differences may be significant, but many of them are simply propaganda from press agents, museum curators and bankers. Let's investigate.

Here is a herd of wonderful elephants:


Heinrich Kley's elephants courting


Rembrandt


Disney studio's "Pink Elephants on Parade"


Jack Davis, GOP elephant


Jack Davis, study for Time Magazine

You will never see these elephants hanging out together in the same neighborhood; some reside in museums, while others reside in corporate filing cabinets. They were produced by very different hands, centuries apart. They were designed for different purposes and cost vastly different amounts. Yet, these are only questions of pedigree and should not distract the true art lover. As you compare these pictures, you will find we can still judge their most important elements on a level playing field.

A museum curator would faint at the heresy of comparing Rembrandt to Jack Davis, but never let that stop you. Personally I think Davis did a better job than Rembrandt here. His humor is broad, but I also think his drawings of elephants are more insightful and interesting than Rembrandt's drawing.

Jack and the Beanstalk

Did this for the all-girls thunderdome at CA, WIPs attached. Davi picked the topic for me, as i wanted to try out something different. I had lots of fun painting this, and thanks to Texahol for the great crits during the WIP :)

ART, FLOWERS AND DINOSAURS

The famous scientist and naturalist Loren Eiseley explained how flowers made human beings possible.

100 million years ago, wrote Eiseley, there was no such thing as a flower. The world was covered with monotonous green vegetation. The inhabitants of that long ago world were mostly cold-blooded creatures with low metabolic rates and small brains driven only by the instinct for the hunt. Their metabolisms made them slaves to weather and limited their lives--they mostly slept through winter, immobilized.

In this reptilian world, our ancestor was an unpromising little mammal who cowered at the losing end of the food chain. According to Eiseley, "man was still, like the genie in the bottle, encased in the body of a creature about the size of a rat."

Then during the cretaceous period, flowering plants (angiosperms with encased seeds) exploded into the world to rescue us. The age of flowers brought us seeds, fruits and nectars-- a totally new store of energy in concentrated form. This energy source enabled us to realize our potential by sustaining our higher metabolic rate. It brought about the rise of birds and mammals, with a more constant body warmth and efficiency and with newly agile brains. Warm blooded birds and mammals depended on high oxygen consumption and food in concentrated forms only provided by flowering plants. As a result of these "supreme achievements in the evolution of life," the human race was on its way:

Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable....man might still be a nocturnal insectivore gnawing a roach in the dark. The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours.

For me, art plays a role similar to the role of Eiseley's flowers. It concentrates our everyday experience into denser packets of visual and emotional nutrition that we can carry with us in our minds and unpack as we go.

Art might take the form of that "special song" that sets your heart to racing, or a poem that is an intense nugget of content that slowly unfolds within you upon reflection. But whatever its form, the invention of art acts like the invention of flowering angiosperms; it allows humans to ingest experience in more intense and digestible forms. It helps our higher metabolism-- intellectual, emotional, visual, amatory-- process the fuel of everyday life.

And it propels us another inch down the road from that "nocturnal insectivore gnawing a roach in the dark."

THE LOW NOTE IN THE HARMONY

In my youth, I was easily impressed by fine, detailed linework.



Fine lines are a great way for artists to show off. They also feel cool to draw. Artists such as Norman Lindsay (above) and Frank Frazetta (below) sometimes got so carried away drawing fine lines that they could no longer hear the muse urging, "turn back!"



As I matured, I noticed that the better artists exercised greater restraint and often employed heavier, bolder lines for emphasis. These stronger lines are like adding a lower note to the harmony.

Below, the great Alex Raymond draws an entire figure using a fine line, but comes back with a separate tool to make one bold stripe for that pants leg:



Here he does the same thing to accentuate a shoulder fold:



And here he uses that bold line to chisel the most wonderfully sculpted pair of overalls I've ever seen:



Once in a while there are very special artists who go even further. Working exclusively with a thick line they somehow manage to create sensitive drawings as descriptive as anything done by the fine line crowd. Here is the brilliant work of Noel Sickles:





When you draw with lots of fine lines, no single line is crucial; if you make a mistake, you can cover it up with cross hatching, or reinforce it with the lines on either side of it. But there is no place for Sickles to hide an imperfect line in these drawings.

Here is another superb example from Alex Toth:



Toth has captured a complex subject-- a group of people in ornate robes walking down a palace corridor under a trellis with palm trees outside-- and he has done so using a simple, bold line. Unlike the Lindsay or Frazetta drawings, this is a work of unimpeachable integrity and admirable restraint.

Finally, here is another powerful example of what can be accomplished at the thick end of the spectrum. The great Robert Fawcett was far too substantial to get distracted drawing button holes and strands of hair in this picture of tear gas at a civil rights riot:



Sometimes the less subtlety and precision in the drawing tool, the greater the subtlety and precision required from the mind and wrist of the artist.

The Grass Car

For the longest time I have been fascinated by grass covered cars. Its a whole other world when people cover vehicles in astroturf or even better real grass. The later takes a bit more skill as you will see in the video of a guy who started doing that in the late eighties. I did a search on Google and Flikr and found a few more vehicles covered in this stuff, the effect is simply amazing. Talk about an eco friendly green car.

Brooklyn, New York artist Gene Pool is featured in this short video from the movie Wild Wheels by Harrod Blank

Gene Also did a Grass Bus

And here are some other Grass Cars I found on Flikr

Photo by temp13rec.

Photo by Cyrius

Photo by basheem

Photo by Daniel Mauermann

Photo by anab Jain

Photo by northreflections

Photo by europeanartphoto

Photo by Mulad

Photo bymeherenow

And a few others

The Plaidmobile by Tim McNally

The Plaidmobile by Tim McNally

Photo by Harrod Blank

The Plaidmobile is a 1985 Buick SkyHawk with a plaid custom paint job. Tim resides in NY and spent a 2-3 years trying to change the official color of the color throught the DMV from"red" to "plaid". This car has been driven all over the country and is also featured in Harrod Blanks book on Art Cars.
Check out Tim's other car on Flikr as well:)