PANMIXIA ON THE DRAWING BOARD

English illlustrator W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944) was hardly an adventurous guy. Meek and withdrawn, he loved to stay at home surrounded by his books. For excitement he puttered in his garden.



In just about every way you can imagine-- his wardrobe, his manners, his relationships, the food he ate, his morals-- Robinson lived a cloistered life. He courted his future bride on Sunday afternoons dressed in a top hat, frock coat and high collar. Even after he mustered the courage to propose marriage, their engagement lasted for nearly five years (he didn't believe in acting impetuously).

Yet, Robinson fell instantly in love with Japanese woodblock prints-- an exotic art form that had newly arrived in England by way of Paris.



He loved their flat decorative patterns, their asymmetrical and diagonal compositions, their creative use of high viewpoint, and their stark use of negative space. He was smitten by the clean, simplified line and highly stylized designs of Utamaro, Hiroshige and Hokusai.

Robinson adapted these qualities to his own work. He went from drawing in the conventional style of English illustrators of his day:



...to drawing with a cleaner line, using checkerboard and other decorative patterns to enhance his designs:









Note that Robinson didn't plagiarize Japanese images. This is not a story of cultural theft. Instead, it is a story of the wonderful panmixia that characterizes the language of forms. Robinson combined the abstract qualities of Japanese prints with his own style to come up with a genuine hybrid approach. (He was not alone-- the arrival of Japanese woodblock prints in Europe also came as an inspiration to artists from Aubrey Beardsley to Van Gogh).











I especially like the fact that Robinson, who was a cultural hermit in every other respect, immediately understood and appreciated the intentions of artists who were geographically, culturally and socioeconomically on the opposite side of the planet.

Robinson had never traveled, spoke no foreign languages and had no exposure to different cultures and styles. But geographic boundaries and language restrictions are no barrier to the appreciation of forms. Forms travel without a passport and communicate instantly in a global language.

This kind of cross-fertilization continues today in the work of illustrators such as Yuko Shimizu, who are far more open to the potential of other cultures than Robinson was:





Technology also facilitates this cross fertilization of images and styles. When you think how long it took for that first steam ship to introduce exported prints from Japan to European audiences, our own advantages in this area seem overwhelming today.

Dana

Oil on canvas panel, 20" x 16"

Vic

Oil on canvas panel, 11" x 14"


(for Jennifer)

Art Showing - Blue Star Cafe

Eight of my paintings are on display
at The Blue Star Cafe until the end of the month.

Address:
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(206) 548-0345
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Art Showing - Martin Barr Massage

Four of my paintings are on display at Martin Barr's Massage Studio until mid August.

Address:
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Suite 115
Seattle, WA 98103
206-310-2823
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FROM PHOTOGRAPH TO DRAWING

Decades after fine artists embraced photography as a tool for drawing and painting pictures, illustrators remained wracked with guilt about the practice.

Artists such as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse Lautrec and Eakins enthusiastically used photographs as a starting point for their work.







They openly enjoyed the exciting new medium. But illustrators-- nursing a giant inferiority complex-- remained concerned that using photographs might somehow be cheating.

Norman Rockwell recounted his shame when he began to use photographs:

At a dinner at the Society of Illustrators, William Oberhardt, a fellow illustrator, grabbed my arm and said bitterly., "I hear you've gone over to the enemy." "Hunh?" I said, faking ignorance because I realized right way what he was referring to and was ashamed of it. "You're using photographs," he said accusingly. "Oh...well... you know...not actually," I mumbled. "You are ," he said. "Yes" I admitted, feeling trapped, "I am." "Judas!" he said, "Damned photographer!" and he walked away.

More than a century later, commenters to this blog hotly debate whether Norman Rockwell's use of photographs undermined his artistic legacy.

Fine artists never felt compelled to justify their methods. Illustrators on the other hand, remained defensive. As a result, the most thoughtful, self-conscious analyses about the use of photography in art tend to come from the field of illustration rather than gallery painting. One of the more articulate artists on this subject was the talented Austin Briggs, who used reference photographs early in his career but soon discovered the limitations of photographs as a tool for quality art:

It was only as I discovered that I did not really possess an image of the object I desired when I took a snapshot that I relegated the camera to its proper place: that of a gatherer of information which has not yet been digested. Only when I reverted to the laborious task of drawing the object directly did it begin to reveal its hidden forms.

Briggs' splendid drawings made from photographs clearly showed how he digested data and probed for the hidden forms.

Photographs provide an undeniable head start by translating three dimensions into two dimensions for the artist. Nevertheless, Briggs described how artists still need to make important choices in order to distill information from a photograph and find the hidden forms most meaningful to the artist. The glory of drawing is that it is a limited medium; it cannot mechanically capture all data the way a snapshot does, or reproduce a snapshot, and still be successful.

It is also well to remember what [drawing] is not. It is not tone, value or color, although some semblance of all these qualities may be obtained by the sophisticated use of line. Line (drawing in its most straight-forward meaning) is the most limited medium, being solely a matter of measure. It is long or short, angularly obtuse or acute and subject to measure. Measure is the characteristic of line... and line is drawing.

It's necessary to know the limitation one is dealing with in order to use its positive qualities to its fullest advantage. To draw an oak leaf is "an exorcism of disorder" Without knowing what a line cannot do we'd try to express the whole leaf with it, but once we know what a line cannot do, we are on our way toward expressing the leaf in the marvelously simple way a line can function. We begin to to look for the object's anatomy, its real shape reveals itself to us because we must speak with such limited means.

Thumbnail sketch by Briggs captures the essence of the forms

Note how Briggs digested information from photographs in this award winning series for TV Guide.









It does not bother me if a drawing starts from photographs as long as the artist exercises his or her judgment and taste in reducing the photograph into a line medium. That is the part of the artist's job that most interests me.

Eve

Oil on canvas panel, 14" x 18"