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Daily Digital Wanderlust

Note: The following post was originally posted on January 13th, 2005. I wasn’t very good about maintaining my blog back then and lost the 3-4 posts from this era, but thankfully the Internet Wayback Machine saved them for me.

The popularity of digital art tools, especially Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, has led to a bit of a crisis in the visual arts. Students are learning with the handicap of the undo–a useful crutch, but a crutch all the same. As my art professor pontificated yesterday, a good artist doesn’t worry about making mistakes, because a good artist knows how to fix these mistakes.

This reminded me of a saying public television art legend Bob Ross would often say, “We don’t make mistakes here, we just have happy accidents.” That truly was the genius of Bob, he knew that for many amateurs, things would just seem to happen with the brush. Bob would show how these accidents could be turned into something wonderful. Bob’s “happy mistakes” turned the tedium of painting into a joy.

This necessity to adapt, the process of discovering the tabula rasa, is slowly being lost in an era of infinite undo’s and thousands of layers. It may be turning a generation of digital artists and designers into hopeless perfectionists. I can’t count how many times people have pined for a real-life undo button for their analog artwork, and I even find myself doing so at times. Somehow the eraser isn’t quite as gratifying as a perfect undo step. The challenge the digital artist constantly faces is to constantly draw in their sketchbooks, paint on their canvas or paper, and force themselves to tackle difficult challenges and mistakes in order to improve their artistic abilities.

Gary Larson was the cartoonist behind The Far Side. I read a lot of strips as a kid–mom and dad always had newspaper subscriptions, and I lived for The Far Side (although once we lived in M’town, I’d often have to read it at school, since the local paper in M’town didn’t carry it and we only got The Des Moines Register on weekends). To fill the void, I picked up the collections and calendars. I also picked up The Complete Far Side after the Xmas it came out and always thumbed through it, but never really sat down to read it.

I’ve been going through the last 6 months or so during the last couple of weeks. The individual comics are awesome, but the real treat is Larson’s commentary before the start of each year. Topics vary from the grind of comic’ing to his upbringing and where some of the ideas came from. (The other great treat are letters from people who hated the strip so much that they sent in letters to local newspaper editors or even the syndicate, including the infamous Jane Goodall strip.) Prior to 1991, Larson compares and contrasts cartoonists with comedians, then goes on to compare cartoonists with writers (novelists really):

“Actually, I think cartoonists have more in common with writers than we do with comedians. The following writer-cartoonist parallels come to mind: loners, quiet room, favorite chair, hand puppet (just me?), and our trusty writing/drawing tools.”

Larson then goes on to contrast the difference between completing one comic versus completing a novel (the novelist goes out to fine restaurant while the comic eats a bowl of cereal).

When we were covering pop art, our art history prof asked the class who thought comics were art. I didn’t raise my hand. I believe that art is largely defined by the will or intention of the creator. Due to the demands of the industry and the sheer volume writers and artists go through, I find it hard to classify comics as a whole as art–comic strips and comics are more lit (or lit lite/pulp). Bad art can ruin a (good story) graphic novel, but seldom can good art overcome a bad story. You don’t often hear many people uttering how great the art is in any sort of fiction, unless it is coupled with quality writing. Sure, there are a few exceptions (I think the art in say, Kingdom Come helped make the book more than the story), but I think that the true triumphs in comics are the coupling of great art with great writing.

Visual art has a level of abstraction and ambiguity to it. A painting should be open to interpretation, perhaps in a similar (but more limited) vein to classical music. Comics are more akin to pop music in the 20th century–largely dialog (or lyric) driven, while the backing (visuals or music) comes in to complement the written work.

That’s not to say that I don’t think comic art is without merit. It can be incredibly moving if well done. But a lot of U.S. comic work today fails to connect with me, it’s almost too busy. In some ways, the adventure line of novels which used the D.C. animation style of art almost appealed to me more because they were simpler.

Something rolling around in my head for a while:
High art must be ambiguous so as to defy a single definitive interpretation, yet there clearly must be something beneath the surface.

Well my abstract paintings seemed to go over well today in our critique in class. We had a mini assignment in class before the critique where we had to try to analyze one of the pieces in a group. My analyticamorphasis abstraction was selected by one of the groups to analyze. The group of females thought that said painting was about the creation of the earth from the sun, or the dawn of the universe, creating order out of chaos. There was also stuff about it being female “fluids” interacting with the male fluids.

I was a bit surprised, as of the two abstracts, that was the least sexual in my mind. (My original concept for the piece, as I transmogrified my guitar hero controller into abstraction, was to represent the struggle in art that I have when I create–specifically, the left side of my brain versus the right side. The left was represented by black ink strokes of various sizes against the plain gessoed canvas, while the right was a yellow “blob” with blue and orange dissolving into the yellow body. (Thereby also representing the orange, yellow, blue, green, and red buttons on the controller.) I like their description–it wasn’t my vision for the piece, but certainly ideas along those lines passed through my head at various times as I created it, as it does have an aura of “order out of chaos” to it.

My process painting (an abstract painting using non-conventional paint delivery method) consisted of me filling condoms up with latex house paint, then pricking holes in the reservoir to create drip paintings. I got really lucky with my random selection of paints–the 4 colors I ended up using each had widely varying viscosity, and one of them even drained away, creating some really interesting depth to the piece. Pollock may have denied the accident, but I cherish chance. Unfortunately it’s probably going to look like crap when photographed–the depth will probably be gone. I wish I had come up with a good reason for the color scheme on it, but I just randomly selected paints.

As for the official logic for this creation? I had the idea of using paint in balloons, but not having any lying around, I went for the closest thing I had in my room–condoms. I then remembered a line Pollock retorted (from a clip of Pollock the movie we saw in Art Appreciation II). When he was asked how he knew he was done with a painting, Pollock responded, “How do you know when you’re finished making love?” I had my justification, aside from the whole drip painting being a metaphor for male ejaculation. (My joking justification in my own mind was that it was a metaphor to the first time I copulated–I was nervous, didn’t really know what I was doing, lasted about an hour, I gained a little confidence as I went on but realistically anything good I did was by accident, and it finished off with a bang.)

Prior to taking Painting I this semester, I had made a total of 3 paintings since k-12. One was a watercolor reproduction for the art for architects class; the others were crappy acrylic paintings I made in 2D design. I took zero art classes in high school (the closest I came to art classes were my drafting classes), and even in middle school I don’t remember painting that often.

I entered Painting I with a fair bit of nerves. My limited experience in painting gave me no reason to think that I would be any good at it. My initial forays into the medium tended to confirm my initial beliefs. On the first day of class, we had to paint from still life sculptures in the middle of the room. Mine… well mine sucked. After that, our first few paintings were from still life, fruit in this case. One was a 2-hour alle prima, the other a grey scale->colored glaze.

Then, something happened–I started to “get it”. Our next assignment was an emotive self-portrait. I opted to channel the low point in my life that ultimately led to me coming to school here six months later. I have issues looking at myself, and the human face is a bear to deal with. I still had no clue what I was doing as far as color went. However, by the time I had finished the portrait, things were starting to come together. I had saved what was, at first, a very mediocre drawing and painting. (Right now, that portrait is hanging in the temporary art displays in the main building. I cringe every time I walk by it.)

After that was the skeleton. I’m relatively certain that the prof is just trying to kill us–I mean, skeletons are hard, what with all the bones and weird angles. However, my initial painting in the burnt sienna was pretty decent, and layers upon layers of paint finally brought round a decent product.

Now we’re working on an abstract painting in class and a historical reproduction out of class. This is my historical reproduction after 6 hours. It’s not done–it will eventually look close to the image pasted on my board to the left (as you look at the photo). This is the underpainting, what I’m using in lieu of actually drawing with pencil upon the canvas. The toga is too high about the waist, and it needs folds in the fabric. David needs a face, and I need to work the dark tones into his flesh better.

Looking at what I did in six hours and looking back at how bad I was before, I think I’m relatively pleased with my progress in the class. During our evaluation for the skeleton paintings, my prof said that while my portrait was good, I had made the leap from a Painting I student to a Painting II student with the skeleton. I doubted that I would make the jump from II to III with this one, but who knows? So far it’s looking pretty decent.

So I made a little creepy image for a poster on campus today. Dunno if it will be used or not, but I sure enjoyed making it! (It scales poorly because it’s a 16-color gif, the full-size looks much better.)

I was actually kind of happy with how the guys turned out–I may see if I can figure out how to make this my Matt Groening Simpsons-esque style. Granted, it needs refinement, but I think I have a usable base, something I haven’t really found in all my many doodlings.

Tomorrow I’m doing lots of drawing–pencil tests for my surrealist painting. I also have some minor projects to clean up too before break is over.