JEAN SENNEP: GENIUS CLASS CLOWN

Many thanks to Jo Jo and Steve Worth for turning me on to Jean Sennep, the funniest 20th Century French cartoonist I know of. That's his work above. Sennep must have been the king of the French class clown artists.  I defy anyone to look at his best work without laughing. It can't be done.

Sennep did a lot of political caricatures. In the example above I don't know whether he was satirizing a real sex scandal or whether he simply decided to draw perfectly normal targets in drag in order to make them look ridiculous.  

Hitler was said to have seen a caricature Sennep did of him and was furious. Yikes! Imagine having Hitler mad at you!

I looked up Sennep on the net and discovered that Sennep was influenced by an artist named Sem.  That's his work above and below. The yellow wallpaper one looks like a parody of Lautrec's style. I have to remind myself that Lautrec was also a pen and ink cartoonist.

Sem (above) in turn was influenced by Cham. Who as Cham? Well, that's his work below. I'm guessing he was influenced by Daumier and Gilray. 

Haw! Good old Cham!

I planned on writing a post about Sem and Cham but got distracted by all the period cartoons I was discovering while doing the research. I especially liked the ones dealing with dance (above and below). 

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in that era!

If you can believe the artists,  the crowded dance halls of that time could get pretty rowdy. The dance styles were increasingly flamboyant and insults, punches, bites, even riots would occasionally break out.  

The funny thing is that before all those wild gyrations could take place, the dancers were still expected to engage in a caricature of upper class gentility. You had to demonstrate your refinement before hopping around like a kangaroo. 

 Those early French caricaturists were fearless. They even dared to make fun of ordinary workers, something that must have appalled doctrinaire communards and socialists.

Maybe Van Gogh would have gotten a better reception from the peasants he lived with if he'd done some funny pictures of them first.

ROMAN SCULPTURE

 I've been searching the net for cheap, good quality plaster replicas of a couple of my favorite sculptures. So far the results haven't been very encouraging but I'll persist. Near the top of my list would be a replica of the so-called "Brutus Bust," an Etruscan-style portrait of a Roman subject from the third century B.C. This is too early to have been a portrait of the Brutus who killed Caesar, but then...who was he?

The book I got this picture from describes this head as being that of "an obstinate peasant, marked by suffering but by no means bowed, and knowing how to bear his lot with dignity." Wow! I'd love to have a decent replica of this.

For comparison, here's (above) a bust of the Brutus who killed his friend Julius Caesar for what he believed was the good of Rome. There's competing depictions of that Brutus, but I trust the accuracy of this one because it was commissioned by his family who must have known what the real man looked like. It's an interesting face, no?

If you liked the black and white photo of the Brutus Bust, then you might be interested in this bronze (above) from the same period. It's from the Getty Villa outside of LA. It's so similar to the theme and technique of the other sculpture that I'm guessing it was executed by the same man. If I'm right, then that sculptor, who's name we don't know, was surely one of the best Roman artists ever to work in that medium.

BEFORE AND AFTER ROOM MAKEOVERS

As you probably know,  I'll be moving in a few months and I've done some research into "staging." In case you don't know the term, in the housing biz that's another word for "where you put the furniture." Some of the best staging advice I've found came from before-and-after comparisons that I found on the net.  Take a look at these examples and see what you think.

By the way, Most of the interior decoration shown here isn't to my taste. I'm just isolating the elements that interest me and ignoring the rest.

 Wow! Compare the "Before" and "After" photos above. What a difference moulding makes! The architect made the ceiling too high but the moulding saves it.

 Boy, leather furniture (above) looks great in wood-paneled man caves but it doesn't work in suburban living rooms. It attracts too much attention.  Fabric covered furniture does a better job of fitting in.

This comparison (above) also underlines another truth, that hardwood floors should never be stained too dark.

Let me digress for a moment to address another issue: does white fabric covering on sofas and chairs really work? It certainly does here (above) but then again this was designed by a professional to look good in photography. Could ordinary people pull this off?  Is white too girly for manly men? Is it practical?  It'll show every spill, won't it?  I don't know what to think.

 I have lots of books that'll require shelves, so I won't need decorative, elephantine cabinets like the one above.  I do like the table in front of the stone wall on the "after" side,  and the two black table lamps look great. Ditto the window curtains. Ditto the hanging light. The desk design in the after photo doesn't work IMHO.

This is an interesting photo because the elements I singled out...the black table, the two lamps, the curtains and the hanging light... are all items which wouldn't impress me much if I saw them out of context in a store. Professional decorators seem to have an eye for what works well in combination.

EATING BREAKFAST

In artist families a sketch war can break out without warning, at any time. Here (above), on a normal day, on a normal morning,  my wife puts outs out breakfast cereal for my daughter and me, and I, as I often do,  pick up my sketchbook to record it.

 Little did I know that this day would be different because my daughter...who hates to be drawn...has decided to take a stand and fight back.

She eats her food in the most gross way possible, no doubt hoping that'll deter me from drawing her.

She peels off the crusts from her bread (something every parent hates to see for some reason), nibbles her bread into patterns, and taps out a song on her cereal bowl. 

   

All this drives my wife nuts and she makes small talk to cover up her anxiety. She's dying to say "YOUNG LADY! That's NOT the way we eat a meal at the breakfast table!!!!," but she restrains herself because I'm nudging her under the table, begging her to let my daughter go, so I can draw it. 

My kid takes full advantage, knowing how uncomfortable we are are. She rolls  her bread into a baseball and crams it into her mouth.  She masticates it, gorilla-style. My wife is appalled.

Finally my kid ends it all by putting up a wall of breakfast cereal around herself. Well, that's it. You can't draw what you can't see.

EDDIE FITZGERALD CARICATURES

Here's (above) the cover of a Mother's Day card drawn by my kid when she was in Middle School. Haw! Am I really that much of a scene stealer?

Here's a pencil enhancer...or is it an eraser... designed by John K and beautifully sculpted by Anthony Hrymakowski. You may have noticed the resemblence to (Ahem!)...me.

And here (above) is a clean-up of the original John drawing. Gee, I made it to the top (literally) of the pencil universe. My place in history is assured!!!!!!

ABOUT GEORGE HERRIMAN

"Just one more George Herriman post. That's a Herriman self portrait, above.

Herriman was what Wikipedia calls a "Louisiana mulatto creole." who "passed" for white. His family spoke French. He might have been self conscious about his mixed ethnicity because he disdained publicity and was kidded by friends for his reluctance to take off his hat.

Early on he did a comic strip in the German style about a black guy named Mose (above) who always tries to pass himself off as white. On first glance all the humor seems to be at the expense of Mose, but that's only the McGuffin. Half the joke comes out of the whites who are over-the-top tickled to death to be Scottish or Irish and who take any opportunity to dance an Irish Jig or a Highland Fling.

I wonder if anyone ever captured Herriman on film. I'd like to hear his voice.

Herriman had one of the great hats of his era. He looked great in it! As a matter of fact, more than any other artist of his day, he looked like a cartoonist.

Of course he always looked a bit awkward in photos. He may have had naturally broad shoulders but it's also possible that he had normal shoulders and simply liked to "puff up" for pictures.

Maybe he was self conscious about being short.

So far as I know, Herriman was the best caricaturist of himself. He did a couple of frequently reproduced back shots of himself,  one of which is reproduced above. These influenced me immensely, to the point where I feel my life will have been will have been lived for naught if I don't do a project built around frequent back shots.

YIKES! A RETRACTION: According to commenter "nodnarB," that caricature of Herriman was actually done by cartoonist Tad Dorgan, who shared an office with Herriman. That's an example of Dorgan's work above.

Well, I'll be dogged! All these years I attributed that picture to Herriman. Many thanks to nodnarB for the correction!!!!!!!!!

Above, another Tad Dorgan. Geez, the world must have been a different place in that era.  The spittoon, the friendly bartender, the practical jokers who all go to the bar at night to drink together, the blank wall...it's so different than what's around now.

MY FAVORITE NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIP

 
One of my favorite funny newspaper strips...rivalling Al Capp's "Fearless Fosdick" or Feinenger's "The "Kinder Kids"...was the collected strips done by George Herriman in the years between 1904 and 1916.  I have to say "collected" because Herriman worked on many strips in these years and no single title dominates.

Some of my favorites were his sports cartoons (above). They were laid out like irregular sketchbook pages at the top of the sports page.

His editors must have liked him because on days when sports were slow he was allowed to put up little autobiographical pieces like the one above. Here the ex-mayor of a town called Independence shows Herriman the local sights.

Sometimes (above) he made fun of amateur theater.

Herriman did some color pages in this period and he sometimes tried to fit in to the formal comics format. In my opinion these pages were much inferior to his black and white "sketchbook-style" strips.

I wish I knew more about the the drawing instruments Herriman used. Evidently the brush didn't suit him. He preferred to use the kind of hard, scratchy dip pen that deters most modern artists. If you haven't used these yet, you might want to give them a try. They're hard to control but everything looks funnier when done with a pen of that type.

DISNEYLAND ARCHITECTURE

Minnie's House in Disneyland is a destination I never get tired of.  The skewered, wonky look of it would be too caricatured for everyday living. Even so, you wonder if some modification of that could be made to work in the real world. 

Wonky or not, the house has a wonderful vibe and that's hard to achieve. Whenever someone succeeds with that they should get a medal. 

Disneyland doesn't contain a reproduction of the home in "Alice in Wonderland," but I'll discuss it here anyway. 

In this frame from the film (above) Alice is a little too big for the house but I can imagine a more practical scale that would still make the visitor feel tall. 

I also like the scale of the stairs. They're the kind of stairs you see in split level houses as opposed to two story houses. In split levels the higher level is off to the side rather than on top of of the bottom level. That makes for a shorter staircase.  It's an interesting idea. 

Also, notice the slant of the ceiling.... 

From this view the film gives the ceiling a different height than it is in the establishing shot. That's okay, it's all about artistic license. 

What a beautiful bedroom (above)!

A visit to a Disney park would be inconceivable without a visit to Tarzan's Treehouse and The Swiss Family Robinson walkthrough, but wouldn't it be even more fun to actually live in something like that? No, we don't have to wait for the far future when we can grow trees fast. We can do it now, with realistic synthetic tree trunks and fast growing real-biology leaves and buds stuffed into fake branches.

I have to admit that most people would rightly rebel against the idea of synthetic trees in real neighborhoods.  I'm only introducing the idea as a thought experiment.

Let me digress for a moment to ask, "Why haven't architects made use of real-size Banzai-type trees?" Can Bamboo, which is fast-growing, be trained to bend in useful ways?

Disneyland attractions are impeccably lit. It seems to me that all new houses should incorporate that kind of professional Hollywood-type lighting. By "professional" I don't mean the expensive quartz lights that are actually used for stage and film, but artistic arrangements of more safe and affordable lights that can mimic stage lighting.

Little old ladies shouldn't have to figure out these lighting schemes themselves. Professional designers should do it and install it before the first owners move in.

 Gee, there's lots more to say about this, but I'm running out of space. I'll pick this up again in another post.

A VALENTINE ESSAY: "HOW I MET MY WIFE"

My computer room is in disarray so I can't shoot the fresh visuals I'd need to illustrate this story. Instead I'll borrow some pictures of myself from previous blogs and hope for the best. Here goes....

Having acknowledged, at a very early age, the indispensability of women, I had to find the answer to only one question: which one?

The girl I found was a hormone driven boy's dream come true, but she was also given to outbursts of sentimentality. She's still that way today. She's a buddy. Women bore her. She insists on buying her round, but she secretly hopes that doors will be opened for her because she's really a quivering jelly of feminine sensitivity.

She writes mystery stories which I'm not allowed to read. She used to paint, but the possibilities of two dimensions have been exhausted, and, besides, the brushes are stiff with neglect. She subscribes to a literary magazine but doesn't always read it because of the demands of her career, of being a mother, and of being a righter of her husband's wrongs.

She crawls from room to room, gratefully whimpering when she finds masculine disorder and piteously hurt by any indications of masculine independence.  She is what writer Patrick Catling described as a "sweetly scented pink octopus of maternal solicitude."

She keeps looking up from her Sudoku (above) to smile. She wields a thermometer like a magic wand.

She's a terrible weight pressing hotly on the shoulders,  a hobble, a blindfold, a distracting sound, a thick wad of fly-paper in the Kleenex box. But she is necessary.

The tests have been numerous, but the final outcome had already been decided long ago when we were both councilors at the same Summer camp.

In the dark, in a rowboat beached under a sheltering cave of pine needles, in spite of awful fear, I first kissed Woman. Though it was an inaccurate kiss, just a touch of the lips, it was a kiss of total commitment. I hadn't yet come across Yeats' advice: "Never give all the heart." I intuitively spurned the advice then and gave all the heart there was, and I give it still.

BTW: This is a much altered version of a tome by children's author, Patrick Skene Catling.