BABY ANATOMY

Have you ever noticed that babies have an expressive furrow above their eyebrows?

It's not the result of a bulging skull. Here (above) you can see the furrow moves independently of the skull. It seems to be brought about by a muscle that's much more subtle in adults.

My guess is that the furrow exists to make crying expressions read better. Nature really wants us to pay attention to crying infants.

Babies cry a lot broader than adults. They put their whole face into it. This (above) is an interesting picture. Look at the way the baby's chin is tucked up under his lip and the way the lip covers it.

Why on Earth do babies have such big sex organs?

And why are their chins and lower jaws so small? You don't see any babies with Katherine Hepburn chins.

MORE ABOUT T. S. SULLIVANT

T. S. Sullivant fans should be in heaven now because John K wrote something about Sullivant at the same I started this. If you haven't read it then run, don't walk, over to John's blog "All Kinds of Stuff' and read the entry, "Being Enslaved" which is a brilliant argument for originality in character design, exemplified by Sullivant. I'm incredibly busy today so my own Sullivant entry is much more modest. I simply note my own discovery that he did some of his best work when he was in his 60's. Imagine that! The picture above was done in 1921 when he was 67 years old! For comparison, Vlaminck petered out when he was 30. Boy, you never know when the axe is going to fall!

Jim Woodring, who wrote the article I'm referencing (The Comics Journal, special edition, winter 2002), says he's seen some of the originals and they appear to have been chipped and scraped with a knife in an effort to make the lines look scratchy. Fascinating! My dad was an amateur pen and ink artist and he was always scraping his pictures with a razor blade. More than once he told me that half the work on a picture is done after it's drawn. I wonder if he picked that up from Sullivant?

A COUPLE MORE FAUVE PICTURES

Most of the cartoonists who visit here hate the Fauves. Me, I love them. Here's (above) a 1906 Derain showing the Thames near Charing Cross bridge in London. His color seems to have poured down into the water, caught fire, then was guided toward the indigo bridge by seething bits of green energy. What's not to like?

It would be a mistake to think of this as some kind of drug-induced LSD vision. Derain uses false colors in order to make us realize that the colors we see every day are just as bizzare. We should see color the way a formerly blind man would see them on his first few minutes of sight. For such a man shadows wouldn't be subordinated to local color, they'd be independent forms. Lines would just be lines, they wouldn't define a shape and colors would battle for dominance. This is the violent, alien world Derain paints for us!

Here (above) is Vlaminck, also 1906. Red leaves on the red trees are no longer content to be decoration. They radiate and burn themselves into the blue sky behind them. Leaves seperate from the trees and gyrate in mid-air. The red and pink path carries this crazy energy to other trees. It's an alien force being unleashed, a force that was there all the time but we never noticed it.

Of course I'm only guessing that this is what Vlaminck had in mind. Artists need to have fantasies about the pictures they paint so they can see their subjects in new and exciting ways, and the same goes for viewers.

Here (above) is Matisse's famous green stripe painting, also 1906 I think. The face is both flat and three-dimensional. The colors in the backdrop refuse to be background and come forward to compete with the foreground. The face plane is stressed and appears to be in danger of splitting.

The green strip painting influenced a lot of painters in Matisse's time and continues to exert an influence today. Here (above) is a Matisse-influenced face by illustrator Phillip Burke. The surface tension is much reduced from the Matisse original but the color is still exciting.

A THEORY CORNER EDITORIAL

To Theory Corner Men:

Men, let's face it. We've been selfish. We never talk to women the way they want to be talked to, the way they CRAVE to be talked to. They want their men to hold their hands and talk to them Don Juan de Marco-style, like this:

"There are some women...fine featured...a certain texture to the hair, a curve to the ears that sweeps like an eternal nautilus...these women have fingers with the same sensitivity as their feet...and when you touch their knuckles it's like pressing your hands around their knees..and touching this tender, fleshy part of their fingers is the same as brushing your hands around their thighs...and..."

OK, it sounds hokey to us but women eat this stuff up. And if they like it so much, why not give it to them? Consider that one half the world (men) has it in their power to make the other half of the world (women) substantially happier without spending a single cent. What a huge improvement for such a small effort!

I hear you say that that modern women would never fall for something this corny. NOT TRUE!

I've tried this on my family and female friends and it worked 100% of the time! I don't mean I tried to seduce them, just the opposite. I bragged before hand that I could get a reaction from them, whether they liked it or not, with over-the-top purple prose, then I read the dialogue hesitatingly from a dog-eared piece of paper in the presence of other people. Even under these circumstances, even with the most skeptical of women, after only a couple of minutes they were all reduced to shell-shocked puddles. Don't take my word for it, try it yourself and improve the world.

BTW, the picture is by the young Robert Crumb.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DERAIN AND VLAMINCK?

Here they are: Derain's portrait of Vlaminck (above, left) and Vlaminck's portrait of Derain (above, right). They were at the top of their form at the start of the fauve period in, say, 1905 and by 1910 they were passe'. What happened?

Here (above) is a Derain from 1905. it's full of verve and vitality.

Here (above) is a Derain from 1909. It's OK but what a come-down! What happened? Maybe the answer is that he bought a house in the country and fatally removed himself from the influence of his friends in the city. Or maybe he acquired depressing friends out there in the country. He hung out with German friends in this period and maybe they didn't understand color the way the French did.

Here (above) is a Vlaminck from 1905. Minimal shadows, unreal color on the tree trunks, color used to contain space...it's a really wonderfull example of the fauve style.

Here (above) is a Vlaminck from the 1920's. It's OK but the painter clearly wasn't interested in experimenting anymore. What happened? Why the precipitous decline? Historians speculate that he was demoralized by his association with Picasso. Apparently Derain felt old-fashioned in the presence of Picasso's Cubist rebellion and in 1907 he destroyed his fauve paintings when he moved to a new studio. Imagine that; fauvism starts in 1905 and one of the leading practitioners feels passe' by 1907. That's how fast things were changing in those days.

Here are photo portraits of Derain (above) and Vlaminck (below). Neither had to desert fauvism. The movement still had a lot of vitality as we know from Matisse's work. Matisse stood up to Picasso and matched him, innovation for innovation. What a pity that Derain and Vlaminck chose to capitulate rather than fight.

THEORY CORNER FOR WOMEN (NO MEN ALLOWED)

Hello, Sisters! I reckon I'm not good at public speaking so I guess I'll begin plain and direct by showing you this plea for help that that I wrote to Uncle Eddie (above) a few weeks ago....

"Dear Uncle Eddie:

Beulah Bradshaw here. I'm sorry to burden you with this. I know you get thousands of letters from lonely females, more than you could ever answer, but I have nowhere else to turn. If you don't help me I'll just just have to buy a one-way ticket to the river, if you know what I mean. Won't you please help me? Here's my problem...

I've had affection for David, the boy next door, ever since I can remember. When he studied to become a doctor, I decided that being a nurse would be my career so that our work would bring us together. And that's exactly what happened. Then Chad, a handsome folk singer came into my life and suddenly there was...well, a new song in my heart. Now I have to choose. David is handsome and talented and has a plush society practice. Chad is something of a wastrel but his touch makes me tremble. What should I do?

Yours Expectently,

Beulah Bradshaw"

I don't know if I really expected Uncle Eddie to answer but a few days later his secretary called and told me that Uncle Eddie would be pleased to meet me that very afternoon at his villa in the Hollywood Hills. Within hours I was shown into the consevatory where I snapped this picture (above) of him lying down and shirtless, evidently in a state of near exhaustion after rescuing a kitten from a nearby tree. After introductions were made and the situation explained, the following conversation took place (transcribed from a tape recorder):

Uncle Eddie: "Beulah...may I call you Beulah?...please take my hand."

Beulah: "Gasp! You want ME to take YOUR hand!!?? Wait til I tell my girlfriends about this!"

Uncle Eddie: "Beulah, I want you to look into my eyes and answer the question I'm about to ask as truthfully as you possibly can. Will you do that?"

Beulah: "(Gulp!) ok...I mean, OK, Uncle Eddie!"

Uncle Eddie: "This, this Chad...can you speak to him without holding back? When you're with him do you hide anything from him?"

Beulah: "(Gulp!) Uh...no, I don't think so."

Uncle Eddie: "That's good! Now listen to me closely! Every woman is a mystery to be solved but she never hides anything from her true lover. Her skin color tells him how to proceed. The hue speaks like the blush of the rose, pink and pale, and she must be coaxed to open her petals with a warmth like the sun. Is this not so?"

Beulah: "Um...uh...(Gulp!) (Gulp!)...um...it's getting awfully, uh, hot in here."

Uncle Eddie: "And under her true lover's gaze the pale, dappled skin of her redness yields to the lust of his wave crashing to the shore, stirring up what lies beneath and bringing the foaming delight of love to the surface, does it not? And when he touches his fingertips to yours is it not like pressing your hands against his knees with the tender, fleshy part brushing...."

At this point I brushed against the recorder and accidentally turned it off. Anyway, after only a few minutes with Uncle Eddie I realized that Chad was the man for me. I want romance in my life! I want to live!!! Thank you, Uncle Eddie! You've changed my life!
!

DO YOU PLAY WITH YOUR NOSE WHILE THINKING?

I do. These pictures were assembled from the margins of papers I was doodling on while thinking yesterday. These aren't good drawings but I include them here because they help make a point, namely that without cartooning we'd never be able to record a lot of the little things in life.

I don't know about you but my life doesn't contain many super events. When I'm not working most of my day consists of waiting while old ladies argue with the cashier, trying to eat while driving, complaining about the state of the world, oogling girls, trying to find a pen that works, etc. Illustrators like super hero artists aren't interested in stuff like this. If cartoonists didn't draw it then it would go completely unrecorded by artists.

I just saw a DVD of "Cars" and was struck by how little "small event" acting the film contained. The cars displayed fear of the dark, shyness and awkwardness when the story required it but these were clearly subordinated to the story and were never allowed to dominate whole sequences. For contrast think of how W.C. Fields devoted entire sequences of his movies to micro events like trying to shave when someone was blocking his view of the mirror.