MORE FACES TO DRAW

I thought I'd lead off with a beautiful face (above), but there's more to this face than meets the eye. I'll talk about it later. Hint: it has to do with the muzzle.

An ironic smile (above) which comes off very strong because of the simple, broad, uncomplicated face around it

Above, a Judith Anderson look-alike.  Remember Anderson in Hitchcock's "Rebbecca?" What do you think of the tiny mouth made prominent by lipstick, the long nose, the eerie, murderous eyes, and the devilish eyebrows? Don't eat or drink anything she offers, and never, ever spend the night.

An odd face (above) because the features appear to be floating on it.

Some faces (above) just naturally seem to be wide-angled, or CinemaScoped. It doesn't hurt her looks, though.


A good-looking girl (above) caught with disdainful "yuck"wrinkles above the nose. The wrinkles don't cross her nose horizontally, but rather fan out from the eyes. Come to think of it, her nose is oddly vertical, and her hair looks like an askew helmet.


Here's a face (above) that looks like it was pushed out slightly from the inside. This is a fairly common trait. 

Here's that face again. Did you figure out what was so unusual about it? It's the muzzle. The mouth is wrapped around a vertical cylinder which is inserted deep into the cheeks. The big lower lip and pointed chin make for interesting embellishments.



Here's (above) a less pronounced version of the same thing. The mouth cylinder is still visible, and it's set off by the teeth and a linear, horizontal eye mask. 

Another muzzle cylinder (above), but one which is not buried too deep into the cheeks.  The mouth with rounded corners, the V-shaped nasal bridge, and the interesting half-open eyes and flair eyebrows make for a fascinating appearance. 

A good-looking woman (above) whose face below the nose recedes inward.

And the opposite (above): a good-looking woman whose face below the mid-point extends outward. 

BTW, Thanks to Lester for the correction about the name of the actress in the Hitchcock film.

SHOULD CARTOONS END WITH A MESSAGE?

I'm always amazed when Saturday Morning cartoons end with an ethical lesson. I mean the cartoon itself is often incredibly unimaginative and intellectually deadening. It's pretty clear that this celebration of mediocrity is the real message of the show, regardless of what's tacked on at the end.

TV producers aren't the bad bad guys. They're just putting on what they think the public wants. It's the public that needs to be educated about cartoons and I think I'll take a shot at that right now. Sorry if I appear to be preaching to the choir.

  

Good, funny cartoons don't need a message at the end. The whole cartoon is a positive message.

First and foremost, a good cartoon always stimulates the intellect of the viewer, even when the subject matter is stupidity.  In the cartoon above Rube Goldberg makes everybody look hilariously awkward but he manages to convey real sentiment as well. The two friends at the top and the married couple below are genuinely touching. This is the power real cartooning has. It can convey deep meaning at the same time it clowns around. 

Even the color in a good cartoon is educational. I look at this creek BG above and I'm filled with wonder about the beauty of nature, and of shadow and silhouettes and hidden places. I'm reminded that spots of color in relative darkness can be awesomely mysterious and satisfying. Backgrounds like this remind us of the ability of subtle things to amaze.

Good cartoon color is immensely stimulating, all by itself. An artist will deliberately take two colors that clash and make them work together by adding a third color that relates them. When you first see them you rebel and want to say, "Hey, you can't do that!" but before you can get the thought out, you realize that the color does work. Improbable as it is, the darn thing works. That means the picture has educated you, made you more graphically sophisticated.

It's silly to take a cartoon (above) that never even attempts to do anything like that and praise it to the skies because it has a single positive message tacked on to the end. The cartoon itself is the message. By the time the fake message comes at the end, the real message has found its mark, and that message is sometimes: "Kids, never try to achieve. Do the easy thing. Let your mind go to sleep." 

Funny cartoon drawings are often the most stimulating.  The dog above is silly and hilarious for sure, but the hilarity forces you to pay more attention to the animal, and when you do you realize that the dog is the very essence of playful good will, energy and loyalty. The drawing exudes life force and seems to say, "Isn't it great to be alive?" It makes you want to be happy and make others happy. It may take a writer a whole book to achieve that, but a cartoonist can do it in a few strokes. 

Cartoon drawings often get their effect by innovating or calling our attention to something we'd overlooked before. Here (above) the artist reminds us of the graphic nature of our own bodies, how we ourselves are designs which can be manipulated. Just thinking about this makes me want to draw. Good cartoons create artists, and people who appreciate art.

Can good cartoon drawings make kids think? You bet they can! The two hand drawings above certainly make me think. They increase my awareness of hands as an expressive instrument and fill me with awe to think that the human mind can find such a wealth of possibility in such a commonplace thing as a hand.

This drawing (above) isn't just lampooning one individual. It asks questions about the nature of femininity and beauty. It applies sophisticated design to a joke, and because the drawing is funny the questions it brings up stick in our minds.

There's something about this picture (above) that's...I don't know what to call it...mischievous.  It makes me want to acquire skill so I can play jokes on people too. The skill of the humorous artist makes me want to hone my own skill, even if it's not related to art. 

It's the job of artists to raise the bar in society. Our achievement in a public forum like TV should inspire others to be good at the things they do. But you can't inspire people if the cartoon is bland, even with a message tacked on to the end.

This (above) is a complex drawing disguised as a simple one. Here two worlds collide. It says a lot about the gulf between different types of people, and encourages us to see the clash of worlds in a humorous light, which is not a bad lesson to teach a kid. The little guy is made to seem rigid and ridiculous for disdaining the offer of friendship. No lengthy lecture. It's accomplished painlessly, in one funny drawing. 

Should cartoons have messages tacked on? I can't imagine why. Good cartoons by their nature are already full of messages, even before the end comes along, and they're more nuanced and sophisticated than the phony, tacked-on kind.

WHY DO KIDS DRAW LIKE THAT?

Like everybody else I'm always surprised by the vitality of  art made by kids. Something about collecting bugs and wearing pajamas with feet gives young artists the ability to draw with shocking freshness and immediacy.  I don't pretend to know how they do it, but it's been on my mind lately and I thought I'd record my thoughts here.

To start with, surely some of the magic comes from the little rugrats never cleaning their brushes. When they want to paint with yellow they use the same dirty brush they used a minute before when they were painting with red. The kids benefit from a lucky accident because this unintentional mixing gives the new color texture, which always makes color more appealing. Not only that but the sloppy colors benefit from the kind of optical mixing that impressionists like Seurat used to talk about.    

Then there's the kid belief that every living thing disturbs the air around them and emits an aura of grief marks or sunbeams (above). Where kids get that from I can't even guess. Exceptions to this rule are army men, ghosts and dinosaurs, which are never granted sunbeams.

Thanks to "N" for pointing out that the picture above is of a lion and the sunbeams are simply its mane. I don't know how I could have overlooked something so obvious, and I almost changed the caption, but my long experience with my own kids' drawings seems to confirm that kids will deliberately choose subjects that lend themselves to sunbeams, cilia and fringe. Primitive masks are often like that.  

The subject of kid pictures is never a unified whole, but is rather a collection of parts, which are separate and distinct. The lady above is a nothing more than a dress, legs and shoes. The bike is wheels and a frame. Usually the collection of parts is given grief by some evil being. Here (above) the collection of parts that is the woman is beset by a demon newsboy...or is that just the just the artist hitching a ride? 

Here's (above) a raging duck man surrounded by blue dots. Since kids like to menace their their subjects I'll guess that the blue dots are killer bees or bombs. Whatever they are, it's a safe bet that the kid who drew it had a definite idea about what they were. Kids don't draw for the sake of drawing. Everything always represents something. 

How do you like the color here? That yellow and orange ground really makes the blue pop out, and the black is a perfect counterpoint. 

Here (above) the warship goes into battle with all guns blazing. Kids don't get distracted by nuances like the color of a late afternoon sky reflected in the sea water. For kids a battle scene portrays battle, clear and simple, and the battle is one of epic dimensions. The nobility of the brave ship is honored by cilia-type sunbeams of fire power.

Interesting huh?

EDWARD STEICHEN: GENIUS

You probably know Edward Steichen for his painting and fine art photography, but did you know that he also helped to create the modern concept of fashion photography?  That's his cover above, one of the most well-known in the history of magazine publishing.


Before Steichen fashion pictures looked mostly like this (above). The idea was to highlight the dress. The woman in it was little more than a mannequin.

Steichen had the revolutionary idea that the women wearing the dresses should look interesting, even if sometimes they almost overshadowed the clothes. They should look like they were having fun and like they had lots of friends. The idea was to make the women reading the magazine envy the models. 

Steichen was a painter before he was a photographer. The influence of Matisse on the two pictures above is obvious. 

Some believe that Steichen was the greatest photographer of women who ever lived. That's Gertrude Lawrence above. 

He made women (above) look mysterious and seductive.

He was no slouch with men, either. What do you think of the pictures above? The picture immediately above is of Conrad Veidt, who played Major Strassner in "Casablanca."


When Veidt was young he played horrific parts in films like "Dr. Caligari."

Nice poster, eh? But I digress....

What happened to Steichen you ask? Well, he dropped out of fashion photography when Borodsky introduced Beaten and Horst to Harper's Bazaar. I put up a blog about these guys a couple of weeks ago. Borodsky introduced humorous surrealism to women's magazines and poor Steichen, who was a serious kind of a guy, just couldn't keep up. That's Steichen's attempt at surrealism above. It just wasn't his thing.  

Why should men be interested in what happened in womens' magazines in the 20s and 30s? Because those magazines, operating beneath the radar of formal critics, helped to shape the attitudes of modern women, and of the whole world we live in today.  That and the fact that these magazines continued the revolution in art that critics supposed had died after WWll.

UNPUBLISHED WOLVERTON

Have you seen the new Wolverton book, called "The Wolverton Bible?" Most of the book is about his Biblical illustrations done for his church, the same church that used to publish "The Plain Truth" magazine, edited by radio preacher Herbert W. Armstrong. The Bible illustrations are interesting but the real treat is the small last chapter, which contains previously unpublished or under-published drawings from his best period. A few of them can be seen here, above and below. 


Of particular interest to me are the ones in the top two pictures, which were among those submitted to Harvey Kurtzman when he was editor of Mad in the fifties, and which Kurtzman declined.  Kurtzman published the best of the lot but these just didn't make the final cut.

Publisher William Gaines didn't like Wolverton. He thought the drawings were ugly and tried to talk Kurtzman into dropping them. Fortunately Kurtzman insisted and the masterpieces of gross that we're all familiar with were published, sans the pictures shown here.  I can see why these were turned down. They're funny but not as focused and polished as Kurtzman's favorites. Even so, they're still interesting, don't you think?

 





Some of these sketches were done for Armstrong's church, but were never (or seldom) reprinted anywhere else. Some of the people above were, believe it or not, depictions of character types Wolverton found in his own congregation. 


Armstrong reportedly tried to talk Wolverton out of cartooning and into serious illustration. He said there was no future in it because cartooning had run its course and would soon die. Actually cartooning thrived in the fifties, thanks to the efforts of artists like Wolverton. 

MAD PRIDE

Mental illness is a fascinating subject, all the more because so little is known about it. You get the feeling that there must be hundreds of kinds of mental illness, yet books on the subject usually list only a dozen. The mind seems to break down in fairly predictable ways, meaning I guess that we're prone to certain kinds of disorders a lot more than others.

One disorder has to do with hearing voices that aren't there. From a little reading on the net I got the feeling that the treatment of this illness is changing. Gone are the days when the patient is told the voices are a figment of his imagination. Nowadays the doctor might accept the reality of the voices and simply try to teach the patient to cope with them, to have constructive conversations with them. 

Here's (above and below) some excerpts from a pamphlet for people who hear voices. It's not very judgemental. The idea is assure the patient that what they're going through isn't as scary as it seems, and that they have some control over it.





My hunch is that a lot of people with this problem get only a pamphlet and some drugs. I don't know enough about the subject to know if this constitutes woeful neglect or simply a recognition that the cause of this problem is mysterious and treatment reasonably has to be restricted to the little bit that we know actually works.

Mental patients are forming Mad Pride groups, mostly to resist compulsory electroshocks, and to get more free benefits from the government, but also to persuade the public that mental disorders don't always prevent people from doing good work on the job.  

The most articulate mad person I've encountered is Spikol (above). She accepts questions from YouTubers and I have to resist the urge to deluge her with them.  What cures actually work? What should parents do? What did she think of the book, "Franny and Zooey?", and the movie "Royal Tannenbaums? Should the state sterilize? Does she agree with coercive institutionalization? Can mad people cope with their problem without curing it, like Russell Crowe did in "Beautiful Mind?" How many crazy people are there? What does she think of the therapy attempted by the author of  "The Criminal Mind?" Does madness stimulate creativity? Are mad people attracted to other mad people? Why do some mad people become violent? Are all violent people mad? Does therapy help? Do previously mad people make the best therapists?  Why is depression so common? Is it curable? What are the most helpful books? Does madness often just go away with time? What's the relationship between habbit and madness? 

Here (above) she talks about the downside of electroshock therapy. Elsewhere she admits that it does seem to work for some people.