SOME LESSER-KNOWN EGON SCHIELE PICTURES

Here's (above) a red woman. She's not exactly a woman painted red but red that takes the form of a woman. We are fields of color that have minds.
Here's a woman (above) reduced to just the interesting parts. She's packaged in a rich brown and presented to us. The picture is sexy but you rebel against it because there's something disturbing about the missing limbs.

Here's legs with transparent, silky stockings stretched between them. It's odd to think that a naked figure is even more naked when wearing something. Transparent color like the green shown here is riveting because our minds can't figure out whether to regard it as pure color floating in the air or as a tint of the flesh color. A vagina thrown into the composition combines the mystery of sex with the mystery of color and texture.


The white woman with the colorful crotch is pure Kandinsky but it's easier to see what Kandinsky was getting at here than in his own paintings. Color here is portrayed as a weird, otherworldly attribute that is tamed and enslaved to allow us to perceive reality, but which has a mind of its own which can assert itself and threaten to show us the chaos that underlies things.Here's an elegant line drawing that suddenly erupts in extreme volume. When you see drawings like this you wonder if volume is the fundamental atom of vision, the thing that art is all about.

J.T. QUINN FIGURED IT OUT!

For a long time I've admired Will Elder's watercolor technique in "Little Annie Fannie" but I could never figure out how he did it. Now, thanks to an animation artist named J. T. Quinn I think I understand it.
A couple of months ago I stumbled on Quinn's blog called "JT QUINN SKETCHBOOK" and there it was, Elder's Annie Fannie technique adapted to Quinn's own sketch ideas! I recognized the look instantly!
Reading on I discovered that Quinn had taken a class with Harvey Kurtzman at SVA in New York city. Kurtzman taught the class Elder's way of painting watercolors. You build the color slowly with layers of transparent washes. Eventually you get a rich, brilliant glaze then you finish by spotting the most important color areas with a little gouache. It sounds simple but I had to read about it in Quinn's blog before I could figure it out.

Quinn's a pretty good sketchbook artist. If you visit his blog you'll find the Elder section archived under August 21, 2005.

TWO KILLER JOHN CARICATURES

Here are a couple more caricatures that John did of me. When I think about the John drawings of me that I've posted up till now I'm amazed at how many ways there are to draw just one face. There's the optimistic me, the seedy me, the retarded me, the rat me, the eager me... it goes on. A number of the ways of thinking about me required John to try a different kind of line or a different design concept.

I don't post these drawings out of ego, because I'm the model. I do it so this aspect of what John does will get into the historical record and so that these techniques won't be lost. And since history is watching I'll cop to accidentally cutting off the final "D" in "dreaded."



Here's me in pantaloons and cod piece. I'm stupid-looking here so the "V" of the head in the disdain drawing is inverted so the wide part is on the bottom, as if my head is too stupid to resist gravity. I like the tiny soda under the soft, rubbery upper-lip flap. The five o'clock shadow looks like it's made of toothbrush bristles. Tiny granny glasses cover the seedy eyes and the long, thin spectacle arm extends all the way back to the hay-filled ear. Warts, of course.

I like the restraint involved in making the wart on the end of the nose tiny and understated. If it had been bigger it would have taken our attention away from the elegant, sloping line formed by the nose and forehead. This long, continuous line is the true focus of the picture.

STEVE'S MIRACULOUS CARICATURE MACHINE

I have no idea what the final layout of this post will look like. I used Blogger settings that I was
warned away from by friends but which I had to try because my curiosity about them was eating me alive. If it all looks chaotic when it's published then I offer my apologies in advance.

Anyway here's some samples from Steve Worth's amazing caricature machine, which is actually a Mac laptop with a camera built in and with Mac Photobooth software installed. This is a $1500 package but that's probably peanuts to the filthy rich artists who frequent this blog. Just get your butler to pick one up next time he goes for a caviar run.

This program is amazing. It contains dozens of virtual lenses all of which distort the face in a different way. You just move your face around infront of the camera till you find a distortion you like then you click to save it.

I learned a lot about drawing by spending less than an hour with this machine. Look at the hand pictures...I never thought of drawing hands that way till I saw these snapshots! This is a great machine but it's going to put a lot of marker and pastel caricaturists out of business. If you do caricatures for a living then consider yourself warned!

My uncertainty about the final layout makes it impossible for me to assign names to the photos. The friends skewered here are: Steve Worth, Jon Trapnel, Marlo Meekins and myself. One more thing...um...I'm not as fat as I look standing behind Jon. That's a camera distortion. Just thought I'd mention that.

Thanks a million to Steve Worth for letting me use these pictures!

HANDS HAVE A LIFE OF THEIR OWN

I love to draw hands. That's because hands have a life of their own.

Hands are pretty good at revealing what their owner really thinks. A face may listen to a boring speaker with what looks like rapt attention but way down below the hands are playing with keys or tapping on the table. Sometimes the hands are more than just magnifiers of their owner's true feelings. Sometimes they have feelings of their own. Hands may be macho, gay, happy, sad, lecherous or virginal, even if their owner possesses none of these qualities (these thoughts cry out for drawings to illustrate them. Sorry, I didn't plan this post very well). I'd love to do a short, pencil-test film of an extreme version of this idea where a guy's hands, acting completely on their own, grope the people around him and get him into trouble.

Here's a drawing where the excitable hand is frightened and clings to the face, which is only mildly disturbed. At least that's what I had in mind when I drew it. The understory about the excitable hand is sometimes for the artist only. Sometimes you want the understory to be so subtle that the audience isn't even aware of it.
Most stories don't lend themselves to this hand theory and those I board the normal way, as above. Even so, it still works for the occassional scene. I'll try to find some examples.

WOULDN'T IT BE FUN TO DESIGN A TEXTBOOK? (PART 2)

A good textbook would have to have lots of faces. Kids need to see examples of civilized, effective, kind and intelligent adults.
It's a good idea to get these pictures from fine art sources. Fine art does a good job of isolating noble qualities.

Some of these fine art faces also get across the idea of man as a rational, fundamentally decent being. What an interesting idea to propose to kids who may see only the dark side of life at home!

THE NEW REN & STIMPY DVD IS OUT!!!!

Do whatever you have to do to get this DVD! Steal purses from little old ladies, sell your children into slavery....anything! It's that good!

A lot of fans were put off by some of the gags in these cartoons and it's easy to see why. There's some gay jokes, some cruelty to animals, some gross gags...most people will find at least one thing that rubs them the wrong way in here. That's the bad news. The good news is that the remaining 99% of the content is pure bliss and, taken as a whole, the contents of this set are probably the most innovative and funny thing to happen in animation in the last half century.

For me the best cartoons in the box, the pearls of greatest price, are "Naked Beach Frenzy," "Ren Seeks Help" and "Stimpy's Pregnant." Naked Beach Frenzy is hands down one of the funniest cartoons ever made. I defy anyone to sit still during the lifeguard and Shampoo Master sequences. Ren Seeks Help is packed with tour de force acting scenes which will probably change the way animation is done forever and Stimpy's Pregnant contains what might be the greatest Mr. Horse sequence ever. And those are just the top three ! I could write all night about the great gags in the other films!

It's a digression but I can't help putting up the note John wrote to his fans on a card on the inside of the box. John is not only the greatest artist working in the industry but he's the greatest writer as well. These are beautiful words. If you read enough of what he writes you begin writing and talking that way yourself. Like everything John does the words beg to be imitated.

BTW, people who pre-paid for the set are getting their's in the mail now. I'm not sure when the discs will appear in the stores.