SOME INTERESTING MATISSE

This is not going to be a popular post. Most of the people who come here are cartoonists and cartoonists are indifferent to Matisse. Maybe it's because his love of pattern seems effeminate, maybe it's because line artists are instictively hostile to colorists. I don't know, maybe a commenter can explain it.

Anyway, I have a real treat for the small handfull of Matisse enthusiasts here. Here (above) is the original cloth that inspired several of his later paintings, including the blue and green painting above (topmost). It's a chance to compare the inspiration with the final product.

The blue and green painting is shocking. The colors seem to burn off of the canvas. I'm amazed that Matisse was able to look at the cloth and derive the ideal of pure, vibrant color from it. Of course to get across the idea of pure color he had to use mixed, textured color. This doesn't suprise me because psychologically intense color is almost always textured. That's why a colorist like Matisse was bound to be attracted to fabric. Hold up a red card then hold up

a piece of cloth colored with the same red. The cloth always seems redder. It may not really be redder but our brains are wired to perceive it that way.

I think we get misled about how color and texture work because we look at the mid-day sky and the sky seems brilliant even though it's only a light, graded blue and seems to have no texture at all. That's because the sky is backlit in a sense. It's all about the difference between additive and subtractive color. A pigment of sky blue (one that really is the same blue as the sky) straight out of the tube won't appear bright unless it's textured.

I'm always surprised that liberated color appears so agressive and so...well, evil and alien. The energy in color is usually locked up and hidden under a matrix of other colors and distractions. When released through texture and contrast it goes wild and seems to attack the viewer. Don't you feel that when you look at the blue painting above? If I were a colorist I might find myself talking to the color as it develops because it definitely seems to have an agenda opposed to my own.

The real excitement in seeing the cloth pattern is in the realization that the alien blue Matisse coaxed out of it was there all along. It makes you see other common objects in a different light.

Just for the heck of it I think I'll throw in a couple of other Matisse-related pictures. Here's an Egyptian tapestry that appears in a couple of his pictures. The wreath seems to spin and inject color into the field around it. I wish I could see the original.

MY DINNER WITH MIKE FONTANELLI

'BE BACK IN A COUPLE OF DAYS!

I TAKE MY SNOOTY FRIEND TO GET SOME FAST FOOD

I don't know why so many people hate fast food restaurants. I understand why they got a bad reputation early on when they were crowded and noisy with plastic seats, but that was then and this is now. My local Carl Jr.'s is quiet and comfortable and the food isn't bad if you know what to order. Anyway, yesterday I finally convinced my food snob friend Mike to try it.

I guess I picked the wrong day because the restaurant was full of mentally challenged people with carts filled with teddy bears and "Lion King' memorabelia. There must have been a convention nearby. They were all shouting incoherently and of course they all seemed to gravitate to Mike.

I forgot that using a door is a learned skill. A man who hadn't learned it yet came to the door, saw his friends inside, but couldn't get in because a slab (the door) was in the way. After making a few tentative little pushes he opened the door about 20% of the way, then tried to squeeze in through the narrow opening. The door, which had a normal amount of spring tension, gently began to close on him, pinning him there by the shoulders. The man painstakingly turned sideways to get more room but the door closed on him in that position too, forcing him to wheedle through sideways, like a crab. I'm embarrassed to say that I was so suprised by what I was seeing that I forgot to offer to help. Besides I was distracted by a little kid who was trying to hit Mike on the head with a DVD box.

I also forgot that using a cup is a learned skill. A man settled into a booth with a cup of coffee and looked wistfully out the window. Nothing wrong with that, just a citizen enjoying a cup of coffee. "Ah!" you could almost hear him thinking, "Life is good!" He took a sip then went to take another sip and was shocked to discover that the cup was empty. He looked at the kitchen angrily then got up and filled it again. Back in the booth he took another long, relaxed sip. "Aaaaah!", you could hear him think, "That's good!" But wait a minute! When he went to take a another sip nothing was there! What kind of restaurant are they running here? Once again he angrily looked at the kitchen then went up and got more coffee. This went on and on, with him looking suprised that he had nothing in his cup then filling it with only one sip's worth of coffee. Once again I didn't offer to help because the kid was back hitting Mike with the DVD box again.

I should add that Mike was sitting close to the aisle. Every time the coffee man passed he would fart next to Mike's head. And when I say "passed," I mean passed in both directions. Mike would get a fart in his face on the guy's way up to the counter and a fart in the face on the guy's way back.


I suggested to Mike that we slide farther in on our seats so we could get away from the aisle but when we did that the woman in the booth behind us cast a murderous stare at Mike, probably thinking that he was the father who abused her and now deserved to be stabbed. Regretfully we slid back to the aisle where Mike was promptly farted on.

So that was my lunch with food snob Mike. I guess we won't be eating at Carl's again any time soon.

THE ROOFTOPS OF PARIS

I got a great book called "The Rooftops of Paris" for Christmas. Thumbing through it I found myself asking, "What are these rooftops trying to tell us?" They seem to be saying something, I just can't figure out what it is.

In the 19th century, when a lot of these buildings were put up, the poorest people lived on the top floor. That's because there were few mechanical elevators and getting up there required an arduous climb. What a good deal for the poor! They not only got a terrific view of the city but they were able to look out over the surreal, mysterious, innovative, historic, artistic wonderland of the rooftops!

Some rooftops seemed to be planned and ornate, others seeme to be gerry-rigged and put up almost as an afterthought. Maybe some featured add-on rooms, built without knowledge of the law. Some of the most creative designs might have been add-ons.

Rooftops like these provoke so many interesting questions. Are we wasting the best part of buildings by putting them so high above the street that nobody can see them? Should we build rooftop-type structures on the street level? Should we promote a world above the ground by bridging rooftops? Should we deliberately send our eccentrics up there to live in the hope that they'll create an interesting world up there? Should we have trolleys up there so rooftop people could visit each other without going down to the ground?

Matbe witches or Dickensian criminal types like Fagin should live up there. Maybe ninjas. Maybe thatched cottages and trees should be permitted. Maybe a foreign country should be allowed to exist up there.

I borrowed this picture from a previous post. This suggests that people in higher rooftops could lean over a railing and enjoy the antics of people on lower rooftops. Or maybe it suggests a kind of pedestrian highway enabling fast travel on the rooftops.

WHAT BIRDS ARE TRYING TO TELL US

Everybody loves the sound of chirping birds. There's something soothing and peacefull about waking up in the morning to the sound of bird calls. It's as if the birds said to each other, "Let's fill this neighborhood with song so the humans will reflect on how glorious and full of happiness the world is!" At least that's what I used to think.

After seeing a TV documentary on the subject I now know what they're really saying:

"I'm hungry!"

"This is my tree!"

"Where's the women!"

Fascinating!

Maybe this is the universal message that the animal world is trying to communicate to us. I remember that years ago the hippies used to talk about communicating with dolphins. A researcher named Lily wrote a book about his ongoing attempt to teach language to dolphins and his book was on every hippie bookshelf. Lily speculated that when we learn to talk to them dolphins will share with us their rich culture and philosophy along with a history of the oceans going back to the time before man.

Lily died before he could finish his work but others took it up and after years of arduous labor they finally achieved what they were after. A dolphin who learned to manipulate a typewriter with his nose painstakingly typed out a message to his hippie friends who were waiting with abated breath. The message, which was the culmination of tears of work, read:

"I'm hungry!"

"This is my water."

"Where's the women?"

I guess that's the universal message.

I JUST BOUGHT A WATER PEN!

I just bought a water pen and I'm delighted with it! How long have these been around? How come I never heard of them before? I only discovered it because Enrico, who runs the Sketchcrawl website did a watercolor sketch of it (above). He seemed to awear by it so I made a trip to the art store to see what he was talking about. Man, am I glad I did!

What it is, is a refillable brush pen loaded with water. If you have a little portable set of watercolors like the Windsor & Newton set above then you're all set to color pictures on the move, any time, anywhere. No fuss, no mess, the brush has it's own water. It's easy to clean and easy to remove the old color to make way for a new one.

I like funny subjects so my pictures aren't likely to look like the ones above. I'm just grateful to Sketchcrawl for turning me on to the materials. The sketchbook he recommended looked pretty interesting too. I never used the Mikado pencil.