Manners
Here is the second installment of my talking about things that move me to make. In my first go-round, I was talking about Noby Noby Boy, No. 5 and Japanese calm silliness. I was talking a lot about concepts and design aesthetics, and with this post I’ll talk more directly about drawing style. An in-depth look at my actual drawing style was conspicuously absent from my thesis presentation, but I’ve had a couple of years to think about it since then, so let’s see how we do.
The above work is Paul Gauguin’s In the Waves or Ondine, from 1889 (“another summer…”). Even though I was a painting major, I’m mostly lukewarm to Painting in general. My interest in art really picks up at the turn of the century, at the point when folks really started to break away from painting and took art making into (I think) much more exciting and relevant directions (Duchamp, Dada, Constructivism, Assemblage, Fluxus, Performance, etc.). I get much more excited by more marginal art forms, I suppose, ones with less institutional baggage (hey, like comics).
Anyways, that being admitted, I’ll say that I’ve really taken to that painting up there. Actually, I only recently took much notice of it — it was used as a centerpiece for the CMA‘s Gauguin exhibit last year, so its image was all over University Circle. Maybe it was just the right moment, when I had begun to consider color more seriously as well as trying to figure out what was useful to me in cartooning.
Mannerism, as I was taught to understand it in school, was a kind of informal period of art that played more with the depiction of human figures, dramatically stretching them out. Necks and curves elongated in poses that flowed with the composition. Basically, as the name implies, adding some style to more analytical naturalistic representation. For whatever reason (maybe since I’m a Taurus) I’m drawn to this kind of depiction, and I think the Gauguin painting epitomizes most if not all of the qualities I find appealing. There’s movement and grace, but there’s also a kind of clumsy reality — Ondine’s gesture is less informed by Classical mathematics than by a more practical observation of human beings learning how to move through space. I love the big round up-turned nose, there’s a lot of character in that nose.
The colors are great too. There’s an Impressionistic sketchiness to the marks that combines nicely with the kind of flat modeling (look at that hair!) carried over from Japanese woodblocks and Manet. All in all, it seems clear to me why a painting like this would appeal to a cartoonist, especially one who’s root influence include the likes of
Theodor Geisel
I’d be surprised if folks who read Spoilers don’t see a resemblance. Dr. Seuss is pure cartooning, I see it as a further extension of the principles we see in In the Waves, gone through the machine of mechanical reproduction (darker outlines, flatter colors). Everything is fluffy in a Dr. Seuss world, and all the characters wear one-piece suits with the gloves and footies woven in. It’s a world of fur and fabric, where every joint shows a bunching of material. Again, these are all things that I’ve more or less replicated in my drawing style.
I can’t ignore content with this one, though. Clearly, I’ve chosen images from The Lorax for a reason, one that may or may not be apparent to you Spoilers readers. My favorite story, The Lorax has Geisel’s progressive worldview showing through to draw our attention to what is perhaps one of the most important morals in our current situation — our unrestrained “lust for life” is fucking ruining us. I know I’m a sentimental fool, but The Lorax is to me Seuss’ projectile to the hearts of new generations to fucking wake up and get us out of this before it’s too late (it might be). Unless
Bringing it Back Around
If my intentions have played out, you should be able to follow the logic of my choices here. Bringing it back to comics, I’ll end with talking a bit about Nick Bertozzi’s fantastic webcomic, Persimmon Cup. Essentially a story of unrequited love where you would do anything for the girl of your dreams but that only makes things worse and worse. As other folks have noted, there is a clear similarity to Dr. Seuss’ work in this comic, but Bertozzi is not telling stories to children. So we get a much less hopeful (and currently unresolved) narrative that’s brutal at times.
This comic served as a turning point in my thoughts about style, and I began to embrace the fluid, manneristic cartoony and imaginitive rather than necessarily trying to recreate or re-present reality. Two dimensions just can’t ever hope to beat the three dimensional world at its game, so I’m an advocate for drawing to explore its own inherent qualities, because there’s a whole lot of amazing things that you can do with graphic imagery that shouldn’t exist in our physical space. Obviously, my work and the work presented here are all still more than knee deep in representation. I’m pointed in another direction though, and I want to see how far I can stretch my legs in between here and there.
Soon after I discovered Persimmon Cup is when I first noticed that Gauguin painting. And it clicked.
