avocare

I can't think of a better way to end 2007 than with this lovely drawing by our old friend Rembrandt. This little drawing makes me wonder why Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell thought it was necessary to invent abstract expressionism.   What an astonishing drawing and what a wonderful world we live in! Happy new year to all of you!

In the comments with readers after my last post I wrote, if you go online and look at the 2,284 drawings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you will be stunned by the amount of unmitigated crap in their collection....the ratio of money to talent at the MOMA cathedral is downright asphyxiating. Some of you scolded me for hyperbole.  After all, would the distinguished Museum of Modern Art really acquire "unmitigated crap"?  Surely I am just applying outdated standards to these pioneering works? In the spirit of the holiday season, I thought I would post some of the offending artwork to see whether my more open hearted readers can point out the mitigating qualities I am missing.  Here are some of the masterpieces currently enshrined in the collection of MOMA: As I browsed through dozens of crummy drawings like these, I noticed that whenever I was tempted to give a drawing the benefit of a doubt I ended up deducting points for pretentiousness. For exa...

. . . Happy Holidays!! Best wishes to all of you. This is something I painted for "Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron". Copyright DreamWorks Animation SKG.

We have chatted in the past about artists who delight in drawing subjects such as hair or folds of cloth   or water , that allow the artist to take liberties with abstract design. The great George Herriman rarely passed up an opportunity to draw smoke coming from a chimney. He seemed to add smoke to a picture the way a hat designer might place a feather in a lady's chapeau. For art's sake, every fireplace in Coconino County must have been roaring all summer long. Look how each example is different-- fluid, intuitive and beautiful. You can treat each of these little abstract designs as a miniature rorschach test: I suspect Herriman used the same standard for smoke that fine artist Ellsworth Kelly employed for his abstract drawings at the Museum of Modern Art.   It's just a matter of what "feels right": For me, the smoke from Krazy Kat's chimney is the superior work.

Well, he's not exactly an illustrator, but I simply can't let the great man's birthday go by without tipping my hat in respect. The illustrator Robert Fawcett studied Beethoven's notebooks and found their thematic notations surprisingly similar to an artist's conceptual sketches: they are both "notations of plastic linear ideas." Fawcett said that abstract drawing "is probably as close to music as drawing can come." Enjoy these handwritten manuscripts as abstract art.

. . . . . . . . . Some photoshop production work this week. After creating several traditionally animated films at the DreamWorks Glendale campus, Shark Tale was our first effort at cg animation. Our goal was to create underwater environments rich with color and light. These are three of my paintings for the " whalewash " location. Acknowledgements to the outstanding Art directors and artists who set the stage: Sam Michlap , Seth Engstrom , Armand Baltazar , Teng Heng , Zhaoping Wei and many others. Copyright DreamWorks Animation SKG.

Artists and spies know there are two ways to convey a message: The first is to write your message in secret code. This is called cryptography . The second is to plant your message within a larger, non-secret communication. This is called steganography : hiding a message within an image, right out in the open. Illustration is essentially a steganographic art. Rather than using the words of a writer, illustrators convey a message by folding it into an image. They use a variety of symbols, brush strokes, colors, facial expressions, body language and other techniques to communicate meaning that writers convey verbally. Here are some dandy examples by Kyle Baker: This picture has a text which you can certainly read, but the marvelous frowns on the young "orphans" add a whole non-verbal layer of humor and intelligence to the message. In the next picture, Baker cleverly distorts the figure to heighten the text he is illustrating: Try conveying this level of frustration with mere wor...

. . Mark Snyder. Compressed charcoal on rives lightweight paper. We've been drawing Mark in head drawing class. As you can see, he has great features to study from. . .

Once lines have been hardened into the shapes of letters of the alphabet, their only function is to form words and sentences. They march in straight rows, following the commands of their master, punctuation. But ah, before that stage, when a line is still free and retains all of its original primordial wildness, it can do a thousand things and communicate in a thousand ways. Excerpt from a drawing by Saul Steinberg The designer Milton Glaser emphasized the potential of a simple pencil line: There is no instrument more direct than a pencil and paper for the expression of ideas. Everything else that interferes with that direct relationship with the eyes, the mind, the arm and the hand causes a loss of fidelity.... I like the idea that this ultimate reductive simplicity is the way to elicit the most extraordinary functions of the brain. The domain of the created line began with the first bubbling urschleim , before your words had consonants... Prehistoric cave art from Queensland, Austral...

David Lance Goines started out as a student of classical languages, reading ancient texts in the original Greek and Latin. After being arrested and expelled from his university for participating in student protests in the 1960s, Goines found work as an apprentice with a nearby printer. Soon, Goines was combining his classical background with his own good taste to design posters that were both beautiful and interesting. Goines also drew upon his classical studies in a series of witty essays (on subjects ranging from miniature golf to the Italian Renaissance artist, architect and philosopher Filippo di Ser Brunellesco). Despite Goines' brilliance and erudition (or perhaps because of it) he had a completely unpretentious view of art, which I love. He described his work as follows: I find it useful, when asked what I do for a living, to say that I am a printer and graphic designer, and leave it up to the questioner to decide whether or not I qualify as an artist. * * * * A plumb...