avocare

. . I have a 6 page spread in the current Spring issue of American Artist's Watercolor Magazine. It has just hit newsstands, I hope you have a chance to check it out. . .

The brilliant young Mathematician Evariste Galois was killed in a duel when he was only 20. His biographer, E.T. Bell, described the last night of Galois' life this way: All night long he had spent the fleeting hours feverishly dashing off his scientific last will and testament, writing against time to glean a few of the great things in his teeming mind before the death he saw could overtake him. Time after time he broke off to scribble in the margin "I have not time; I have not time," and passed on to the next frantically scrawled outline. What he wrote in those last desperate hours before the dawn will keep generations of mathematicians busy for hundreds of years. Later biographers believe Bell's account to be a little overheated; for example, Galois did not invent his famous theorem that very night, he had been working on it for some time. Still, it is clear that when faced with almost certain death the next morning, Galois' defense was to keep doing what he d...

. . How to Train Your Dragon comes out next week, we're very proud of how it turned out so I hope you'll have a chance to see it. This is a poster for marketing done by Emil Mitev and myself. .

Compare Saul Steinberg's observation on the obstacles to creation... ...with John Cuneo's treatment of the same theme: Cuneo's hapless artist suffers from very different constraints. You'll rarely find a theme-- or a line-- in Cuneo's offbeat world as straight as Steinberg's leash. Cuneo's artist is bedeviled by his diminutive artistic size, by the huge, languid planet of muliebrity between him and his art, by that rump distracting him from his artistic mission, by that wobbly little easel perched on top of his subject... here is a valiant artist clearly outmatched by his subject matter, whose vast limbs drape beyond his field of vision. Like much of Cuneo's work, this picture is laced with subtle visual touches; without the impassive face on the woman, this picture wouldn't be nearly as smart. The woman is utterly indifferent to the artist's presence, both artistically and amatorily. I find Cuneo to be one of the most psychologically insightful ...

. . Ink on paper. .

. . A scene painted for The Road to El Dorado back in '98. Acrylic on illustration board with a little photoshop work. .

In my opinion, illustration art has a brand of potency unrivalled by any other school or genre in the history of art. Peak Frazetta Hale N.C. Wyeth I defy you to find images with greater vigor and assertiveness in any art museum. The difference in visual impact between illustration art and traditional painting is not simply a question of subject matter. Plenty of fine art depicts military battles, murders, rapes and other lurid or violent subjects. Yet, the difference in vitality is apparent: Ucello Gentileschi Rubens Nor can the difference between illustration and gallery painting be attributed to vigorous brushwork. Twentieth century action painters such as de Kooning , Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline used violent brush strokes to convey raw emotion, yet even their most extreme work lacks the particular force and thrust that can be found in some illustration. Kline de Kooning Abstraction somehow just doesn't seem to produce the same "pop." Perhaps part of the secret li...