Illustration Art

JUNE 2, 2006

Sometimes it takes the greatest amount of self-discipline to capture the things that are most free and elusive. You might think that painting water-- that most fluid, shimmering substance-- would permit an illustrator to indulge in the wildest excesses. But I was surprised to discover that some of the painters who are best at capturing the freedom of water can only do so using the most exacting self-discipline and control.

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Illustration Art

FEBRUARY 4, 2006

Based on the traffic from my last post ("Drawing With Your Brains") I thought it was important to spell out my views on Chris Ware's artwork: I enjoy Chris Ware's work, but the highbrow critics currently fawning over him drive me absolutely bats. Ware is being offered up as one of the few "Masters of American Comics" (the title of the exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art) and is feted at the Whitney Museum and in the pages of the New Yorker.

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Illustration Art

MAY 14, 2006

The illustrator Robert Fawcett used to complain about the grueling training in figure drawing that he received at the Slade school in London. He recalled bitterly how one professor made him devote a full week to drawing a single figure on plain paper using a hard graphite pencil. While it seemed like torture at the time, Fawcett admitted that by forcing him to focus on every nuance of the drawing, his professor weaned him from "the long, long search for shortcuts.

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Illustration Art

APRIL 1, 2006

© The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Saul Steinberg was one of the greatest illustrators of all time. He was so damn smart you could warm your hands by the intellectual glow from his drawings. Yet, his content never overpowered his visual images; they worked hand in hand. Art critic Robert Hughes wrote that Steinberg exhibited a form of " graphic intelligence that had not been imagined in American illustration before him. " This lovely drawing is not one of his more f

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Illustration Art

OCTOBER 23, 2006

[This is not my last digression into the difference between illustration and abstract art. It is probably not even my second to last digression. But take heart, because the end is definitely in sight.] __ The inspiration behind abstract art was bold and brilliant. As Holland Cotter wrote about the invention of cubism: The day of pure optical pleasure was over; art had to be approached with caution and figured out.

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Illustration Art

OCTOBER 11, 2006

This lovely little drawing by Robert Fawcett appeared in Look Magazine in the 1960s. It was just a spot illustration, about 2 inches across. It is not likely to be reproduced ever again. In the 1960s, illustration went wild. Innovators used psychedelic colors and bold new styles to create increasingly abstract work. Representational art was declared obsolete.

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Illustration Art

JANUARY 6, 2006

In the 1950s and '60s, fine artists Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg and Franz Kline dazzled art critics and museums around the world with their brilliant avant garde paintings. At the same time, another painter-- Bernie Fuchs-- dealt with the exact same aesthetic problems in a different forum. Like Motherwell, Rauschenberg and Kline, Fuchs rejected the realistic painting of his predecessors (such as Norman Rockwell) and focused on broader qualities of abstract design and composition.

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Illustration Art

DECEMBER 30, 2006

There's obviously no such thing as the single greatest drawing in the history of the world. It would be foolish to think about rating art that way. However, if there was such a drawing.87.42% of the world would probably agree with me that it's this one by Michelangelo. It's a preparatory drawing for his fresco of the Libyan Sibyl on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

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Illustration Art

JULY 6, 2006

Eugene von Bruenchenhein (1910-1983) was a small man who worked the night shift at a bakery near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He and his wife Marie lived a humble life in a tiny home where Eugene painted and wrote poetry. Eugene and Marie mostly kept to themselves. The neighbors never guessed that inside their meager shack, Eugene and Marie lived quietly as a god and goddess.

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Illustration Art

APRIL 11, 2006

© The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY In the whole long clanging pageant of art, no artist ever combined words and pictures the way that Saul Steinberg did. He was truly an original. When Steinberg died, art critic Robert Hughes wrote, "He had no equals. Now he has no successors." The critic and philosopher Harold Rosenberg noted with admiration,"there is only one of his kind." © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Steinberg dealt with the mo

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Illustration Art

AUGUST 9, 2006

William Blake, the great English mystic, observed: Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street. That is why I have a special fondness in my heart for artists such as Kaethe Kollwitz (1867-1945) who were driven to grapple with the big subjects-- life and death, injustice, war and peace. Kollwitz lived through two World Wars in Germany where she worked with her husband in the most impoverished areas of Berlin.

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Illustration Art

MARCH 26, 2006

While it is great fun to talk about the larger landscape of art, sometimes we can see more by looking through a microscope than by looking out the window of an airplane. That's especially true when you are talking about the intimate art of drawing. As I have noted elsewhere, I think art critic Roberta Smith got it exactly right when she wrote about the special quality of drawing: Drawings are the most overtly delectable of all art forms.Drawings in general are like love letters.

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Illustration Art

JUNE 23, 2006

George Nathan once wrote, "art is the sex of the imagination." That may seem like a pretty dumb thing to say but it serves as a good springboard for my series of posts discussing the relationship between art and love. Maxfield Parrish was 33, a successful illustrator living on a grand country estate in New Hampshire when he first met Sue Lewin. She was a 16 year old girl from a nearby farm town hired to help Parrish and his wife Lydia care for their two young children.

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Illustration Art

DECEMBER 19, 2006

100 years ago, women were thrilled by Redbook magazine's romantic stories about dark and mysterious men, exotic perils from the orient, women in danger, sublimated passions and heaving bosoms. The stories were illustrated by marvelous pictures like these. Often the heroine watched as powerful men struggled over her virtue, or were reduced to helpless tears by their love for her.

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Illustration Art

MARCH 17, 2006

When the illustrator Robert Fawcett decided to abandon fine art for illustration, His painter friends objected that illustration was coarse, vulgar and tasteless. Fawcett responded that "good taste" is often the enemy of creativity: the creative act in art involves a kind of courage which good taste might easily modify. It almost seems as if the creative impulse involves a large ingredient of vulgarity to be a vital statement.

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