Doodles, cont.

Poor Twirlita.
All she wants to do is finish her dance:

 Doodles by the great Lynda Barry

  

Lynda Barry is of course a cartoonist, and as such, her basic tools are pen and paper. There's a brilliance about the way in which she uses drawing to convey humor -- from the willowy legs of the dancer to the motion lines and stars throughout. There are 40 examples of this on the page, and all of theme, either taken as a continuous narrative or viewed individually, are hilarious.

Disorderly Digression

Occupy Wall Street is this generation's very own Kent State. As the demonstrations heat up in cities across the country, here are just a few of the signs captured by photographers on the ground. They're an important record of the times, a combination of political cartoon and performance art, coaxing factual knowledge and interpretive skills from viewers. And there's the drawing technique - sometimes slick, but mostly raw and emotional, with shards of cardboard boxes as support for the varied illustrative styles.

I like the one with the little girl in the tiara. She seems to be caught up in the festivity of it all, but it's doubtful she really understands the context in which her poster appears. I think it's an example of grammar school expressionism, juxtaposed with the expressions of an angry proletariat, which makes it kinda sweet.

Grime Writing

Street artist Moose Benjamin Curtis was once arrested for creating graffiti on a South London public wall. Which is ironic, because Moose wasn’t creating marks on the wall – he was subtracting the dirt and grime deposited there over time by air pollution. The result, as you can see in the above “drawing” at the Broadway Tunnel in San Francisco, is a more beautific public space, created with scrub brushes, rags, cleaning fluid and sometimes a high-pressure hose. Check out these other examples of his negative space art:

  The one below says “Thank You For Not Breeding.”

 

Subway Drawings on an iPhone

 
A friend of mine posted these amazing drawings on Facebook. The artist is Dug Winningham, a sound technician who was born with an ability to draw what he sees. He used an iPhone app called Brushes to create these drawings. The program allows for intense detail via its zoom capability, and the drawings show a much more sophisticated approach than what seems possible, given the diminutive nature of the tools. Each drawing is multilayered with color and line, produced with just a finger treading on the screen. It's interesting to see how artists' tools are evolving along with technology. We have literally at our fingertips the ability to create a project like this one, which involves more sophisticated technology than that which attempted to launch the Apollo 1 spacecraft.

Line, Pt. 10

This amazing linocut by Marc Snyder demonstrates the importance and agility of line to produce meaning. Every detail is rendered either by the creation of line, or the complete excavation - the absence - of line.

How to Draw a Drowning

"How To Draw A Drowning," 8"X3" intaglio by Marc Snyder, 2001

This schematic of a critical event is calmly rendered by artist and printmaster Marc Snyder, who runs the Fiji Island Mermaid Press. A visit to his website is strongly recommended.

Best Use of Graphical Representation of Landforms

Drawing by Marc Snyder

About Narrative

Have you seen this band? Of course not. Polish artist Jakub Julian Ziolkowski made it up to satisfy an insatiable craving for storytelling. 

His work is a product of his imagination and presented in non-linear and disjointed narratives, grotesque figures fraught with death and decay, otherworldly forms, and obsessively created and rehashed imagery.

"I really like to create artificial, imaginary names and situations," says Ziolkowski. "I just invent them, which I think is more real. If something is completely imaginary, like a portrait without a name, it's surreal, but if you've got the names, you think, "Who is this Timothy Galoty?  What's going on here?'"

More Bunnies

Pencil on paper by Jedsada Tangtrakulwong

If Computers Did the Drawing For Us

A list of perfect female statistics was fed into this artificial brain (the thing that looks like a vending machine in the corner) and the result was this drawing, titled "Miss Formula," 1964.

Drug Store Mannequin Digression

Business has taken me out of town and away from the blogosphere for a few days. Until I return, here is a post of the coolest thing I have ever seen (discovered at a Long Beach, Calif. collectibles shop Feb. 20, 2010):

It is an Italian mannequin made of resin in the 1950s and used as a drug store display for bandages. This fellow stands under 5 feet tall, and has a small, perfectly round hole straddling his upper and lower lip -- I suspect it was to hold a resin cigarette that fell off at some point.

Today's Drawing

Pencil, oil stick and turpentine on bristol, 11" X 14"

Line a la German Expressionism:

Kathe Kollwitz, self portrait 1924, charcoal on paper

Anti-anti-art

Anti-anti-art

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anti-anti-art is a stance proposed by the Stuckists in their manifestos outlining their art. In it, they take a particularly strong position in opposition to what is known as "anti-art".

Stuckists claim that conceptual art is justified by the work of Marcel Duchamp, but that Duchamp's work is "anti-art by intent and effect". The Stuckists feel that "Duchamp's work was a protest against the stale, unthinking artistic establishment of his day", while "the great (but wholly unintentional) irony of postmodernism is that it is a direct equivalent of the conformist, unoriginal establishment that Duchamp attacked in the first place".

Line, Pt. 9

Let's look at two things together that we have so far explored separately: line and doodles. The following three drawings were discovered at random on a notepad in the lunch room of the pencil factory where I sometimes do freelance graphic work: 

Do these drawings tell a story? Are they maps of something? Are they somebody's daydream? Are they a continuous narrative? What can we tell from the line? Is it obvious the person who did these drawings was sourcing their imagination, or is there evidence of some reference material? Does the drawing use symbols honed in childhood to communicate information? Does it matter? Do you think these drawings are more interesting as mystery artifacts, or are you searching for their context to derive meaning? Submit your doodles to eglazner@gmail.com for future discussion.

Mystery Artifact

I don't like the assumption that some people can draw and others can't. Anyone who can hold a pencil or a pen, or in some way create some sort of mark-making, can draw, just as anyone who can think can write. We are all artists and writers in that sense.

Witness the doodle or the tweet. Both of these are means of communicating in our culture, though the first is usually done in a semi-aware and private manner and the latter is designed to be a shout out to others. What they have in common is that they are both organic. They both indicate immediate process and execution and are windows into the doodler or tweeter's sensibilities. "Artists" are lauded for such behavior because of their specialness.

I found this doodle the other day and think it is worth sharing. Withhold judgment re: style or context, and it gains power as a mystery artifact:

Third Generation Pop Artist

I don't like hairy men, terrorists, scatological humor or the devil, but I LOVE the drawings of  William James Barminski:

11" X 17" colored pencil drawings mounted on wood, 2006

Herbert Baglione on the Emptiness of Chaos

I Heart Snow

In respect of snow, and to wish well those affected by "Snowmaggedon" this week, here is what it looks like in Inyo County, looking west:

Gouache on paper, 3.5 X 5 inches

Line, Pt. 8

A storm system moved in to the Eastern Sierras today. By the time I was walking the dog this afternoon along the canal, the clouds were a dense purple and grey edged in silver, and the mountains behind them were thick and white with a vein of gold. Barren trees and brush receded from red to grey, until they became ghostly thickets of smoke. Where had I seen this before? I kept wondering. Then I remembered.

These are large drawings by Anthony Goicolea, in which he uses semi-opaque mylar overlays to soften and obscure his otherwise strident mark-making. I think I know now how he came upon this imagery.