some early visual heroes...

over the past few weeks, thanks to my good friend dan's obsession with the comic books he read as a kid, i have recently found myself mired in looking back at some of the comic books i also read. i have to admit that the hours i spent with these things when i was young were much more involved with looking than reading (in fact, i seldom actually read these things), but these intimate visual experiences were certainly seminal in terms of the development of my own graphic resonance as a visual maker. they were the first human made images that i responded to, and of course, some of the first images i tried to copy.

my time with comics was relatively short... i bought new comics for two or three years starting in 1971, and after not really caring about them for 2 or 3 years, sometime around 1975 i got into comics again, mostly buying back issues from the 60's. it was during that second phase that i started to appreciate and know the names of certain artists i liked, and at that time i became obsessed with the work of jack kirby.

(neal adams)

attempting to look back in time to draw memories out of these objects was a complex experience. while certain pages or covers instantly offered emotional earthquakes, sometimes i'd look at a cover of a book i have owned since childhood and could not identify with the contents in any way. in other cases, the cover would instantly send me to the room i was sitting in when i devoured its image, or i could see the store where i stood looking at the rack of books before making the decision of which one to buy.

(neal adams)

looking at the work of my three favorite artists now, i am completely blown away by the experimental ways these guys broke up their pages - as they seldom broke a page into 9 neatly uniformed panels. as a painter who is also constantly looking at different ways of breaking up a rectangle, i am humbled by their abilities to continually re-invent the space and the narrative tactics of a scale and size that was the same every time.

(neal adams)

the two artists that had the most impact on my memory were neal adams and jack kirby. adams was the one i was obsessed with earlier on. my first comic, an issue of batman with cover and inside drawings by adams, was purchased for me by my grandmother in 1970, and that book was the beginning of my interest in both comics and adams' work. for some reason, i was particularly enamored of his work on several issues of green lantern that revolved around a drug addiction story (i have no idea why or how i was so into such a thing at age 8... but his cover art for green lantern 86 still kills me). adams style is tight, "scratchy" and generally feels very connected to classical life drawing - his lines are, at times, so fine they almost feel as if they were was etched into the paper. this is not to say the work wasn't exploratory, aggressive, and experimental... for it certainly was. but looking at his work now, i marvel at its technical brilliance, especially the way he drew the figure, and the work is unbelievably crisp. he was also a master of emotion.

(neal adams)

an even more colossal figure for me, as well as tons of folks who read comics in the late 70's and early 80's, was jack kirby, and there is no disputing that his work was some of the most innovative and personal in the history of comics - certainly from the 60's forward. when i started digging through the childhood comics i had saved since childhood, a ton of them were drawn by kirby. his dynamic use of line is wholly unique, and when inked by the right inker, the work is unmistakably different than everything else. kirby, more than anyone - at least to my mind - was constantly building his own visual world like an outsider artist; who, rather than replicating a "brand" determined by a publisher, consistently created images through a language that was uniquely his own. sure, at times he towed a party line, or an inker tried to genericize his work; but for the most part, once you have seen kirby's work you can spot it a mile away.

(jack kirby)

graphically, his sense of space can be claustrophobic, and his linework aggressive and heavy (not heavy handed!). everything in kirby's work seems to have weight and gravity - not just beings, but his lines as well. his images of machines tend to be more interesting and inventive than most modern sculpture, and his style was always about vision much more than technique. he was the first and only artist experimenting with collage in the 60's, and the work always seems to be pushing things beyond what is already known and accepted. in truth, once kirby was allowed to not only draw, but also write his books, there has never been anything stranger (just look at the murdering misfit below!) or more personal in mainstream comics ever. everything about kirby's work completely slays me.

(jack kirby)

what is sad is that for much of his career, kirby was a genius working in an industry that reviled personal vision in the same way that contemporary hollywood approaches filmmaking - where creative decisions are generally made by committee in relation to what an executive thinks the public wants, rather than allowing the film or book to simply be the voice of a visionary. in the 70's kirby was able to do a lot of amazing things - mr. miracle, machine man, kamandi, new gods, etc. but one has to wonder how much more he could've done if the industry had acted less like an industry much earlier on in his career.

(jack kirby)

it wasn't until i started looking at my old comics again that i re-discovered gene colan, an artist who was anonymous to me as a kid, although like the books kirby and adams had drawn that i saved, a remarkable number of also-remembered images were drawn by colan... and i have recently been reacquainting myself with his work, which is incredible.

(gene colan)

unlike the strong graphic presence of adams and kirby, colan's work rarely exists in a flat world. it always feels ephemeral and in motion. yes, the graphic qualities of his work are tremendous and similarly innovative (once you know his work, you can also spot it a mile away); but colan's strength, to me, is its dynamic, ephemeral and motion filled world. in a previous post, i reprinted an interview with colan in relation to his listening to films while he was drawing; and his pages tend to express a kind of impossibility of ever grasping the passage of time. the work doesn't rely on the sequential images, like a flipbook, as much as his perspectives, fragmentation, abstraction and agitated compositions suggest the instability of time and bodily motion. much of this is expressed in his unique approach to the shape or posture of a body within a frame, and for me, colan's work always seems alive. looking at these pages, they feel as if you return to one an hour later it would somehow be changed. where kirby's work approached the abstract through a graphic and mechanical presence, colan approached the abstract much more like a futurist, all simultaneous motion and flux.

(gene colan)

sadly, just as i was beginning to re-immerse myself in these artists' works a few months ago, colan passed away. like kirby and adams, colan was certainly a visual genius, rarely producing identical approaches to the page like a machine, and consistently pushing the potential of the page and exploring different ways an image could speak. in essence, he brought the whole medium forward. if you look at graphic novels and recent comics you will see less and less traditional approaches to frames and panels, and i really think colan's work was one of the earliest to disrupt the frame in such a way - and particularly because his career was long, he has been incredibly influential.

from the few interviews i've read, colan seemed not only down to earth, but remarkably honest about his process. he was also a pretty darn interesting thinker. i can't remember reading an interview with a comic artist from the silver or bronze age period who was so articulate about his interest in trying to expand the language of narrative in ways that might intentionally confuse a viewer - and to use that confusion to expand a drawing's potential for interpretation. to achieve such a thing colan sometimes moved towards abstraction in his panels to suggest that a reader might have to look a little longer. as a kid who seldom read the words in comics, colan's images certainly allowed me to jettison the story and to fall deeply into the images.

here's another great bit of relevance from the same interview i posted a week or so ago (click here to read the entire interview):

COLAN: Well, the biggest complaint that Stan ever had about my work was that he didn’t have an easy time understanding what I was drawing. There’s a lot of confusion about my work. [Laughter.] And I meant it to be a little confusing. You don’t always understand what you’re looking at even when it’s a photograph. Like a room with many things on a desk. You can only identify a few of the objects but you can’t say what they all are. Some books might be there, an inkwell might be there.

RODMAN: It all lends to the atmosphere.

COLAN: But it all lends to the authenticity of what you’re looking at. In life, you don’t notice everything at one time. Certain things – and the rest you don’t know. You don’t even think about. So I try to do that. If there’s a fight scene, and it’s in the dark, I try to confuse it so that you see arms and legs but you don’t know who they belong to. A fight is a confusing thing to begin with. Tables and chairs are overturned. You shouldn’t be defining everything for the reader. The reader is not an idiot. He gets out of it what he wants to get out of it. And if it thrills him to see all these puzzling pictures, then I’ve accomplished something. At least that’s how I viewed it anyway, personally. Someone would say to me, “Yeah, but, who does this belong to? Whose leg is that?” I said it isn’t important. Put any connotation you want on it.

when the russian avant garde suggests captain america and guru dutt...

while going through a couple of boxes in my storage space i found a magazine i bought in the late 1980's called the journal of decorative and propaganda arts. this 1987 summer issue had a special "russian/soviet" theme, and i'm guessing i originally bought it for the articles on the ballets russes ( around that time i was pretty obsessed with cocteau, satie, and nijinsky), and early russian avant garde book design.

the strange thing about looking at something i last looked at 23 years ago - during a kind of nether-moment between undergrad and grad school - is seeing what might have inspired me then, and what inspires me now. certain things, such as lev bakst's beautiful costume drawings, seemed very important to me 23 years ago, but i can't for the life of me now figure out how they might have impacted my work and thinking then. looking through the magazine now, there are also things that i don't remember ever seeing, which means i felt they were irrelevant towards my interests then, but which now feel much more relevant to my work and interests, but were simply outside of the scope of my own vision then.

there is one work in the magazine that i remember killed me then, and still kills me now. this is the 1913 watercolor by mikhail larionov pictured above, which was created as a cover design for alexei kruchenykh's book of poems called pomade. in 1987 i was just entering a stage painting that looked like "pure abstraction" on the outside, but was really constructed of images and symbols much more reflective of narrative on the inside. thus at the time, the visual language of the russian avant garde provided a lot of inspiration for me, particularly the pre-constructivist works.

this watercolor by larionov, still feels somehow as if it is straddling the space between abstraction and image, even though the piece is clearly an image. at a time when i was moving away from the aggressive and violent imagery of a former punk rocker heavily influenced by the language of german expressionism, i was finding my way towards quieter and more introspective explorations, fueled by the discovery of rilke, and arthur dove. larionov's picture seemed to signify, for me, this shift. the way he deals with image seems to riff away from blue rider and german expressionist tendencies, towards more visual freedom, softness and a bit closer (although tentative) towards abstraction.

seeing larionov's image now, it feels even more powerful. as a maker, i realize that the simplicity is completely deceptive, and on top of everything that i have learned about history over the last 20 years or so, the image still has the ability to bring more conversation to the table, such as how much it suddenly seems related to early modernist japanese painting. but none of these connections are what set me to wanting to write about larionov's piece. i wanted to write about it because it suggested something to me that has nothing to do with art history, something outside of larionov's own intentions, and yet the minute my eyes fell upon that image, my mind flew towards a 1957 film still, which of course, seemed totally unrelated.

larionov's watercolor, was originally made for a book titled "pomade", and the image seems to be of an angel (or a four armed man) rubbing/massaging another person's head, and it left me thinking of a scene from one of my favorite films of all time, guru dutt's 1957 masterpiece pyaasa. one of the classic scenes in the film consists of johnny walker standing in a park, massaging a gentleman's head with oil, while singing a song. the scene is somewhat hilarious as walker not only massages the man's scalp, but includes some bongo type "drumming" upon his head in sync with the music and walker's song.

i know it would be a ridiculously unrealistic leap of faith to think that dutt might've been inspired to write the scene after seeing larinov's cover piece for pomade, but dutt was certainly schooled in art history, and he did "borrow" ideas from other things. one of the main plot devices in pyaasa was stolen from the hollywood film sullivan's travels. in both films the main character loses his coat to a bum,who then gets hit by a train and dies; which leads everyone to think that the main character has died. dutt loved hollywood films, and was clear and "transparent" in his use of preston sturges' earlier plot device; but of course, i have never read anything by him that mentions larionov's drawing as an influence on the johnny walker pomade scene.

the magazine also contains a photograph of a "sports costume" designed by varvara stepanova from the early 1920's. i don't remember this image from my first encounter with the magazine, but does seem strange for a russian design to resemble an american flag, and even more so to resemble some of the patriotic clothing rural americans wore in homespun fourth of july parades and festivals in the late 1800's. the dress, as you can see above, is red, white, and blue, and contains a star in the center and a number of stripes. like larionov's pomade drawing, what surprised me wasn't so much the reference to the american flag, but again to something seemingly unrelated, the superhero outfit of captain america.

as with larionov's image, i have no idea where, when, or if images of this dress ever traveled, but i can't help but wonder if jack kirby and joe simon , who created captian america in 194o to combat the rising tide of hitler and nazi-ism, ever saw stepanova's design. russian avant garde designs and artworks were certainly known in the usa by the 1940's, but how much of it was exhibited in museums or published in magazines i have no idea. of course, all of these thoughts are quite a stretch, and my thoughts are simply founded upon intuitive connections as opposed to academic or scholarly research, but perhaps it is simply setting the table for more connections between seemingly disconnected things, or at least suggesting some amount of the potential viability of following one's own path through things...

when starch was used to clean the moon...

images from a small premium booklet that came free with faultless starch circa 1895. this tiny book, very much a pre-curser to cereal and food premiums, was part of a series of tiny kids story giveaways involving the starch as a main "ingredient" of the narrative. in this case, a boy is awakened by some pixies who invite him to visit the moon. there he discovers that the dark spots on the moon are dirty from coal, and that there are small moon pixies who clean the dirt away with faultless starch, which is why the moon shines so brightly. the boy ends up back in his bed (was it all a dream?) with a fresh box of starch by his side... can't find any info on the illustrator of these tiny newsprint booklets, the drawings are pretty darn nice...