The What’s So Funny! podcast will soon follow. This inaugural post is just a placeholder. But like a 1950s kid running home from school, watching the test pattern on TV, you may enjoy this until more content is up.
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I’ve heard a lot about “cultural appropriation” recently. It seems to be a sticky situation and many people have a number of different ideas about what is right and what is wrong.
Then there’s this girl, Kezia Daum of Salt Lake City, who wore a Chinese-style dress to her prom and faced monstrous backlash from the Twittosphere. I find myself scratching my head.
People for thousands of years have worn clothing that is functional, with the materials they had on hand. If they had time/materials, they would add adornments such as beads or embroidery. The people in roles of leadership — or ones who had greater means — would have more ornate adornments.
I admit I’m pretty American, and I’ve traveled around the world a few times. This doesn’t mean I’ve seen everything or know everything. I have however seen people dressing in T-shirts and blue jeans or cowboy hats or business suits wherever I’ve gone. I was pleasantly amused to see a Japanese actor dancing in cowboy boots at Tokyo Disney’s Country Bear Jamboree.
I’ve also occasionally dressed up in traditional clothing (kimonos, sarongs) when it was offered or it suited my purposes. Did I think I was stealing someone’s culture? Not when it was offered/sold to me.
I know some types of clothing are associated with holy, or sacred roles. As a clown, a thespian, and a smartass, I know historically in a healthy society, anything holy is ripe for exaltation, depiction, and iconoclasm. But there’s also the fact that art, fashion, and technology progress much more quickly if they can breathe. Sharing/cross-pollinating ideas is the best way to find new, better, and stronger ideas.
Putting up walls saying, “this is my culture and you can’t have it” I don’t think is the answer. Which brings me to a Kezia Daum, the blonde teen who found a cute Chinese dress for her prom and is now being subject to a world of hate for it. Really?! It looked like the sort of dress so sacred it was placed in the holy land of Japanese company CapCom’s Street Fighter game. So sacred.
But then there is stuff like keeping black artists out of the music industry while white recording artists plagiarized their songs and made the money from them. I’m sure there’s a bit of (deserved) resentment here and there. I see no simple answer to this, especially when everyone’s on a knee-jerking hair trigger and yelling.
While doing taxes, (of course at the last minute) I always end up meandering over things I’ve done over the last year. This one was kind of cool. At the height of that idiotic media-invented “clown hysteria” last October, the good folks at Good Morning Washington reached out to the experts of Washington DC’s Clown Cabaret to get a more educated perspective. Check it out. I’m the blond. The one wearing pants. 🙂
http://wjla.com/features/good-morning-washington/clown-cabaret-joins-gmw
As GMW mentions, you may find more information about Clown Cabaret at our website.
www.clowncabaret.com
Paintings 43-45 of 365: So, I got to a point with this project where I had an idea for a piece but there are things I didn’t know how to do in watercolors to make it happen, hence the Universe painting (#43) today, and in the last two posts, (here and here). Today’s post contains a few paintings with elements of either a technique, or playing with concepts of style and spirit of the upcoming God piece. I believe these experiments have their own charm though.
I always enjoy seeing the finished piece vs. the rough sketches, to see the artist’s mind taking every detail available to the lump of matter in their skull, crunching it down to the comparative few strokes of the final work. These are simultaneously rough sketches and finished works. I’ll explain that conundrum to anyone who can explain the Trinity to me without using tautology.
But art really is a tip-of-the-iceberg thing. Whenever you see artwork, literature, performing arts, etc., the final product represents many, many discarded ideas, blood, sweat, tears, etc. Even if it isn’t rough sketches, there’s still much iceberg beneath the water. A quote attributed to Pablo Picasso suggests, “It took me 30 years to learn how to do that in 30 seconds.”
Similarly, it takes 12 pounds of grain, 35 pounds of topsoil, and 2400 gallons of water (19,200 pounds) to produce one pound of beef. Yikes! Glad I eat plants– smaller footprint and they fart less.
In #44 here is God, in His eternal glory, farting around with some planets. All-powerful beings have got to have fun sometimes, when they’re not flooding or smiting people. The “upcoming painting” is a take on God that I found amusing, and will likely end up hanging in my office, though I may make another one to sell.
#45 is also thematically aimed at the upcoming painting. This reflects the sensibility of my book of illustrations, “Snapshots of God,” which I might sell online at some point. I currently only sell them at shows because I hate stuffing one envelope at a time. Give me 100 envelopes to stuff, and I’m your guy.
If you really want one, drop me a line and I’ll hook you up.
I don’t normally do requests… unless I’m asked.
–Victor Borge
I occasionally find myself struggling for something to draw/paint. I find no shame in the occasional block. My daily practice has trained my brain to just find something and do it without asking my “editing brain” if it’s a good idea. Or my “choosing brain.” I find it hard to make choices.
So on this day, I asked Facebook At Large to suggest a subject. “Lon Chaney.” The next suggestion, “A Watermelon.” And third, “A bullfrog.” All three are things I could get better at rendering, so I went on a crash course.
I am still trying to figure out this thing called watercolor, and will be for a while. I do enjoy some of the subtleties that are guided by the artist’s hand but some of is left to entropy. Guided entropy, I guess.
The second one, #41, is just a study, an admission that I am not very knowledgeable at that extremely important aspect of illustration: Perspective. The first step it to admit you havea problem :0).
And #42 is the second in a series. I wanted to create a painting that requires a little warm-up. Part of that is learning how to get certain effects. I’m not entirely happy with the results here, but it’s like going to the gym. You don’t always get results on the first visit. But I know I can.
And you can, too. What are you putting off improving because the first time you tried, you got discouraged from your lack of professional skill on your first try?
Day 36/365. FML. Not a commentary; just busy relaunching a show in Brooklyn NY a couple of weeks from now and don’t have the time and brainspace to do a pretty pretty picture. So back to my ink-first quickie-simple style which fills so many sketchbooks.
In doing so, I find the pleasure of the simplicity of communicating an idea with as few lines as possible. I find that penciling first makes the playground the paper, but with ink first, most of the work takes place in my head, as erasing is not an option.
On the one hand, I can make a bolder statement with a more complex idea by drawing it out first, then laying the indelible ink (and colors) on afterwards; on the other hand, the more simple image that was thought out first has the more iconic feel.
I guess it’s similar to music: you can painstakingly write out your notes and create some amazing stuff, or you can internalize your scales, open yourself up to improvisation, and play Jazz. it makes sense in words, but I’m not sure a viewer will immediately look at this image and think, “Jazz.” (Interestingly, R. Crumb, known for not using pencil, is also a great Jazz aficionado.)
Or maybe it’s more like juggling fire torches: you practice with them unlit. You can do much more crazy things when they’re not lit, to experiment and find your parameters. That way, when you light them, you can do less crazy things, but operating in a lower threshold of difficulty to please an audience while not causing a disaster. Ink first can be one stroke away from disaster.
Day 35 Getting in Shape. Part of the brainthought that brought about “Whoa, Dude!” (Day 28) and “Eternal Beauty” (Day 29) … just imagining what life would be like with our body parts configured differently.
Because I didn’t like the original background, I drew a new one onto a different sheet and spliced the two images together digitally, and decided to color by computer. It’s actually more fun to color by hand, I am finding. The allure of the “undo” makes you sloppy. I got aggravated after a while. I’m clearly out of practice with coloring in photoshop. Photons behave very differently from waterborne pigments on textile.
Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but I really like the feel of Nature. I’ll do digital art, but a stylus on glass is missing that drag of the pencil, or brush across the texture of the paper, canvas, or board. One thing that bothers me about acrylic paints is it’s really just air-dried plastic. Of course, that means your art won’t biodegrade, and maybe that’s a good thing.
I really miss the organic feel of the watercolors. Funny; I’ve done so much computer-colored work in the past because it’s “more versatile,” but it’s amazing how old school brush and pigment just … is easier, and it feels more real. It would probably help if I pulled out my Wacom tablet, but still, ugh — it just feels unnatural. (Get off my laaaawn!)
Again with the boring mechanical lines that I hate because I don’t feel competent at them. No way to get good but to do it. Over and freaking over. Sigh.
It’s funny how as I depict many things, I have the “forest for the trees” effect; “it doesn’t look right … it doesn’t look right… this will never work… and then, standing back … hey; it worked! I guess it often feels that way in the middle of creating something, or doing life changes: You feel like it’s all wrong and you’re making no progress, then look back, and, “hey; it worked!”
There’s still a few things that bother me about this one, but it’s just a rough sketch. I made a number of mistakes, but I figure that makes it look more organic — more real. The final work will also likely be flawed, but hopefully less glaring flaws (to me).
The commission I plan to evolve over the next week. Still learning some watercolor techniques and am producing a show for God, in New York, this September, so I may get behind schedule. I also still have to figure out the size the end product will be.
I really wanted to do another thing, but at the point of the evening where I was about to set pen to paper, I realized just how tired I was. I really need to start this stuff earlier in the day. Of course, in the quiet of the night is really my favorite time to create. The stillness of the world around me is crucial to finding those crevices of the imagination where the ideas lurk.
Reverting to a much more minimalistic style, I was able to convey my exact state of mind yet still appease the seductive pillow-goddess.
Day 31. Truck.
I’ve never felt competent at drawing machinery, preferring organic, natural characters to the cold, repetitive lines of machine-made objects. I thought I’d step out of my comfort zone a bit. Still, I had to put a person in there somewhere, otherwise the art tells no story.
I chose brush and ink because color can distract from a whole lot of structural errors. I wanted to be able to focus on the bones so I can see the half dozen or so problems with this, but I think at least my style shows through, despite there being (almost) no creatures involved.