Thursday 31 July 2008

GARY PANTER: CHER IN JOHNNY ROTTEN'S CLOTHING?

Artist Gary Panter is all over the news lately. Hollywood gossip magazine Entertainment Weekly placed him on this week's "Must" List along with Cher's new Las Vegas show. The New York Times applauded the arrival of a fancy new two volume, boxed collection of his work.



His recent New York gallery opening was touted (by the gallery) as a "visual tour de force." And Panter's own website announces that Panter is
"possibly the most influential graphic artist of his generation, a fact acknowledged by the Chrysler Design award he received..."
It would take a lot of nerve to question the artistic judgment of Chrysler (which announced this week it had lost another half billion dollars due to its inability to design a decent car). Nevertheless, let's be brave and explore together:

Panter's web site proclaims that he "successfully broke down the barrier that separates 'trash' from 'art'...." Of course, previous artists have made similar claims. In 1961, Italian artist
Piero Manzoni claimed that he successfully broke down the barrier that separates art from shit.



But I'm still not ready to concede that the barrier is completely gone. Perhaps the more interesting question is: which side of the barrier is Panter on?

Panter is a "cyber punk" artist, most famous as the creator of Jimbo, "a post-nuclear punk-rock cartoon character" who first appeared in the LA hardcore-punk paper Slash and later in RAW. Occasionally Panter creates a fine, strong image:



But most of the time, Panter produces the kind of art you'd expect to find in a decent high school literary magazine:







And all too often, Panter's work is (in my opinion) downright awful:







I can hear the Gary Panter fans out there fuming, "the punk movement is exempt from bourgeois standards of taste and beauty." The New York Times didn't compliment the beauty of Panter's images, it complimented his "raw lunatic expression."

Genuine punk was never pretty, but at least it gained some legitimacy from its brute, energetic defiance. I love Johnny Rotten's response to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it tried to honor the Sex Pistols:



What a fabulous message: "Were [sic] not coming. Your [sic] not paying attention." I doubt you would ever see Johnny Rotten bragging on his web site that the Chrysler Corporation had vouched for his artistic ability.

But the point of this post (and believe it or not, I do have one) is not to take a poke at an overrated artist or the the fans who fawn over such minor work. If "raw lunatic expression" is your game, artists such as Jean Dubuffet out-punk Panter by a mile.







Dubuffet's art embodied genuine rebellion. He preferred the art of the mentally ill to the work of classical artists. He wrote raging manifestoes about trashing all museums and abolishing culture. But despite his rebellious message, Dubuffet's drawings and paintings are still deeply beautiful. This is the most important difference between Panter and Dubuffet. Punk or no-punk, Panter is an artistic failure because he never seems to achieve (or even understand) some form of beauty. Regardless of the boldness of his color or line, his work is artistically anemic. He hasn't paid the dues required of those who seek to participate genuinely in form-creating activity.

And I'll even go one step further. For a man who is so eager to eliminate the barrier between art and trash, Panter repeatedly draws a bright line between his art and lowly "commercial" art. For this, commercial artists should be grateful. But it is a tired old cliche for Panter to suggest that illustration or other commercial forms of art can't be as raw as Panter's. Even within the straightjacket of commercial illustration, serious artists manage to look deeper into the abyss than Panter ever does. Panter's fans celebrate his "ratty line," but I don't find his line nearly as raw or unsettling as the truly scary linework in this spot illustration by commercial illustrator Robert Fawcett:



Take a close look at the violence and anarchy of Fawcett's line. For those with eyes to see, Panter is splashing around in a far shallower pool than Fawcett.

I have read the adulatory reviews of Panter's work, looking for help in finding what I am missing. So far, I cannot shake the conclusion that Panter is primarily an entertainer who tells amusing stories for people of a certain maturity level. Nothing wrong with that. But if that's the case, how do we explain all this attention to his work? My only explanation is that shallow, immature times call for shallow, immature art.

Freefall

Vector illustration by expansiondesign

Tuesday 29 July 2008

Vector Icons Pack #2

A free vector icon pack from gwhite83. You'll get a better view if you open the PDF file with Adobe Illustrator and scale the icons up. Many of them are detailed illustrations, that can be refined and styled to what you need. Download

Website Layout Design with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop

It was just about time for the first web design tutorial in this blog. Vector illustration skills are handy not only for print , but also for web design. A warmup exercise from ComputerArts Magazine.

"Craig Grannell shows you how to use Adobe’s two CS3 graphic design powerhouses to work up the layout for a website
Most web designers work with Photoshop or Fireworks when creating websites, and Illustrator is often overlooked. However, Adobe’s vector package is perfect for crafting the initial components of web layouts." Full tutorial and source files via Computer Arts Magazine

Fly Me to the Moon













drawings by Vasco Morao.

Friday 25 July 2008

Dream Away. Andrea Galvani

Andrea Galvani, La Morte di Un'Immagine #9 (2006)

Have you ever witnessed something so beautiful it makes you angry? Something that makes you angry because it blows your entire scale, because it makes your delicate struggles for harmony ridiculous, petty, insignificant? This beauty that should elevate you, that should lift you up and carry you through the night, the beauty that is the inspiration and the core, is its exact opposite: smashing, unbearable, hard and cruel. It is a sunset that is just too magical, stars that shine too bright, or an event that seemed like the best of all performances. But what I mean is not perfection, it is beauty. It is not unnerving because it doesn't allow you to access it, like the perfection of the stone. It is unnerving because it takes away your ability to judge it, or what's worse, it's a type of beauty that takes away your ability to include it into your appreciation of beauty. It makes it silly to think of art, to create, to go to galleries and museums, to scan art blogs and dwelve into poetry. It leaves you lonely, ridiculously hanging on to an outdated scale or desperately trying to adapt it to something that corresponds more to what Kant calls the sublime - although the problem is, it is not sublime, it is exactly what beauty could have been, had you not already developed a different scale altogether.
I'm lucky: I forget. The taste fades quite quickly from my mouth, the text evaporates from my head, and so does the view of the sea after the storm. It all starts again for me, and what is left is like a bookmark, a sign that says "this was good" and maybe, maybe manages to reproduce some sort of a sensation of a sensation I had when it happened.
And then, sometimes, if one focuses on this memory, the memory starts growing a new head, one that is nothing like the previous one. One that does not compete in these subjective beauty contests, one that is at once much more raw and more constructed, that uses your imagination but somehow fits it together with whatever surrounds you, adapting the memory into an idea, transforming it into this weird creature that still has the body of a horse, but instead of the head has grown a thick, black cloud. Of balloons.
Delicious.
Thank you Andrea Galvani.

(via)

Businesswoman & Businessman EPS Silhouettes

Here we have two free vector packs with illustrations of businesswomen and businessmen in different poses from parka. You can easily change the color of their outfits by simply selecting and changing the fill colors.

You can use them for design brainstorming, designing a business card logo or for designing a corporate website interface.

The artwork is saved in EPS file format, you can use any vector compatible editor to modify or customize it.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Download *EPS File

Download *EPS File

Chinese Ink Brushes for Adobe Illustrator

A set of 13 vector ink brushes by xentric For Illustrator CS2 and above. Download

Thursday 24 July 2008

The Font Conference


collegehumor.com present the FONTS and their characters in their own Font Conference.
Starring: Times New Roman , Arial Narrow, Arial Black, French Script, Rage Italic, Baskerville Old Face, Bookman Old Style, Wide Latin, Old English, Jokerman, Futura, Ransom, Courier New, Century Gothic, Wingdings (the one that got kicked out by Times New Roman), Comic Sans, Broadway.

Tuesday 22 July 2008

90 Artistic Brushes for Adobe Illustrator

Over 90 artistic brushes for Adobe Illustrator from nextexile. They are all in different shapes and you can use them for personal and commercial use...

For a detailed preview click on the image below. To use them you will have to expand the .zip archive and load the "NextExile Artistic Brushes Pack 1" file with Adobe Illustrator (File>Open). After that, open the brushes palette (Window>Brushes). Download

36 Vector Fashion Model Illustrations

A collection vector fashion model illustrations from Dezignus / Fireman10.The pack contains 32 silhouette shapes of girl models in different poses and outfits...

Free for pesonal and commercial use. The artwork is saved in EPS file format, you can use any vector compatible program to modify the file. Download

Vector Fashion Models

A collection vector fashion model illustrations from Dezignus/Fireman10.The pack contains 32 silhouette shapes of girl models in different poses and outfits...

Free for pesonal and commercial use. The artwork is saved in EPS file format, you can use any vector compatible program to modify the file. Download

Cityscapes drawing tutorial for Adobe Illustrator

Another inspirational digital illustration tutorial from ComputerArtMagazine
"Illustrating city scenes can be simple, but creating an idyllic place is often tricky. Ben the Illustrator, aka Ben O’Brien, uses Illustrator to create subtle effects and creative techniques that will bring a cityscape to life
You’ve ambled around London’s backstreets, sauntered through beautiful European capitals and stood awestruck at majestic American skylines. You’ve snapped your photos, but how do you take the atmosphere, architecture and soul of a city and put it into an illustration?" Full tutorial and files

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 21



This may be my favorite drawing ever.

I encountered it on the wall of a dark cave at Pech Merle in the Pyrenees.

20,000 years ago, humans were struggling for survival in a hostile ice age world. A desperate, hungry man prepared himself to hunt the dreaded wooly mammoth-- a lumbering beast that weighed ten tons, with tusks 15 feet long. The man's only weapons were a pointed stick, a rock... and this drawing.

He captured the mammoth with a line on the wall, and with a bold red color he struck a killing blow. Once... twice... twenty-seven times.

Other creatures were bigger and stronger, but only humans could give their hopes and terrors abstract form. In such dark places art was born.

This drawing contains the seeds of everything that would follow:

  • A design as beautiful as any modern abstract painting
  • A magical power over his enemies that was as illusory-- and a courage that was as genuine-- as that gained from the most persuasive religious art
  • A message as passionate and sincere as the content of any art form to come.
If this artist survived the ensuing hunt, the subtle hand that created this masterpiece (notice how the artist was careful to get the contours of the mammoth's hump exactly right) would soon be gouging and hacking through matted fur and thick hide so his family could feed on the bloody carcass and survive for another day.

There was a time when humanity was just one of nature's less promising experiments competing for survival. This ancient artist held on through an existence that you or I would consider intolerable so that today, trained artists can sit on cushions in air conditioned comfort and make pictures using highly sophisticated tools. But with all these advantages, I doubt you will ever see a more lovely drawing.


Monday 21 July 2008

Marek CecuƂa. The sense of matter.

I must admit I had no idea Polish design (well, design-related sculpture would be the more correct term I suppose) can be anything like this.
While I'm at it, I must also admit that the moment of becoming a little less ignorant, this moment of moving from a state of nothingness to the sudden illumination by something of this caliber is something delightful.



Last Supper (2003)

Porcelain Carpet (2002)


from the Hygiene series (1995)



from the Hygiene series (1995)


from the Eroticism series (2005)


from the Scatology series (1993)


It does not necessarily make sense. It does not necessarily say something, as in, a thing, as in, a message. It prefers to wink at us, like someone sitting in a waiting room winks at us, right after we finally managed to get our eyes of a gorgeous neighbor. Is that the "I know how you feel" wink? Or is it showing you he knows something both of you know he shouldn't and yet both of you know he certainly does? Is this something you share? A common interest? A common feeling of guilt? A feeling of risk, maybe? This winking, the one I feel when seeing CecuƂa's works (not touching them, unfortunately, although that seems a perverse desire), is one of recognition, but also one of daring sensitivity, if not always sensuality. Touching is key? No, come to think of it, the not-touching, here, is what drives the senses right to the matter.
More on Marek CecuƂa at his site.

(via)

Sunday 20 July 2008

The big Fuss: Who Killed Barack Obama?


Once again, Peter Fuss (remember his "For the Laugh of God"?) manages to poke the finger in the right spot.
His most recent work, exhibited at the Out Of Sth exhibition in WrocƂaw (Poland) (which also has blu's animation on display) plays on our sense of reality.
What I like most about this work is something I didn't notice at first. The first reading, to me, was simple: knowing the fate of the liberal Americans who came to positions of power, it is difficult not to think of the risk Obama is facing. This also might be seen as a cool and lucid way of looking at politics. Can any ideal manage to survive? Isn't Obama, the Obama we know as fighting for "change", somewhat dead, already? Who killed him?
But what I really like about this work is not this seemingly political message. It is the way it portraits us and our own patterns of looking at reality.

The problem is not that Obama may get killed. The problem is our thinking of it as a fact. It is not Fuss's work that is cynical. We are.
Seeing the work on a billboard makes it even more obvious: we take it for granted that things are the way they are, and even if they aren't, too bad for the facts. The billboard is there, so Obama is dead. Who killed him? Guess who.


update/ps: A couple of months ago an Israeli designer created a shirt with a similar text. I think the differences between the two projects prove my point. Having/seeing this on a T-shirt and seeing it on a billboard are two completely different experiences. (Not to mention the completely different level of design). And that's what sets apart a good artpiece from a, well, another one. (Also notice the context - one is set in NY, the other- in WrocƂaw). Suffice it to say that already a few days after the opening of the exhibition two French tourists entered the gallery (you can see the entrance to the right on the second picture) saying they haven't had the chance to follow the news and they were quite terrified. Now, just to add another level of artsy-fartsy commenting, the person attending them answered they weren't to worry because it was "just an art installation". Ouch, now that's not what I would call effective art guidance. Or what she being ironic?

Vector Silhouettes

A free vector stock from teach-me-freedom. The set is a mix of 35 different silhouette people postures. To use, open the file with Adobe Illustrator. Download

Saturday 19 July 2008

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 20

I love Mort Drucker's drawing of General Patton:



Drucker clearly owes a debt to Arthur Szyk's famous portrayals of Nazi generals from the 1940s:



Yet, as much as I love Szyk's paintings, for me Drucker's is the stronger work. Compare these two details to understand how differently the two artists make decisions:





Szyk makes thousands of tiny choices, shading with color and small feathering brush strokes. None of these lines is particularly insightful or descriptive by itself, although the cumulative effect is splendid. By contrast, Drucker's bold line is an act of supreme confidence. Every time Drucker's brush touches the paper, he is making a thoughtful observation about an object in the world.

The great illustrator Austin Briggs offered the following wisdom about the benefits of working with the restrictions imposed by line:
Line ... is the most limited medium.... [I]t's necessary to know the limitation one is dealing with in order to use its positive qualities to the fullest advantage....[O]nce we know what drawing cannot do, we are on the way toward expressing [a subject] in the marvelously simple way a line can function....[I]ts real shape reveals itself because we must speak with such limited means.

Thursday 17 July 2008

Interactive Pattern Swatches and Symbols in Adobe Illustrator

Artlandia LivePresets is a new plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. Instantly create live pattern swatches or symbols and start editing them with your favorite Illustrator tools. All linked artwork updates interactively as you edit...

Once you try the live editing, you will never want to edit your swatches or symbols any other way. Read more

Sunday 13 July 2008

PART OF SOMETHING LARGER

Sometimes great and important art can only be achieved by disregarding the level of effort required.

The ancient historian Herodotus estimated that it took 100,000 workers 20 years to build one of the great pyramids of Egypt.



These workers had no labor union; they mostly led wretched lives and died unpleasant deaths. But at the same time, each of them played a role in the creation of monumental beauty. The pyramids, tombs and monuments they built have inspired humanity for all time.


Those Egyptians who did not work on the pyramids may have lived more comfortably and died with full bellies, but they disappeared from the world without a trace. All memory of them was quickly erased by the sand.

You could make a similar point about other major works, such as the great cathedrals of Europe, or Emperor Qin's army of 8,000 terra cotta warriors. These objects of great beauty could not have been created without an endless supply of cheap labor. Hundreds of thousands of underpaid peasants or slaves were persuaded (or forced) to sacrifice themselves. Perhaps by associating with something great, they were able to transcend their poverty and mortality. All I know is that anyone who tries to judge these works by weighing the number of hours spent against the result achieved is measuring with the wrong stick.

I think about early animation the same way. The great early animated films-- Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia-- were produced by hundreds of low paid artists drawing millions of drawings on an industrial assembly line. They worked under primitive conditions compared to today's computer animation. Just as Egyptian laborers learned to transport granite blocks weighing 60 tons apiece using nothing but strong backs and ingenuity, early animators compensated for the lack of multiplane cameras or photocopiers by working longer and harder.


Early Disney artists


Some of Disney's "ink and paint girls."

Like the slaves who worked for pharaohs or Emperor Quin, some of Disney's artists became quite bitter about their working conditions. Hours were long and the work was back breaking. Union unrest broke out and tempers flared, leading to the Great Walt Disney Cartoonists Strike of 1941.

It's doubtful that early animation could have been created without cheap labor. And whatever the disadvantages of working on the assembly line, each of these artists was part of something larger than themselves. At the end, they had a product of shining brilliance that stands as a landmark for future generations. Famed Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein called Snow White "the greatest motion picture ever made."




After the uprising at Disney, some of the animators who were fired or quit went on to accomplish great things. Walt Kelly escaped to create the comic strip Pogo. Hank Ketcham went on to create Dennis the Menace. a few animators went on to do great work at rival animation studios. Perhaps these gifted entrepreneurs should never have been on an assembly line to begin with. But for the vast majority, their work with Disney was their one chance to touch excellence. Sure, some of them might have made more money drawing spot illustrations of laundry detergent for a local commercial art studio, but looking back at the end of their lives, would the trade off have been worth it?

Today, you can still get a sense for the economics of animation from the fact that collectors can buy bundles of current animation art for shockingly low prices. Each of the following original paintings, reflecting some artist's hard work and personal craftsmanship, was purchased for about the price of a Hallmark greeting card:









I don't know what cartoons they are from. They tend to show up in sheafs, packaged with Asian markings that I cannot read:



In some far away country, new artists who don't get paid very much are working on another assembly line composing huge numbers of such paintings. They are pressured to work quickly but they still care enough about their craft to compose with precision and skill. I don't know if these artists even make enough to eat, but I honor them for the professionalism and commitment in these paintings.