For the artist drawing is discovery.
And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true.
It is the actual art of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations.
It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see.
Another way of putting it would be to say that each mark you make on the paper is a stepping-stone from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as though it were a river, have put it behind you.
John Berger: Berger on Drawing. Aghabullogue, Co. Cork: Occasional Press (II edition, 2007), p.3.
domingo, 27 de abril de 2014
Spinoza - Prop. XVIII
A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present.
So long as a man is affected by the image of anything, he will regard that thing as present, even though it be non-existent, he will not conceive it as past or future, except in so far as its image is joined to the image of time past of future.
Wherefore the image of a thing, regarded in itself alone, is identical, whether it be referred to time past, time future, or time present; that is, the disposition or emotion of the body is identical, whether the image be of a thing past, future, or present. Thus the emotion of pleasure or pain is the same, whether the image be of a thing past or future.
(Ethics, Prt III, Proposition XVIII)
So long as a man is affected by the image of anything, he will regard that thing as present, even though it be non-existent, he will not conceive it as past or future, except in so far as its image is joined to the image of time past of future.
Wherefore the image of a thing, regarded in itself alone, is identical, whether it be referred to time past, time future, or time present; that is, the disposition or emotion of the body is identical, whether the image be of a thing past, future, or present. Thus the emotion of pleasure or pain is the same, whether the image be of a thing past or future.
(Ethics, Prt III, Proposition XVIII)
terça-feira, 15 de abril de 2014
Memory
Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.
Walter Benjamin,
Berlin Childhood: Around 1900
quarta-feira, 13 de junho de 2012
Technique
The worst enemy of progress is prejudice: it holds back progress, blocks the way to it. In our art, one such example of prejudice is the opinion which defends an amateurish attitude of an actor towards his work.
There can be no art without virtuosity, without practice, without technique
and the greater the talent, the more they are needed.
Amateurs reject technique, not because of conscious conviction but out of unbridled laziness… Indeed, among professional actors, there are many who have never changed their amateurish attitude towards acting.
Stanislavski
 |
| Dedaulus (the symbol of techne) by Rubens |
sexta-feira, 8 de junho de 2012
Borges on reading and writing
 |
| Jorge Luis Borges (1963) by Alicia D'Amico |
what I have written.
For one reads what one likes -
yet one writes not what one would like to write
but what one is able to write. (p. 98)
When I write, I do not think of the reader
(because the reader is an imaginary character),
and I do not think of myself
(perhaps I am an imaginary character also),
but I think of what I am trying to convey
and I do my best not to spoil it. (p. 116-117)
Quote from Borges' when he gave the Norton Lectures (from This Craft of Verse).
segunda-feira, 23 de janeiro de 2012
Avant l’Incal, d'après Moebius
ORIGINAL TILTLE: "THIS WEEK IN COMICS! (5/18/11 – TRANSFORMER)"
BY JOE MCCULLOCH MAY 17, 2011 VIA THE COMICS JOURNAL
I was reading some Alejandro Jodorowsky comics last week – stuff relating to The Incal, mostly, since that’s the material that’s gotten re-released/completed lately. What interesting in reading a lot of the stuff at once is observing how much the art can change over the course of a story – a lot of these French albums take a year or more to see release, after all, and techniques are bound to shift, even as the collected editions typically released in the U.S. recall the quicker production pace of superhero comics.
One particularly striking case is that of Zoran Janjetov, a Moebius devotee who actually served as a colorist on The Incal itself. Pretty much immediately after the series finished, Jodorowsky wanted to begin on a prequel series, Avant l’Incal, and Janjetov became the artist, initially working in a manner close to Moebius’ own, but gradually moving into a beefier look as the series went on. Following its conclusion, in 1998, Jodorowsky launched a spin-off especially for Janjetov, The Technopriests.
As you can see if you stare intently at the Mortal Kombat-looking fellow at the bottom, Janjetov is working with a good amount of line shading on some of the creature designs; some early pages evidence a type of stippling effect, or tight cross-hatching. These stand in contrast with other elements of the page – not just the digital lightning effect, but the near-photographic hair texture on the bottom character’s mask and especially the eerie computer smoothness to the faces of the bottom-right characters. That last part in particular is a hallmark of the series’ colorist, Frédéric “Fred” Beltran, himself a comics artist since the late ’80s. By ’98, though, Beltran had begun working heavily with digital textures and 3D modeling, debuting his own series with Jodorowsky, Megalex, in ’99.
Megalex was initially created entirely through the use of digital modeling, as you can probably tell from the backgrounds. What’s striking, however, is the female character (I mean, aside from the obvious; and yeah, pretty much every woman in the series looks like that) – she looks remarkably similar to Janjetov’s humanoid female characters in The Technopriests, where Beltran was limited to the use of coloring, texture effects and presumably some modeling. He was also the cover artist for the series, so he’d be used to creating art that looked a bit like Janjetov’s. Yet as the series went on, a transformation seemed to occur inside:
As The 3D models are gone, replaced by a good deal of ‘traditional’ drawing. Oddly, it doesn’t look so much like Fred Beltran, as if the ‘Beltran’ that seemed to wash over The Technopriests was only ever a possibility, a construction of tools used at the time. A specific identity for a specific time, that worked best, I think, with two actors playing the role, and could later be retired in the manner of any collaboration giving way to a series of other things stated in an interview, when asked why The Technopriests seemed to begin resembling more of a Fred Beltran comic than his own: “Working the way I do with FB for a while now, I’ve come to familiarize myself with what I can expect from him. Now I know almost exactly which parts have to be done my way, and which should be left open for “Beltranization”. It’s a collective effort, and all three of us have learned to adapt to each other’s needs in order to make the whole experience more enjoyable.”
Essentially, a type of parity had been struck between ‘artist’ and ‘colorist’ – certainly Janjetov began using less inky techniques, focusing on forms that could be smoothed over with Beltran’s digital stylings. Yet because the latter party had focused so much on transforming his own solo art into a digital construct, to the curious (and English-only) reader he can seem like even less a co-artist on The Technopriests than a dominant force, this despite not apparently being the first party to create visuals on the page. It’s interesting, this trend – Beltran was also instrumental in the early ’00s re-coloring effort on The Incal and Avant l’Incal, replacing the original colors’ brightness with a dimmer, more ‘realistic’ set of environmental effects. Ironically — and while Beltran did not personally handle all of this re-colorization — this eliminated Janjetov’s own presence as colorist on The Incal, and put his Avant l’Incal work a tiny bit more in line with his later, Beltran-associated art.
Perhaps some further, interesting material comes from the artists parting ways. In 2008, two years after The Technopriests ended, Janjetov again participated in a related project, taking over for artist Travis Charest on Weapons of the Metabaron. As far as the credits go, Janjetov appears to have done his own colors on the project, a little brighter than Beltran’s, with figure work that leaves his recent art behind to return to a strong Moebius influence, perhaps in recognition of the Metabaron character’s origins in those original comics, and maybe to set himself apart from Charest all the easier. These two artists were certainly not collaborations.
As for Beltran, the third and final volume of Megalex was released the same year, ’08. It has yet to see English-language release, but I don’t think words are necessary to convey the new evolution in his own work:
The 3D models are gone, replaced by a good deal of ‘traditional’ drawing. Oddly, it doesn’t look so much like Fred Beltran, as if the ‘Beltran’ that seemed to wash over The Technopriests was only ever a possibility, a construction of tools used at the time. A specific identity for a specific time, that worked best, I think, with two actors playing the role, and could later be retired in the manner of any collaboration giving way to a series of other things.
BY JOE MCCULLOCH MAY 17, 2011 VIA THE COMICS JOURNAL
I was reading some Alejandro Jodorowsky comics last week – stuff relating to The Incal, mostly, since that’s the material that’s gotten re-released/completed lately. What interesting in reading a lot of the stuff at once is observing how much the art can change over the course of a story – a lot of these French albums take a year or more to see release, after all, and techniques are bound to shift, even as the collected editions typically released in the U.S. recall the quicker production pace of superhero comics.
One particularly striking case is that of Zoran Janjetov, a Moebius devotee who actually served as a colorist on The Incal itself. Pretty much immediately after the series finished, Jodorowsky wanted to begin on a prequel series, Avant l’Incal, and Janjetov became the artist, initially working in a manner close to Moebius’ own, but gradually moving into a beefier look as the series went on. Following its conclusion, in 1998, Jodorowsky launched a spin-off especially for Janjetov, The Technopriests.
As you can see if you stare intently at the Mortal Kombat-looking fellow at the bottom, Janjetov is working with a good amount of line shading on some of the creature designs; some early pages evidence a type of stippling effect, or tight cross-hatching. These stand in contrast with other elements of the page – not just the digital lightning effect, but the near-photographic hair texture on the bottom character’s mask and especially the eerie computer smoothness to the faces of the bottom-right characters. That last part in particular is a hallmark of the series’ colorist, Frédéric “Fred” Beltran, himself a comics artist since the late ’80s. By ’98, though, Beltran had begun working heavily with digital textures and 3D modeling, debuting his own series with Jodorowsky, Megalex, in ’99.
Megalex was initially created entirely through the use of digital modeling, as you can probably tell from the backgrounds. What’s striking, however, is the female character (I mean, aside from the obvious; and yeah, pretty much every woman in the series looks like that) – she looks remarkably similar to Janjetov’s humanoid female characters in The Technopriests, where Beltran was limited to the use of coloring, texture effects and presumably some modeling. He was also the cover artist for the series, so he’d be used to creating art that looked a bit like Janjetov’s. Yet as the series went on, a transformation seemed to occur inside:
As The 3D models are gone, replaced by a good deal of ‘traditional’ drawing. Oddly, it doesn’t look so much like Fred Beltran, as if the ‘Beltran’ that seemed to wash over The Technopriests was only ever a possibility, a construction of tools used at the time. A specific identity for a specific time, that worked best, I think, with two actors playing the role, and could later be retired in the manner of any collaboration giving way to a series of other things stated in an interview, when asked why The Technopriests seemed to begin resembling more of a Fred Beltran comic than his own: “Working the way I do with FB for a while now, I’ve come to familiarize myself with what I can expect from him. Now I know almost exactly which parts have to be done my way, and which should be left open for “Beltranization”. It’s a collective effort, and all three of us have learned to adapt to each other’s needs in order to make the whole experience more enjoyable.”
Essentially, a type of parity had been struck between ‘artist’ and ‘colorist’ – certainly Janjetov began using less inky techniques, focusing on forms that could be smoothed over with Beltran’s digital stylings. Yet because the latter party had focused so much on transforming his own solo art into a digital construct, to the curious (and English-only) reader he can seem like even less a co-artist on The Technopriests than a dominant force, this despite not apparently being the first party to create visuals on the page. It’s interesting, this trend – Beltran was also instrumental in the early ’00s re-coloring effort on The Incal and Avant l’Incal, replacing the original colors’ brightness with a dimmer, more ‘realistic’ set of environmental effects. Ironically — and while Beltran did not personally handle all of this re-colorization — this eliminated Janjetov’s own presence as colorist on The Incal, and put his Avant l’Incal work a tiny bit more in line with his later, Beltran-associated art.
Perhaps some further, interesting material comes from the artists parting ways. In 2008, two years after The Technopriests ended, Janjetov again participated in a related project, taking over for artist Travis Charest on Weapons of the Metabaron. As far as the credits go, Janjetov appears to have done his own colors on the project, a little brighter than Beltran’s, with figure work that leaves his recent art behind to return to a strong Moebius influence, perhaps in recognition of the Metabaron character’s origins in those original comics, and maybe to set himself apart from Charest all the easier. These two artists were certainly not collaborations.
As for Beltran, the third and final volume of Megalex was released the same year, ’08. It has yet to see English-language release, but I don’t think words are necessary to convey the new evolution in his own work:
The 3D models are gone, replaced by a good deal of ‘traditional’ drawing. Oddly, it doesn’t look so much like Fred Beltran, as if the ‘Beltran’ that seemed to wash over The Technopriests was only ever a possibility, a construction of tools used at the time. A specific identity for a specific time, that worked best, I think, with two actors playing the role, and could later be retired in the manner of any collaboration giving way to a series of other things.
terça-feira, 21 de junho de 2011
Battle of the business card
American Psycho, ≈18:30:
— Is that a gram?
— New card. What do you think?
— Whoa. Very nice. Look at that.
— Picked them up from the printer’s yesterday.— Good colouring.
— That’s bone. And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.— That’s very cool, Bateman. But that’s nothing. Look at this.
— That is really nice.
— Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think ?
— Nice.
— Jesus. That is really super. How'da nitwit like you get so tasteful?
— I can't believe that Bryce... prefers Van Patten's card to mine.
— But wait. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Raised lettering, pale nimbus... white.
— Impressive. Very nice.— Mm.
— Let’s see Paul Allen’s card.
— Look at that subtle off-white colouring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God – it even has a watermark.
— Something wrong? Patrick? You’re sweating.
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