Wireless Era?

Art Out Loud

If you would like to watch five artists on a high wire act, come to New York City a week from tomorrow.

At the Society of Illustrators, five of us will demonstrate our painting methods in an informal setting, where people can come up and watch or ask questions.

I'll be joining four of my admired friends and colleagues: Sam Weber, Charles Vess, Donato Giancola, Greg Manchess (painting above).

Just for fun I'm going to try something a little different. Walt Reed and his son Roger, authors of The Illustrator in America and owners of Illustration House gallery, have agreed to be my models for a series of two quick portrait studies in oil. I'm not only excited to have the opportunity to paint them, but also to chat with them about the history of illustration.

Also, you can peruse the first advance copy of Imaginative Realism, which just arrived from the printer, as well as copies of Dinotopia for sale.

As Irene Gallo has mentioned on her blog post about the event, "Space is very limited and tickets are cheap. Buy tickets in advance, all previous Art Out Louds have sold out." UPDATE: I'm very sorry, but I just found out that the event has just sold out. You were right, Irene!

When: Saturday, September 12, 2009 1-5pm at
Where: Society of Illustrators on 128 East 63rd Street.
Cost: $10 students, $20 members, $25 non-members. Refreshments included.
RSVP: kevin@societyillustrators.org 212 838 2560

Cumberland, Part 4: Final Art

I read somewhere that Beethoven worked on his fifth and sixth symphonies side by side, switching back and forth between dark drama and pastoral light.


While I was painting this scene of blood and fire, I was also starting on the art for Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. Rather than clashing, the two worlds that were crowding the inside of my head seemed to need each other, like Jekyll and Hyde.


Fast forward to 2008. The book tour for Chandara brought Jeanette and me through Virginia, and the timing worked out for us to be there and see the installation of the painting at the Mariner's Museum, the same museum where I had done the research about three years earlier. For naval history buffs of any kind, this place is Mecca.

Since the last time I had been there they had opened the new Monitor center, where they are continuing to work on conserving the remains of the U.S.S. Monitor. The famous ironclad was recovered from the sea floor in the 1970s and stabilized in tanks. Now it's emerging piece by piece under the careful attention of professional restorers. You can follow along on webcam videos.

Part of the new development at the museum, built after my painting was finished, is an immersive walk through of the Virginia and the Monitor, and a multi-media presentation that puts you in the middle of the terrible events of March 8 and 9, 1862.

When my painting was installed on a 10 year loan to the museum, I was touched by all the kind comments that people wrote in a guest book that was set up next to the painting.

I also received a letter from John Quarstein, one of the most respected historians of the Battle of Hampton Roads, and one of my consultants on the project. It was a great honor to read his words of approval: “I think you have created the most accurate and awe inspiring depiction of the death throes of the Cumberland. You have done a masterful job of luminating the story of March 8, 1862.”

The truth is, I could never have done it without the help of Mr. Quarstein, Mr. Ratliff, and the team of experts and art editors at National Geographic who answered all my questions and gave me the benefit of their life studies. These kinds of paintings are never done alone. They really do take the cooperation of a lot of people, and it was my privilege to meet people who have given their lives to bringing the past to life.

Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 1A: The Backstory
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 1B: The Research
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 2: Choosing the Scene
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 3: Acting it Out
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 4: Final Art

Cumberland, Part 3: Acting It Out

My next job was to die a thousand deaths.

I had to act out the parts of all the sailors in various conditions of
leaping, swimming, nursing injuries, or manning oars. Wearing a navy uniform that I found in a surplus store, I jumped off a platform and writhed around on the ground, trying to imagine what it would have been like for the various sailors who were coping with the tragedy.

My wife took snapshots with a digital camera. One of the photos has a motion blur effect that I used in the final painting. There were something like 90 figures in all, and I wanted to make each one a little actor facing his own terrible drama.

One of the most helpful parts of the research was a visit with a naval historian named Colan Ratliff at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Maryland. This was an awesome place to visit, but I couldn't take pictures because it's a classified research facility.

Mr. Ratliff, who works deep in the heart of the complex, has built several museum models and drawn extensive plans of the vessels involved in this battle.

From our consultations, and from the approved concept sketch, I made a comprehensive line drawing and sent copies to Mr. Ratliff. His notes, drawn on a sticky note over the photocopied drawing, corrected some of my errors.

I had shown the old-fashioned deadeyes instead of rigging screws and had drawn the wrong kind of gooseneck attaching the boom to the mast. These corrections were going on by phone, mail and email for months after our meeting.

It really helps when a scientific or historical consultant can draw to explain their points, and many of them can.

With all the references and corrections in place, and after nearly a year of
research and roughs, I finally was ready to start the 30 x 40-inch oil painting, which took a couple of months. Most of the time was devoted to painting the various figures.

As I worked, I did everything I could to project myself into the action of the scene: playing the soundtrack to Master and Commander, the Flying Dutchman overture, and Rimsky Korsakov——and reading again and again the eyewitness accounts.

Warfare was such a brutal face-to-face thing in the Civil War. The guys on the Virginia could hear the screams of the Cumberland's wounded men below decks as they drowned.
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Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 1A: The Backstory
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 1B: The Research
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 2: Choosing the Scene
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 3: Acting it Out
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 4: Final Art

Cumberland, Part 2: Choosing the Scene

This is the second part of the story of the making of the Cumberland painting.

With all this background information, I began visualizing the scene with some small color sketches in oil of various possible viewpoints and compositions.

The crucial moment, it seemed to me, was when both ships were firing on each other at close quarters, even as the Cumberland filled with water.

Some of the men were trapped below decks. One man was seen trying to escape from a gunport and was swept back inside by the power of the water. Others scrambled into the rigging. Many jumped overboard and either were drowned or were rescued by the lifeboats. Several accounts noted that the day was beautiful and clear, which presented a problem if I wanted to make the scene appear dramatic.

One of the four sketches is painted in a limited color range, resembling the sepia photos of the time. Historians and re-enactors told me that there would have been a tremendous amount of smoke and steam. I worked up a small comprehensive sketch in oil to plan the basic composition.

One detail that struck me was the account of a fat drummer boy who
jumped overboard and used his drum as a float. You can see him below in a detail of the finished painting.

All along, my instinct had been to view the scene from enough distance
to see the lifeboat and the waterline of the Cumberland. But before I went into full production on the painting, art director Christopher Klein suggested that I produce one more sketch showing a much closer view of the action.

In the oil sketch below, we see the pivot gun crew suffering great losses and yet bravely fighting on, with Morris calling out through his speaking trumpet.

Like all compositional decisions, this one would have been a tradeoff. Getting this close to the action brings the viewer closer to experiencing the psychology and the horror of battle. But if this scene was all that the viewer saw, it wouldn’t be clear what was going on at the water level. We agreed to pull back the viewpoint back just far enough to see the lifeboat action, but a little closer than we had shown in those first sketches.

Tomorrow, we'll get into the nitty gritty of research and acting out the poses.
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Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 1A: The Backstory
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 1B: The Research
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 2: Choosing the Scene
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 3: Acting it Out
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 4: Final Art

The Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 1

For the next few days, I’ll be giving you a detailed, blow-by-blow tour of the making of a complex Civil War painting called the “Sinking of the Cumberland.” I mentioned it on the blog over a year ago when the painting was installed at the Mariner’s Museum in Virginia.

The artwork was commissioned by the National Geographic, but never published in the magazine because the article was severely cut in length at the last minute, a common but somewhat frustrating fate of art (and photos) for the magazine.

I’m very pleased that the art will be published for the first time, and at a large scale, in my upcoming book Imaginative Realism.

HISTORY PAINTING
History isn’t a collection of facts. It’s a collection of stories. A historical painting is first and foremost a storytelling picture with a set of characters at some moment of crisis or decision. Although you can show only a single snapshot of the events, your painting can suggest the full scope of the narrative. The challenge is choosing the moment and the angle that tells the tale in the most memorable and engaging way.

Above: researching on the Constellation, a surviving Civil-War-era ship in the Baltimore harbor.

The moment I chose to portray was 3:37 p.m. on March 8, 1862, when the USS Cumberland sank in Hampton Roads, Virginia, the victim of the CSS Virginia, which went on the next day to battle with the Monitor.

The Virginia, or Merrimac, as it was known before it was converted into the slope-slided ironclad, delivered its fatal blow to the Cumberland with its 1,500-pound iron ram.

As his ship sank, Lieutenant George U. Morris gave the command for all hands to save themselves, but he remained on deck to encourage the decimated pivot gun crew, who kept firing even as the waves closed around them. Morris defied a request to surrender, declaring that they would sink with their colors flying. The Virginia sustained only superficial damage as the Cumberland’s cannonballs bounced harmlessly off its 4-inch iron covering.


Part of the research involved reading the extensive surviving firsthand accounts, not all of which agreed on the details. I then traveled to the location and met with historians, including John Quarstein, above, who pointed to the exact spot where the Cumberland finally settled. At naval history museums, I looked at the few remaining fragments of both ships, and I photographed scale models of the vessels.

Tomorrow we'll look at the first sketches to explore the composition.
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Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 1A: The Backstory
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 1B: The Research
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 2: Choosing the Scene
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 3: Acting it Out
Sinking of the Cumberland, Part 4: Final Art

Jurassic Park Set Visit

In 1992, when I was in the middle of a booksigning in LA, a guy said came up to me and said, “Hey, if you’re not doing anything tonight, do you want to check out the set for Jurassic Park?”


His name, it turns out, was Mike Trcic, one of the hottest creature sculptors in the business. He worked at Stan Winston Studio and helped develop the look of the animatronic T.rex that attacks the car in the rainy night sequence.

When we arrived on set, the night crew was wielding blow driers on the inert dinosaur, trying to dry out the heavy water that the foam rubber skin had absorbed from the rain machines.

The T.rexes didn’t have legs. The bodies rested on sophisticated (and potentially dangerous) motion bases that could quickly move the upper body around. The feet were built as separate pieces used for close-ups. The digital effects get a lot of credit in Jurassic Park, but the animatronics were equally groundbreaking.

Some of the artists told me that they anticipated that much of the work they were doing would be superceded by CGI. As it turns out, animatronics have held their place in the industry, a necessity for close-ups and interactive shots.
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Thanks, Mike! More about Trcic Studio.
Wiki on Stan Winston.
"How Stuff Works" about the Jurassic Park animatronics, link.
GJ post on interactivity.

Harvard Wind

Sometimes I like to exaggerate a little when I'm out sketching to poke some fun at my fellow man (and at myself in the process).