John Dillinger

In October of 1980, I was sketching the Sealtest ice cream sign on Broadway in Nashville, Tennessee when a man came up and asked me to draw his portrait.

He struck a pose but jerked around from time to time to look up and down the street. Then he eyed me narrowly. “You’re not a cop, are you?”


I assured him I wasn’t. He asked me where he could get a Thompson.

“What’s a Thompson?” I asked.

“You know, a submachine gun. A tommie gun.”

“Why would you want that?” I asked.

“I’m going to jack a bank.”

He said his name was John Earl Dillinger and that he just got out of the pen. He told me that he had spent time in solitary confinement in San Quentin and that he had been married three times. He asked that I draw a mustache on him so that he wouldn’t be recognized.

I didn’t know how much of his story to believe. The original bank robber named John Dillinger died in 1934, and looked nothing like this guy. Tommie guns were obsolete, even back in 1980. I had the feeling that parts of his story may not have been what he told me, but his face told a story of its own.

Every portrait is an attempt both to study the mask and to see beyond the mask, because every subject is trying to project a persona— at least if they’re aware of being drawn.

In any event, my meeting with “John Dillinger” in Nashville was a prototype for Arthur Denison’s first encounter with Lee Crabb in Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time.

Boulter’s Lock

Imagine that you were an artist from a hundred years ago, and this was the scene that met your eyes.

This is Boulter’s Lock, a popular gathering point for pleasure boaters along the Thames west of London. There’s a mix of personalities and a variety of watercraft crowded together waiting for the lock to be opened. Everyone is dressed for a fashionable day outdoors.

But what chaos! Everything is moving and changing. How would you design a coherent picture out of all these raw elements?

Here’s what Edward J. Gregory (1850-1909) exhibited in 1897, called "Boulter's Lock, Sunday Afternoon." It’s one of the masterpieces of Victorian painting, and today is the pride of the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool. But it’s hardly ever mentioned in art history class because it doesn't fit neatly into the streamlined narrative of most survey courses.

That’s too bad, because it’s a supreme example of composition. Note the clustering, spokewheeling and shapewelding in the main boat in the lower center of the picture. As a contrast to that crowded boat, the boats nearby have only single figures in a remarkable variety of postures and expressions, and those figures speak volumes about the social classes of the time. The Art Journal said, "it is in fact the three volume novel in art, the guide book and encyclopaedia of the manners and customs of the English people'."

Gregory worked on Boulter's Lock for about ten years. He was a remarkable painter. How many people would dare to paint reflections and cast shadows crossing in shallow water?
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More details about the real Boulter's Lock on Wikipedia and this local website, link.
Lady Lever Art Museum's page about the painting, link.
Art Renewal Center, three paintings by E.J.Gregory, link.

Art By Committee: Roasted

Wednesday is our day to have some fun with sketching game called "Art By Committee." The challenge is to illustrate an actual quote from a science fiction novel.

This week’s quote about a narrow escape from being roasted called to mind all sorts of images, from marshmallows to dragons. Each one has its own flair and shows how differently our imaginations work.

Roberta Baird

Robert Brown
Topher Sipes

Michael Geissler

Andy Wales

Kristina Carroll

Ryan Timm

Jared Shear

John Randall York

Susan Adsett

Arthur Keegan

Airan Wright

Rob Hummer

Andrew Walker
Paul Bozzo

…and the sketch by Jeanette, me, and a couple friends.

I wonder what strange and wonderful stories lurk beneath the surface of next week's quote: “The man looked bored.”
Please scale your JPG to around 700 pixels across. Title it with your name, send it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC, and let me know in your email if you want me to link to your blog or website. Please have your entries in by next Tuesday at 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA.

Atelier Autodidactique

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. I want to take this moment to thank all of you. I appreciate all of you who have taken a moment to share a funny thought, an encouraging word, a philosophical musing, or an expert insight.

Thanks too to all of you who have given your time and talent to the weekly Art By Committee contest. And thanks for linking or putting me on your blogroll. I wish I could link back to each of you, but my sidebar is already way out of control.

I am a firm believer in the value of self-teaching. Whether or not each of us has been to art school, we never get to a point where we know enough. Learning about art is a lifelong occupation.

Right now the history of art is at a remarkable crossroads, with a convergence of knowledge between digital effects innovation, vision research, a new realism in painting, and an outpouring of creativity in caricature, cartooning, and animation. As a result of all this cross-pollinaton, there’s a lot we can learn from each other, and I've been learning a lot from you by doing this blog.

I hope you’ll visit Gurney Journey from time to time over the future months. There are dozens of new topics lined up for future posts, with material on everything from reflected light to rainbows, silhouettes to spotlighting, interactivity to idealization—plus a few bizarre surprises along the way.

Image: Unused concept sketch for The Voyage of Argo, National Geographic, 1985.

Tone Paper Portrait

Here’s a portrait of my friend James Warhola, a children’s book illustrator best known for his autobiographical book Uncle Andy’s, as well as a frequent collaborator on the original Art By Committee sketchbook.

The sketch is from life, and it’s a quick technique that’s halfway between drawing and painting. I used a heavyweight gray-brown tone paper with a rough texture, and did the drawing first in soft pencil.

Then I washed in white gouache over the background using a bristle brush, leaving soft edges on the left side of the hair. For the light side of the face, I used a softer brush to lay down a milky-thin layer gouache, building it up a bit more for the highlights.

Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) used a similar technique for this self-portrait, where he indulges a shameless talent for gurning.

Greek Statues in Color

Seeing Greek and Roman statues painted up in bright colors may look a little bit unsettling at first, but archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann has made a convincing argument that they originally looked this way.

Garish? Gaudy? How could the same artists who carved those immortal forms prefer such a tacky treatment? If Brinkmann is right, we may have to revise our estimation of what constitutes good taste in sculpture.

Actually, the more I look at it, the more it makes sense. In fact I love it. Look out, Mount Rushmore, I’m on my way with my van full of spray cans.
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Smithsonian article, link.
Slide show of full-color restorations, link.
Boston.com article about traveling exhibition, link.
The standing figure is Augustus of Prima Porta. The Trojan archer is copyright Stiftung Archäologie, Munich

Happy 400th Birthday, Québec.

This July marks four centuries since Samuel de Champlain and his crew of 28 men stepped ashore from their little boats on the bit of land that was later to become Québec city.

Here is a croquis of Québec rooftops. I did this sketch while sitting in a dry bathtub, the only place in our hotel room with a good view. The hollow rattle of a horse's hooves on cobblestones floated up from the street below.

I started by laying broad watercolor washes with a ¾ inch white nylon flat over a light pencil drawing. The last step was to add the brown lines with a Waterman fountain pen. The copper roof was weathered to a gray-brown color under the cornice alongside the clock. I tried to suggest that effect by dragging my finger over a passage of wet pen lines.

Bonne Fête, Québec!
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See also the GJ posts on bronze weathering and the watercolor-with-fountain-pen technique

Free Dinotopia Podcast

Skeptics said that it was impossible to make an audio adaptation out of a picture book, but Tom Lopez of ZBS Productions proved them wrong. The Christian Science Monitor called the Dinotopia audio adventure, “a dazzling soundscape that does full justice to Gurney’s wondrous lost world…perfect family listening.”
You can hear for yourself in this free podcast, where audio wizard Meatball Fulton recalls the thinking behind the ZBS productions of A Land Apart from Time and The World Beneath. He shares a few samples of the productions with a full cast of actors, effects, and music by Tim Clark. You can order copies on CD or cassette from the Dinotopia Store or purchase the MP3 download directly from ZBS.

Don’t miss all the other great podcasts and audio productions from ZBS, which make evocative listening in the long hours of the artist’s studio.
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Free Dinotopia podcast, link.
CDs from Dinotopia Store, link.
Full Dinotopia MP3 paid download from ZBS, link.
ZBS’s new “Two Minute Noir,” link.
Bix sculpture courtesy Jim Henson's Creature Shop, link.

Impersonality

For the last two centuries, the art of the western world has been driven by the concept of individual expression. But it hasn’t always been so. Other notions have prevailed.

Hamilton Easter Field, in his 1913 book The Technique of Oil Painting made the case for another conception of the creative enterprise. He identified greatness in art, music and literature not with personal expression, but with impersonality:

“Impersonality is in no way the antithesis of personality, but its fulfillment. As a great man gets bigger and broader he drops a lot of his prejudices and meannesses, and his heart, like that of St. Francis, goes out in sympathy to all manner of men, to the birds of the air, and even to inanimate nature, until he gets to feel in harmony with the universe. Gradually he has passed beyond the personal into the impersonal. Whatever the hand of such a man finds to do will bear the stamp of his breadth of vision. It will remain personal because it will be true to his inmost self. It will, however, also be impersonal, because the man has so broadened in character that in his work he no longer expresses the emotions of one man, but those of mankind."

Is this just a rhetorical flourish or a genuinely fresh way for artists to think of their work? Is impersonality desirable, or even possible in our age of navel-gazing and psychoanalysis? Haven’t all the great works of art history, from Rembrandt’s self portraits to Beethoven’s symphonies been founded on a deep level of introspection and inner discovery?

What Field seems to be advocating is a way seeing beyond the limits of the self into the collective experience. Many of the greatest works of art have come from enigmatic individuals like Shakespeare, Vermeer, and Homer, about whom we know very little. And perhaps it doesn’t matter. The miracle of their work is that the range of their emotional expression seems to extend beyond the scope of a single person’s life. Each of these creators looked into themselves, but in so doing, they saw beyond themselves.

You can read Hamilton Field’s entire book online (it’s short, at 84 pages) Link
Thanks, Jason

Addendum
I found another expression of this idea in a letter from Australian painter Charles Conder to his good friend Tom Roberts, after a couple of blissful summers they spent painting together in Heidelberg, 1888-1890: "I feel more than sorry that these days are over, because nothing can exceed the pleasures of that last summer, when I fancy all of us lost the ego somewhat of our natures, in looking at what was Nature's best art and ideality."

--from Australian Impressionism by Terrence Lane.

Pyramid of Vision

Here is Jeanette Gurney using a homemade viewfinder to frame a composition for her sketch. The red arrows show the lines from the apex of her eye through the corners of the viewfinder to the scene beyond.

The “pyramid of vision” is the sector of the entire field of view that you have selected to represent in your picture.

In perspective class, they used to call it “cone of vision,” but I like “pyramid” better, because most pictures are rectangular, so a pyramid better describes the volume of space reaching out from your eye. "Pyramid" is also used now more frequently in the CGI field.


Even though the overall visual field takes in an angle of about 60 to 90 degrees, the ideal pyramid of vision for figure drawing or landscape painting in my experience is about 20-30 degrees. Any more than that, and the drawing will look distorted, because you have to turn your head to see from top to bottom or side to side. An angle much less than that puts the subject a bit too far away to see clearly.

Here is Jeanette’s watercolor painting from the scene.

To see other views of the motif, visit the Dalleo’s Deli post.