Never the Same Love Twice

Kitagawa Utamaro

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Edgar Degas

William D. Berry: Wildlife Drawings

William D. Berry

William D. Berry

William D. Berry

William D. Berry

William D. Berry

William D. Berry

The late William D. Berry was an exceptional wildlife draftsman. He lived and worked in Fairbanks, Alaska. We are fortunate to have an original Berry drawing of a moose in Stately Mangus Manor.

Robert Motherwell and T. S. Eliot

Robert Motherwell

T. S. Eliot

Robert Motherwell

Art School Memory: "The Danny Williams Story"

Danny Williams

The Danny Williams story -- 

As an undergraduate at SMU, I took Roger Winter's "Advanced Drawing" at least 6 or 7 semesters in a row. All the best artists at SMU were in it, so you had to re-up. 

At some point, each semester, Roger would stage a "show and tell" of masterworks that he had saved back from his "stand-out students" of years past. These were showcased, as teaching aids, as shining examples of the heights we, the current crop, should aspire to.

One of the finest of drawings was a suburban landscape by Danny Williams. It was sort of in the realm of an Edward Hopper, or perhaps a more recognizable Richard Diebenkorn "Ocean Park" landscape. Roger would wax on and on about Danny's keen eye and unparalleled light touch with drawing tools. I hadn't met Danny yet so he was more of a  "legend" than an actual person at this point. 

In short, these drawings were built up as near-unobtainable works of graphic brilliance and were gifted with rare universal praise from Roger. As a competitive young artist -- after about my third semester -- I began to jealously begrudge the DW's inevitable reappearance as a reminder of my graphic shortcomings even as I racked up the experience -- 

On occasion, Roger used to walk to his classroom from his house in University Park. Near my last semester, while carrying the small DW drawing under his arm, it seems Roger was savagely attacked by a crazed Mockingbird -- which dive-bombed and viciously pecked at him -- again and again. Roger had no choice but to smite the bird using only the framed DW drawing as a club. Whap. Whap. Whap. Thud.

When he finally straggled into class, the DW drawing had tragically slipped from its mat and was now clearly roughed-up and askew-- its once perfectly-aligned geometry now totally whopperjawed -- a literal paradigm shift caused by the bird attack had occurred. Myth-busted -- the "perfect drawing" had fallen from grace. 

Now, at last, I was free to enjoy Danny's work on a more casual basis. Now a fellow mortal, he remains a fine artist indeed.

Brian Cobble: The Poetry of Facts

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

Brian Cobble

by Roger Winter

"There is a dignity and poignancy in the bare fact that a thing exists." -- C. S. Lewis

John Ruskin once wrote that delicacy of drawing and subtlety of sight were common traits in all great painting, an unmistakable clue that Ruskin belonged to some time other than the second half of the 20th century. Most painters of the 1950s through 2000 followed the trends of the art world, pursuing either an expressionistic approach to materials or a pristine flatness via pop and minimal art thatshowed no evidence of the artist’s hand.

Fortunately for us, but perhaps not always for him, Brian Cobble turned his back on this trend away from subtlety and fineness. His hermetic painstaking style has, more often than not, left him watching his friends gain wider recognition through approaches to painting that allow more rapid production. But with dogged commitment, and with the support of a few devoted patrons, Cobble has managed to follow his heart. He has resigned himself to an almost monastic existence of long workdays and a frugal lifestyle that allows him to remain true to his gift and to his aesthetic ideals.

Knowingly, Cobble’s work picks up some long abandoned threads of American art, especially the art of reportage. This is not to infer that his work is out of date -- “out of date” is a concept of fashion -- but rather to point out its timelessness. The insistence on facts seen in the works of Cobble’s predecessors such as Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer has precedence in 17th century Dutch painting, still earlier Flemish miniatures, and in occidental philosophy all the way back to the Hellenistic idea that art was neither more nor less than the careful imitation of nature’s appearance. And although earlier American painters turned away from their aristocratic parent cultures of the Old World and toward the phenomena of a new society, the art that did emerge over time was a pared down factinfatuated echo of the remembered grandiose styles of Europe.

Cobble is a self-taught historian of 19th and early 20th century American painting. During his years in New York, he spent time each week in the back of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, where scores of earlier American paintings are clumsily displayed in huge glass cases. Here he was able to study at leisure a wide cross section of painters, some famous and some not so famous. While he deeply admired the works of the best known of pre-Armory Show artists, especially George Inness (whom Cobble wanted to be when he grew up), he was perhaps more personally enamored of some lesser-known painters such as Samuel Colman and Daniel Garber. Colman and Garber’s views of America -- its recently placed architecture, its special light, its geographical terrain, its distinct flora -- seem to match and reinforce Cobble’s own vision. His interest in artists whom some Americanists would call minor is consistent with his general investigative curiosity which leaves no stone unturned.

Though Albuquerque is Cobble’s home, one would make a mistake to think of him as a New Mexican painter in the current typical use of that label. The state’s picturesque landscapes and Pueblo cultures have been painted and repainted ad nauseam, sometimes with great originality as in the works of Georgia O’Keeffe as well as any number of fine artists who worked in New Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. But despite its growing legitimate art scene -- the highly regarded Site Santa Fe being but one example -- New Mexico has been flooded in recent decades with commercial galleries that cater to the tourist market. Cobble is aware of this phenomenon, and he knows he must eschew the stereotypical. Like Walt Whitman thinking of the sea while writing about other matters, Cobble’s work is influenced by the awe-inspiring light of the desert and by vernacular architecture in small New Mexican towns even as he translates this influence into subjects in places as far ranging as New York or Nebraska. His view of the Long Island Railroad seems haunted by the same espantos he originally discovered at home. His vision is, as in Edward Hopper’s definition of art, “nature seen through a personality.” Cobble’s is a personality formed by the forces of a specific place.

When he does paint a pure landscape, Cobble is painting a subject that he knows about and cares deeply about. His vision of the mountains, deserts and rivers of the southwest is based on decades of firsthand observation. As a nine year old, he moved with his family from Ohio to Las Cruces, New Mexico. Throughout his life, he has kept close contact with the New Mexican landscape through frequent camping, backpacking, cross-country skiing and kayaking, although he understands that this landscape is not just a playground. As well as seeing it as a place rife with present dangers and a very long bloody history of human conflict, he also shows respect for the maintenance of his beloved corner of the planet through involvement in environmental work. Cobble and his wife Julie Kutz, a biologist, worked for years to get the Mexican wolf reintroduced to the area. They have also participated in river restoration projects, as well as clearing brush for trails and for wildlife areas.

If Cobble has a signature subject, and whether or not he does is, to his credit, a debatable issue, it would have to be called the built environment. Like American artist John Gast’s 19th century painting of an angelic figure stringing telegraph wire across the continent while below, pioneers on the ground are moving west pushing the aboriginal population and the wild animals out of their way, Cobble sees the landscape superimposed with fences, artificial waterways, refineries, quickly installed human habitation projects, trailer parks, asphalt slabs, and on and on and on. He paints the outward signs of a mobile seminomadic human culture, a culture in constant change. He often quotes his Skowhegan teacher, Willard Midgette, as saying that he thought it strange that so many artists painted landscapes as if they had just walked into a world without cars or telephone poles. To the earlier American artists who saw landscape as beautiful (pastoral) or sublime (wild), a third category needs to be added to cover the commonplace.

The most noticeable and comment provoking aspect of Cobble’s painting is his medium: pastel. Pastel, often written off as a Sunday painter’s bailiwick or a medium for quick studies, became Cobble’s almost by accident. Oil paint was the medium through which he learned about art. Because of oil’s flexibility, atmospheric nature, and, in his own word, “cachet” – after all, oil had been the major medium of every great painter from Rembrandt to de Kooning -- he assumed it would be his medium. But an eye condition called iritis (inflammation of the iris) worsened by the solvents used in oils led him to experiment with pastel. It seems more than possible that even without an eye condition Cobble might have gravitated to this medium. Pastel’s simplicity and directness (no brushes or palette to clean, no tubes or lids to deal with) and its potential for drawing fine detail in color makes it a natural for his needs. As time has passed, pastel has all but supplanted water and oil based media for him, although he still uses watercolor and gouache, along with charcoal, for underdrawing and underpainting.

The folk-painter, Grandma Moses, once said that she started her paintings “with a broom and ended with a straw,” a good metaphor for Cobble’s approach. The early stages of his painting are broadly rendered, the middle stages less so, and the final layers are composed of thousands of tiny colored strokes made with finely sharpened pastel sticks. He shies away from no complexity, giving each square centimeter the loving attention that it must have. Almost obsessively, he works until each painting’s surface is left with no “hot spots;” no unevenness of craft.

Certainly, Cobble’s technical artistry is a magical, compelling quality in his work, but not the only such quality. He is able to compose a horizontal rectangle quite as well as any living painter of any style. At first glance, we may think that we are looking at a painting based on one photographic image, but on examination we begin to suspect that what is there is a synthesis of details from several sources placed together to orchestrate a system of values, linear forces, colors and shapes that have likely never existed before in quite this arrangement. For instance, in “Shakeytown,” a commonplace two-lane highway scene, we begin to see a constellation of small shapes and colors juggled into an overall treatment of light that has to be too ordered to be the random aggregate we know to expect from chance clutter. But nothing here is overt; nothing for surrealistic effect. Cobble incorporates predictable imagery for design’s sake, and he does so expertly.

As close to the surreal as he is likely to get can be seen in the detail of artificial tulips in “310 W. 7th,” (pastel, 12 7/8 x 31 3/4-inches) a dead-season scene in a stable American neighborhood showing fragments of several houses and yards. In the lower center of his composition, Cobble has placed an arrangement of flattened brightly colored metal tulips -- a visual pun that heightens the viewer’s experience of a structurally complex portrait of a prosaic cultural stratum. His depiction is as poignant and telling as realist literature.

In “Tchoupitoulas," Cobble paints a vintage commercial street at the point of being reclaimed by nature (as can be said of many of his subjects) sharing the space with an elevated freeway. The freeway, oblivious of its surroundings, ushers in a new world that demands expediency above all other considerations.

“Machine Gun Fun” (pastel, 26 x 39 1/2-inches) is a tour de force depiction of a carnival stand shown near closing time. The noisy rhythm of the repetition of pinwheels, stuffed toy prizes, bar stools and other motifs is foiled by a quietly working cleaning man off centered in the foreground and two women in passive poses behind the counter. Cobble echoes the spinning nature of the pinwheels with a distant view of a Ferris wheel.  The more we look at the painting, the more we see repeated forms, whether in the far away city lights, the vertical posts in the middle ground or the windows and stripes of a nearby trailer. And yet the counteracting, deceivingly random placement of figures and objects throughout the picture plane makes “Machine Gun Fun” a perfect example of Croce’s classic observation that art possesses “variety in unity.” The same is true of “View from the Viaduct” with its rhythmic repetitions in an unplanned industrial neighborhood seen from above.

While “Machine Gun Fun” takes a giddy garish subject and turns it into a serene study, “Lotaburger” reverses course by transforming a potentially pedestrian fast food establishment into an exciting cacophony of reflections, figure studies, signage, distant mountains, etc., without losing the quality of classic calm that always prevails in Cobble’s work.

Any attempt at painting by any artist is an act of faith. In Cobble’s case, the element of faith is magnified since he inevitably spends months of his life resolving one middle-sized work. The world around him changes while a single painting evolves hopefully toward a successful completion. He may feel, as does Joyce Carol Oates’ metaphorical writer, that the whole world is having fun outside his window while he pushes a peanut with his nose across a dirty floor. He has come to accept the fact that low production can lead to under appreciation in the short run, but he also knows that his gifts of perception and discrimination are rare, and that they can only be manifested through disciplined work. This knowledge is enough to bring him into his studio at 7:00 o’clock each morning for a ten to twelve hour workday. We are the beneficiaries of his faith, his patience, his insistence and persistence. In a clamoring market-driven art world, Brian Cobble’s contribution is, indeed, blessed assurance to each of us that delicacy of drawing and subtlety of sight still exist.

Simon Greco: The Art of Perspective Drawing

Simon Greco

Simon Greco

Simon Greco

For anyone wanting to learn about perspective drawing, this over-sized 48-page book by Simon Greco remains a favorite. I studied it for countless hours as a cartooning tyro...

Disney's Twelve Basic Principles of Animation

Walt Disney Studio,  animation art

Walt Disney Studio,  animation art

Walt Disney Studio,  animation art

Walt Disney Studio,  animation art

Disney's Twelve Basic Principles of Animation were introduced by the Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. Johnston and Thomas in turn based their book on the work of the leading Disney animators from the 1930s onwards, and their effort to produce more realistic animations. The main purpose of the principles was to produce an illusion of characters adhering to the basic laws of physics, but they also dealt with more abstract issues, such as emotional timing and character appeal.

Squash and Stretch

The most important principle is "squash and stretch", the purpose of which is to give a sense of weight and flexibility to drawn objects. It can be applied to simple objects, like a bouncing ball, or more complex constructions, like the musculature of a human face. Taken to an extreme point, a figure stretched or squashed to an exaggerated degree can have a comical effect. In realistic animation, however, the most important aspect of this principle is the fact that an object's volume does not change when squashed or stretched. If the length of a ball is stretched vertically, its width (in three dimensions, also its depth) needs to contract correspondingly horizontally.

Anticipation

Anticipation is used to prepare the audience for an action, and to make the action appear more realistic. A dancer jumping off the floor has to bend the knees first; a golfer making a swing has to swing the club back first. The technique can also be used for less physical actions, such as a character looking off-screen to anticipate someone's arrival, or attention focusing on an object that a character is about to pick up.

Staging

This principle is akin to staging in theatre, as it is known in theatre and film. Its purpose is to direct the audience's attention, and make it clear what is of greatest importance in a scene; Johnston and Thomas defined it as "the presentation of any idea so that it is completely and unmistakably clear", whether that idea is an action, a personality, an expression, or a mood. This can be done by various means, such as the placement of a character in the frame, the use of light and shadow, or the angle and position of the camera. The essence of this principle is keeping focus on what is relevant, and avoiding unnecessary detail.

Straight Ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose

These are two different approaches to the actual drawing process. "Straight ahead action" means drawing out a scene frame by frame from beginning to end, while "pose to pose" involves starting with drawing a few key frames, and then filling in the intervals later. "Straight ahead action" creates a more fluid, dynamic illusion of movement, and is better for producing realistic action sequences. On the other hand, it is hard to maintain proportions, and to create exact, convincing poses along the way. "Pose to pose" works better for dramatic or emotional scenes, where composition and relation to the surroundings are of greater importance. A combination of the two techniques is often used.

Computer animation removes the problems of proportion related to "straight ahead action" drawing; however, "pose to pose" is still used for computer animation, because of the advantages it brings in composition. The use of computers facilitates this method, and can fill in the missing sequences in between poses automatically. It is, however, still important to oversee this process and apply the other principles discussed.

Follow Through and Overlapping Action

Follow through and overlapping action is a general heading for two closely related techniques which help to render movement more realistically, and help to give the impression that characters follow the laws of physics, including the principle of inertia. 

"Follow through" means that loosely tied parts of a body should continue moving after the character has stopped and the parts should keep moving beyond the point where the character stopped only to be subsequently "pulled back" towards the center of mass and/or exhibiting various degrees of oscillation damping. 

"Overlapping action" is the tendency for parts of the body to move at different rates (an arm will move on different timing of the head and so on).

A third, related technique is "drag", where a character starts to move and parts of him take a few frames to catch up. These parts can be inanimate objects like clothing or the antenna on a car, or parts of the body, such as arms or hair. On the human body, the torso is the core, with arms, legs, head and hair appendices that normally follow the torso's movement. Body parts with much tissue, such as large stomachs and breasts, or the loose skin on a dog, are more prone to independent movement than bonier body parts. Again, exaggerated use of the technique can produce a comical effect, while more realistic animation must time the actions exactly, to produce a convincing result.

The "moving hold" animates between similar key frames, even characters sitting still can display some sort of movement, such as the torso moving in and out with breathing.

Ease In and Ease Out

The movement of the human body, and most other objects, needs time to accelerate and slow down. For this reason, animation looks more realistic if it has more drawings near the beginning and end of an action, emphasizing the extreme poses, and fewer in the middle. This principle goes for characters moving between two extreme poses, such as sitting down and standing up, but also for inanimate, moving objects, like the bouncing ball in the above illustration.

Arc

Most natural action tends to follow an arched trajectory, and animation should adhere to this principle by following implied "arcs" for greater realism. This technique can be applied to a moving limb by rotating a joint, or a thrown object moving along a parabolic trajectory. The exception is mechanical movement, which typically moves in straight lines.

As an object's speed or momentum increases, arcs tend to flatten out in moving ahead and broaden in turns. In baseball, a fastball would tend to move in a straighter line than other pitches; while a figure skater moving at top speed would be unable to turn as sharply as a slower skater, and would need to cover more ground to complete the turn.

An object in motion that moves out of its natural arc for no apparent reason will appear erratic rather than fluid. For example, when animating a pointing finger, the animator should be certain that in all drawings in between the two extreme poses, the fingertip follows a logical arc from one extreme to the next. Traditional animators tend to draw the arc in lightly on the paper for reference, to be erased later.

Secondary Action

Secondary Action: as the horse runs, its mane and tail follow the movement of the body.

Adding secondary actions to the main action gives a scene more life, and can help to support the main action. A person walking can simultaneously swing their arms or keep them in their pockets, speak or whistle, or express emotions through facial expressions. The important thing about secondary actions is that they emphasize, rather than take attention away from the main action. If the latter is the case, those actions are better left out. For example, during a dramatic movement, facial expressions will often go unnoticed. In these cases it is better to include them at the beginning and the end of the movement, rather than during.

Timing

Timing refers to the number of drawings or frames for a given action, which translates to the speed of the action on film. On a purely physical level, correct timing makes objects appear to obey the laws of physics; for instance, an object's weight determines how it reacts to an impetus, like a push. Timing is critical for establishing a character's mood, emotion, and reaction. It can also be a device to communicate aspects of a character's personality.

Exaggeration

Exaggeration is an effect especially useful for animation, as animated motions that strive for a perfect imitation of reality can look static and dull. The level of exaggeration depends on whether one seeks realism or a particular style, like a caricature or the style of a specific artist. The classical definition of exaggeration, employed by Disney, was to remain true to reality, just presenting it in a wilder, more extreme form. Other forms of exaggeration can involve the supernatural or surreal, alterations in the physical features of a character; or elements in the storyline itself. It is important to employ a certain level of restraint when using exaggeration. If a scene contains several elements, there should be a balance in how those elements are exaggerated in relation to each other, to avoid confusing or overawing the viewer.

Solid drawing

The principle of solid drawing means taking into account forms in three-dimensional space, or giving them volume and weight. The animator needs to be a skilled artist and has to understand the basics of three-dimensional shapes, anatomy, weight, balance, light and shadow, etc. For the classical animator, this involved taking art classes and doing sketches from life. One thing in particular that Johnston and Thomas warned against was creating "twins": characters whose left and right sides mirrored each other, and looked lifeless]. Modern-day computer animators draw less because of the facilities computers give them,yet their work benefits greatly from a basic understanding of animation principles, and their additions to basic computer animation.

Appeal

Appeal in a cartoon character corresponds to what would be called charisma in an actor. A character who is appealing is not necessarily sympathetic -- villains or monsters can also be appealing -- the important thing is that the viewer feels the character is real and interesting. There are several tricks for making a character connect better with the audience; for likable characters a symmetrical or particularly baby-like face tends to be effective. A complicated or hard to read face will lack appeal, it may more accurately be described as 'captivation' in the composition of the pose, or the character design.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright, selected by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer

Frank Lloyd Wright, selected by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer

Frank Lloyd Wright, selected by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer

Frank Lloyd Wright, selected by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer

Frank Lloyd Wright, selected by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer

Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer became Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentice at the Taliesin Fellowship in 1949. In 1957, he attended the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, returning in 1958 to continue his apprenticeship with Wright until his death in 1959. He remains at Taliesin to this day, as director of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, a vice-president of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and author of numerous publications on Wright's life and work.

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter