How to Reheat Leftovers

Cherry pick the printmaking detritus for the good stuff. 

This isn't one of those posts abut sprucing up leftovers to please the whole finicky family, nor is it one of those screeds about being frugal, using everything you have to the fullest, composting, or even recycling. It's about collage. "Collage, you say? Why I went to collage, it was the best, most expensive 7 1/2 years of my life." Not "college" you doofus (are you even paying attention?), collage. You know, the assemblage of seeming disparate elements into a new coherent whole. Mostly it's a technique employed by artists when they don't want to put in the effort to draw or paint anything new. Why not just use scraps of old stuff and call it collage?

Collage: The artistic equivalent of stir fry. Nothing goes to waste and 
you get the satisfaction of cleaning out the refrigerator.

As a printmaker, I love collage. I have lots and lots of images or pieces of images that sort of worked out, but not really. Why not just cut out the good parts and stick them all together? It often happens that when you put the old images in new situations, new ideas suggest themselves. I will see relationships between images that I never saw before. Sometimes small collages lead to large-scale pieces, or entire new series.

Collage is more than just a greatest hits clip show. It's something new.

                                           

Holy Ancient Heresies, Batman part 2

Last time we dealt with the possibly heretical implications of Batman. Today, I hope to muddy the waters just a little further before I try to clear them up. Potentially clear them up, that is. I won't rehash since you can just read the preceding post here.

Batman really, really believes in the power of art.

I left off with a teaser about who the next divided character would be. Well, to no one's surprise I want to talk about Two-Face. Here we have a guy who is literally split right down the middle. He has his good/rational side and his evil//irrational side. (Interestingly, I think, his evil side is his left side.) Well, as all the best stories are, his story is a sad one. Harvey Dent was an attorney who was doused in the face with acid by one of the men he was prosecuting. Only half of his face was burned, he went nuts and began to believe that everything in the world was determined by chance. From that point, he began to run around with a double headed coin that was scratched up on one side and unmarred on the other. He would use this coin as a means of making decisions - clean side up, all is well, scratched side up, look out!

The thing about that coin is he would pursue either the good or evil with single-minded determination (pun intended) depending on what the coin told him to do. He could be good or evil depending on what chance determined that he should be. He attached no moral weight to either choice. So, if my high school math teachers were right, we can flip a coin a thousand times and we are likely to approach something like 500 heads and 500 tails. In Two-Face's world that is perfect balance between good and evil. This is the perfect dualist, Manichean balance.

Batman is also passionate about an aggressive drawing posture.

So what are we to make of this? Does Batman live in a Manichean world? Is it important? It is important because we do not live in a dualist world. Good and Evil do not exist in harmony nor do they seek balance. There is no god of evil at all. God is good and Satan is evil, it is true; but Satan is no god. There is no struggle on God's part when it comes to Satan. He allows Satan to have some freedom for a time, but that allowance will run out, and when it does, there will be no struggle, just capitulation on Satan's part.

All of this would make Batman's world a false one if it is dualist. But I'm not sure it is dualist at all. It certainly looks like it is from what we can tell from the stories. But our own world looks like a dualist one from our perspective as well. Read the news. Does it look like good and evil are striving with one another? Does it look like good is winning? We only say that it looks like evil is prevailing because we lack the perspective to see the end of all things. And this is precisely what we lack in the Batman stories - the end. Christianity has an eschatology - a doctrine of the end; but Batman does not. His is an ongoing story that will not have a resolution as long as it is profitable to DC Comics! 

While I have no illusions that DC is run by a bunch of seminary students, I chose to believe that, in the end, Batman and Bruce Wayne can be resolved into one, whole man; that the Joker will be finally defeated; and Two-Face, like Bruce, will be made whole again. I think this is what we all hope for ourselves, to be made whole and not to live divided against ourselves, doing those things that we do not want to do and not doing those things that we do want to do. 

So I can't say if Batman is a Manichean or not because I can't see the end of all things. But the good news is, neither can he, so he will continue to fight evil in the hope that it can be defeated and the Batman version of the Kingdom of God can be ushered in so Gotham can enjoy rest and peace without worry of evil.

Masculine Batman's only superpower is his beard.

Holy Ancient Heresies, Batman!

The Batman is joyous because he absolutely nailed that drawing!

I am a Batman fan. And just so you know, I was a Batman fan before it was cool. In fact, I have five children and their names are Barbara, Bruce, Wayne, Alfred, Jim and the baby we are expecting will be named Selina. (Of course I'm joking; we plan to name her Rachel.)* Now that I have established my bonafides, let me clue you in to a problem I have had with The Batman and his myth. I have deep-seated fears that it may be a Manichean myth that has so captivated me.

What do I mean by Manichean? Ah, what a delicate question you have asked; one that, in the hands of a more careful expositor than I, would take many, many pages to explain. Even after this, you would likely be left scratching your head. So allow me to mix metaphors, cut to the chase and paint with a very broad brush; the Manicheans were a group of folks living circa the 5th century A.D. (You guessed it, they were a big splinter in the spiritual eye of St. Augustine during his youth.) Theirs was a gnostic cult that centered on the idea of dualism. For them, good and evil were separate and equal forces vying for control of the universe. So, to recap, we have a group of people who taught that the world was in a precarious balance between equally powerful forces of good and evil and that balance was always in danger of being upset.

Even Batman gets bored with his own drawings sometimes.

So what in the world does any of this boring nonsense have to do with Batman? Let's start with the big man himself, Bruce Wayne. Or do I mean Batman? It's a fun middlebrow exercise to ponder which of these is the "mask" that hides the other. Does Bruce Wayne put on a Batman mask so he can protect his identity and continue to live as "normally" as possible while he carries out his self-imposed mission to rid the streets of Gotham of crime and corruption? Or is it that Bruce Wayne is merely the mask that Batman puts on in the daytime; the mask that provides cover for his obsession with nocturnal crime fighting? The comics are certainly not forthcoming on this and an argument for either position could be made using them. So it seems that Bruce/Batman is in an ever constant tension about his own true identity.

A hero needs an anti-hero. And Batman has one of the all-time best antagonists in the Joker. I say this not because the Joker is cool or interesting, but precisely because he is not those things. In Batman, we have a hyper-rational, logical man who has definite goals he wishes to attain. In the Joker, we have none of those things. He is the opposite of Batman in every way. He doesn't seek to commit crimes in order to get anything or control anything. He only works against Batman. In fact, it seems that the Joker wouldn't exist if Batman didn't exist. There is nothing to the Joker, he is blank, he has no "secret identity", he has no definable motives. Some of you with an Augustinian bent would be tempted to say Joker doesn't exist properly speaking, he is merely the privation of Batman.

I bring two authorities to confirm this. First is Frank Miller in The Dark Knight Returns from 1986. This is a story that takes place about 10 years after Batman has retired. It is a world without wither Batman or the Joker. When Batman finally comes out of retirement, we see the Joker slowly emerge from his catatonic state. It is implied that the Joker has neither acted nor spoken since Batman disappeared 10 years previously. My second piece of literary evidence comes from a Legends of the Dark Knight story called Going Sane from 1994. In this story the Joker believes he has killed Batman. In short order he loses his memory, gets a name (Joseph Kerr!), a job and a girlfriend. He lives a normal, prosaic life. That is until Batman reappears at which time the Joker also reemerges.

So here we have two equal and opposite forces - both of which seem to be invincible and immortal (they've been fighting since 1939!). If this is true, then Batman cannot hope to "win", he can only ever balance out the evil committed by the Joker. 

It seems that Bruce Wayne/Batman is divided internally in his own person and externally against the Joker. In neither instance is he complete without his other half. What is Bruce without Batman? Is Batman even necessary without the Joker? Could Batman even exist if it weren't for Bruce? 

These are the questions that cause me to fear for the orthodoxy of my favorite superhero. Must I, like St. Augustine before me, shun this gnostic heresy? Must I  move my loyalty to the gnostic Christ of Superman (again with the heresies!)? Is there a possible solution that will satisfy; one that we can cling to as we stumble around the dark streets of Gotham? I think so, but we won't get there today. We have one more villain to deal with who is even more deeply and irrevocably divided than Bruce before we get to our resolution.

See you next time for part two.

*I'm not really that much of a nut. My kids all have real, non-comic book based names.

Picasso in Hell part 2

Last time I told you about why I painted Picasso in Hell. Today I will tell you about what's in it and why I put it there. But before I begin, let me reacquaint you with this excursion into the Inferno:

So, what the inferno is going on, Clark? Why does Picasso have freakishly large hands?! Look around the Googles at pictures of Picasso and notice how prominently his hands feature in a lot of those pictures. I thought this was appropriate seeing as how he made his living working with those hands. He was a manual laborer. He also smoked a lot. I know that wasn't really all that unusual, but still, I thought it would be fun to put a couple of cigarettes in there as a kind of testament to the excesses that landed him in hell in the first place.

Picasso of the large, nicotine stained hands.

The minotaurs are probably next on the list of things to talk about. As monsters, they are a travesty. In the Greek understanding of life, the universe and everything (and also partly in the Christian one), Man is the crowning glory of creation and the crown of Man is his head, or his reason. So to take a man and crown him with the head of a bull takes away his reason and lowers him to the state of an animal that is governed by his passions and appetites. Picasso once said “If you marked on a map all the routes along which I passed and drew a line to join them together, it would perhaps take the shape of a Minotaur.” This is fitting for a guy with a biography like his; one that is strewn with broken women and illegitimate children. 

The minotaur stowaway.

The bike seat in the boat was just for fun. It's a take on Picasso's famous bicycle/handlebars bull's head from 1942. But it's hell and you're not allowed to keep the cool stuff you've made. So there's a weird warthog sneaking in to filch it.

The bike thief caught in the act.

There are other things, of course, and you may even be wondering about them. Why is there a bug-winged dinosaur or a gas-masked... thing... in the sky? Who are the blue people? What's that giant killer whale doing in there? I'm glad you asked all of these things. In fact, I hope that you ask a lot more questions than that. Pictures are not books, they famously show they do not tell. So I think I have given enough decoder key type clues to this picture to satisfy the mildly curious. Keep looking and enjoy to spectacle.

(PS Think Hieronymus Bosch for the monsters in the sky!)

"Christian" art

What I am writing below is a reaction I had to a blog post by Peter Chin about why he really dislikes Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) but listens to it anyway. (You should probably read that first if you would like anything I have to say make sense.) This article made the rounds where I work and I reacted to it. I suppose it was partly because I have heard variations on this argument so many times about why it is okay for Christians to make bad artwork. I originally sent this to friends, so it is written with a smile on my face! Anyway, here are my thoughts:

Sorry [fantastic colleague], I can't follow you down the road of liking this article. If loving "secular" music is wrong, I don't wanna be right. What is the sense of listening to (pop) music that everyone concedes is no good? There is no joy in it. The best - the absolute best - the author can say is that it is not as disagreeable as "secular" music. (I think he sets up a huge false dichotomy here, by the way.) It's sort of milquetoast neutral lyrics set to highly produced music. It's bland, shallow and simplistic. If that's all there is, then I'll choose silence. At least there is a very long tradition of Christians (and Old Testament Jews) recommending silent meditation as a spiritual discipline. 

I will not concede that it is difficult to be creative within a discipline. If anything the opposite is true. Try being creative without any structure at all - I've never been able to do it. Not to mention, it doesn't seem like John Donne, Dante, John Bunyan, Tolkien, Lewis, Gerard Manly Hopkins, George Herbert, St. Francis, Anne Bradstreet and others had difficulty in being creative within the strictures of thousands of years of Christian thought. Of course those people all had things to say that were shaped and seen through their experiences of living a Christian life. I doubt very much if they gave a great deal of thought about systematic theology as they were writing their poetry and stories (Bunyan aside); rather, I would bet that since they were orthodox themselves, their work was naturally orthodox as well. (And don't think that "secular" artists have any less of an orthodoxy that they have to stick to. They will fail as commercial acts the moment they apostatize. Their orthodoxy is just a lot newer and is only as current as the spirit of the age.) 

I will also take issue with the idea that CCM is a ministry beyond the sense of what any of us do as Christians simply living our lives. I do not think that I am under any kind of proscription against writing, as he calls it, authentically in order to write infantile prose, poetry or music so as not to cause someone to "stumble". That is why we are given pastors. It's the job of the local church to foster spiritual formation, to help immature Christians to lose their illusions and to experience mature Christian life. Musicians do not have a para-church ministry as if they are, by definition, lay ministers. They are artists and they are to make good art. And good art is sometimes very difficult stuff. Holy smokes! For heaven's sake, I've actually read the Psalms! Talk about causing people to stumble! "The book of Psalms ... spits piss and vinegar at God in praise..."* David would never get a record deal today, he's just too hard. I suppose contemporary songwriters should look elsewhere than the Bible's songbook when they are composing their own tunes.

I think the real problem is how to make a marketable product. He's right that evangelicals are a thin skinned bunch. I would also say that for the most part they reflect very nicely the content of their music. Record labels are concerned with how to make a product that will meet all the criteria listed in this article as they are selling a product that reflects their market of consumers. Musicians need not be concerned with these issues - at least they don't as artists. 

Maybe the problem is that there is such a thing as CCM in the first place. If you've been reading about it at all, the music business is in a lot of trouble. The money does not flow like it used to - at least not from record sales. In fact, U2 just released their new album as a free download. It think the problem of insipid CCM may vanish in the near future as music becomes more easily available to listeners (almost) directly from the artists via online streaming websites. If musicians who are Christians want to write great songs with challenging music they will not have to deal so much with record labels as they will with a smaller but more discerning public. Lay it all out there! Let us hear about your dark night of the soul, how God has forsaken you, how you thirst for vengeance against the enemies of God; let's hear just how good and challenging of a musician you are - learn a 4th or even a 5th chord!

I have only reacted this way because I have been given this argument about a million different times in regards to "Christian" art. The excuses for bad art masquerading as somehow "Christian" are myriad and they are infernal. Geez, if making art or music to the glory of God were easy, everyone would do it! It's making a buck while doing it that seems to be the real issue.

*http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2013/08/the-egoism-of-god.html#ixzz3EeXKdIwa

Jormungandr

In Norse myth, Jormungandr is also known as the Midgaard Serpent or The World Serpent. The Greeks called it Orobouros. It is a monstrous serpent that circles the world; it is so large that it is able to stretch around the earth and still fit its tail in its mouth. This fitting of the tail into the mouth is telling because it speaks of cycles, repetition. 

This drawing is about many things. It's actually a pastiche of several different drawings that laid around in my studio for a long time before I knew what to do with them. The head was a demo for pen and ink and the gargoyle heads were for an illustration job of some sort. Jormungandr came later. I put all of this together because of my reading of Purgatorio in The Divine Comedy and CS Lewis' The Discarded Image. For the medievals, chance, fortune, mutability, change, sin, all of these things were alien to the heavens properly speaking. All that stuff only happened below the circle of the moon. (Did you see the moon in my drawing? Did you? Did you?) The title of my piece is Subjected to Futility and Beset with Temptations. Because we live below the circle of the moon, we are subject to things like temptations - we repeat cycles of temptation, self-denial, temptation, capitulation, repentance, temptation, self-denial, etc.

The Divine Comedy itself is, of course, based on circles, a spiral, and spheres. (My chart of Paradiso can be seen here.) In hell everyone is confined to a circle which is a never-ending cycle. Once in a circle, no one in it can ever leave it. In a sense, in hell, the serpent bites his tail and never lets it go. This is my diagram of hell and its circles:

This is a two page spread from my drawing book Sins Committed, Sins Remitted. There is an orange Jormungandr and a blue Ouroboros. My Ouroboros is crying for reasons that I will leave up to you, the viewer. (The red earthworm astronaut should maybe be ignored - or not, it's up to you.) I like the medieval artists' tendency to draw all of their animals with little ears and a dog nose. And plus drawing mammalian dragons is pretty fun. 

To sum up, Jormungandr and Ouroboros are cyclical monsters that devour themselves and they figure into my artwork somehow. I don't know how much more I have to write about them as I still find them both mysterious. I will just have to keep making drawings to figure it all out.

Making a Drawing - The Painting!

This is a cleverly titled part two of a previous post. There I discussed the ins and outs of making a drawing and inking it with pens. I also wondered why this generic looking man had the expression that he does. Who knows? But I figured he could use some color, the camera was still set up and so I went for it. The painting is very simple and was done in just a few minutes.

Making a Drawing

This is how I generally go about making a drawing. I did this as a demo piece for my students so they could see the steps from initial drawing to inking. The face is of no one in particular, it's just a generic man. He looks nonplussed about something or another. I wonder what he has to be so miserable about? Early on in the drawing he looked more alert, hopeful somehow. But it all seemed a sham; this dude is not having any of it. He hasn't even shaved in who knows how long?! How can you expect him to get all excited about your inane news?! Cut the guy some slack, mind your own beeswax and enjoy the short video.

Sheesh!

Picasso in Hell part 1

I am a big fan of the Divine Comedy by Dante. I won't write much about it here since that would be like trying to describe the Brothers Karamazov using only pictures from Awkward Family Photos. But please allow me to say a little bit. Dante populates his Inferno with a lot of people; some of them he knew by reputation and some of them he knew personally.

I started to wonder who he would put in hell if he was writing today. This may be a pointless exercise; I'm not sure. But I don't mean it out of any malice, so I don't think there is any harm. Looking back on recent art history (Dante has several artists in Purgatory on their way up to Paradise) I thought about Picasso as a colossal figure whose ego would demand that he be mentioned in a work like The Comedy. Knowing some of Picasso's biography, I think it is safe to assume Dante would have assigned him to hell.

While he would probably have landed in the circle of the lustful and their blowing winds, I put him down with the wrathful. Not because he was a particularly angry guy (I guess), but because I used Eugene Delacroix's Barque of Dante as my model.

I began this piece as a watercolor but soon became dissatisfied with the bland colors and flatness of the piece. I liked the drawing aspect of it and wanted to rescue that from mediocre painting.

I painted over the whole thing with oils. I didn't really add anything except the flaming city of Dis in the background. I switched up some colors and juiced everything for the electrifying spectacle seen below. 

There's a lot going on here and I will talk about the content of this picture next time in part 2 of Picasso in Hell.

Illustrations of Bugs

Once upon a time I had the idea that I would be a scientific illustrator. I really didn't know what doing that would entail. I figured I could just make some good bug drawings and BANG! I'd be a successful scientific illustrator. I found out that's not the way it works. After speaking with my entomology professor in college, I realized that while I truly love bugs and good drawings of bugs, I was probably not the guy to do it as a professional. This was not because of my abilities or anything like that, rather it was that I didn't want to go to school for a master's degree in entomology on top of what I had already done.

In the mean time, I still really like making bug drawings. Some real, some not so much.

Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, watercolor. I had quite a lot of these at one point but I got skeezed out and got rid of them.

This is a Florida Plant Footed Bug, watercolor and ink. No skeez factor here, it's just a cool looking relatively large bug.

Stag Beetle, pencil. These small stag beetles were super common where I lived in PA. I think their larvae ate the decaying mulch on playgrounds and the emerging adults were then easy to find while I was taking my kids to the park to play.

Mydas fly, pencil and white ink. One of my kids caught this Mydas fly at a playground. He just reached out and grabbed it. I had never seen a Mydas fly at this point and it looked very wasp-like to me. I prepared for the worst, but it never came. It just made a cool drawing.

Alien Insect Head, photoshop. Alien insect heads are not so real. I made this one up, but it was fun to draw all the imagined nooks and crannies.