Family Resemblances part I

After finishing my last drawing book, Interplanetary Ambassador,  I knew I had made a mistake in the way I was thinking about the art of a drawing book. If you'll remember, I said I finished that book in about 8 months. Well, this new book will take 4 years to finish. It's called Family Resemblances because everything in it sort of looks like it belongs; nothing is quite the same as everything else, but it isn't separate either. You know? Anyway, I got the name from Ludwig Wittgenstein which you can read about here if you want to. It's not that I was reading Wittgenstein so much as I think I was listening to a lecture about him. Or something like that. The name stuck in my brain and it seemed to work well for this book.

We got some natural history action here. Birds will fly into windows and I will try not to let them go to waste.

I say this book took four years to make. That's because I had gotten my MFA, moved away for "work" and had a baby (my wife actually had the baby; but I was there!). All of a sudden I found that life was not so amenable to me spending untold hours toiling away in my drawing books. It's a big book, no doubt, but not that big, for Pete's sake. I was just unsettled and not able to work on my artwork. It happens.

Oh, yeah! Collage! The bull skull on the right was one of the greatest Christmas gifts I have ever gotten.

I went back, more or less, to the every-page-is-a-work-of-art model that I had gotten into before. That's okay I guess because I really love this book! There are plenty of pages that I still like very much. In fact, there are so many that I will split this post into two. But isn't that self indulgent? I suppose so, and thank you for asking. Certainly you are concerned – especially in this season of Lent – that I am too focused on myself. Well, the thing is, this is my blog where I write about my own work. So I guess it's okay.

Minotaurs and Monsters – a Clark classic.

This one had a lot of impact on later artwork for me. It's genesis (pun!) goes all the way back to Natural History and will continue into a few linocuts that I made as illustrations for the book The Beginning: A Second Look at the First Sin published by Square Halo Books.

Here's another one that grew legs and made its way into a larger painting which you can read about here.

Next time I'll write more about what some of these images are about.

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!)

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.