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.

The Old Man

For years I have struggled with the Old Man. St. Paul uses the imagery of the Old Man to talk about what a man (or woman) is before life in Christ. He says the old man has been crucified with Christ and that we no longer live to him (the Old Man) and he calls for us to cast off this old man. This is a very easy thing to say but not so much in the doing. 

I've tended to deal with it in my artwork in a couple of ways. The first is with the idea of the old man being a literal other body like we have here:

That which I would, that I do not!

At conversion it seems that a man is split in two; with a New Man and an Old Man, both of which vie for control. This is wonderfully and confoundingly explored in Romans chapter seven.

Another way I have thought about the Old Man is through the image of a minotaur. I have about three tons of minotaur drawings. Here are a couple of them:

Minotaur as sinner

Minotaur as tempter

Minotaur as an identity to be tried on

Minotaur as an identity to be cast off!

 What exactly is a minotaur? Here's my understanding of this beast. Man is the pinnacle of creation – we are made in the image of God. And our minds (or hearts) are understood to be the thing most like God. He reasons, we reason; He feels, we feel. But the Minotaur is an obscenity. He is a man, but his reason or heart has been replaced with that of a beast. The minotaur is the complete abdication of a man's mind and passions to his base, animal desires.

I see both of these images – that of the dual-man and the minotaur – as fertile material for exploring St. Paul's compelling imagery. Of course, there is a ton more to say about both the Scriptures and even about my drawings of them. But these are drawings and they are meant to be looked at and not read about!

Taking Pictures, Making Pictures

Remember waaaayyyy, waaaayyyyy back when people used film? Back when you used to drop off your film and quiver with anticipation at what you would get back in a day or two? Or one hour if you were a big spender? Or how about this; you discover the holy grail of photography: the roll of forgotten and undeveloped film. The suspense was intense.

Not so much anymore. Everyone has a million pictures on his phone and photographs are largely throw-away things. Oh well, that's the way things go.

But what about those old photos? I used to keep almost all of them. Even the really bad ones because who knows? Maybe I'll think of a good use for them. These are all photo-collages that I made using old photographs.

Dream of the Advancing Minotaurs

For the Dream of Advancing Minotaurs, I used a picture of an old etching and pictures of my Dad and myself holding up a bull skull like we're a couple of minotaurs. By the way, that bull skull was one of the best Christmas presents I have ever gotten.

Matt and Amy

Both of these images are temptation scenes. That's about all I want to say about them.

Nimrod and His Father

The pictures on the left are of an etching and woodcut while the drawing of the snake on the right is a preparatory piece for a linocut. It so happens that I've always seen these images as part of a whole composition. I suppose the way I have reinforced that conception is by having the far left coil of the snake spill over slightly onto the preceding page. 

Anywho, if you have a bunch of old photographs, hang on to them. They may come in handy.

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!)

Here are a couple more drawings out of my new drawing book (which is still unnamed).

This old codger was at the same conference as the female minotaur below. He appeared not to be bored at all as he was smiling and laughing to himself through almost all of the sessions I was in with him (which was quite a few - it was a rather small conference). I have no idea why no one else at the conference was bothered by the presence of an aging minotaur. And also, he had a neck beard.

The character on the other page, which shares a common background with the minotaur, is a sort of terranaut, I suppose. The color blue is the only thing they have in common.

As I mentioned earlier, I have begun a new drawing book. I made rules for my last book - I only drew things that I could observe from life. So far, it looks like I am rebelling against that rule in this book. I have drawn a lot of monsters so far. The woman on the left is real - I saw her at a conference and drew her while she was listening to an unbelievably boring session on something or another. A true confession, I have always loved minotaurs. I do not have any idea why. But here she is, a middle aged minotauress as she sits in quiet contemplation.

On the other side is a man contemplating Rembrandt. So I suppose these two are joined in the act of thinking. This head is made from the leftovers from a collage I did years ago. (I almost never throw things away.) Rembrandt comes from a demo piece for relief printmaking I did for school. There's no real reason to make a print of Rembrandt besides the fact that I love him even more than I do minotaurs.