Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Harmonies of the Spheres line work


The author of the visionary text I am setting to image here is a composer of avant-garde music, so some of the ideas he uses are musical ideas. In this panel, number 6, I incorporate not only stylized musical staffs with whole notes, but an actual sample from his hand-written music manuscript, which was sent through the mighty Internet and processed in the equally mighty Photoshop. One of the Seven Creatures, the golden wildcat, is at lower right. The text will go where the ringed planet is, just above the music writing.

These days I feel that I want to concentrate on sequential art (the poorly named "comic books") when I am not doing commercial commissions. That has always been a prime goal for me, to do graphic novel and sequential work. This has never been respectable "art" in the USA but in the last decades has gained ground as "serious" work. In Europe the "bande designee" or comic frames has always been considered fine art, since in places like France and Belgium and Italy words and pictures and frames have always been a part of their art environment on the walls and stained glass windows of churches and in illuminated manuscripts. 

I also am working on a physically smaller scale, or digitally. The experience of caring for and storing my mother's large, heavy paintings, and giving them away for free to relatives and collectors, has shown me what the future of such a "fine art" production is. That is, lost to everyone except a few private viewers and collectors. I believe that art is communication and that art deserves to be seen and shared, not stashed away for decades in a garage as my mother's work was. With the help of the better functions of the Internet as well as digital storage options (even if they might not last and become obsolete) my art can communicate without being hidden away in a dusty parlor or an obscure attic.

Drawing is in marker and Photoshop, 7 3/4" x 4 1/2", March 27-28, 2017. Colors soon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Many thanks for the history lesson in European art. I didn't make the connection. I need to look up a book Robert Graves wrote about the interpretation of a series of plaques which also appears in King Jesus. He claimed that numerous problems about the story of Adam and Eve were the result of reading the plaques the way we do read everything, from left to right. Back then people read in a fashion he called "boustrephedon" or as the ox plows. The Israelis can do this too.