Howard Pyle Exhibit Catalog Gripes

The Delaware Art Museum has an exhibit (November 12, 2011 – March 4, 2012) dealing with famed illustrator Howard Pyle (1853-1911). It opened three days after the 100th anniversary of Pyle's death.

The cover of the exhibit's catalog is shown above. If you can't visit the museum store, you can order the catalog here.

I have issues with the catalog. That's because it drifts a small way into the cesspool of academic political correctness which, in my possibly warped judgment, is unfair to both the subject and readers interested enough in the subject to fork over the $45 cost of the book.

First, the positive elements. I thought the chapter by illustrator James Gurney was especially informative, probably because he is knowledgeable about the history of illustration and understands the trade's practical aspects. As for the authors of the other chapters, I didn't at first know who they are because nowhere in the book is there any background information. Gurney is not identified either; I'm aware of him because I follow his blog (linked above).

Although there is some subject matter overlap, most of the chapters are informative, even the one dealing with Pyle and the Swedenborgian Faith that was related to some of his works.

One place that ruffled my feathers was a chapter titled "The Gender of Illustration: Howard Pyle, Masculinity, and the Fate of American Art" by Eric J. Segal. Some Googling suggests that this Segal is on the faculty of the University of Florida and has written about masculinity with respect to Norman Rockwell and the matter of race as related to the Saturday Evening Post magazine. "Gender" and race are two politically motivated academic obsessions of the last few decades, so I suppose Segal is doing a nice job of building his career dealing with those and related subjects. I regard this business of applying currently fashionable views as a yardstick for evaluating a past that was essentially unaware of them as both intellectually silly and potentially dangerous to the reputations of worthy historical figures. This chapter should never have been included in the catalog.

I also had a problem with part of the chapter "The Persistence of Pirates: Pyle, Piracy, and the Silver Screen" by David M. Lubin. Lubin's chapter isn't all that bad except where he takes several detours attempting to link piracy to late 19th century capitalists, a gratuitous gesture unnecessary to the chapter's subject. Lubin is on the faculty of Wake Forest University.

As for my overall reaction to the catalog, I would have preferred more larger reproductions of Pyle's art and a lot less "scholarly" analysis.

John Berkey Featured in Illustration

It's pile-on time. Illustration magazine just came out with its 36th issue which features ace illustrator John Berkey (1932-2008) and illustration-oriented blogs are already posting about the great event. So why not join in? After all, I too am a Berkey fan and wrote about him here just about a year ago.

The author of the illustration piece is Jim Pinkowsi who maintains a blog that has images of much of Berkey's work; the link is here. A Website by the Berkey estate is here.

Pinkowski's article has details on Berkey's use of casein paints, a medium I was never fond of. It seems that Berkey didn't use the paints out of tubes (though he might have early in his career), instead he mixed his own batches using raw pigments. Later he seems to have added acrylic binder to some of his mixes.

Let me propose two classes of classical illustrator (ignoring those using digital media for most of a given piece): There are those who paint using easels (Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, Dan dos Santos, Greg Manchess) and there are others who work on a drawing board. Drawing board based artists tend to be commercial artists who use gouache, airbrush and other water-based media on materials such as illustration board, though a small (less than 0.5 meter, say) illustration can be done on a drawing board using almost any kind of medium and support.

Berkey was a drawing-board guy. And he was shrewd enough to realize that working close to the image could degrade the result; it had to be viewed from farther away because the final version usually would be reproduced at a smaller size than the original -- in effect increasing the viewing distance. Berkey's eventual cure for this problem was a mirror setup. His drawing board was reflected using a mirror placed above it to another mirror placed at a distance. This double-reversal allowed him to view the work-in-progress at a distance of about eight feet (2.5 meters) without having to budge from his chair.

Here is how the setup looked from the perspective of the drawing board. This image was scanned from the book whose cover is shown below.

Pinkowski's blog includes other images of this setup.

The Illustration article is of interest because it contains more than just a bunch of Berkey's space ship images, great though they are. A nice selection of other subjects can be found, demonstrating Berkey's overall ability and versatility.

If you don't see the new issue of Illustration in your local Barnes & Noble's magazine rack, go the the Illustration site linked above and order before it is sold out.

In the Beginning: Robert Fawcett

Up until now, the items I've posted on early works by artists dealt with painters -- mostly modernists who began their careers painting in a more traditional manner. But recently I've been doing a little research on illustration art from the 1920s and 30s and stumbled across some early examples of work by illustrators mostly known for their later styles. So I thought I'd expand the concept to include illustrators.

The main source for the present post is the Annual of Advertising Art, an awards publication of the Art Directors' Club of New York (its history is here). The first volume appeared in 1922 and succeeding volumes have continued to the present. I found a number of early volumes in the stacks of the University of Washington's main library and took photos of selected pages: these photos are the source material for the "beginning" art in this post. Ideally, I should have made scans, but that wasn't convenient so I hope the inferior quality of the images won't be held too much against me.

Illustration for Sherlock Holmes story
Above is a characteristic illustration by Robert Fawcett (1903-67), one of the most successful illustrators in his day. A number of items about Fawcett can be found on the Web, and here are links to blog posts by Charlie Parker, Leif Peng, and David Apatoff -- the latter wrote the text for a recent book about Fawcett that I reviewed here.

Note Fawcett's mature style in the image above and compare it to some of his early work below. I cast dates as "c.1929" and so forth; my conjectural date is for the year preceding the year the Annual in which the image appeared was published.

Gallery

Illustration for Rayon advertisement - c.1929

Illustration for Knox Hats - c.1929

Lesquendiu lipstick advertisement illustration - c.1929

Illustration for Cadillac - c.1931

Illustration for Cadillac - c.1931
Note that the depiction of the couple in this illustration is nearly the same as in the illustration below. I don't know which was created first, but Fawcett was able to leverage his effort and his art director apparently either didn't notice what was going on or else didn't mind it.

Illustration for Cadillac - c.1931

Fawcett was in his late twenties when he did the work shown above. To be included in the Annual of Advertising Art was a major feather in an illustrator's career cap, so the young Fawcett was no slouch even though these works are unrecognizable to casual Fawcett observers.

Keep in mind that he was building his career in those days, not maintaining it. He was experimenting with the styles of around 1930, creating salable works while evolving towards the classical Fawcett idiom.

Flawed Golden Age Ad Art

Some observers place the Golden Age of American Illustration from the last few years of the 19th century up through the first two decades of the 20th. Me? I'm more partial to the 1920s and 1930s, possibly because that era interests me greatly and also because color printing technology continued its advance, allowing artists' intentions to be better realized.

Regardless, the publishing industry was crawling with illustrators during the heady late 1920s because color photography technology hadn't reached the state where resulting images reproduced as well as illustrators' work did. As always, quality of those illustrations varied. This variation was due to the spectrum of talent and skill of the illustrators as well as to deadline pressures resulting in rushed work.

Below are two examples of flawed illustrations that appeared in advertisements by important automobile companies of the day. One set of flaws is minor, another flaw is more noticeable: were the advertising agency art directors asleep at the switch?

This image is not from the original Hudson Motors ad, but rather a photo I took of a page from a book that included the illustration. (I used a photo because my available scanners can leave funny striped patterns when dealing with some printed images. In any case, my intent is discuss details, not the piece of artwork in general.)

The advertisement was probably for Hudson or Essex cars and the artist was Karl Godwin (not to be confused with the contemporary and better-known Frank Godwin). I have found little concerning Karl Godwin on the Internet, and this short post by Leif Peng contains most of what seems to be out there.

The illustration appears to be done in transparent watercolor, a difficult, unforgiving medium. Godwin did a nice job from a technical standpoint with the exception of that ugly, too-dark shaded area at the base of the neck of the girl at the top.

But the real mistakes have to do with the cloche hats at the top and left. Note that, in each case, the front base of the hats' crowns do not align with the foreheads of the wearers; their foreheads are, in effect, chopped just above the hats' brims. Putting it another way, trace the lines of the foreheads up from the eyebrows and continue the curves are they should appear naturally: such extended lines will fall outside the sides of the hat crowns.

Here is another Karl Godwin illustration, this for the 1929 Hudson. The kinds of defects noted above are not found here. (Well, just maybe there's a similar problem with the bathing cap of the girl at the top, but there's not enough image available to be certain.)

I do like Godwin's use of color. Very 1920s. Rich, toned-down effects. The orange skins are set off by purple shadows in a manner picked up in the early 1930s by Walter Baumhofer on his cover illustrations for Doc Savage Magazine (scroll down the link for examples).

This is a detail from a late 1920s advertisement for Willys-Knight automobiles. I don't know the name of the artist.

By the 1930s and 40s, illustration art for automobile brochures and advertisements usually featured smaller-than-normal people who were often placed closer to car windows than they could possibly be in reality -- the idea was to make the cars appear larger than they actually were.

This Willys illustration has a college theme, and Joe College, Jim College and Jerry College are scaled about the right size for the car. The problem is with Betty Coed, perched on the running board. She is much too small compared to both the guys and the car. Plus, her pose looks awfully familiar, though I can't place the source. Why didn't the art director catch this sizing error? Lack of oversight? Or was the printer deadline too soon for changes to be made? We'll probably never know.

Muddy Colors: An Illustration Group-Blog

I only recently stumbled across Muddy Colors, a group-blog written by some leading figures in the science-fiction and fantasy (SFF) genres, one illustration field where representational art (even if the subject is non-existent) still rules. It's a highly worthwhile blog, so I immediately added it to my Links list on the sidebar.

I'm not fully "into" art created by computer programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Painter, so I appreciate the fact that the Muddy Colors crew use traditional handwork media as much as possible for their illustrations. Moreover, they have a keen sense of historical representational art and classical illustration which informs their professional efforts.

Blog subjects include multiple views of works as they progress from thumbnail sketch to final art, tips regarding techniques, insider views of the business side of illustration, occasional interviews with artists not part of the group, news of upcoming events such as conventions and master-classes, and even something called Crit-Submit whereby aspiring illustrators send in works to be evaluated and (often) digitally modified or corrected by a group member.

Go to the blog for a full list of contributors on the sidebar. I'll mention four of them here and toss in a few images for good measure. The instigator of Muddy Colors is Dan Dos Santos an articulate art-book junkie who specializes in book cover art. Donato Giancola (who professionally goes by the name "Donato"), considered a leader in the field despite the fact that he must deal with the consequences of an eye injury "which destroyed the macular region of my right eye (the part that lets you see detail, and yes it was permanently destroyed)." Greg Manchess who does not restrict himself to SFF. He painted a mural for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Illinois, created images for postage stamps and did illustrations for publications such as National Geographic. Arnie Fenner, who along with his wife Cathy, created and continued Spectrum, an annual publication featuring jury-selected SFF art.

Gallery

Dos Santos illustration

Book cover by Dos Santos

Illustration by Donato

Manchess self-portrait

Cover of recent Spectrum, punk Wizard of Oz illustration by Manchess

Herb Kane, Illustrator of Hawaiian History

Herbert "Herb" Kawainui Kane (1928-2011, last name pronounced KAH-nay) was an illustrator of Hawaiian-Danish descent who abandoned a career in commercial art in Chicago to return to Hawaii and create paintings illustrating Hawaiian history. Plus, he instigated the building of replica catamarans that duplicated voyages by Hawaii's Polynesian settlers. For more details on his career, here is his Wikipedia entry.

I'll present some of his views on art and illustration in a follow-up post and focus here on the art he created.

Kane was basically an illustrator in the sense that he tried to convey the appearance details of people, man-made objects and nature as they were in times past. This required a good deal of research along with personal knowledge of sailing techniques and acquaintance with Hawaiian and Polynesian culture. Therefore, in his paintings tended to be "hard-edge" (not "painterly") in style so that he could present as much detailed information as possible. Exceptions were allegorical works dealing with Hawaiian gods and legends.

My own taste runs to adding a dash of the painterly. For example, I tend to be less fond of depictions of aircraft that include lots of little dots representing rivets than of pictures showing non-center-of-interest parts of an aircraft slightly out of focus (such as they would be seen in person).

Nevertheless, I find Kane's approach both suitable for his purposes and satisfying from a visual standpoint. Below are images of some of Kane's work. Original-size versions are much more impressive than what you see here; click images to enlarge for slightly better views.

Gallery

Wa'a
One of a series Kane painted of Polynesian sailing craft.

Ka'anapali 200 Years Ago
This beach on western Maui is now lined with resort hotels.

The Arrival of Keoua Below Pu'ukohola
The rival king to Kamehameha approaches the stone temple and soon will meet his death.

Kamehameha Landing
Kamehameha and his army landing on Oahu near Waikiki Beach. Note the swivel cannon on Kamehameha's craft and the Western style sailing ship in the background.

Kamehameha at Kamakahonu (detail)
The aged king at what is now Kailua-Kona.

Moment of Contact
Captain James Cook's ships meet native Hawaiians off Kauai, 1778.

Pele
The Hawaiian goddess of fire and vulcanism.

Hula Holoku
Multiple views of a hula dancer wearing a holoku gown. I find this image charming.

Noel Sickles: A Cartoonist Who Could Draw Really Well

The key words in the title of this post are "really well." All cartoonists by the nature of their game have to draw. Some (I won't mention names) can hardly tell which end of a pencil is pointy. But a few, by the time they hit their stride, were top-notch draftsmen who maintained a high level of quality despite a highly demanding deadline environment. Examples from the classic era of comic strips include Hal Foster ("Tarzan" "Prince Valiant"), Burne Hogarth ("Tarzan") and Alex Kotzky ("Apartment 3-G").

And there is another class of top-notch comic strip artist, cartoonists who were skilled enough to do commercial illustration at the "slick" magazine level. John Cullen Murphy ("Big Ben Bolt" "Prince Valiant"), Frank Godwin ("Connie" "Rusty Riley") and Alex Raymond ("Flash Gordon" "Jungle Jim" "Rip Kirby") did this to a limited extent, but remained in comic strips. Then there was Noel Sickles (1910-82) who switched completely from strips to slicks (and other publications).

The Wikipedia link above is limited, so if you want to pursue Sickles' career in depth, I recommend this book which contains his "Scorchy Smith" panels along with many examples of his post-Scorchy work.

So how well could Sickles draw? Take a look (click to enlarge most images):

Gallery

Scorchy Smith panel out-take

Servicing AVG (or perhaps 14th Air Force) P-40, China

Colonial scene

Cold War scene

Life magazine cover

Comp sketch

Comp sketch

Oh, did I forget to mention that Sickles was versatile?

More Walter H. Everett Illustrations Appear

Based on the surviving fraction of his work that he himself mostly destroyed, I judge Walter H. Everett to be one of the very finest painter-illustrators of 20th century. I last wrote about him here.

Until fairly recently little could be found on the Internet. But Leif Peng recently posted some Everetts that I hadn't encountered before. Peng found them on Greg Newbold's blog, and Newbold mentioned that he had been trading Everett scans with Kev Ferrara. The illustration at the top of this post is from the group of "new" Everetts just mentioned.

Clearly I've been well out of the Everett image loop, so I hope that Kev or Greg Newbold will drop a hint as to where those images were found. Regardless, the images solidify my initial judgment regarding Everett.

Henry C. Pitz in his book The Brandywine Tradition characterized Everett as follows:

Everett was cocky and confident, short but broad and deep-chested, with knotted arms like a wrestler. He had a strongly modeled, dark-skinned, rather handsome and pugnacious face that seemed to threaten bad temper. All this left one unprepared for the eventual discovery that behind this manner was a vein of poetry. Although he possessed all the outward signs of a brusque man of incessant action, he was in his heart a dreamer -- a daydreamer, incorrigibly lazy....

All his best pictures, even those of banal subject matter, had some flavor of an imagined world. His people were believable but not ordinary. Most pictures had a secret place; a tantalizing area where nothing was explicit, but where the eye was coaxed to muse and speculate. He preferred tonal subtleties, close values, edges that were lost and then found again....

Yet he was difficult, for he hated deadlines. Things were put off until the last moment or beyond it. He loved the long indolent hours of dreaming about pictures he would paint and when the day for delivery arrived he would go fishing to avoid the insistent telephone calls. Editors, wise in his ways, planned to spend the last twenty-four or forty-eight hours before deadline in his studio while he painted furiously and surely... For once galvanized into action, he was amazingly rapid and certain -- a true temperamental virtuoso.

Everett was a student of immensely influential Howard Pyle who is best known for illustrations featuring pirates and Revolutionary War themes.

So the illustration above from the May 1897 Ladies Home Journal strikes me as unusual. Moreover, compare it to the Everett below:

If the Pyle illustration had been painted around the time Everett was his student, I'd be wondering if the work was partly done by Everett, many of whose works are similar in spirit and also include blossoms. As things stand, it's possible that Everett was aware of that illustration even though he was 16 or 17 at the time it appeared in a women's magazine. Or perhaps Pyle has similar material to show his students while Everett was there.

(My source for the the Pyle publication date is Arpi Ermoyan's Famous American Illustrators, page 64.)

Bernie Fuchs in Telluride

I am kicking myself. Really hard. You see, I was in Telluride, Colorado, the old mining town - cum - deluxe ski resort in September and had totally forgotten that illustration master Bernie Fuchs painted views of the area and was the subject of a major exhibit in a gallery there a year or so before he died. I have a copy of the catalog and had I remembered to do so, I could have brought it along and correlated his Telluride scenes with what I was observing. This would have been interesting because artists necessarily have to be at least a little selective in what details they paint and also can invoke artistic license if deemed necessary.

For readers not familiar with Fuchs, here is his Washington Post obituary, here is a post by David Apatoff, a blogger who knew Fuchs personally and here is the Web site of the Telluride Gallery which held the exhibit and sells his works.

Since I didn't duplicate Fuchs' points of view, the best I can do here is pair two of his paintings with two of my photos that deal with the same subjects, but from different viewpoints. Also, he painted in winter whereas my photo showing mountains includes a dusting from an early storm that passed through two days earlier.

Telluride Looking East - 2007

Looking down East Colorado Avenue
Fuchs placed himself a block or two farther east than from where I shot my photo. His painting has a telephoto lens perspective, so it's quite possible that he worked up the painting from a reference photograph.

Winter Noon on Main Street - 2008

New Sheridan Hotel
My shot of the old (but recently restored) New Sheridan was taken from directly across the street whereas Fuchs seems to have selected the lane in the middle of Easy Colorado that is used as a zone for temporary parking for unloading while checking into the hotel.

Adam Hughes Draws Cover Babes

The best comic book art is usually found on the covers. That's because an artist can spend more time on a cover illustration than on any one of all the panels required for inside illustration. Oh, and the publisher always wants a flash cover that will generate sales, so that adds to the motivation.

An illustrator whose career has focused on cover art is Adam Hughes (born 1967). His Wikipedia entry is here, his web site here and he also has posted work and comments here.

The image above is the cover of his book dealing with cover work done for DC over the last 20 years along with other items. It seems to be doing well because the copy I recently bought is from the fourth printing.

Allow me to confess that I don't follow the comic book trade nor that of the graphic novels field. It's all so complicated these days what with editors and writers valiantly trying to keep their products fresh by reinventing backstories, creating alternative universes, assembling new character juxtapositions and diving headlong into politically correct themes. When I was a kid reading comic books, the superheroes simply went about their business of dealing with criminals of various sorts.

Another change from the good old days -- one that I approve of -- is the improved quality of cover art. Nowadays there is a body of illustrators who create dramatic scenes whose impact is heightened by the sound drawing and anatomical knowledge of the artist. Such illustrations and their creators are so prized that collections of their work are published in book form, as is the case for Hughes.

But Adam Hughes differs from the rest of that pack: he includes humor and a general light touch as opposed to depicting stern scenes of superheros in conflict with their opposition. Examples are shown below.

I wish I knew more about Hughes' background. He was born and raised in New Jersey but spent most of his career in Atlanta. He has called himself a high school dropout and on another occasion claimed that he didn't go to college because he was, as he has put it, too middle class to get financial aid and didn't muster the grades and test scores to earn a scholarship. As for art, he is essentially self-taught, which is probably a good thing; the usual art school training would have wasted a lot of his time.

That said, Hughes comes off as a sharp cookie in the commentaries he likes to make on many of his works. He knows art history and color theory plus a good deal of general history and other useful knowledge. I didn't catch any serious errors while reading through those commentaries. And by the way, those commentaries are salted with humorous bits; buy the book and enjoy!
Gallery

Catwoman head rendering stages
This shows stages of Catwoman's head as it appears on the book cover. The image to the left is in ink and colored markers. It was scanned into Photoshop where coloring, shading and other details were added; this is Hughes' typical approach, though his convention demonstrations go no further than the ink and marker stage.

Cover art for Catwoman No. 56
This isn't Catwoman, but instead her apprentice Holly who's recuperating at a diner after a rough night learning the cat burglar trade.

Power Girl
The Power Girl character is mega-stacked, and Hughes had some fun with it here.

Bookplate for Hughes' San Diego Comic-Con materials
Hughes is a big Art Nouveau fan and likes to use that style when he can get away with it. That's Wonder Woman, by the way.

Wonder Woman and Lois Lane dish while Superman ponders
Besides Catwoman, Hughes did a lot of Wonder Woman covers. He likes this illustration a lot because Wonder Woman is relaxed and smiling, which he feels is her true character.

Illustrators and World War 2

Once upon a time there was a war on, and nearly everyone pitched in to fight or provide support for those who did.

This was true for illustrators and the clients they worked for. World War 2 illustrations and photos in American advertisements (along with some stray government promotional works, editorial content and even comic strip panels) are the subject of a book by the Frenchman Georges Grod who came to love American aircraft and related advertising as a boy at the time of the Liberation. The cover with a fine J.C. Leyendecker illustration for Goodyear Aircraft (yes, the tire company built planes too) is shown above and a link to Amazon is here.

Although illustrations are scattered throughout the book, one chapter is devoted to illustrators organized alphabetically. Each illustrator is given a short biographical note and examples of his work in war advertising are shown nearby. Featured illustrators include Melbourne Brindle, Reynolds Brown, John Gannam, Clayton Knight, Jo Kotula, Fred Ludekens, Paul Rabut, Noel Sickles, Thornton Utz and even Coby Whitmore.

Some advertisers used ads to push their products, but did this in the framework of wartime. Others such as automobile companies no longer had products to sell, but advertised their war manufacturing in part to remind people that they were still in business and (perhaps) to keep their name in mind for after the war. In many cases advertisers were able to make a strong link to the war effort, but others sometimes had a large stretch to do so. Below are a few examples I located on the Web.

By Dean Cornwell

By Saul Tepper

By Ray Prohaska