Author: lindamayoux

http://davidshrigley.com/category/drawing-painting/

Examples of his cartoon animations

Talking about his work

Guardian article

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-st-ives/exhibition/anna-boghiguian

https://youtu.be/hSMiMEI0OiE

Chris Ware has been an important influence on the way I look at issues of image, text and narrative, and the possibilities of non-linear approaches.

Edited from Wikipedia

Franklin Christenson “Chris” Ware (born December 28, 1967), is an American cartoonist. His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression. He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail. His lettering and images are often elaborate and sometimes evoke the ragtime era or another early 20th-century American design style.

Ware often refers to himself in the publicity for his work in self-effacing, even withering tones.

I arrived at my way of “working” as a way of visually approximating what I feel the tone of fiction to be in prose versus the tone one might use to write biography; I would never do a biographical story using the deliberately synthetic way of cartooning I use to write fiction. I try to use the rules of typography to govern the way that I “draw”, which keeps me at a sensible distance from the story as well as being a visual analog to the way we remember and conceptualize the world. I figured out this way of working by learning from and looking at artists I admired and whom I thought came closest to getting at what seemed to me to be the “essence” of comics, which is fundamentally the weird process of reading pictures, not just looking at them. I see the black outlines of cartoons as visual approximations of the way we remember general ideas, and I try to use naturalistic color underneath them to simultaneously suggest a perceptual experience, which I think is more or less the way we actually experience the world as adults; we don’t really “see” anymore after a certain age, we spend our time naming and categorizing and identifying and figuring how everything all fits together. Unfortunately, as a result, I guess sometimes readers get a chilled or antiseptic sensation from it, which is certainly not intentional, and is something I admit as a failure, but is also something I can’t completely change at the moment.

Although his precise, geometrical layouts may appear to some to be computer-generated, Ware works almost exclusively with manual drawing tools such as paper and ink, rulers and T-squares. He does, however, sometimes use photocopies and transparencies, and he employs a computer to colour his strips.

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)

Graphic novel serialized in the alternative Chicago weekly newspaper Newcity and in Ware’s comic book Acme Novelty Library in issues #5–6, 8–9, and 11–14) from 1995 to 2000. Jimmy Corrigan is a meek, lonely thirty-six-year-old man who meets his father for the first time in the fictional town of Waukosha, Michigan, over Thanksgiving weekend. Jimmy is an awkward and cheerless character with an overbearing mother and a very limited social life. After an ill-timed phone call, Jimmy agrees to meet his father without telling his mother. The experience is stressful for him as he can barely communicate with anyone other than his mother, let alone his estranged father. The two do very little together and Jimmy’s father, while well-intentioned, comes off to Jimmy as slightly racist and inconsiderate. A parallel story set in the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 shows Jimmy’s grandfather as a lonely little boy and his difficult relationship with an abusive father, Jimmy’s great grandfather.

Building Stories (2012)

Graphic novel made up of fourteen printed works—cloth-bound books, newspapers, broadsheets and flip books—packaged in a boxed set (inspired by Duchamp??). The parts of the work can be read in any order.

The intricate, multilayered stories pivot around an unnamed female protagonist with a missing lower leg. It mainly focuses on her time in a three-story brownstone apartment building in Chicago, but follows her later in her life as a mother.

Loss is a dominant theme. The characters suffer loss in terms of relationships, romance, finance, weight, and in terms of the main character, loss of limb. The characters fear and resist these losses–though sometimes they desire it. As in other works by Ware, there is much interconnectivity—the smallest details have great importance in the work.

 

 

 Quimby the Mouse

Quimby the Mouse is perhaps Ware’s most autobiographical character. Quimby’s relationship with a cat head named Sparky is by turns conflict-ridden and loving, and thus intended to reflect all human relationships. While Quimby exhibits mobility, Sparky remains immobile and helpless, subject to all the indignities Quimby visits upon him. Quimby also acts as a narrator for Ware’s reminiscences of his youth, in particular his relationship with his grandmother. Quimby was presented in a series of smaller panels than most comics, almost providing the illusion of motion à la a zoetrope. In fact, Ware once designed a zoetrope to be cut out and constructed by the reader in order to watch a Quimby “silent movie”. Ware’s ingenuity is neatly shown in this willingness to break from the confines of the page. Quimby the Mouse appears in the logo of a Chicago-based bookstore “Quimby’s”, although their shared name was originally a coincidence.

 The Last Saturday

Ware’s latest project, The Last Saturday, a “comic novella,” began appearing online every Friday at the website of the UK newspaper The Guardian, starting in September 2014. The story follows a few people in Sandy Port, Michigan: Putnam Gray, a young boy caught up in his sci-fi and space fantasies; Sandy Grains, a young girl and classmate who is interested in Putnam; Rosie Gentry, a young girl and classmate with whom Putnam is infatuated; Mr. and Mrs. Gray and Mrs. Grains. The strip also features in the newspaper’s Weekend magazine.

The serialization has now apparently ended after 54 instalments. The bottom right-hand corner of the last page has a note that says, “END, PART ONE”, but so far there appears to be no indication from The Guardian or from Ware that there is to be a Part Two.

 Mural for 826 Valencia

Dave Eggers commissioned Ware to design the mural for the facade of San Francisco literacy project 826 Valencia. The mural depicts “the parallel development of humans and their efforts at and motivations for communication, spoken and written.” The 3.9m x 6m mural was applied by artisans to Ware’s specifications.Describing the work, Ware said “I didn’t want it to make anyone ‘feel good’, especially in that typically muralistic ‘hands across the water’ sort of way,”…”I especially wanted it to be something that people living in the neighbourhood could look at day after day and hopefully not tire of too quickly. I really hoped whomever might happen to come across it would find something that showed a respect for their intelligence, and didn’t force-feed them any ‘message’.”

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

In 2011, Ware created the poster for the U.S. release of the 2010 Palme d’Or winning film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Describing the poster, Ware said “I wanted to get at both the transcendent solemnity of the film while keeping some sense of its loose, very unpretentious accessibility… This being a poster, however—and even worse, me not really being a designer—I realized it also had to be somewhat punchy and strange, so as to draw viewers in and pique their curiosity without, hopefully, insulting their intelligence.”

Use of symbolic metaphor

leaps of imagination

See:

Google images for Tracey Emin Self Portrait

Tate page on Tracey Emin Self

https://youtu.be/43d_QPg2l1w

Savage Messiah

Later work

!! to work on further. Here cut and paste from Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Oldfield_Ford

Ford’s work subsequent to Savage Messiah tends to move beyond the zines’ focus on London and beyond the zine from, concerning other geographical spaces and adopting other forms including paintings and installations.^[38] Her work was also featured in Urban Constellations, a 2011 collection edited by Matthew Gandy.^[39] As of 2019 Ford was writing fiction and collaborating with the musician Jam City on work continuing the themes of the Savage Messiah project.^[2]

From January until March 2009, a collection of her work entitled London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins, including all ten issues of Savage Messiah, was featured in London’s Hales Gallery.^[22] Ford was one of three artists whose work was exhibited as part of Slump City at SPACE in London in June 2009.^[23] Another exhibition, Britannia 2013–1981 ran in Hatfield from November 2009 until January 2010.^[6]

In February 2011, Ford’s work was on display in Bristol as a part of Poster Sites, a project commissioned by Arnolfini.^[3] She created 11 posters based on dérives in the city; though Arnolfini produced a map and Ford led a walk between them, they were primarily left to be casually witnessed by the public.^[10] Also in 2011, her work was featured in Orbitecture, an exhibition at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool.^[3]

In 2012 her work was exhibited as part of There Is a Place… at The New Art Gallery in Walsall.^[24] Also in 2012, work by Ford inspired by El Raval and protests in Barcelona were featured in Desire Lines at the Espai Cultural Caja Madrid in Barcelona.^[25]

In 2014 Ford’s work was featured in Soft Estate at The Bluecoat in Liverpool.^[26] The same year, her work was included in Ruin Lust at the Tate Britain.^[27] Later that year a solo exhibition of paintings and collaged drawings entitled Seroxat, Smirnoff, THC ran at the Stanley Picker Gallery in Surbiton.^[28]

Her solo exhibition Chthonic Reverb ran at Grand Union Gallery in Birmingham in 2016. Featuring audio and visual work, the exhibition focuses on Birmingham, where Ford lived in the early 1990s, including Herbert Manzoni‘s impact on the city and the Big City Plan.^[29]

In 2017 Ford’s solo exhibition Alpha/Isis/Eden ran at The Showroom in London. The exhibition focused on the effects of urban regeneration in the neighbourhood surrounding the gallery near Edgware Road in central London, and included audio recordings of the area.^[1][30][31]

Themes and practice[edit]

Skye Sherwin of The Guardian writes that Ford’s work “focuses on areas haunted by an urban dispossessed, which regeneration seeks to concrete over: city wastelands where fortress-like old tower-blocks rise, with their Escher-like walkways and bleak ‘recreational’ open spaces.”^[3] These include the East End of London and the new towns of Harlow, Hatfield and Stevenage.^[6] Her work on the East End is critical of the 2012 Summer Olympics, held in London, and the associated development program,^[22] in particular the regeneration process surrounding the Olympic Park.^[23] Christopher Collier has argued that Ford’s work utilises “semi-fictionalised settings of dilapidated blue-collar and immigrant districts of a post-Thatcherite London increasingly ghettoised, defunded and threatened by the state.”^[32]

Her work also engages with architecture. In a 2009 interview Ford reiterated the centrality of a critique of urban regeneration, and expressed an interest in brutalist architecture (referring specifically to Broadwater Farm in Tottenham and Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar.^[33] Ford has argued that brutalism is significant due to “the collective ideals inherent in it: the rethinking and radical reshaping of public space, the idea of cities being conducive to an endless ‘derive‘, the postwar idea that everyone is entitled to a publicly owned house.”^[1] She also critiqued “an obsession with friendly looking architecture, curved lines, outgrowths of green roof tops, panels and balconies in Scandinavian wood or brightly coloured aluminium”, describing these trends as “playschool architecture”.^[33] In 2018, Ford noted that her recent work was concerned less with inner cities and more with suburbs and urban peripheries: “That’s mostly where you have to go now if you want to encounter the former intensity of zones 1 and 2 … It used to be the inner cities that were sacrificed, ruled by slum landlords, starved of investment and surrounded by circles of unreachable affluence. But in the past decade or so there has been an accelerated reversal of this process.”^[1]

In the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Andrew Harris wrote that London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins (2009) “attempts to reactivate more conflictual architectural, political and aesthetic strategies that have been largely erased by the widespread gentrification of London since the 1970s” and is an example of an intervention which offers “an important and neglected resource for complicating, disrupting and re-visioning understandings of urban change”.^[34] Paul Gravett describes Ford’s work as being fuelled by a longing for a past incarnation of the punk subculture and a “recovery of punk’s provocation and politicisation”.^[5]

Contemporary archaeologist James R. Dixon set Ford’s February 2011 Arnolfini exhibition against the April 2011 Bristol riot. Dixon saw in her work “the material conditions that can be identified as a contributing factors” in the riot, and noted that rather than being immediately apparent, those conditions are identified by Ford through the dérive technique and her use of found images. Dixon argues that, like the riot itself,

She describes her practise as centring on walks through London and the creation of “emotional maps”.^[6] Ford has said “I regard my work as diaristic; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting. The need to document the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and privatisation continues apace.”^[22] Discussing Alpha/Isis/Eden in 2018, she said “I walk around London to gauge what’s happening, to tune into the affective shifts. This is how I think about walking and memory, as a process of piecing fragments together to resurrect something, to stop them being erased, and to will something into being.”^[1] She also said, in the same interview:

While Ford’s work has been described as psychogeography, Mark Fisher suggested that it be understood instead in terms of Jacques Derrida‘s account of hauntology, in order to better understand the ways the urban spaces she depicts represent “ghosts” or political paths not taken.^[35] Christopher Collier, conversely, has proposed that Ford’s work be understood as both hauntology and psychogeography, and that such an approach allows a reappraisal of the politics of psychogeography.^[35] Collier argues that “Savage Messiah is psychogeographical in that it involves drifting through the city, exploring the effects of the environment upon behaviour and emotion”,^[36] but also draws on hauntology as a means of engaging “the failures of social democracy and post-war Modernist urban planning, but also … the collapse of the psychogeographic revival” of the 1990s.^[37]

Veronica Lawlor is a freelance illustrator based in New York. Most of her work is urban sketching and reportage. Her illustrations often include a combination of buildings and landmarks, street furniture, figures, crowds, and transport and convey a sense of place. She is known for her ability to do many fast sketches as well as drawing quickly for larger and more sustained drawings. She adapts the media she uses and aesthetic choices such as the use of colour and mark making, the selection of scene, content and focus, the illustrator to communicate a distinct personal interpretation of the event or scene. As Lawlor explains, “you’re touching the paper so your emotions come through the tactility.” (Brazell and Davies, 2014).

She creates artwork both directly on location, and also developed from sketches, collecting visual information, to capture fleeting moments in busy public events such as parades and festivals. Many of her illustrations give the impression of being drawn on location because of the fluidity of line, splashes of colour, sense of editing and compressing the content of a scene. But they were actually created within the more controlled environment of her studio.

Major works:

She is the president of Studio 1482. She also teaches drawing and illustration at Pratt Institute, Parsons, The New School for Design, and Dalvero Academy.http://www.veronicalawlor.com

Evan Turk is an illustrator, animator, and designer working in New York City. He specializes in travel illustration, on-location event reportage, cultural children’s books, and concept illustration for video games, animation, and advertising.

His illustration are very colourful and dramatic. Much of his work is in pastel on coloured paper. Other work is very experimental in his use of media as in the use of traditional Moroccan ultramarine and sugar tea in The Storyteller.

He also does animation concept work, using layered effects from his illustrations.

https://evanturk.squarespace.com

Saul Steinberg (June 15, 1914 – May 12, 1999) was a Romanian American cartoonist and illustrator. He described himself as “a writer who draws”. He works mostly in pen, often a single black line, to produce complex witty commentary on absurdities of life. In some of his illustrations he also incorporates black and white collaged elements and objects like thumbprints.

He is best known for his work for The New Yorker. His cartoons have been compiled and produced in a number of books.