“I have had to go to men as sources in my painting because the past has left us so small an inheritance of woman’s painting that had widened life….Before I put a brush to canvas I question, “Is this mine? Is it all intrinsically of myself? Is it influenced by some idea or some photograph of an idea which I have acquired from some man?”
Some people have found it helpful to think about the history of the feminist movement in terms of first, second and third waves. Broadly speaking, these are:
First wave – from the formation of the National Women’s Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1867 to full female enfranchisement in the UK in 1928.
Second wave – from the feminist movements associated with the American civil rights movement of the early 1960s to equality legislation in the UK in the 1970s.
Third wave – from the 1980s to the present day, more about social and political change than legislative change.
Some early women photographers did do serious topographical work in the late nineteenth and early 20C:
Evelyn Cameron,
Laura Gilpin,
Frances Benjamin Johnson
Elizabeth Ellen Roberts
Artistic photography, continuing the ‘genteel’ occupations for lady sketchers and watercolourists, was also conducted by:
Anna Atkins
Julia Margaret Cameron
Lady Hawarden
Lady Elizabeth Eastlake
But their work was more closely aligned with the family album, documentary and performance, rather topographic. (ibid, p.188). Feminist discourse since the 1970s has rejected the monopoly of the male gaze and articulated the female point of view in relation to the landscape. Social and technological developments have also made serious photographic excursions into the landscape considerably more accessible (Wells, 2011, p.189). A number of female photographers have, in one form or another, engaged with feminist politics in relation to the landscape and the concept of nature, as well as the male gaze. For interesting feminist and other modern approaches see:
Helen Sear’s series Grounded (2000), in which she digitally combines photographs of skies with images of animal hides photographed at a museum.
Jo Spence subverts classical depictions of nude female figures within idealised settings.
Elina Brotherus
Karen Knorr
Susan Trangmar
Sian Bonnell
Barbara Kruger
Joan Fontcuberta Bodyscapes (2005) employ three-dimensional imaging software used for military applications to render landscape images of close-up photographs of his own body.
Peter Kuper is an American illustrator and cartoonist. Some of his work is overtly political, some if reflective. But all of his work has an implicit political undertone.
I am trying to bring myself back to the smiley face.
We desperately need to have artists who will tell us about the world, to describe the beautiful world we live in and try to give hope.
Be kind and be positive.
We live in an inspiring world.
Peter Kuper does both his own personal and commissioned work. He does a lot of work for free eg all the editing and work by all authors in World War 3 was done without payment. But provided a springboard to future work.
Peter has lectured extensively throughout the world and has taught comics and illustration courses at Parsons, and The School of Visual Arts and Harvard University’s first class dedicated to graphic novels. He was the 2020-21 Jean Strouse Fellow at The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center and received a 2022 Yaddo residency.
Translations of his work have appeared in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Slovenia, China, Brazil, Poland, Sweden, Israel, Germany and Mexico.
More recently he has become interested in the potential of e-publishing as a way of bridging print and animation, and possibilities for including links to video and external information.
Peter Kuper’s work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Mad , where he has written and illustrated “Spy vs. Spy” every issue since 1997. He is the co-founder of World War 3 Illustrated, a political comix magazine now in its 43rd year of publication.
He has produced over two dozen books including Sticks and Stones (winner of The Society of Illustrators gold medal), The System, Diario de Oaxaca, Ruins (winner of the 2016 Eisner Award) and adaptations of many of Franz Kafka’s works into comics including The Metamorphosis. His most recent graphic novels include Kafkaesque (winner of the 2018 Rueben award) andan adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
His New York sketchbooks were published as as series of short fiction works in different styles in ‘Drawn to New York’.
His Exhibition INterSECTS: Where Arthropods and Homo sapiens Meet was on display at the New York Public Library Jan. 14- Aug 13th 2022. He is currently working the on INterSECTS, a graphic novel on the history of insects that will be published by W.W. Norton in 2024.
Connections between his sketchbooks and his creative identity and illustrative style?
Sketchbooks are central to his practice.
He always keeps small sketchbooks with him as he travels on the subway.
He then uses larger sketchbooks to refine his drawings and practise techniques. And to map out book plans.
If I draw in one style too long I get bored.
He works in many different media:
mixing crayon, pen, ink and watercolour often adding digital colour over ink
gluestick collage
stencilling and spray paint
scratchboard and woodcut eg in Kafkaesque
He does a lot of research, draws from photographs and spends time writing on location to experience what he draws.
From my research before the assignment I did not find very much that was particularly striking, compared to sketching techniques I had looked at from other places. Much of it was fairly conventional ink and wash, with some watercolour like the very detailed ink and wash of Peter Wenman. Some etchings that I find too flowery by Walter Keesey from 2013 and Cambridge:The Watercolour Sketchbook with illustrations by Graham Byfield whose style I find quite insipid.
My main new influences from Cambridge were:
Frank Hopkirkink line drawings – often using just one continuous line. He produced a number of cards of drawing of Cambridge musicians that I bought at the 2016 Open Studios.A key resource for much further exploration going forward to level 3 – is a recent publication (only available just before Christmas 2017):The Cambridge Art Book: the City through the Eyes of its Artists edited by Emma Bennett 2017. The official website has links to the websites of the different artists. The selection on the site is not however the selection I would have made. I have not included actual images here as I am not sure of the Copyright protocol with the galleries and artists.
The artists I find most innovative and interesting – though I discovered these artists too late to explore these techniques in my Assignment – are:John Tordoffwho combines collage – often newspapers – to create tone and texture. His images in the book and on the Byard Art gallery site are very moody, often twilight time, using dark tones and skies, often with windows with lights on. For some reason these are not on his website. I particularly like: Green Street, Walking at Night, What’s on in Cambridge!, Cambridge market, Bridge of Sighs. He also does iPad paintings, but I do not find these as accomplished or interesting as his other work or other iPad art.
Claire Caulfieldwho often combines printmaking with other media. Here images often have an exaggerated curvature of linear perspective to give a dynamic lead in and/or isometric overview and other distortions. Her pen drawings use a range of distinctive ink styles. In her drypoint and chine colle the drypoint gives a very distinctive line to her images and the chine colle add texture as well as colour. Her website also has screenprints some of which also use acrylic and watercolour – these also have a very distinctive irregular line that give a lot of atmosphere and dynamism to the image.
This is the first major UK exhibition devoted to Anna Boghiguian (born 1946, Cairo, Egypt). First organised by Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, it brings together notebooks, drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures and large-scale installations, including a new work made for Tate St Ives.
Books have been central to Boghiguian’s work since the 1980s, from bound volumes and concertina folds to series of single drawings that recall film frames. Equally, Boghiguian’s walk-through installations such as The Salt Traders 2015 and Promenade dans l’inconscient 2016 are like giant pop-up books.
Boghiguian has travelled all her life. The daughter of an Armenian clockmaker, she studied political science and art in Cairo, Egypt in the 1960s and arts and music in Montreal, Canada in the early 1970s. While keeping her studio and home in Cairo, Boghiguian travels extensively, bringing direct knowledge of world cultures and politics into her work.
A close observer of the human condition, Boghiguian proposes a unique and diverse interpretation of contemporary life. She draws equally on the past and the present, poetry and politics, joyfulness and a critique of the modern world.
The best overview of her artistic vision and work in French. Mapping the interlinkages across the world, through time and between objective and subjective.
This work is inspired by Dak Ghar (The Post Office), written in 1912 by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Anna Boghiguian has recreated the characters and settings of Tagore’s play through paintings and cut-out figures inspired by props used in forms of folk theatre.
Tagore’s play tells the story of Amal, a boy confined to his home by a serious illness, who dreams of receiving a letter from a king. Amal’s separation and death are considered to represent India when it was under British rule (1858–1947). To research this work, Boghiguian visited Santiniketan, India, where Tagore founded a school promoting outdoor teaching.
Boghiguian’s work also pays tribute to educator and writer Janusz Korczak (1878–1942). During the Second World War, Korczak staged The Post Office as a play at his orphanage. This children’s home was in the Warsaw Ghetto, where Jewish citizens were imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Korczak and the orphans were later transported to the Nazi death camp at Treblinka in 1942.
Made up of painted sails, collages, honeycombs, sections of a boat, red wool and salt, this work is inspired by the commerce and history of salt. It is based on a story imagined by Anna Boghiguian about an ancient Roman salt ship emerging from melting polar ice in the year AD 2300. In Boghiguian’s story, future civilisations use this ship to learn about the history of their world.
In ancient China, Egypt, Rome and elsewhere, salt was a valuable commodity used to preserve food. The Latin salarium (salt money) is the origin of the word ‘salary’. The trade of salt has contributed to the creation of ports and shipping routes that have triggered human migrations to the present day.
The Salt Traders links world events relating to salt across history: the travels of Alexander the Great to salt lakes in Egypt; Mahatma Gandhi’s pacifist Salt March in India; and the recent economic crisis in Greece, which Boghiguian terms ‘a collapse of bread and salt’. She has mapped these histories, as well as scientific formulae related to salt, onto the various elements of her installation.
PROMENADE DANS L’INCONSCIENT (A WALK IN THE UNCONSCIOUS) 2016
This installation brings together stories, people and symbols from the history of the city of Nîmes, France. It is named after the title of Anna Boghiguian’s exhibition in Nîmes in 2016–17.
Named after Nemausus, a Celtic god once worshipped in the region, Nîmes was founded by Roman military generals returning from the Battle of Actium, Greece (31 BC). This conflict led to Rome’s control of Egypt, which Nîmes’s coat of arms references by showing a crocodile, representing Egypt, chained to a palm tree symbolising Roman victory. More recently, Nîmes has been a centre of the global textile industry and is known for the bullfights that still take place in the city’s Roman arena.
Boghiguian’s procession of cut-out figures is a march backwards through Nîmes’s history, featuring gods, Roman soldiers, a bullfighter and many other characters. The installation also includes Nemausus 2016, a blood-red curtain with a blue form that recalls both the palm tree and crocodile from Nîmes’s coat of arms. This shape is made from denim, a material that originated in the city and takes its name from the French phrase serge de Nîmes (meaning sturdy fabric from Nîmes).
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.
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.
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.
Chris Ware Building Stories
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
Chris Ware 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’.”
Chris Ware Valencia mural
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Chris Ware 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.”
