Cloud 109 - The Twelfth Instalment

It's a snowbound Wednesday morning and as well as the blog there are other pressing considerations - have we got enough food? will the heating hold out?. I suppose if the worst comes to the worst we can just eat the huskies but I am old enough to remember the winter of 1962/63 and that was endless, about two - three weeks at least of everything being shut down but great fun when you're a kid - we actually did build an igloo.

Anyway it's that time of the week to reveal another page of Cloud 109 to you and as we've had a bit of a festive break I'll upload the previous pages so you can get a good run at it.

I'm hoping that everyone is in general cool with the way this blog is evolving as I think I've already explained it's nigh on impossible to do a blog like this on a regular basis by just confining oneself to the product in question, both David and myself are creatives and being a creative involves a journey as you are constantly seeking out new stimuli and then absorbing and reacting to that stimuli.

So by reprising some of the influences that have informed our work we are in a way showing you where we have come from as well as where we are going and without this freedom to lay before you some of the stuff that got us all fired up in the first place you would be deprived of the wonders of postings such as "Planet of the Knobheads" or some of the gems of classic and contemporary comic art and illustration that have been appearing here recently.

With this approach, none of you (often myself included) knows quite what will be unveiled on these pages, which is for me what makes visiting blogs so much fun. But rest assured David and I are ferreting out all kinds of stuff that we are really enthused by in the hope that you will also share some of our enthusiasms too.

So here is episode twelve of Cloud 109 and as you can tell David with omnipotent heartlessness has cast Gina, Cary and Rabby into a large and very dark dungeon - can they navigate their way through it?

Only time will tell ...

Maurice Boutet De Monvel and Jeanne D'Arc

Continuing the thread first prompted by a comment from Leeann about silhouette and negative space, another illustrator with an uncanny sense of strong outline is Maurice Boutet De Monvel. He originally trained as a painter at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the 1870's and developed a highly sensitive and fashionably sentimental approach to his craft as is evidenced by the example below of his early work.

However it was portraiture and particularly children's portraiture that was to occupy much of Boutet De Monvel's career and the way he achieved this was somewhat serendipitous as it was via a foray into the rapidly burgeoning market of children's book illustration that was occurring in France as much as elsewhere in the civilized world at the end of the nineteenth century.

After creating several truly charming child orientated artworks for mass circulation magazines he received commissions to illustrate two books on children's songs which were so successful that they were translated into English and remained in print for many years thereafter.

The success of these books was such that he was then in receipt of numerous solicitations from the landed and wealthy as they sought De Monvel's skills in immortalizing their children on canvas. This put De Monvel into the enviable position to be extremely judicious in the kind of illustrative work he was prepared to consider. He created one more book and this was not only a true labour of love but his piece de resistance and a book that was to have a profound effect on the development of children's book illustration as well as the development of comic strip."Jeanne D'Arc" was published in 1895 and in the wake of the Franco Prussian War made an immediate call on French national sentiment, although De Monvel was neither a historian or a writer the passion and sheer storytelling power that he brought to bear on this creation were second to none. In these magnificent artworks you can see clearly the profound effect that exposure to the graphic line and subtle use of colour by Japanese artists such as Hokusai had exerted on De Monvel's generation. These figures really emote via attitude and gesture rather than their relatively muted facial expressions and it is the clarity of their outline which so masterfully carries the narrative that really connects you to what they are feeling and where the story is going.

The enthusiasm and recognition that De Monvel's "Jeanne D'Arc" received was such that he was invited to travel to the U.S.A. in 1899 and was subsequently commissioned to recreate several of the illustrations from the book as large scale panels which are now part of The Corcoran Collection of Paintings in Washington D.C.

De Monvel died at the age of 63 one year before the outbreak of the First World War, when once again French National sentiments would be brought to the fore of public consciousness.

The Narnia Covers of Steve Lavis

Well to pick up on where we were with my ongoing Maxfield Parrish reminiscence, some two years or so after being introduced to his work suddenly and almost out of the blue there was a revival of interest in the artistry of this hitherto "illustrators illustrator". This was at least in part engendered by a sumptuous biography which included a lot of reproductions of the great man's work and an accompanying article in The Sunday Times which helped spread the word across the coffee tables of middle England.

The book by Coy Ludwig soon became a staple of art college libraries and once again poster sized reproductions of many of his classic paintings were back in circulation. In addition and hardly suprizingly there was also a whole generation of illustrators paying homage to Parrish with varying degrees of success. A lot of the work inspired by Parrish was in danger of veering towards the slightly tacky but amongst all the variations on a theme of urns, colonnades, misty mountains, gradated blues and androgynous nymphs there were some really lovely pieces of work being created.

One of the best exemplars of the art of creative use of reference points as opposed to slavish imitation is a very dear friend and colleague Steve Lavis. Steve was one of those very motivated young guys who outgrew his art college before he had time to qualify, in fact he ditched his third year as the tutoring at his college was so lamentable and at the age of twenty two was married and living in London building up a career as a successful fantasy artist. His work was sufficiently strong to bring him to the notice of some of the leading commissioners of paperback covers and some of his earliest covers were for Alan Garner, where employing a work method not dissimilar
to Parrish he took photographs of real teenagers and using an epidiascope projected the images onto the board that he was working onto. The results were really alluring here again was that lovely juxtaposition of fantasy made tangible by the alliance of real-world elements and imagination run wild.

The Garner covers were soon followed by a re-working of Pauline Baynes Narnia covers, Pauline's original covers were full of charm but lacked the connectivity with children of the here and now, which Steve's work so adroitly captured. The series of covers had after the usual beauty contest which accompanies such commissions already been assigned to an illustrator (me - Steve I needed that job!!!) but the editorial team were evidently a little unsure and so Steve was invited to produce a painting to the same brief which was to create a cover for "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The resulting artwork was so far ahead of the rest of the competition that Steve then commenced work on the entire run and was also commissioned to create the box that they should sit in for people who wanted to buy the entire run as a collection.

The box artwork is a truly magnificent reworking of Parrish with more than a smattering of Parrish's painting "Romance" which was the end papers for his last and most eagerly sought book "The Knave of Hearts" the original 1925 edition when it does turn up in collectable condition commands four figure sums from Parrish enthusiasts.

Anyway here's Steve's Narnia covers, plus the original artwork for Alan Garner's "Weirdstone of Brisingamen", the texture running throughout the artwork is via toothbrush splatter - lovely stuff!!!

A Parrish P.S. for Dave Morris

Enya's Memory of Trees

Parrish - The Arabian Nights

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, my introduction to Maxfield Parrish was via a really supercharged young tutor who was in fact part of a group of three graduates from Brighton Art College who arrived to take up part time teaching posts at my then Foundation course which was based in Hastings.

Mike was a true devotee of Maxfield Parrish and as I said, very generously lent me the only three Parrish books he had, these being the two black and white editions of Kenneth Grahame's "The Golden Age" and "Dream Days" and a copy of Eugene Field's "Poems of Childhood". I avidly poured over these books for a couple of weeks before returning them but there were many more Parrish books that Mike was aware of but had so far failed to locate. Most desirable of which in his opinion was Kate Douglas Wiggin's adaptation of "The Arabian Nights" with 12 (depending on which edition you sourced as some editions only include 9 artworks) of Parrish's sumptuous interpretations of these classic tales.

A couple of years later and Mike did finally locate this holy grail of Parrish bibliophiles and perusing it's contents I had to admit it was every bit as captivating as I had been led to believe.

In these illustrations you are once again treated to Parrish's mastery of image manipulation, many of the props that appear in these artworks were carefully constructed by Parrish in his own workshop (the example shown was used for the "Young King of the Black Isles" illustration) and his pioneering use of photography and projecting slides onto the blank canvas/paper he was working on allowed him to create a quasi-photo realism, which made the fantastic scenes that he was creating all the more seductive and alluring.

These paintings are a reminder of what was for a brief period a golden age of illustration, where technology had finally allowed an illustrator's work to be viewed as the artist intended as opposed to being reinterpreted by an engraver, or reproduced in a murky monochrome. A pre Hollywood era where people's fantasies were largely stimulated via the printed image and magazines with
massive circulations could indulge illustrators with rewards that would propel them into the league of the super rich. Parrish who was pre-eminent amongst his contemporaries in terms of business acumen managed to maintain a very comfortable standard of living until he passed away peacefully at the age of 95.

Maxfield Parrish - And Mastery of Negative Space

Leeann made an observation a couple of postings back about use of negative space and the strength of uncluttered silhouettes ... and it got me to thinking.

I thought about it even more after I posted Winsor McCay's New Year Little Nemo. Here was a guy that was such a master draughtsman that he instinctively drew his figures in silhouette before filling in the details, which for both comic strip and animation work - McCay's particular areas of expertise - is essential.

I then began to think about several other illustrators whose work I really treasure who were roughly contemporaneous with McCay and it began to dawn on me that they were all real masters in terms of constructing work with a strong sense of silhouette and inventive use of negative space. I'm assuming here that everyone knows what negative space is but just to be sure - it's the areas around a shape rather than the interior of the shape, but ultimately this area is every bit as important as the shape - it's just easier to forget as all your attention is devoted to attending to the contents of the shape your drawing. If you think about it for a moment that's why McCay's preoccupation was the outline of what he was drawing - he was all too aware of the importance of negative space.

Here's another consideration, the middle classes at the turn of the last century in a world where at least a smattering of the arts and a degree of manual dexterity were considered desirable accomplishments, were in a weird way actively encouraging their children to appreciate negative space. Children were encouraged to master the craft of cutting things out, they could construct toy theatres from pre-printed sheets which required careful and judicious cutting, they could adorn dressing screens with cut out figures, they could even attempt mastery of the art of silhouette by cutting heads out of black card; a particular skill which would capture the imagination of many a child when encountering a master of this discipline at some local fair or carnival. All this requires careful analysis of the areas you are cutting out - the negative space.

All these skills would have come as second nature to the illustrators of the 1890-1900's and it certainly informed their artistry. I'm going to show you a few samples of an exemplar of this approach to illustration and an artist who I first encountered via the enthusiastic proselytizing of a young tutor who I encountered during the second year of a two year art foundation course. Lucky for me it was a two year course as I was relatively crappy and needed all the help and time I could squeeze out of the system.

Mike had arrived from graduating at Brighton Art College and was full of enthusiasm and positive kharma and managed to inject me with a sense of vision and self belief that had somehow so far eluded me. Not only that but he knew a lot of up and coming young illustrators based in Brighton and apparently they all worshipped at the altar of an illustrator named Maxfield Parrish. I'd never heard of Maxfield Parrish but Mike was so dedicated to opening my eyes to the splendour of Parrish and his fantastic worlds that he actually in an act of incredible generosity lent me three near impossible to get hold of original editions of his work.

The illustrations that I'm reprising today come from one one of those books; Kenneth Grahame's "The Golden Age" and the magnificent end papers replete with red lobster are from Eugene Field's "Poems of Childhood". You'll notice the almost collage like feel of these illustrations and in many ways these artworks which were relatively early on in Parrish's career certainly show a mastery of manipulating shapes and elements to create a fantasy of breathtakingly surreal intensity

Illustration doesn't get much better than this.