isozyme | Entries tagged with art

At long last, another installment of isozyme's Comic Art Gripes!

This time, featuring a particular splash page:

I'm going to go hard on this page because it exemplifies a giant problem I see with a lot of superhero comics. The text is telling the audience one thing, and the art is haring off in its own direction, doing another. For effective visual storytelling, you have to be conscious of what information is being conveyed by the drawing, and make sure that's the same stuff you mean to say. The above example is not managing that.

The text gives us these key takeaways:

It's 2 in the morning
She's late, she's broke, and she's had a bad week
And she just got an exciting last-minute gig
But it's eerie that the streets are empty

What the artist has instead decided to portray is:

SEXY LADY
SEXY
SEXXXXY LADY
LADY SEXY DON'T YOU WANNA FUCK HER

Let's go through point by point and see how well the illustration is doing at conveying this information.

It's 2 in the morning: Well, the sky is colored the pink/purple of dusk, and there aren't any visible streetlights but the trees are still casting sharp shadows, and the buildings in the distance are reflecting a blue sky instead of lit from within, so if I had to guess from just looking at the picture I would assume it was closer to dusk. The real kicker, though, is that somewhere there's an incredibly bright light source making sure to outline her thighs and boobs with shiny. It doesn't jive with the story, but boy are those spheriboobs picked out in incredible contrast.

She's late, she's broke, and she's had a bad week: I will forgive you if you missed that Dazzler is rollerskating. If I was rollerskating with my legs like that, I would be 3 seconds from eating pavement. I love the character note that her solution to being late is to get out her skates to go fast! I do not love that the artist has chosen a bizarre floating pose that would only make sense if she could fly. This is particularly egregious because these are comic books; it is not outside the realm of possibility that I would be introduced to a flying character. But the pose is sexy, so that's been prioritized over making sure the audience doesn't mistakenly conclude things about the character. As far as being tired and beat up by the past week of X-men shenanigans and broke -- she looks perfectly put together. I'm not saying that a person who's had a bad week can't cover it up and look fab, but this is a story: for the love of god, man, give us some visual cues! Of course, broke and tired is not sexy.

She's just got an exciting last-minute gig: I am down with her being already in her performing outfit; that's a good decision because it means there'll be continuity in what she's wearing from scene to scene. The crazy outfit is great as a stage costume. But you could show she's late and harried and going to a job by giving her a bag that's larger than a postage stamp! But, say it with me again: duffel bags full of performing equipment are not sexy. Having your makeup only half-on and planning to do the rest of it on the subway is not sexy. Storytelling is secondary to sexy.

It's eerie that the streets are empty: This one is, I think, more subtle but extremely telling. The background does, indeed, show an empty street. But this picture doesn't convey eerie. The city around her looks like the swanky Upper East Side, with nice landscaping and clean windows: no broken pavement, no garbage out on the curb. (ETA: even the richest parts of NYC have shitty sidewalks, construction, and garbage. it's new york! so it's even failing to convey the most basic parts of the setting. and it's the 80s! nyc was notoriously not the nicest town back in the day. I also can't believe that someone broke would live within a few minutes walk from an area that looks so blandly affluent.) So that's working against the story the text is telling straight away. But the real kicker is that absolutely no woman would go out at night, alone, in a strange place, wearing a skin-tight jumpsuit cut down to the navel, and -- just -- that's not -- c'mon, man!!! C'MON! The fact that she's dressed up very sexy and doesn't have a coat or jacket to cover up conveys to me, a woman reading this, that she feels safe. And the story is saying with its words that she definitely isn't safe -- on the next page she gets grabbed by some robot-dudes. But the art -- you get it by now. Sexy.

For each of the four key takeaways, the art is sacrificing a way it could be helping the story in favor of being sexy. In some cases, it's actively working against the text. This is bad storytelling! It's squandering the medium! It's infuriating! I'm not saying that I don't like sexy lady pictures. I am a huge lesbian. Women are great! The skin-tight outfit and plunge neckline are sexy and make sense for the story at the same time. Great! Boobies! Love 'em. But sexy lady is not the most important idea going on here! If I wanted that, I'd look through my tumblr likes. I want to read a good story about superheroes and their emotions! Comics are awesome. They have all these cool tools to make narrative, which is why it's so disappointing when they ditch half of them and use them to draw tits.

Okay, one last note: I wasn't going to make any fuss over the anatomy here but LOOK AT THOSE PERFECT HEMISPHERES ON HER CHEST. The colorist has shaded around them like there's a right angle between her boob-flesh and her chest. Sir. Please sir. I beg you. Take advice from a homosexuelle and look at some breasts. There are lots of pictures of them on the internet. I swear you'll enjoy it. Look at an actual tit just one time because I swear to dyke god they do not look the way you seem to think they look.

"Agnes Martin!" I shouted out loud when I saw the featured gallery last time I was in the contemporary section of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "I love her so much, I love her, look, look at these, oh my god they have her letters!"

Agnes Martin's art looks like this:

a drawing by agnes martin; it's a grid drawn freehanded neatly in pencil on cream paper

She was obsessed with the appearance of perfection in things that are, by nature, not perfect. Her grid drawings aren't completely regular, even though they look it. I think her work is about how despite the fact that we all see the same reality, there's a difference between the vista in front of us and the way we construct it in our mind. "When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is in the mind, not in the eye. In our minds, we have an awareness of perfection that leads us on." In a letter, she writes: "Your work must hold some of this reality for you. If it does not it will not mean anything to anyone."

To me, her drawings are absolutely beautiful, meditative, and rigorous. They have soul. If I had several thousand dollars to spare, I would be sorely tempted to buy one and place it in my home.

How could the museum do a better job conveying this?

This gallery did a better job than usual -- there were many of her works next to each other, and her letters were displayed alongside them. The words of the artist are always important to me. They're the starting point

The letters were written the artist's brisk cursive: beautiful objects, but difficult to read. Anyone using a wheelchair couldn't get close enough to see the words. Posting transcripts in a large, clear font would be a good first step. She gave many recorded lectures; there's no reason not to play her voice and show her face in motion. I'd propose playing video in addition to the letters. The audio could be piped through headphones, as well as subtitled.

But to truly understand something, it's not good enough to have the ideas told to you in words; they're best when they come from one's own mind. A museum should pose a question and then present us with the objects we need to answer that question.

Early in her career Agnes Martin left New York for New Mexico. Her relationship with nature and land is obvious. She despised squares, and was suspicious of vertical lines in general. In her own words: "When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square. Destroys its power." "And I thought there wasn’t a line that affected me like a horizontal line. [...] And I thought to myself, there aren’t too many verticals I like. But I did put a few in there." Place two photographs on the wall: one of the long, flat horizon of New Mexico, one of the towering buildings in Manhattan. Now do her paintings have more meaning?

She was insistent that although her drawings looked like flawless grids, they were filled with errors. It would be easy to print a crisp, computer-generated grid with the same number and arrangement of lines as an Agnes Martin piece and place them side by side; the same size, the same color, only one is actually perfect.

Here is a copy of the above drawing perfected by photoshop. Does this illuminate the soul and beauty of the work? It's okay if it doesn't. You may like or dislike both equally. But I believe the comparison is interesting no matter your reaction.

And last, I would provide pencils (without erasers), and pads of paper, and invite anyone who wished to draw their own grids. Do you take pride, too, in the ability to draw many straight lines? It's difficult! It's easy to make mistakes. The museum could help you to feel an echo of the body of the artist in your own body.

When I look at a room filled with only her drawings, hung on white walls with tiny placards, I think of all these things and more. That's the benefit of an art degree. That's why I bounced with glee walking into that room, and why I hurried to stand as close to the glass as was polite, and it's why I wouldn't leave until I had read all the letters, to the annoyance of my companions.

alas, there were a couple facts about agnes martin i couldn't fit in the essay, so here they are: 1) she burned her drawings and paintings ALL THE TIME, she'd get fed up and just be like "time for fire!" 2) she resisted selling her stuff until she was really starving. then afterwards she said she always regretted it because she hated thinking about her art being in the home of someone she didn't like (and i get the impression there were a lot of people she disliked)

Art museums are a failure. I wrote about this in 2015, that tumblr post is reproduced below:

Imagine the modern art wing of a museum.

Spare white walls.
Intense, even lighting.
Hard wooden floors.
No seating.
Maze-like, interconnected galleries.
Small plaques identifying the artist, year and title in clean sans-serif font.

These design choices are all in the service of making the art museum the best possible habitat for art. The museum is a neutral void into which we place great works of beauty to be appreciated. The work shines. It’s unburdened by context. It’s alluring and impressive and an utter fucking cipher if you don’t already know why it’s interesting.

Art museums, while being very nice places for art, are fucking miserable places for people. (And I say this as someone who absolutely loves art museums.) They’re hostile. It’s easy to get lost. All the expository information is given in either tiny little bricks of text next to the art (and it’s boring) or in big sprawling banners of text next to the door of the gallery, totally divorced from the art (and it’s still boring).

So we walk into this awful space, with its glaring emptiness and its lack of anything friendly and we think “I don’t understand this, this is ugly not-art, why did this cost millions of dollars, I would like millions of dollars and nobody has given it to me so I can make ugly not-art.”

How dare the modern art museum lead us to think this. We have come through its doors, willing to be awed, willing to engage with beauty, and the art museum punches us in the nose. It says “I am a museum so this art is good art. If you don’t understand, you’re stupid and I don’t care.”

Art appreciation is bullshit. It puts all the burden of interest on the viewer and requires they walk in with extensive knowledge of an esoteric field. I have never been to a natural history museum that sits back and asks me to appreciate the bones. I’m not a fucking paleontologist and they know that, so they step up to help.

Museums can generate curiosity! Engagement! Wonder! The best museums do this by prompting us to think of a question, and then offering up the object that answers that question. That’s exciting! It makes us feel powerful and smart!

Say you are wandering a museum, wondering how the horse got its hooves, perhaps because you saw a skeleton that highlighted the hooves of the horse and their articulation. You wander into a little room full of fossil feet from the ancestors of the horse, slowly progressing from something that looks like a paw to something that looks like a hoof, accompanied by descriptive text. The most important text is large and can be read from a few steps away, while the more detailed information is smaller, so if you are curious you may step forward and read on. The museum has masterfully given you the tools to answer your own question.

Modern art museums almost never do this and it’s very frustrating because there’s no reason they can’t.

There is no reason for these museums to be interesting only for people who have taken classes in art history.

I think that part of why modern art museums think they can get away with this is that they are allowed to get away with it in their older collections. We are pretty happy to walk through a huge gallery of Dutch still life paintings because they’re a spectacle. We see them and baffle at the utter impossibility of how such a wonderful thing could be made. It is pretty, and we don’t mind so much that we’re being condescended to, denied any deeper understanding or education because the museum has assumed that all we want is to gape at a nice picture.

Then we walk out of that wing and into the modern art wing and everything is blocky and off-putting. Of course we don’t instantly like it; in the previous gallery the art was easy to love, but now the art is asking a lot more of the viewer. Meanwhile the museum shrugs and continues to help 0%.

What if when you looked at an old Dutch painting and wondered “how did they do that?” the museum gave you the tools to answer that question. What if you were then shown x-rays of the painting to see the process of revision, or encouraged to compare a photograph of a vase to a painting of the same.

What if when you looked at a Frank Stella painting you had first been led to ask “why are paintings rectangular?” or “what is the difference between a painting and a sculpture?” ”Is a painting only beautiful when it depicts something lovely or can the painting itself (the canvas, the board, the paint) be beautiful?” These are questions that I already know to ask because someone sat me down in a class with powerpoint and flashcards and taught me to ask them, but not everyone in the museum has that because not everyone in the museum is a giant art nerd! Can you imagine a world where everyone is a giant art nerd? Awful thought. We would all kill each other immediately.

If modern art museums extended a hand, I honestly think we would reach back. Modern art is full of cheeky, delightful moments that I want to share with people every time I drag them through the Art Since 1950 gallery. Ad Reinhardt and and Yves Klein are hilarious bastards and I’m certain their sense of artistic humor has mass appeal. If only the art museum would let us all in on the joke.

Art museums are making small steps towards being less hostile. Guided audio tours help, but the pace is slow, the headphones isolating, and the viewer passively receives facts instead of becoming curious and seeking them out. There is a little more seating. There is a little more interest in displaying process documentation and artist interviews. However, these things are not the norm and they are not enough.

I often look at museums and galleries and cannot distinguish between the two. In a museum the public wishes to appreciate and learn about the art; in a gallery the avant-garde wishes to evaluate and purchase the art. With such different audiences and goals, surely they should look nothing alike. And yet, they are the same.

Thus, the failure of the modern art museum.

Ever since writing this essay, I've kept coming back to an imaginary art museum that solves these problems. In my mind I've described enough exhibits for it to fill wings and wings. I've been thinking about turning those thoughts into a series of essays/blog posts for four years. Now I'm going to try to do it.

So, incoming: THE IMAGINARY HANDS-ON ART MUSEUM. I want to share my dream of a children's art museum. One where you can touch things, one where you learn. This is what, in a different universe where I went into museum studies, I would devote my life to.

It's time for Comic Art Gripes: part one of many!

I find a lot of comics art to be difficult to understand visually. One of the reasons for this is when the artist prioritizes drawing muscles over treating the character as a three-dimensional mass. This has the effect of making the figure look like a bunch of lumps arranged on the floor and covered by a rug. It flattens them. These overworked, flat forms don't look very much like a real human being.

Here's an example! It's Spiderman:

three versions of one spiderman comic showing how the lineart could be edited in a way more conscious of lighting

three versions of one spiderman comic showing how the lineart could be edited in a way more conscious of lighting

Spiderman is swinging off, outside in the sunlight. Look at all those muscles, picked out in red and gold. Shiny shiny shiny. Every muscle is shaded individually. In the black and white version, every single muscle has its own large white highlight and its own dark black shadow. If you squint at the middle Spiderman, he blends to an all-over average of grey. The detail is taking priority over the body.

In the third picture, I've put a big red arrow showing where the light is coming from. I used the highlight on Spiderman's head to estimate the angle. Looking at the light, it's obvious that Spiderman's back and shoulders are getting hit most directly. However, they're not the brightest part of Spiderman's body in the drawing. It's the same as his butt and his legs, which are struck more indirectly by the sun.

Using photoshop and a mouse, I've roughed in the brightest areas and lightened them, reducing the contrast there. Instead of each muscle being shaded from black to white, the shadows that are getting hit by the sun are light grey, closer to white. In the indirect sunlight, the shadows are still black. This means that Spiderman's body as a whole is shaded from black to white. If you squint at the third picture, instead of a grey silhouette you get something with light spots and dark spots. You can lose the detail without losing the fundamental form of Spiderman.

So, back to the title of this post. We can imagine any solid as a collection of planes, flat surfaces joined together to make a sort of very complicated polygon, like a 3D character in a computer program. Good drawings, ones that have a convincing sense of mass, focus first on the largest planes. For example, the large span of Spiderman's back. That should take priority over the smaller, more complex planes of this trapezius muscles. After all, the point of the drawing isn't that Peter Parker has sick traps. The point is that Spiderman is zipping off to do Spiderman stuff.

Too often, comics art fails the consider the simple, important planes that define the body before they consider the details. They fail to sit back, look for the fundamental, simple shapes, and consider how the light will touch them.

One final note: the picture of Spiderman I chose is one I was initially picked for its crazy anatomy. Look at how insanely long they've made Spidey's thigh so they can show you his entire ass. Amazing. However, after looking at it longer, I think the bad anatomy is a secondary issue. Comic characters get slammed a lot for not having bones, but I think that problem springs from the artist trying to draw a 2D picture that looks good because it's detailed instead of a 2D picture that looks good because it effectively conveys weight and movement.

That concludes today's gripes! That got longer than I expected. Now I'm going to go read more comics.