What's Greg been making?

I've been busy with lots of illustration projects, as well as teaching. Here are a few things recently released into the wild. Two just for fun, and one not, but which was a lot of fun to make anyway. Above is a panel from Apartment 3G, a comic strip that has been around forever and is a favorite over at the Comics Curmudgeon, thanks mainly to the character Margo, whose coldness and self-absorption border on villainy. Someone suggested that this panel, which sums up Margo's philosophy perfectly, would make a good shirt or a Roy Lichtenstein painting. Josh was kind enough to post my "appropriated" version. Actually, I barely changed it, just cleaned it up and added the all-important Lichtenstein flesh tone dots.

Item two: here are the latest "awards" I have drawn over the past year or so, given out by the hosts of Filmspotting for their movie marathons. They represent marathons with these themes: Angry young men (British working class dramas from the 1960's), heist movies, 1970's sci-fi (we know Planet of the Apes was 1968, but the spirit is right), Almodovar, Bergman, and film noir. Have I mentioned I love this podcast?

  

Last but not least, here's a piece I did for Trial Magazine about organ donors not being properly screened for disease. This happens extremely rarely, but when it does it's tragic, as donors' organs tend to go to numerous recipients. Sometimes a topic is so gruesome that I feel the need to go in the complete opposite direction with the art. And again with the Lichtenstein dots!

Screaming Links

Today's topic: screaming faces in art. What expression captures modern man's unhappiness as well as a scream? Everyone knows Edvard Munch's "The Scream," but he was not alone, or the first.

Above is a self portrait by Franz Messerschmidt. Not a scream as much as a grimace, this is one of sixty-four extreme, even grotesque "Character Heads" which he sculpted, believing that the act of creating them and using them as guides would help fight the evil spirits/mental illness plaguing him, and hopefully help others with similar afflictions. Hard to believe these were done in the 1770's; they are so modern in their sensibility. 

Here's a collection of some of my favorite screaming faces from the past century.

TOP LEFT: On my first visit to John Fisher's house to learn to play Dungeons and Dragons, he showed me the cover of King Crimson's "In the Court of the Crimson King." John was a friend of my older brother, and the album belonged to his older brother. There was an overall older brother vibe happening as we listened to the first song, "Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man."

TOP RIGHT: A friend recently sent me a link to an animated student film that was inspired by the King Crimson album from almost forty years earlier. Six thousand paintings, according to the film's creator. I'm not sure how he is defining individual paintings as they seem to be digital, but a Herculean feat nonetheless. 

CENTER LEFT: Gottfried Helnwein's take on contemporary angst. If the King Crimson album had come out twenty years later, this could have been the cover. This is the first image I ever saw of his art, and he has been making indescribable things for most of my lifetime, touching on everything from Austria's whitewashed Nazi past to surreal visions of Donald Duck.

CENTER RIGHT: Still from Sergei Eisenstein's silent 1925 film "Battleship Potemkin." This is one of the final frames of the amazing Odessa steps scene, depicting Tzarist troops slaughtering innocent civilians.

BOTTOM LEFT: Francis Bacon's "Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X." I grew up seeing this painting in the Des Moines Art Center, which was free and which I could ride to on my bike. I was fascinated by it as a kid, that something so terrifying could also be beautiful and in a museum. Maybe that is why it is still my favorite Francis Bacon painting. Was it inspired by Eisenstein's film as well as by Velazquez? I don't know.

BOTTOM RIGHT: A frame from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which made me think of the Bacon painting when I first saw it, but now everyone says is an homage to Eisenstein. It may also just be a coincidence—did Spielberg know what it would look like, when he filmed a time-lapse shot of a multilayered wax head collapsing under heat lamps? What isn't a coincidence is that it is showing the fate of the most sadistic Nazi in the movie.

Another List?

There is a huge backlash against the Facebook "25 Random Things About Me" exercise, which to me seems like getting mad at people for keeping a diary, or writing a blog, or being on Facebook to begin with. So flying in the face of opposition, here's another self-indulgent list.

I was inspired by my favorite podcast Filmspotting when they recently discussed transcendent filmgoing experiences, where what happens in the theater goes beyond just seeing a movie. (A listener had written in with a story of the stars of "Once" doing a Q and A at a screening and unexpectedly performing the film's signature song. One of the podcast's hosts mentioned feeling hugely energized by watching "The Matrix" and, curiously, "Meet The Parents." Say what? That's why I love that podcast.) 

This was right up my alley, and as Filmspotting is known for their top five lists, here's mine. They are in reverse chronological order, which also happens to be in order of increasing significance, which seems logical. The most recent isn't on the list, but "Pan's Labyrinth" just blew me away, thrilled me, and left me emotionally drained.

Greg's Top Five Transcendent Movie-Going Experiences



5. 2004: The Last Waltz. It's always good when a long-anticipated film surpasses expectations, and this did. Pristine print, and the best sound I have ever experienced in a theater. Still probably the best time I have ever had at the movies.



4. 2002: Chicago. This was a special preview screening and Q and A with director Rob Marshall and critic Janet Maslin. While it was an entirely enjoyable film, the real thrill was seeing Maslin helping Marshall navigate through his dawning realization that this would be not just a hit, but a grand slam. He had clearly never seen it with a full audience before. Two hours earlier he was probably just hoping people liked it, after the screening he seemed transformed.



3. 1986: Blue Velvet. A Philadelphia college student, on a rare afternoon free, goes alone to see the latest movie by the guy who made "Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man" and has his mind exploded. Luckily the staff of the dumpy little theater off Rittenhouse Square didn't come and clean between screenings, so he could sit through it again.



2. 1984: This Is Spinal Tap. The night of high school graduation, three friends went in knowing it was supposed to be funny, but not knowing we were in for the funniest two hours of our lives. Bonus: The angry metalhead who stormed out of the theater when it dawned on him, a half hour in, that he was watching a parody of all that he held dear.



1. 1977: Star Wars. Like "The Last Waltz," a long-anticipated (three weeks is LONG when you are eleven and EVERYONE is raving about this thing) film that exceeded expectations. I am sure I am not the only one who watched the opening sequence with the massive Imperial Star Destroyer looming over my head and realized, "movies can do ANYTHING."

Oddly enough, I only own one of these movies ("Star Wars," obviously) and don't have a great desire to watch any of the others over and over. The intense experiences were enough.

Nudity You Can't See

An art director and friend of mine was clearing out her and her husband's huge collection of books and ephemera and came across something that I thought only existed in jokes: The Braille edition of Playboy. No centerfold, I am assuming.

On the other end of the spectrum, artist Jason Salavon has gone into centerfold overload. He created art by blending the images of every Playboy centerfold, mathematically averaging the color and value of each, one per decade. This is every Playmate from the 1980's:

So Miss November 1981, who presumably does not appear in the Braille edition above, is hidden amongst the pixels here. To see the art based on other decades, click here. I really like how they are completely luminous and ethereal, like a soul should look.

Salavon has done similar amalgamations (his term) of class photographs, special moments, and architecture, video amalgamations of late night talk shows, and an audio amalgamation of twenty-seven versions of the song "Yesterday." He also has interesting art based on still frames from movies. 

I obviously can't get enough of this kind of thing. Once I created visual formulas to depict some of my friends (you know, "You are like two parts Yukon Cornelius and one part D-Day and a dash of My Name is Earl") and one of them created a similar formula for me. It included Duchamp, John Linnell from They Might Be Giants, and the animated groom from The Corpse Bride, among a half dozen others. I blended them all together, Salavon-style, to create a metaphysical portrait of me:
Salavon creates his own software to make his art; I just fiddled with Photoshop layers. Here are my friends Scott, Wayne, and Fran, done the same way. Hidden in there are Saddam Hussein, Orson Welles, George Harrison, Dylan Thomas, Terry Gilliam, Casper the Ghost, and many others.

Why designers can include movie tickets as business expenses

My friend Scott, who is responsible for pointing me in the direction of much that is awesome, sent me this link to an ever-expanding website that collects screen captures of movie titles, from A:

to Z:

(Zathura, by the way, is by no means the last one on the list, what with Zombies being on Broadway and Zontar being from Venus and so on. Similarly, Anatomy of a Murder is preceded by lots of Alien and Abbott and Costello movies. I just like the looks of these two.) It's interesting to me to see how many different solutions there are to the problem of putting the movie's title up on the screen. There's the Woody Allen approach, simple and unchanging from film to film, creating a kind of brand for the director:

Then there are the ones that really set the stage for the film, like an illustrated book cover:

And apart from the first image on this blog entry, which I included as a personal favorite, I haven't even looked past the A and Z pages. Lots of treasures to unearth.

Mea Culpa

I am a bad blogger. I realize the key to being a good blogger is fresh content. I know this because when the half dozen blogs I check daily do not have fresh content, I am disappointed. Of course, you are saying, "Greg, instead of reading other blogs, shouldn't you be writing your own? Wouldn't that help?" I hear you, imaginary reader of my blog. So here is an end-of-the-year wrapup of all new stuff:

An actual unretouched photo of what the recent Moon/Jupiter/Venus alignment looked like, in China. It was impressive here in Pleasantville, but it wasn't a smileyface. A friend of a friend took this photo, and said through the mutual friend I could post it, but didn't want his name used. So I figured I shouldn't name the mutual friend either, to throw the Chinese government off the trail or whatever it is we are trying to avoid, but thanks, mutual friend and anonymous photographer.

A sketch by one of my ten-year-old students. She did it as a joke, and was probably going to throw it away, but I think it is awesome in a Daniel Johnston kind of way.

A piece I did for a gallery show curated by my friends Jordin Isip and Rodger Stevens. It's called "Harold Grows Up." Every participant was given a lovely piece of wood and instructions to incorporate a horizontal line at a specific height, so that the overall effect was a continuous dividing line/horizon running through all the art, all of which were hung butted up against each other running the length of the gallery. I have done work for other shows created/curated by these guys, and never sold anything, so when this piece sold I was pleasantly surprised. My twelve-year-old predicted it would sell: "It's a character people know, and it's like, a gag." I gotta listen to him more often. See this and other recent art on my you-don't-have-to-be-a-member-of-facebook facebook page. The link is up there in the right column also.

The piece at the very top of this entry was done for Yale Alumni Magazine, and it is about the psychology of witch hunts, and it is probably my favorite thing I did this year.

New Years Resolution: Spread out this content (God how I hate that word) over weekly installments instead of doing it all at once.

How 'Bout Some Illustration?

Yes, I do illustrations. I just end up thinking about lots of other things and probably a part of me wonders who wants to see my artwork anyway. So here is one. This was used in Yale Alumni Magazine and accompanied an article that presented the theory that the great thinkers of the Enlightenment were not necessarily the originators of revolutionary ideas, and that many of their ideas came from so-called common people. The great thinkers synthesized and codified these grassroots ideas. I like this theory.