Rashomon

Rashomon (Dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1950)


http://www.criterion.com/films/307


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"You have one subject and you look at it from three different perspectives and then you intercut those perspectives."

- David Bowie, from an interview on Countdown, 1980


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"Now montage is actually closer to the facts of perception than representational painting. Take a walk down a city street and put down what you have just seen on canvas. You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments. And the same thing happens with words. Remember that the written word is an image."*

-William Burroughs

(*extract from The Fall of Art, taken from The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 1985)

traces of a human hand

http://www.shadowrobot.com/hand/

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A step back from Photoshop...


The layered and reworked comic art style by Jerry Moriarty shows traces of what was erased and painted over giving a false sense of motion to the artwork. The thought process of the artist becomes part of the message.

art by J. Moriarty from Jack Survives

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In Paris at the BD Artist(e) gallery, I got up close to a page of original comic art by Dave McKean that featured a reworked panel pasted on top of the page. Traces of the alternative dialogue and artwork could still be seen through the new addition on the panel below. The imperfection seen in the original art showed evidence of the human hand that would be lost during the print process.




http://www.bdartiste.com/


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An interview with UK based illustrator and comic artist Matt Timson

Matt Timson is currently illustrating the horror comic, Impaler.






Have you found working in the comic industry to have been a struggle in the UK?

MATT TIMSON:

It is quite a lot of work. Really, your only way in, in this country is the small press or 2000AD. 2000AD is obviously quite hard to get into; there’s a limited amount of spaces. Everyone has to start with a Future Shock (that has to be perfect) and you’ve only got a five-page story every ten progs or so, so it’s difficult to get in.

Do you do much digital work?

All of it is digital… It’s been about five years since I’ve drawn on paper and I’m actually finding it quite difficult now which is a terrible thing to admit, but I’m used to looking at the screen and adjusting something straight away if it’s not quite right, but paper is a real pain.

Do you find using digital media to be an advantage?

Ten or fifteen years ago when I first started out it was really a bit harder because your work really had to be on your doorstep, which was quite limiting…
Of course with digital and I don’t care who says it isn’t, it is easier; it’s a lot easier to work in stages. Fully painted art work like that (Impaler comic art) with traditional media it would take probably just as long but, if you’ve stuffed it up, you’ve stuffed it up. In some ways that’s kind of a good thing because once it’s done, it’s done and you can’t go back, because I keep going back. There are a lot of people, and I am one of them to be fair, who couldn’t have made it as a comic artist before. I can because there are lots of cheats, which I’m not going to show you. I started doing cartoons and that was quite easy; just draw and colour things in. From that I started to do this sort of thing (fully painted artwork) just for fun and the more I did it, the better I got at it and I realised one day, you know that’s it. I don’t actually need paper. Before that I was drawing things and scanning them in. I think if you can draw and you put in the time you can pick it up quite easily.

Do you think there are disadvantages to drawing digitally?

You get used to the fact that it doesn’t matter if you draw something badly because you can resize it and reshape it in Photoshop; it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if that side of the heads wider than the other because I can just shrink it across and Bob’s your uncle but obviously I can’t do that in real life and I sat at home last night thinking I can just do a few sketches and urgh – I can’t be giving those to people (laughs). I thought I’d do some on the computer, print them out and trace them off which is a bit sad; it kind of defeats the object.

adaptation

Adaptations of Kafka's Metamorphosis have had varying degrees of success. The beginning of Kafka's text forces us to see events unfold from Gregor Samsa's perspective and evoke a sense of empathy from the reader. Translating the text to a visual narrative creates a very different response from the audience. Something is always lost in translation. A reworking or re- imagining of the original text is required to adapt it to a visual medium.



Robert Crumb's Kafka, 2005

Part illustrated biography, part comic adaptation.





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Caroline Leaf The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa, 1977. Animation.








http://www.carolineleaf.com/

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Steven Berkoff's stage adaptation of The Metamorphosis





Filmed version, 1987 (Dir. Jim Goddard)


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...

Opening montage...

The opening montage...

motion and confinement...

setting up clues to character and their instincts and behaviour...

contrast between chaos and order... juxtaposing static scenes with frantic motion... building tension... setting up obstacles

reflections using montage as a mirror, actions are duplicated

internal and external expressions

animal instincts



Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (Dir. Miike Takashi, 2002)


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The Cremator (Dir. Juaraj Herz, 1969)

black and white

The Kiss by Jeffrey Catherine Jones


http://www.jeffreyjones-art.com/



Expressive and loose inking styles can be seen in the comic art of:

Jacques Tardi
Jeffrey Jones
Jorge Zaffino
Tony Salmons
Dave McKean
...



Black and white photography gives a sense of the past and a feel of documentary - an objective feel... removing emotional associations of colour, the viewer is guided toward a particular reading...
I have chosen to produce black and white artwork for my MA project to compliment a subjective visual narrative.


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"Black is the most essential colour ... [it] should be respected. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and does not awaken sensuality. It is the agent of the spirit much more than the splendid colour of the palette or of the prism."

-Odilion Redon


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"I didn't have money to buy the paint so I would work a regular day job working on apartments, doing sheet rocking or plastering things and then I would steal all the leftover gallons of paint and add them to other gallons. So (my work) was purely black and white because it was the easiest and cheapest way to pull it off."

- WK Interact

(from an interview in Juxtapoz magazine, Jan 2009)


the cover to the Jan 2009 issue of Juxtapoz magazine features art by street artist WK Interact

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"For some unknown godforsaken reason, I become an editor at DC Comics. I pitch the idea of a black and white anthology series featuring Batman. The key to the series' success, I figure, is to hire the very best artists in the business. Most everyone at DC tells me it won't sell. No one likes black and white comics. No one likes anthologies... the series becomes a creative and financial success."

- Mark Chiarello

(from the introduction to Batman Black and White, Vol. 1: 2007)

Breaking walls - film and animation

Subjective narratives that use the medium as part of the storytelling...





The Holy Mountain (Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)

"What I cannot do in [cinema], I do in comics."

(Alejandro Jodorowsky, 2004)

Heavy Traffic (Dir. Ralph Baksi, 1973)





Poster designed by Jan Lenika for Roman Polanki's Repulsion, 1965


The Tenant (Dir. Roman Polanski, 1976)


"just play yourself"

Irma Vep (Dir.Olivier Assayas, 1996)

Breaking walls - comics

self-reflexive comics...


An awareness of the comics medium becomes part of the narrative...






Japanese manga artist, Shintaro Kago... As Abstraction progresses, the narrative becomes fragmented and the panels are re-ordered giving a dreamlike and disjointed sense of time



> a page from Abstraction by Shintaro Kago (c. 2007)















Grant Morrison's Animal Man... the author interacts with the character...
The character exists outside of the comic book panel...



Animal Man #19 (Cover Art by Brian Bolland, 1990)




Animal Man #26 (Cover art by Brian Bolland, 1990)


(interior page from Animal Man #26. Written by Grant Morrison, art by C. Troug and M. Farmer)

Cronenberg's typewriter

Stills from Naked Lunch (Dir. D. Cronenberg, 1991)






Below:

A Polish film poster for Cronenberg's 1986 film The Fly, designed by Eugeniusz Skorwider







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A short interview with John Reppion and Leah Moore on writing for comics




John Reppion and Leah Moore are a married comics-writing team. They are based in the UK, and have been writing for American publications.

Do you ever draw layouts on scripts for each other or the artist?

JOHN REPPION:

The ridiculously strict, long winded process that we have is that we sit down and we discuss everything, we sit down and discuss the story, we make notes about what's gonna happen (the beginning, middle and end kind of thing) then we write down the numbers of the pages and then next to each page we write down what happens on each page then Leah draws a rectangle, we divide that rectangle into how many panels we want on the page, how big they are and then Leah draws little sketches...

LEAH MOORE:

...I do little thumbnails of indecipherable nonsense and whenever he has to type from them he's always like, "What's that there? Is it like a man lying on his back screaming?" No, it’s a horse joyously leaping over a hedge - they're really awful aren't they?

JOHN REPPION:

They're not that bad... you get to do them, I'm not allowed to do them because you can't tell what mine are... Because we talk things through as you're drawing them out, we just have them in our mind more than anything. We divide those sketches up and then basically just sit at separate computers and type them up.

LEAH MOORE:

We grab say four pages each and type four pages and then get another four pages until its all done...

JOHN REPPION:

...and when they're typed up, then we go through and add al the dialogue in. I think most people would just say, write what's happening and just start typing...

LEAH MOORE:

Like; "he is climbing up a building"... yeah, it would probably be a lot more conversational.

JOHN REPPION:

Which you could do if you were writing it on your own I suppose but, if you're two people writing it...

LEAH MOORE:

This might be why it takes us so bloody long to get through a script to be honest.

Storyboards

Above: my pre-production storyboard sketches for the infamous NTU 'Violette project' depicting unnatural and uncomfortable interview compositions. The sketches were made after our teams initial brief to create a short documentary film was canceled by the man himself and replaced by a new brief to film a series of short interviews about perceptions of fear and comedy in a controlled studio environment.



below: the video footage was edited by Benz and projected onto a studio wall as part of an exhibition of the collective Violette projects




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Body horror - transformation scene from John Carpenter's The Thing:




The Thing (Dir. J.Carpenter, 1982)

Storyboards by Mentor Huebner





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storyboard layout for Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso

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In terms of speed, it is much faster to draw storyboards directly into Photoshop, especially when an animatic is to be produced using the storyboard art, but after recently experiencing computer malfunctions, with my laptop attempting to self destruct, I am looking to a more traditional way of producing storyboards. A beat script will be illustrated using the Japanese storyboard layout seen above and I will be sketching quickly on paper using soft lead pencils. The art can later be scanned and manipulated further. Having a hard copy of the original pencil art, it will be easy to display the work without having to rely on technology. The storyboards will be used as a reference for further experiments with poster design, comic book art and animation.

Polymelia

Polymelia: the presence of supernumerary limbs.






Odilion Redon, The Crying Spider, 1881





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Jon Beinart's Toddlerpede's:







http://beinart.org/info/jon-beinart.php


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The Amazing Spiderman #101. Art by Gil Kane, 1971
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Santa Muerte

"Such a crumbling beauty. Ah, there's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars wouldn't fix." - Tom Waits





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Concept sketch for Santa Muerte - female skull with Aztec tile decoration

using existing news stories to help form visual narratives...

Mexican drug gangs worship Saint Death

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6982343.ece

Art and Literature, Bacon and Ballard

Crash: A Homage to JG Ballard

Gacosian Gallery, London
(11 Feb - 1 April 2010)







The Gacosian gallery space works... the artwork reflected Ballard's investigation of environment, violence, corrosion, destruction and technology. The large spaces allowed the art room to breathe and held an eclectic mix of modern artwork by Francis Bacon, Jenny Saville, Jean Michel Basquiat, Paul McCarthy and more.










Paul McCarthy Mechanical Pig, 2003-05 (Silicone, platinum, fiberglass, metal and electrical components)

Francis Bacon Still Life, Broken Statue and Shadow, 1984 (Oil and pastel on canvas)















Jenny Saville Witness, 2009 (oil on canvas)







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On the otherside of town was the claustrophobic setting and pretension of the Whitechapel Art Gallery's exhibition as they scraped the barrel with:
I shake you by the hand, comrade Bacon: British Art Abroad




In the small room that held the exhibition, a queue formed in front of a handwritten letter by Francis Bacon. I joined the back of the queue and eventually got to have a closer look. Not a sketch, not a piece of art, just a handwritten scrawl on a scrap of paper by Francis Bacon in a room full of very strange people determined to enjoy themselves. In the corner a woman stared at a wooden container on the floor for a long time before declaring, "It's not a work of art at all!". Clarita and I couldn't contain our laughter and decided to leave before we were asked to. We went back to Cinephilia East near Brick Lane to look at more Polish film poster prints to recover.

Cinéphilia: Polish film poster design exhibition in London

Polish film posters @ Cinéphilia West
171 Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill

and at Cinéphilia East,
Sclater Street, off Brick Lane, London









Narrative illustration that is not constrained by the source material...





















































Holy Mountain (Dir. A. Jodorowsky, 1973) Artists: J. Gorska & J. Skakun

Blade Runner (Dir. R. Scott, 1982) Artist: Michal Ksiazek

Un chien andalou (Dir. L.Buñuel, 1929) Artist: Wieslaw Wajkuski

Seven Samurai (Dir. A. Kurosawa, 1954) Artist: Andrzej Pagowski

Breakfast at Tiffany's (Dir. B. Edwards, 1961) Artist: Michal Ksiazek

The Shining (Dir. S. Kubrick, 1980) Artist: Leszek Zebrowski

Alchemy

After being derailed by a broken laptop I have just got back into doing digital artwork and discovered Alchemy - an image idea generator... a bit like the bastard son of an etch-a-sketch and clouds in the sky, the patterns that you create in Alchemy can lay the foundation for a composition that can then be further developed and finished off with additional layers of digital paint by importing the image into art software (eg. Photoshop/ArtRage).


http://al.chemy.org/gallery/

mixed media as the message

Transliteracy Conference, Leicester
9th February 2010 @Phoenix Square

Professor Sue Thomas described Transliteracy as being the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms. The conference presented a wide range of media used to engage with modern audiences and the use of social networking tools was encouraged and the speakers were filmed to document the day for a digital audience.

Gareth Howell of De Montfort University presented the use of web comics as a means of producing small press style comics cheaply and using the web to have access to a wider audience and stretch the medium. When asked about audience and the possibility of having to wait for a 'transliterate audience', he replied that you can't wait for the audience or aim too low to make them happy; you need to challenge them to adapt and evolve their grammar as the medium evolves. His target audience is web savvy and he produces fragmented narratives that complement his medium of choice using the internet as a tool and weaving web comics with character blogs to allow stories to be broken up and read according to the audiences personal preferences.

The comics medium relies on audience interaction; the reader imagines what takes place between the gutters as the artwork changes from panel to panel and Howell uses the web to encourage readers to engage with a story from site to site or device to device (e.g. a story read on a hand held mobile device.) Using different mediums such as comic book layouts and social network links to expand the stories changes the way that it is read and allows for the author to experiment with different perspectives and designs and get audience feedback. The medium is further expanded as the work can then jump from author to author as the readers comment on and develop the fictional worlds.




Above: fan fiction based on The Watchmen commenting on the decline of the newspaper comic. Ombudsmen by Scott R. Kurtz.



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Dr. Steve Gibson presented Grand Theft Bicycle; interactive video game art produced as political satire. The user interacts with a 'Borgcycle', a customized bicycle with controls built into the handlebars that is hooked up to the game. The interactive game becomes a social experience as onlookers enjoy watching the action unfold as much as taking part.











http://grandtheftbicycle.com/


“The medium is the message.” - Marshal McLuhan

The Long Tomorrow

Graphic storytelling: The influence of Dan O'Bannon and Moebius on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner














Above: toe curling body horror as 'The Girl' transforms.

Moebius has frequently collaborated with film makers, having previously worked on Ridley Scott's Alien, designing space suits, his artwork was also a source of inspiration for the design of Blade Runner. His collaboration with writer, Dan O'Bannon produced The Long Tomorrow which shares similar themes to those seen in Scott's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Moebius conveys mood, atmosphere and horror with stripped down and direct line art. His attention to detail and body language; showing the curled toes of a horrified man witnessing his lover shape shifting into her true alien form is something that I will try to capture as I gather visual references for my own project; a graphic treatment of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Experiments with mixed media and sequential art will be presented at my MA exposition. A distorted perception of events, paranoia and body horror, featuring contorted and cramped hands and feet will feature in my own concept art for Gregor Samsa's awakening in The Metamorphosis. His metamorphosis and his altered perception of reality may stem from a seizure or stroke...