On originality and finding your "voice" - Part 2: A few examples.
There are too, too many to choose from but my favourites might also be my influences, you be the judge.
A few weeks ago I was thinking I should do some longer posts about particular cartoonists I admire. This isn’t that, but it’s leaning that way. The artists featured below have books written about them, but for now, we’re just talking about originality and I want to use them to point out some things that I recognize as original. I hope that might help you in your thinking about other artists’ work and your own creative work.
Let’s get to it:
Seymour Chwast is a legend in the graphic design field. Co-founder, with Milton Glazer and Edward Sorel (who you may recall from Part 1 is part of the inspiration for this series, via a visit to his studio by Jason Chatfield) of the Push Pin Studio, a New York collaborative that promoted artists and illustrators to the New York City trades.
Chwast’s style is highly original. His drawing style, outlines and solid colour fills, and wit, verging often on the surreal, are distinctive. You don’t see a lot of Chwast imitators and why would you when the character of the drawing is so unique? It’s as if the drawing is the person, the way they think.
Jules Feiffer’s dancers are remarkably expressive. His simple line drawings capture movement in way you feel in your body. And his way of bending gesture to satirical social commentary is as distinctively unique as it is funny. He often parodies “freedom”, and yet the whole experience of his work is strangely liberating.
Feiffer’s story of finding his way is worth reading; talk about persistence, and breaks… I’m not putting links in this post, there is a ton of material online about all these guys. Search them up!
Feiffer’s long time friend, Ed Sorel (ya, him again) wrote a lovely homage very recently in The Atlantic. I’m sorry, they have a stupid pay wall that you will have to dance your way over to read the whole article. Bonne chance.
Gary Trudeau is another American satirist of renown. Trudeau’s syndicated strip was a staple of in the newspapers of my day. His originality lies less in his drawing style than in his cast of “weird” characters and satire. The particular daily strip shown here is one of a one-week series I’ll post here soon. In so far as it is about art as much as politics, I absolutely love it. Has it been an influence? Hardly, I’m nowhere near that league.
And speaking of art…
If there’s a dividing line between art and cartooning or art and illustration or art and design, I’m not interested in it. The walls constructed around media serve no purpose in terms of what we experience and learn from creative work. Stay open people!
The same things drive all manner of creativity imho, making work interesting or not: and of those things, originality and innovation are paramount to my way of thinking.
Art is full of originality is the sense that we expect art to be more different than we might expect drawing or illustration or graphic design to be. Art can be more “out there” but that alone does not make for originality. “Out there” today has become a cliché, making it much more difficult for artists to be original, let alone innovative.
If you’re enjoying this post, please let me know and I’ll do more like it.
I honestly don’t know where to start with art because I’ve been immersed in it for so long. I discovered A. R. Penck, shown above, sometime in the 80s I would guess. I love the brave simplicity and boldness of his work, which shows a distinct kind of assurance, playing with our sense of context, from Palaeolithic to playground. His stick figures always show their sexuality too, which is kind of cheeky. Refreshing.
Philip Guston found his “voice” in his 50s, in 1970, flying off in an unexpected and totally original direction from what he was already known for, painting in the by then conventional style known as abstract expressionism (or AbEx). Brand new was the style of goopy, rough drawing/painting but also the subject matter, gritty, blunt and provocative scenes of smoking, drinking, raw life (including figures in white KKK hoods). It caused a scandal of course, but proved its worth over time through the originality of both the technique and the provocative subject matter.
Interestingly, the provocative nature of Guston’s work has not subsided; it resurfaced with the exhibition from which the image shown above was taken, which was delayed by four years because of the KKK references. So muddled is the world by identity politics today that “speaking one’s truth” has become confused with speaking truth to power, stealing from the possibility of liberation the very history of criticality that is its foundation. But I digress.
As I said above, I’d like to hear from you about this series on originality. Do you think it’s as important as I do? What do you think makes something original?
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