On originality, Part 3 - more examples +
A few contemporary cartoonists whose work I admire and a digression on scribbling.
It’s tempting, and perhaps inevitable when you reach a certain age to refer to the culture (music, art, fashion) you grew up with, or rather, matured with. For me that was the 70s and there is without doubt a certain magic to anything brown, orange, Harvest Gold or Avacado, Doobie Brothers or CCR. Sad but true.
My last post reached back mostly to some cartoonists and artists I discovered back then, but today I want to look at some of the more contemporary work that I love, that makes me laugh or think differently.
Ed Steed
I discovered Ed Steed on the pages of The New Yorker (print edition) to which he has been contributing since 2013. It had been a long time since I’d seen an exceptionally original cartooning style in the NYer. Steed’s scratchy drawing style belies his very original and clever, somewhat dark, sometimes perverse sense of humour. His work aligns neatly with classic NYer cartoonists like James Thurber and Saul Steinberg, with shades of Edward Gorey. This rare interview is a good read and of interest in terms of his process and general character.
Scott Menchin
I’m pretty sure I’ve known Scott Menchin’s work for a long time, he’s widely published including Time magazine covers, but I just came across him again in a small online publication called Compact Magazine, where he seems to be the resident illustrator. The mag is worth checking out if you are into alternate, critical news (very refreshing). But visit his website for a taste of the breadth and depth of his work.
What I like about his work is the rocky primitiveness of it, not unlike Steed’s. It’s a statement of “ink” in all its irregular beauty. I really like it when it seems like all the artist can do just to get the idea down. In fact, there’s a lot of skill involved in making something look so fresh and innocent.
Chester Brown
For something completely different, Chester Brown’s tight drawing style is distinctive and consistent with his sort of emotionally flat, or ‘objective’ kind of writing. I found him via his graphic novel Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography, which I came to because the first real book I remember reading was a biography of Louis Riel that my father gave me on my 15th or 16th birthday. I had never been given a book before (that I remember) and I devoured it. It was both historical and political, and very likely laid the foundation for my general left-leaning, social conscience (or what’s left of it).
All three of Steed, Menchin and Brown are, without doubt, “originals.” What makes them so is a combination of distinctive drawing style and the way they approach a subject.
Postscript on Squiggles
When you want to do a drawing, you might have an idea but how do you get the characters and their positioning? Where do you start? It’s a completely open question and very intimidating. I really don’t know how it works so often I just start making a lot of squiggles. Get the pen, or the pencil usually in my case, moving on the paper. With luck, something emerges.
I’m still going backwards historically here (sigh) but I’m looking for drawing styles with a lot of squiggles and these are familiar: there’s Giacometti, best known for severely thin roughly made sculptures; Rembrandt, or practically any Old Master’s preliminary drawings; Daumier is perhaps the all time best in terms of lines searching for a figure and an expression; and of course, there’s the very awesome and completely original Ed Sorel, who seems to be coming up in every dang one of this series. Hmmmm…
I especially like, and relate to, Sorel’s the hand lettered captioning.
That’s it for this week. I haven’t posted an original drawing for a while now. I promise to soon. Something is brewing or stewing. (And quite a lot of my attention is getting diverted into substack’s Notes. I don’t know if this is a good thing or not. Must all platforms aspire to be all things to all people, as in like Twitter, and Instagram, and Pinterest and YouTube and and and?
Thanks once again for an entertaining and informative take on drawing. I laughed out loud at the woodpecker.