For my kind $7 Patrons, I recently posted a ton of samples of my artistic process for my brand new, upcoming graphic novel that has consumed all my creative time lately, and which is called UNLiKE.
Here I’m posting some artistic influences that got me to the artistic style I chose for my figures.
In this post, let’s look at Henri Rousseau!
I’ve told this story often, but when I was young, I hated Jack Kirby’s artwork. I hated that it wasn’t more realistic. I hated how he drew anatomy, I thought his characters’ faces – men and women – were ugly, stupid. I hated how he drew hands. I hated the exaggeration of the blocky body poses. I hated the square buildings and machinery. And most of all I hated that shine he put on people’s arms and legs and backs. I would become furious if I bought a comic and then realized at home that the art inside was Kirby’s work.
But then I went to college and studied art. And out of college, I was talking with a friend about how little I cared for Kirby’s work, and I listed all the things that irritated me. And my friend said, Exactly. But that’s all the reasons I LOVE KIRBY!
And that made me take a step back. Because in college, I was studying all this artwork that through reality out the window. Abstract work, surrealist work, German Expressionist work, non-representational work that wasn’t even about anything. And I realized, I had to re-evaluate my opinion of Kirby. It wasn’t fair for me to hate all these aspects but then revere them when the works of art on the museum were doing the same thing. And so I pulled out all my Kirby work again, and I viewed it now with a completely different set of eyes. It gave me a whole new respect and awe and appreciation, and I realized now that I loved it more than perhaps any other comics artist.
Henri Rousseau boastingly considered himself a great painter, if not the greatest painter of all time. He was routinely ridiculed by the art community of his period, however Picasso was buying cheap paintings at a junk shop so that he could use the canvases by painting over them – and he discovered a painting of e, which he was delighted by. So Picasso’s support helped create an interest in Rousseau.
Rousseau was completely self taught, and he didn’t begin painting until he was forty years old, and he was poor his whole life, although he received a small pension from his life’s work as a custom’s officer, which afforded him the luxury of being able to paint in his old age. His anatomy is so childish and simplistic, but so specific. You can easily recognize that any of his paintings are distinctly his.
His Football Players ranks as one of my favorite paintings ever. And I was really thinking about these characters’ arms and legs and hands and fingers for my UNLiKE project.