When I first began researching and accumulating art to reference for this project, I had found and collected a bunch of PHOTOS of the ACTUAL PEOPLE Lucian Freud, Robert Arneson (and Picasso, etc. etc), in addition to their self-portraits in paint or ceramic. I had chosen for them to be characters, and I wasn’t yet differentiating between the artist and the piece they make of themselves – I just visualized all of these sources as multiple perspectves that could combine into a “big picture” of each character, and that I wouldn’t necessarily only reference those, so much as use them to help me create a composite 3D round, as needed from panel to panel. In other words, I would take all these sources and try to absorb them into an overall feeling or understanding of a “character” from these multiple sources, and these sources were only a starting point, from which I could then develop different poses or angles or expressions. (Notice how I did this on Page 023 first panel (or last, in that I “created” the character’s hands), and the same character again on Page 026.
Without articulating the idea in my head, I think I innately sensed the limitations of only using known artwork as panels in my comic, because I would be limited to only that pose or angle or expression. So it wasn’t even a consideration – I simply assumed I would show characters or setting from famous paintings in other situations or from different angles, that would be recognizable from the artwork, but didn’t directly reference its “source material.” I would “move the source material around.”
So if you look at panel one of my first draft Brush with Peril, page 008 – Drafts, the Lucian Freud character is kind of sitting at an angle in the car, and the Arneson character is dancing, and later they’re laughing or drinking or kissing. In other words, this references no particular work. I used imagination to envision these “characters” and their poses and expressions in 3D.
This has been done in pop culture. I swear that somewhere, there is a comic I read by Alan Moore, I believe from his Tom Strong’s Tomorrow Stories, in which a museum is robbed and the bandits bring the famous paintings to life. I see it in my mind, as a realistic artistic style, but with apologes, I have been unable to hunt it down.
Moore did a similar concept, using famous artwork, in a more cartoony story, for Tomorrow Stories #7, “A Bigger Splash” (2000) (above).
Of course conceptually, there is a resemblance to the Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009 – which I didn’t become aware of until much after I’d begun drawing my Brush with Peril graphic novel. The film brought to life a lot of artwork that isn’t actually at the Smithsonian. The earlier 2006 film did take place at a museum, but brought to life diaramas and historical enactments more than actual artworks).
When I saw the film Loving Vincent (2017) was coming out, my heart dropped. Here was a film endeavoring to take hundreds of famous Van Gogh paintings and string them together into a narrative story, to tell his biogaphy. In this case, actors played the paintings, and then were used to animate a Van Gogh style of art, that filled in the spaces between images of his paintings.
In all these instances, the paintings burst forth from their static stillness and come to life, creating new sequences of images to fill in the gaps and tell the story in-between the famous images.
MORE ART REFERENCE!
I began drawing my project in 2009, and I fell into this exact assumption of using images in this way. However, as the project unfolded, my rules changed for how I decided to handle the use of art, and I made the decision that instead, I would use the art sources as often as possible, only resorting to creating my versions or alterations as a last resort. I only wanted to reference whatever we see in the painting directly. I wanted only the painting to be the image I use.
This meant coming back to earlier pages like this one, and finding artworks to replace images I’d drawn from imagination (like in Panel One). I did this in 2019 – ten years after creating the original page!
I also realized that there are so many opportunities to reference art that I had missed. So I went in again to make all the women in the scene figures from (Klimt or Gauguin) paintings. See Panels One and Three.
BACK TO MASTER LIST
Small List of Great Artists
Small List of Museums