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PAGE FOURTEEN:

Panel Two: Edward Hopper, Lighthouse Hill (1927), Dallas Museum of Art.

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GIORGIO MORANDI (Italian, 1890-1964) painted simple still lifes, more or less without backgrounds, of bottles, bowls, and vases, often depicting the same familiar bottles in multiple works. His color palette was muted, pale creams, beiges, grays, off-whites, and whites. This sounds about as boring as you can imagine, however these plain little bottles and bowls and vases feel like figures in figure paintings, full of amazing personality; stars of little stages. The compositions near abstraction from their simplicity, limited value and depth, and lack of detailed background. He focused on subtle gradations of hue, tone, and compositional balance of arrangement, and the results are just beautiful; precious. He made around 1350 of these oil paintings, and they were featured in films by Fellini and Antonioni.  President Barack Obama selected two of his works which are now part of the White House collection. He was said to be quiet, polite, and enigmatic. He died of lung cancer.

Above, Marcello Mastroianni and Alan Cluny view and discuss Giorgio Morandi‘s Still Life (1941), In Federico Fellini’s Italian film, La Dolce Vita (1960):

“Listen, I see that you have a wonderful Morandi.”

“Oh, yes, he’s my favorite painter. The objects are flooded with a wistful light and yet painted with such a detachment, precision, rigor that makes them almost tangible. You can say that it’s an art where nothing is coincidental.”

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:


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One thing I consistently have trouble with, once I’ve drawn the appropriated images, is remembering to put masks on them afterwards.  In the beginning, I may have imagined having my original art without masks, or maybe being afraid I could ruin the picture with a mask, and deciding to do a separate layer for the masks, that I could adjust the size or coverage. At some point I digitally drew some of the masks onto the characters in Photoshop. For some reason, this page, I decided to draw masks by hand, cut and paste them in Photoshop, and as you can imagine, mis-judge the exact size and angle when I did cut and paste them, so it was a weird choice to try that!

Clearly I planned to re-use the carriers image from the previous page, because he shouts “Carriers” in Panel 2, and I left a hole for it to be dropped. I believe I needed the dialogue there for panel one, but after drawing it, realized I hadn’t designated a spot, so I drew it in Panel 3’s area in order to cut and paste it into Panel 1, and move it around as needed for the best placement.

Last panel, I once again just drew a picture of Bacon’s popes without referencing an actual painting, although I kind of used a mirror image of the actual painting I did reference.

Below is the first draft of the cleaned and edited page, including the moved text and (re-)insertion of the carriers image. Notice I later flipped the final two panels, so that I coud alter the final image to look more like a close-up of Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait II (1953), private collection.

In 2015, my best friend, Gerry Chow, colored the first chapter and a few pages of chapter two. Here’s what he did with this page:

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PAGE THIRTEEEN:

Panel One:  Francis Bacon, Study After Vélázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) Des Moines Art Center, Iowa.

Panel Two:  Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait VII (1953) Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Panel Three:  Georges Rouault, Porter from Réincarnations du Père Ubu (1932), etching, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, and Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, and Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Panel Four:  Robert Arneson, Pic (1980), Lithograph, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence.

Panel Six:  Detail from Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait II (1953), private collection.

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This page was drawn 6/28-7/11/09. Even though I didn’t draw panel borders, you can see that I imagined panel one as the truck pulling up, and panel two as the “truck’s eye view” of the location where it had pulled up to. By flip-flopping these two images, it become one combined image where you see the tuck pulling up on the opposite side of the street.

My best friend, Gerry Chow, colored these pages for me in 2015:

In 2019, I realized these early pages had a lot of panels that could have infused additional art references, so I went back in and swapped out a bunch of panels, including panel two here, for the revised version. (You can read about this decision in greater detail, and see the original art of this image, on Page 008 – Drafts).  I inserted it and colored that panel below:

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PAGE TWELVE:

Panel One:  Francis Bacon, Figure Seated (the Cardinal) (1955), The Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent.

Panel Two:  Detail from Francis Bacon, Head VI (1949), Arts Council Collection, Britain.

Panel Three:  Robert Arneson, California Artist (study) (1982), Conté crayon and oil pastel.  Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.

Panel Four:  Francis Bacon, Small Study for Portrait (1955), destroyed.

Panel Six: detail of Robert Arneson, California Artist (study) (1982), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and

Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait II (1953),  private collection.

Panel Seven:  Robert Arneson, A Hollow Gesture (1980), Lithograph, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence RI, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

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This page was drawn on 7/2-7/17/09.

Notice panels two and four are from the same source material, so I later decided to substitute the second close-up with a different Francis Bacon pope painting. As for those other curved lines, I think I planned to use that as a background texture somewhere, but I don’t remember where, and I don’t see it anywhere.

I spoke with my best friend, Gerry Chow, about making this a ful color comic, and below is his colored version from 2015. Notice I swapped Panel 2’s image with Panel 2 of Page 13. I felt the emphasis of the close up was more important for “burning in hell” than for “carriers!”

When I decided that I should infuse this project with as many direct references to actual works of art as possible, instead of altering or moving the painting compositions into different poses for example (read more on Page 008 – Commentary), I decided I needed to reverse Panel 6 and take them directly from works of art.

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