Ed Brubaker discusses how he found his way into the comics industry and all the comics he was reading and getting inspiration from. Access a second 10 minute clip of this interview when you support https://www.patreon.com/ChrisWisniaArts!
Wow! HERE ARE LINKS to MORE great clips of ALL your favorite comics creators… from my upcoming documentary, “Diary of a Struggling Comics Artist!”! Thanks for watching!
“I saw [this painting] in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it’s called Empire of Light by René Magritte. I had that in mind..and I chose the house [in the Exorcist] to match the Magritte painting… the streetlamp…the shaft of light.” – William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist (1973), interviewed in A Decade Under the Influence (2003), a documentary about American Cinema in the 70’s.
Friedkin removed the daytime sky completely from his cinematic version of Magritte’s composition, choosing instead for the light source to project from the high window, within which the demon lies in waiting.
The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin, based on the 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty. A still from this iconic scene in the film was used for the movie poster, promotion, and video releases.
When I was in college and began thinking about and studying art, my relationship with artwork was that these were all just a bunch of images we would look at in art books, or that the professors would project on the wall as slides, to talk about. Some of the work spoke to me, and a lot of it didn’t. (We all like we what we like, don’t we? And that’s ok!) And during that college time, as I got older and got out and saw more of the world, something that might seem really simple and self-evident to you occured to me, and kind of surprised and delighted me to realize it. Sure, I understood in an abstract sense that these aren’t just pictures in books – These are all actual, real, one-of-a-kind objects that physically exist in our world. All these paintings. But the surprise and revelation for me was that, as objects that exist in different locations, they are viewable. They’re in publicly accessible museums – all over the place, anywhere you go. Either you can just go somewhere and then view whatever they have, or if you want to view something particular, then you just need to find out where, and then you can go there, and then you can view it. They’re out there!
My first visit out to New York, popping into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stupidly asked one of the gallery attendants, “Wait a minute, is that the actual piece, and not a duplicate?” He was understandably baffled at the question. Here I was looking – all in one place – at a bunch of the most famous paintings I knew of, by all the most famous artists I could think, and that I new of since they were in all my books. Somewhere back in time, that actual artist held a brush in their actual hand, and chose and mixed that particular hue of color and chose that very spot of their canvas, and touched their brush against that very canvas, and now here is that finished work, right before me.
Don’t take my word for it: Pop into your local museum! Or if you’re on vacation, pop into THEIR museum! Go see these amazing works of art! Spend time with them! It’s a record of time, these paintings, recording these moments of the artist’s life – what was before the artist’s eyes, and the fact that the artist recorded it on their canvas. And YOU can be right there with these pieces, face to face, seeing what the artist sees for as long as you like; study them, enjoy them, think or talk about them! And every city around the world you go to will have a new and exciting and uniquely different selection. It’s like the ultimate scavenger hunt! This has come to become a source of great joy to me, popping out to art museums and getting a chance to see and snap a photo with all these amazing works of art. Please look forward to more of this from me, on all the other of these artist pages.
When I began working on my graphic novel, one thing that surprised me (and surprised me how much I delighted into delving DEEP into it whenever I discovered a new one!), was realizing how many artists’ famous pieces were often part of a series. These artists found something that got their juices flowing, got them wanting to paint every day, the same subject matter, over and over. They were really working at something, in creating all their artwork, but when they did a series of the same subject or composition, they were clearly not just trying to get at a nice work of art – they were working at it over and over again, sometimes from different angles or perspectives or variations – like they hadn’t quie gotten it right yet, and they were hoping to nail it even better. Or perhaps they knew they were onto something that was marketable and that they could make more money producing, so they just pumped them out for a paycheck.
It turns out (and I didn’t realize until I’d practically completed this graphic novel, eleven years after beginning it!) that Magritte’s pipe above (Treachery of Images) was one of these very series! (And I get the feeling that it might be the kind of series where the original was popular, and Magritte was popular, and fans would say, “Hey, ya know, I really loved your pipe, I’d love if I could get my hands on one of those,” or, “Hey, could ya make one in English instead of French?”, or, “It costs HOW much??…Well could you maybe make a cheaper one, like just with black ink on paper? Wait, THAT’S how much??? Well what about a print or something?”, and so on, and THAT’S why it’s a series! (That’s my theory.)
Bill Morrison discusses the infamous Little Mermaid poster he made for Disney’s video cassette release, and the scandal that resulted!
Wow! HERE ARE LINKS to MORE great clips of ALL your favorite comics creators… from my upcoming documentary, “Diary of a Struggling Comics Artist!”! Thanks for watching!
The Exorcist (1973), directed by William Friedkin, based on the 1971 novel by William Peter Blatty. A still from this iconic scene in the film was used for the movie poster, promotion, and video releases.
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