Brush with Peril

The Gold

This project took eleven years from when I began putting ink to the first page until completion. I kind of jumped into it without knowing exactly what would happen, which is different than how I normally jump into a story. Normally, I have a complete script. I didn’t have a script, I had a vague idea in my head what favorite works of art I would like to reference, and how those dozen pieces would determine the storyline – and that was it. I had a lot of holes to fill in, in between those few banner images. The excitement and story kicked off after I had drawn a couple pictures of my lead character, and it had gotten me excited enough, I just jumped in and thought, let’s see what happens and where this goes, and I started drawing without a map. (Without a very complete map.)

My initial concept – which you can see elements of, on this and the next page – is that the President character is so megalamaniacal, he decides he needs a statue of himself made of solid gold – and that it should be the largest gold statue that has ever been made of someone in history. This idea tickled me immensely, the thought of someone deciding that this is an ultimate show of self-value and worth, and that it would be something to aspire to accomplish. I find it to be such a poignant, sad, ugly, disturbing metaphor to reveal the kinds of needs to feel respected and values we hold high as a society.

I had gotten the idea from an old 1967 episode of the Spider-Man cartoon, in which the villain, The Rhino, decided that HE wanted a solid gold statue made in his likeness – not of whatever he looked like under his costume, but decked out IN his Rhino super villain costume!

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A Small List of Great Artists – FRANCIS BACON (Irish-born, 1909-1992)

see Francis Bacon’s Popes

FRANCIS BACON (Irish-born, 1909-1992) was known as being the life of any party, staying out all night, entertaining everyone at a bar or party with his boisterous wit and fascinating opinions and insights on any subject. He was one of the first artists whose work got me really excited to learn more about art. He’s a figurative painter – he primarily paints portraits, often of friends and lovers, often of those who have passed away, and then addressing issues of loss – but his brushwork and imagery is unsettling, raw, brutal, and horrifying; almost more properly descended from medieval depictions of Hell and its eternally anguished sufferers than from classical portraiture – except for the clear Godlessness in Bacon’s world view. He considers his work realist – not because of photo-realistic qualities (which are absent), but because his work instills a very real, visceral, emotional reaction. His portraits feel existential, alienated, claustrophobic, tormented, bleak, and alone, and they often literally scream within their confined spaces.

Extra special thank to the official Francis Bacon website, http://www.francis-bacon.com/ – an absolutly stupendous resource full of great and fascinating information, as well as a place to enjoy such an enormous selection of artwork!

Chris with Francis Bacon’s *Painting* (1946), Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:

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A Small List of Great Artists – Claude Monet’s Trains

see A Small List of Great Artists Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

For some reason, all through art school, I had very little interest in Monet, although I do remember a student in class sharing an art book that we flipped through together, and I began to realize how Monet had done a series of very similar paintings of a cathedral, and then later in the book, he had done a number of very similar paintings of hay stacks in the fields. My fellow student said that she found these series interesting, and pointed out that Monet was looking at how light played on these places at different times of the day. So Monet would paint the setting in the morning, and then he woud paint it again, at high sun, or during sunset – or on a cloudy day, and again on a sunny day. These types of images, then, become more interesting to me as you see them as a series, and not just as a stand-alone piece. And from a comic book point of view, they become narrative, or filmic, rather than one moment in time – because it documents changes in time.

When I began my comic, Brush with Peril, referencing art by Monet was the last thing on my mind. I thought of him as a painter of parks and plants and “girly things” that weren’t suitable for a manly man like me who only enjoys spies and fast cars and sports and guns and other manly things like that. HOWEVER, spy novels have to have suspenseful scenes on trains, and when I started looking for train themes in the history of art, a number of Monet’s paintings popped up, and I realized that this too was somewhat of a series he had dabbled with. In fact, this is considered his first series of paintings that concentrate on a theme. AND I really liked this series, so I would say that Monet’s trains were my gateway drug into an appreciation of his work.

Claude Monet, *Train in the Country* (1870), Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Chris with Claude Monet, *The Saint Lazare Train Station in Paris, Arrival of a Train* (1877), Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge

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A Small List of Great Artists – Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)

see Claude Monet’s Trains

CLAUDE MONET (French, 1840-1926). A founder of Impressionist painting, in which artists, usually in nature, try to quickly capture impressions of the countryside they see before them, using fast, raw brush strokes, live at the scene, before the weather or light changes. As an appreciator of Batman and Daredevil and other super-heroes who beat up bad guys, I never had much interest in his work; I felt Monet’s subject matter was a little “sissy-ish.” However, when I finally saw his humongous originals of lily pads, I was blown away. When I began attempting to draw them for this comic, I gained a new appreciation of his illusions of the plants above the water, the surface of the water, and what lies under the water. How do you represent all that depth and dimension with only paint on a flat two-dimensional canvas?? It’s been argued that these were the first abstract paintings in art history.

Claude Monet, *Self-Portrait with a Beret* (1886), private collection

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A Small List of Great Artists – George Seurat (French, 1859-1891)

GEORGES SEURAT (French, 1859-1891) devised, without any tradition before him, a mathematically precise painting technique of color theory, where he juxtaposed tiny dots of contrasting colors close together, so that the viewers’ eyes blend the colors optically. This may be one of my earliest realizations about the magic of art, having an elementary school teacher show the class how all these tiny dots combine to make an enormous drawing of a park! His paintings took years, often with dozens of preparatory studies beforehand, and as a result his actual body of work is small (seven monumental paintings, hundreds of drawings and sketches, forty smaller scale paintings and sketches). The average artist doesn’t show their full potential until the two-thirds mark of their lives. Seurat painted his masterpiece at age 25 and died at age 31, the cause of death uncertain.