Brush with Peril

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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Wow, lucky $4 Patreon Supporter: 48-pg PDF of Chapter One!



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This page was drawn 7/1-7/13/09. Notice panel 2 was a close up of panel 1, too big to fit within the page width, and that there is a blank hole where a panel 7 should be. My intention here was to draw the full panel 2, and then divide it in half, and then make one half panel 2, and the other half panel 7.

In real life, Arneson was a total “left coast heathen,” as he says in the final panel. And yet for my story, I chose for his character to be the opposite. It was a line I didn’t care for, and I wound up changing it by the next draft.

Here was my cleaned up first draft, with some slightly altered dialogue and the panels cropped and moved into what now became Panels 2 and 8:

Below, you can see my best friend, Gerry Chow, coloring the completed page in 2015. Notice that panel 2 and 7 would together make the full image of Panel 2 above.

In 2015, when I got back the above page from Gerry, I realized there are so many amazing Pope paintings by Francis Bacon, it seemed silly to just keep drawing the same Pope painting, farther away, then close up of the left of his face, then close up of the right. I drew the below references to different paintings of his, with the intent of deleting out the previous images. (Notice I also drew a Van Gogh which I intended to use in the same way for an upcoming Van Gogh image that I had drawn, without even using any reference!)

Below is Gerry’s colored page, with my new Pope images superimposed over the old images. I colored these new panels.

 

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Below is the original scan for the first draft of this page, which was created 6/28-8/2/09.

If you read my Page 008 – Commentary, I talk about realizing that I wanted to reference more art than I’d thought to do during these first pages, hence the alteration later (Aug and Sep 2019!) to panel five.

Notice also, above panel 2, I was brainstorming dialogue (in pencil) and even printed in ink (above panels 1 and 2) some dialogue that I would insert elsewhere (some of which I opted not to insert after all).  I had a tendency back then not to think of the page as a completed work of art, but instead as a slab where I could clutter up anything I might need for the printed version, and then I’d clean up, move and alter everything in Photoshop later. Putting them on pages like this insured I wouldn’t lose them when I needed to access them later!

In 2015, I discussed making this comic in full color, and my best friend, Gerry Chow began digitally coloring the comic. Below is what he did with this page.

Below you can see the edit to panel 5 I made in 2019 (You can see the original scan of the art in Page 008 – Drafts), that I inserted into Gerry’s colors, coloring the alteration myself. 

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This page was drawn 6/26-7/9/09. Below is the original scan of the page upon its completion.

At the time, when I scanned the image and began cleaning it in photoshop, I remember spending A LOT of time trying to make the captions on the right of panel 1 look more distinct with its font. I do not use fonts in illustrator, I still hand draw all lettering onto my page. But this means a lot of potential time consuming editing if I want to make any changes.  If you look at the page 009 – Drafts, you’ll see some text I just wrote onto the top of the page, which I wound up cutting and pasting to include on THIS page!

In 2015, I discussed making this comic in full color, and my best friend, Gerry Chow began digitally color the comic. Below is what he did with this page.

In 2019, I decided I needed more art reference (read more about this in this page’s Page 008 – Commentary), and so to make the edits I wanted, I drew these images below, which would be placed into the story’s different upcoming pages:

That gave me the imagery I wanted altered, which I then photoshopped into the original page, thereby creating the current Page 008 – Published.

After doing so, I made alterations to Gerry’s colored page with the new art inserted, and coloring these new areas myself (below).

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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.

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PABLO PICASSO (Spanish, 1881-1973). Art before Picasso, and art after were completely different beasts, and Picasso was responsible for the changing of its course for the entirety of the 20^th century. He was a child prodigy who painted superbly realist, naturalistic works. Spending most of his adult life in France, he went on to create, co-found, and experiment in perhaps more art movements and styles than any other artist before or since. He co-founded Cubism, collage, and constructed sculpture, made major contributions to Symbolism and Surrealism, and experimented in expressionism, monochromatic palettes, primitivism, abstraction, and Neoclassiscism.  There are currently over 29,000 catalogued Picasso artworks, and he received universal acclaim and an immense fortune in his lifetime.   The female form was an imminently recurring theme of his work, with many of his lovers serving as his emotional and erotic muses.   He was a tempestuous womanizer and misogynist who had several mistresses in addition to his wives and partners, and two of them committed suicide, while others had nervous breakdowns. He had four children by three women, one who died of alcoholism.

Evolution of Picasso’s Painting Style

Early Work (thru 1897, age 16)

Expressionist and Post Impressionist Influence (1897-1901)

Blue Period (1901-1904)

Rose Period (1904-1906)

African Period (1906-1909)

Cubism (1908-1914)

Neoclassicism (1917-1925)

Surrealism (1925-1932)

Late Work (1932-1973)

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:


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(Also see EDWARD HOPPER’S HOUSES)

(Also see EDWARD HOPPER’S CITY)

EDWARD HOPPER (American, 1882-1967) drew realist scenes of modern American life, in rural and urban settings. He struggled as an artist and finally started to see some success just as the depression was about to hit. He was described as quiet, stoic, fatalistic, and introverted. His paintings are meticulously constructed with shadows and sunlight, color, geometrical design, and a careful placement of figures. They contain a longing melancholy, an emptiness, and a feeling of aloneness.

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:


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see A Small List of Great Artists: Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903)

Paul Gauguin had been painting for nearly twenty years when, around 1891, it looks like he wasn’t having much success as an artist or husband, and so he maybe convinced himself that if he could get out to Tahiti (then a French colony), away from the bustle and artificiality of modern society, he would find an enchanted paradise of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration, and from it, could produce a body of work that was bound to captivate buyers and sell his paintings and make him rich. And with this plan, he threw a banquet and convinced friends and benefactors to help him raise money to get out to Tahiti, including the French government, who – since they had colonized the area – also wanted to promote this positive and tourist-attracting view of it.

To Gauguin’s disappointment, he found there a harsh reality of poverty and sickness and invading industrialization, but this didn’t stop him from bringing to life a very specific, new, romanticized, mythological body of work from his imagination (exploitative and culturally appropriating), by depicting this region as a fictitiously “exotic” and “primitive” tropical paradise where lovely island women lay all about seductively and voluptuously bare-breasted – as starkly opposed to the modestly-dressed community of Christian missionaries wearing conservative missionary gowns that he found. Many of his finest paintings were produced at this time.

I feel conflicted about my love of this art, but it’s just so seductive and alluring to the eye.

Gauguin was interested in conveying symbolism over realism, often infusing the supernatural into his day-to-day images. Adding elements of his imagination and emotion, he sought to make the subject more “pure.” In pursuing these goals, Gauguin was a pioneer of the use of non-representational and impossibly unrealistic, bright colors, often in large flat swathes.

His work inspired the next generation of European artists (especially Fauves and German Expressionists) to examine and push these ideas even further.

In a letter to his close friend, Émile Schuffenecker, Gauguin wrote, “Art is an abstraction. Derive it from nature as you dream in nature’s presence, and think more about the act of creation than the outcome.”

He returned to France and continued producing this style of work, but sales weren’t great. He wound up receiving charity from friends to buy passage back to Tahiti, where he spent the rest of his days until his death from syphilis. Unlike Van Gogh, he was able to sell some paintings and scrape up a living, but like Van Gogh, Gauguin’s work didn’t become popular until after his death.

Read the comic book, “Brush with Peril”:


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