deviantART: by:Laemeur

It's art.

~Laemeur — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:49:23 PDT

Returning from the grocery store this evening, I walked past the art museum and passed a pair of people exiting the sculpture garden. I overheard one of them, a German fellow, say to his companion in beautifully accented English:

"If you can't figure out what it is, it's art."

I didn't find it quite as funny as she did.

The great tragedy of the modernist movements of the last hundred years isn't that they've lowered the bar for technical excellence or eroded classical values or any of the other criticisms that classically-minded people like to level at them; rather it's that they RAISED the bar on criticism, commentary, and rhetoric so much that, word-by-word, the layman was removed from the dialogue as art criticism became a highly specialized discipline in its own right.

I've read chapters -- yes, entire chapters -- centered around Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and strong cases have been made for why it's important (Newsweek thinks it's the most important painting of the last 100 years) but all this doesn't change the fact that I think it's ugly as shit. That's alright, isn't it? Of course I'm entitled to my opinion, but a person who thinks they know better would tell me that I'm just not getting it, wouldn't they?

The arts will always be evaluated on two planes: the sensual, and the intellectual. For the art critic - a writer - it is an unfortunate truth that his chosen medium, words, are a far better vehicle for concepts than sensation. Even a thorough description of sensation (a flat yellow plane, just paler than canary and with the smoothness of cream, having a nearly random dispersion of tiny, blood-red flecks, being in heavier concentration near the top-right corner) can yield wildly different syntheses in the mind's-eye of the reader. On the other hand, "the first of its kind," (assuming the kind has been well-defined), is a statement that can only be interpreted one way.

And so the art writer tends to write about the things that his medium facilitates: what happened when, who knew who, who said what, who saw what, who paid what, what was intended, what was understood. Out of all this data comes conflicting and contentious valuations based on everything BUT the sensual aspects of a piece, and this dominates the dialogue. If a layman steps in and says, "yes, but it looks like a piece of moldy broccoli and I don't like it" the reply is "ah, but who has painted a piece of moldy broccoli before? Hm? And why don't you like moldy broccoli? You've closed your mind to the beauty of moldy broccoli, and if only you'd broaden your appreciation, you'd get it. Besides, you're lacking context. The artist's statement is blah blah blah, in direct conflict with so-and-so's concept of blah blah blah, influenced in part by the blah blah school of blah blah..."

None of that changes the fact that it looks like moldy broccoli, but in the face of such expertise on a subject, one can start to question their own valuation of a piece.

But the critics can't bear the entire weight of the guilt here (they're easy targets, though). They happen to be right sometimes when bemoaning the intellectual vacuity of the layman. Billions of people in this world inexplicably hold to the notion that manufactured images are meant to be depictive, and when you can't tell what's being depicted, the artist (as opposed to the designer, who is allowed to be abstract) has failed to do his job. I hate to be a smart-ass (that's a lie), but sometimes the correct answer to "what is it supposed to be?" is:

"A picture."

"I just don't get it" is defeatism, and "you just don't get it" is elitism. I welcome neither. The layman should recognize the validity of his gut-level valuation of art (would you let an intellectual talk you out of how attractive you think your significant other is?), while avoiding the temptation to reject the validity of the art scholar's highly informed valuation. For me, I like things for both reasons. Despite my feelings on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, I think Picasso was a genius, and I love a lot of his work on a purely sensual level. Alternatively, I think Kazimir Malevich's Black Square is about the best thing ever for almost purely intellectual reasons (although it is a very nice-looking black square, isn't it?)

But let's get back to what the German guy said: "If you can't figure out what it is, it's art."

When I heard it I sort-of ran through the short-form version of what I just wrote in my mind. It only took a second or two, thank goodness, and then I was on another track which was much more fun. I remembered a piece of metal I'...

Short term memory is broken.

~Laemeur — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:21:19 PDT

So I'm about to draw a DNA molecule, and I think to myself I'd better do a GIS search to make sure I'm drawing this right (better safe than sorry).

I link over to the website of a biologist who's keeps a sort-of archive of all the reversed images he sees of DNA molecules. See, normal DNA winds in the same direction as the threads of a right-handed screw, and when a publication flips an image of a DNA molecule, it becomes left-handed, which is not correct (left-handed DNA does exist, but it doesn't look exactly like right-handed DNA).

Anyway, I get done reading this humorous account of all these erroneous DNA illustrations and get some visual reference and some specifics (10 nucleotides per turn -- useful!) and get back to the drawing board.

After a few minutes of sketching-in my DNA molecule and thinking "yeah, this is really working into the composition nicely", I take a sip of my coffee, space out for a second, stare vacantly into my drawing, and abruptly slap my forehead.

The reason? Before my eyes rests the lovingly half-rendered form of a left-handed DNA molecule.

GIMP is a Fucking Piece of Shit

~Laemeur — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 22:35:01 PDT

I don't know about the rest of the world, but when I'm working rather intensely on something, I don't keep very good track of time. In fact, I'll be in the so-called 'zone' for an hour or longer every now and again. This kind of working intensity, while generally a good thing in most lines of work, is a major hazard for users of GIMP.

GIMP is a graphics program that behaves very well when you're not in the zone. It's very friendly if you save your work every five minutes, close the program after an hour, and reboot your computer a few times per day. It also likes it if you never task-swap. In fact, just to be safe, you should load up your task manager and kill all unnecessary processes while you're running GIMP. It'll work much better that way.

GIMP has a very nasty way of telling you that you are in the zone, or have recently been in the zone: it crashes. In particular, it likes to crash when you ask it to do something really mundane, like, say, maximize or restore the window. Or click a button on the tool palette. Or change the zoom level. Or switch from tablet to mouse. Or make a brush-stroke.

If you're in the zone for, say, ten minutes, you usually won't suffer any ill consequences. In fact, GIMP seems to have been written only to punish people who work intensely on a piece of art for thirty minutes or longer. I just lost a little over an hour of work, myself. That's what I get, though. Thanks for the reminder, GIMP. Shame on me.

Commissions?

~Laemeur — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:26:56 PDT

We'll call this a pilot project. If anyone would be interested in paying, say, $40 for a full-page drawing (subject of your choosing), then drop me a note. I'm interested in continuing my half-traditional/half-digital working methods, so the final product would be the high-res finished art in a digital format. Maybe even the source files so you could get an inside look at how the thing came together.

Troves of Racketous Mind-Bending

~Laemeur — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:06:40 PDT

I told my friend some hours ago that it was my intent this evening to sit, drink coffee, eat carrots, and write something mind-blowingly profound. Failing that, I would simply write a page of gibberish and call it profundity.

It is now some hours later, and the coffee has given way to beer. The carrots are now Tim's Cascade Style potato chips, and any hopes of profound prose-smithing, feigned or genuine, are so many punched-paper bits in that proverbial bucket. But let's talk for a moment about digital inking.

Digital inkers are quick to point out the difference between what they do and what others have termed "digital line enhancement" which, as we all know by now, is just histogram adjustment with a little (optional) clean-up. What's usually being implied by the delineation (no pun intended) is that "digital inking" (which we could just as easily call "interpretive manual line enhancement") is a more mature, nuanced, respectable, and VALID discipline than the former. This, of course, is utter bullshit.

Many amatuer penciliers turn to digital line enhancement out of laziness, and frankly, it shows. But the crimes of a multitude of amateurs ought not reflect on a minority of modern and saavy artists who, in the penciling stage, have a mind on how their pencils will "clean up" in Photoshop. This is no different from the potter or ceramicist who must apply glazes with an informed foreknowledge of what their work will look like after firing. The fact that the kiln and the glaze, in an automatic process, are actually rendering the final colors in no way invalidates the efforts of the artist who applied the glaze. The fact that a computer program, in a guided-but-automatic process, manipulates the tones of a scanned page, in no way invalidates the work of the artist who produced that page.

Now, I was going to make some accusations, but I decided that I simply wasn't informed enough to make them, so instead, I'll make an invitation. Could someone point me towards a digital inker who does something with their work that can't be done with traditional media? Users of "special effects" (blur, lens flare, etc) need not apply.

It may sound like I'm blasting digital inkers, but I'm not; I dare not, because I'm a digital inker myself. No, what I'm really blasting are critics of digital line enhancement -- it just happens to be so that many of those critics are digital inkers. But let's move on and blast some people who really need blasting: traditionalists.

A few weeks back, Sean Gordon Murphy wrote a journal about digital inking. Now, I'm not going to blast Mr. Murphy because, frankly, I drool over just about every page he does, the bastard. I am, though, going to blast one of his points. A quote:

"There's more soul in keeping your mistakes, rolling with the punches, thinking on your feet and adjusting your technique every second than simply hitting "undo" each time and making everything perfect. There's no soul in perfection. With digital inks your final piece is more likely to be "exactly what you planned" as opposed to "close to what I wanted, errors here and there, happy accidents throughout, but heart all the way".

Okay. There's no soul in perfection. I'll buy that. But the rest is pure silliness. If we're going to criticise digital inking because it makes it easy to correct mistakes, then there had better be an accompanying piece criticising rubber erasers, because erasers sure as heck make it easy to correct mistakes in pencil work. I'm not just being funny, the issue is exactly the same. It has been an exercise in discipline for all artists, from the beginning of time, to accept their mistakes and move on. The temptation may be greater for the digital artist, but it's not like mistake correction didn't exist before Ctrl-Z.

In my opinion, it's the same issue recorded music has faced: in the early 20th century, the problem of terrible recording quality and under-production was a severe one. By the end of the 20th century, the problem of over-production and staleness was equally severe. It's no easier to record a great album now than it was in 1950, but the challenges have changed. In the early days, the technology was a problem because of it's deficiencies. Now, with technology that's reached a very high level of sufficiency, the blame for a lousy album rests squarely on the creative parties.

Another artist whose line work I admire greatly, but whose traditionalist dogma I abhor, is N8 Van Dyke, who graced the pages of July '08s issue of Juxtapoze with the following:

"I see all these guys who do digital stuff and they're lazy. They don't even have a drawing table at home; they have a Wacom tablet. It pisses me off that people don't draw anymore."

<...

On Improvement.

~Laemeur — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:21:59 PST

No one wants to be a mediocre artist. The modest among us will say that they just want to be good, maybe a bit above average, while the rest of us are honest enough to admit that what we really want is to be great. Some very lucky souls are blessed with the egotism to believe that they're already great, and for them the continued practice of art is simply an exercise in self-indulgence and patience (the patience to wait for the rest of the world to wake-up to their undeniable genius). For those of us not so blessed, we've simply to rely on our inexplicable, neurotic compulsion to press-on; and take faith in the sometimes questionable notion that to continue to practice is to creep ever closer to the summit of greatness.

Sometimes questionable, I say, but fundamentally sound. If you never practice, you'll never get anywhere; that much is a certainty. But you can't blame arty-types for questioning the wisdom in "practice makes perfect" because all of us at some time have entered into periods where continual practice seems to yield absolutely no improvement whatsoever.

Sometimes it's just good to quit for a while. Wait for some neurons to rearrange, read books, watch good movies, engage in other pursuits such as music or writing or programming or fishing, or fixing cars -- then go back at it. The fact is that you're never the same person that you were yesterday, and while this only means that CHANGE is occurring, and not necessarily improvement, it's another case of mutual exclusion: you can't have one without the other.

Quitting doesn't always cut it, though. Sometimes the will demands action, and for working artists, sometimes the bills demand action. So, we're forced to force improvement, but... how?

When you're young, you just blindly forge ahead because, really, you don't know what you're doing in the first place. As I've gotten older, though, I find this to be less and less acceptable. In fact, when I was about eighteen, I very nearly quit visual art altogether. Music and computers took over my time because with those things I was still getting results from blindly forging ahead. Drawing, on the other hand, felt more and more like a vast pit into which I was throwing shovel-full after shovel-full of energy, and never seeing the floor rise.

It took about five or six years before I started regaining any real interest in drawing, and I don't think I ever would have regained my current level of interest if it weren't for the fact that I just sat down one day and said "I want to be better. Why am I bad?" It's not like this was some sort of great epiphany or something. What I'm trying to convey is that I found it impossible to move forward in art without taking an analytical aproach. We're all great critics of our own work, but the thought process spurred by our self-criticism is usually something along the lines of "that sucks. I'll try it again". This is pretty much the Einsteinian definition of insanity (which, I suppose, is actually fitting of artists). In a good case, we have a strong conception of what we want to do, and simply trying to do it over and over again will pay off because the failure isn't in the idea, but in the execution; a failure of technique.

A natural escape from the insane cycle is through copying. "That sucks. So-and-so does it better. I'll do it like so-and-so does it". This, though, reaches a dead-end after a while (although some people can build careers on it). When you run out of reference material to copy, you're hosed. You can start mixing and matching your sources, which can produce interesting results, but it's really not helping you improve. Only when you start to understand WHY So-and-so does it better will you actually have gained something which you can adapt to new situations. Copying is necessary in learning, but copying without analysis is, ultimately, fruitless.

I'm not even sure where I'm going with this anymore; it's getting a bit stream-of-consciousness now, but I started writing this because I was sitting here at my desk, trying to think about where I need to improve, because my last few drawings have failed to satisfy, and while thinking, the realization crept in on me that I'm having difficulty nailing down the problem. I'm trying to be analytical, but I'm failing because I actually lack the artistic knowledge necessary to identify with any precision what's not working. I know it's a problem with my composition, and I suspect it's related to my tendency to assemble images microscopically, rather than macroscopically. But, how do I exercise agaist that? Is my ignorance of art theory putting me back in a position where I must blindly forge ahead?

Ugh.

I like how this started off sounding like I was going to write something really helpful and insightful, and I'm ending it on a note of total uncertainty. You don't realize how much you don't know until you try to sound like you know somet...

Brave Ulysses, Take Two!

~Laemeur — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:20:23 PDT

Well, my comic Brave Ulysses lost the April competition at Zuda Comics, but by popular demand another 8 screens will be added for July's invitational competition. Ain't that swell!? The really swell part is that I'll be competing against a couple of comics that I voted for in past competitions: The Crooked Man, and Reno. Excellent company, indeed.

The time crunch to make the competition was a new experience for me. I hadn't lifted a finger on the comic since submitting the first eight screens in March, so when I got the call for more pages on June 2nd, with a deadline of June 20th, I sweated a bit. Given my snails' pace at the drawing board, I sorta didn't think I'd make it, but I did, and had all screens in by the 19th. It's lucky that I don't have a reg'lar job right now, otherwise there would have been no way. Hopefully the pages don't look as hurried as I felt.

Anyway, I'll post a little promotional artwerk in the next couple of days before the competition starts (July 7th, I think), but I just thought I'd toss this journal entry out there as an advance notice. And to all the folks who elected Brave Ulysses for the invitational: thanks buckets!

Brave Ulysses at Zuda

~Laemeur — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:09:53 PDT

SatyQ says I should have something about Brave Ulysses on my main page instead of in the comments of a pic trapped behind a mature content filter. That's probably pretty good advice.

If you still haven't gotten the message by now, I have a comic called Brave Ulysses in the April competition at Zuda (DC's web comic experiment), and everyone should go there and read it and vote for the comic they think is the best. I could tell you to just go and vote for Ulysses and not even bother to read the other comics, but I'm morally opposed to that. I think. Of course, I won't object if you do just that, but... I don't recommend it, either.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

~Laemeur — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:44:07 PST

Nothing here since August, eh? That's a pretty shameful display, I must say. But rest assured, I is cooking up some new stuffs; at least one comic by the end of the month. Promise.

For those of you who have not had the pleasure, be sure to cruise on over to my website-proper: [link] On there I have, in addition to the comics and what-nots that are here on dA, some music (if I may be so bold as to call it that), and some other very, very old crap that really doesn't warrant looking at, but I keep on the site regardless so that it actually looks like there's a lot of stuff on there. Dig?

Okay, well, back to this pic I've been workin' on all night. Hopefully you'll be seeing it soon.

Holy Toledo!

~Laemeur — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:02:01 PDT

Wow, I guess I got a Daily Deviation, huh? Well, a huge thanks to ~darrell31316 for recommending me, and ^GH-MoNGo for making it happen. And on top of that, a whole big whack of thanks for those of you who took the time to look, comment, and fave some of my stuffs. I will make an effort to visit all of your pages and try to extend the same courtesy.

Now I'm gonna go horse around on the internet some more.

-Laemeur