The Passenger Pigeon

Partly inspired from seeing the Audobon exhibit at the MFA a few times, and mostly inspired from seeing a Passenger Pigeon specimen yesterday at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, I took a stab at a science-style illustration of the famed extinct bird.

George Bellows at the Metropolitan Museum

The show so nice I went to see it twice.

While spending the holidays in the greater NY area, I learned that the Met has been hosting a special exhibition dedicated to the works of George Bellows, one of my favorite painters. I was especially excited to see this since Bellows isn't your typical museum headliner, certainly not the kind of name they're going to hang on a banner out front to attract the casual visitor. As you can see those honors went to Matisse, who I'm a big fan of, and Warhol (meh...) Pop art - once you've seen it once you've seen all you need to see. But let's get back to Bellows...

The first time I really noticed a Bellows painting was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a few years ago...a painting called "Cliff Dwellers" that immediately drew me in with it's amorphous, gestural figures, dynamic composition, engaging color palette, and narrative quality amongst many other factors. I had seen plenty of old paintings before that showed old, gritty urban life but something about this one seemed different. In person I admired the super textural quality of the surface and seemingly brisk swiftness of every single stroke. Didn't know much about the artist...assumed he was probably American based on the name and figured he worked in the early 1900s based on the subject matter.

Of course our Telfair Museum in Savannah has this great Bellows snow landscape in their permanent collection, but I never made the connection for a while for some reason that they were painted by the same person. I just remember always going by it and thinking, "Wow, this is a really cool painting" but there was so much sophistication to it that I just wasn't ready to see yet as a budding art student.

Last December I was in Cleveland visiting my ol' American Greetings friends and went to the Cleveland Museum of Art. While browsing around the gallery of American paintings I saw Stag at Sharkey's from a distance and exclaimed to my wife, "Hey! It's THAT painting!" I must've missed it somehow in my one and only previous visit to the museum while living in Cleveland. It's always exciting to see a well known painting for the first time in person, it's like spotting a celebrity.

Back to the present day...the Bellows show at the Met was great to finally see. As I mentioned before, he's one of those artists you really have to see in person to appreciate as you get up close and try to decipher the types of artistic decisions he was making in the span of a painting. I found myself most drawn to many of the landscapes on display, especially the ones of NY Penn Station under construction and some cityscapes...very engaging. His energetic brushwork really lends itself to bringing these environments to living, breathing, life. Also on display were some really powerful war paintings which I had never seen before.

And in a sort of "full circle" kind of moment all three of the paintings I had seen of his before and admired were collected together and on display as part of this show too. It's always enlightening when you can see an artist's body of work together, it gives you a better sense of what their overall vision of the world was.

"Three Cats and a Rat"

In this month's Appleseeds magazine I was given a fun opportunity to illustrate an old folktale where a swordsman and his friend try to employ cats to catch a pesky rat, though the first two cats turn out to be more high maintenance than they are skilled. The third cat, a plain tabby, uses patience rather than an aggressive approach to finally catch the rodent who upon release promises to never return.

The story mentions a swordsman and the art director suggested maybe a Spaniard, so right off the bat I channelled what I knew of old European painting as inspiration, especially in terms of using dramatic chiaroscuro, multiple figures in complex angled poses, and setting everything in a ambiguous, darkened, rural space. Then from there I tried to combine it all into a more modern palette and look. (AD and Layout: Joshua Banks)

In my first rough sketch for the big splash image, I thought it was important to focus on a high maintenance persian cat and emphasize that by showing the swordsman rushing over with a bowl of milk to appease it. The little blobs up top were supposed to be kittens holding a "Fight of the Century" sign as mentioned in the story, to build up the hype even more. After stepping back and looking at the sketch I felt it just showed a jerk of a cat but didn't tell anything about the relationship between the swordsman and the cat.

I decided I really needed to include a mouse hole to show the reason that the swordsman is cajoling the cat. But at the same time the mouse hole alone wasn't enough to show the gravity of the situation - that was where the friend from the story came in handy. I placed him waiting to pounce by the entrance, thereby suggesting that there was something actually pesky inside that hole that the cat wouldn't even attend to until fully fed. Perfect...except for the fact that the composition became incredibly left-heavy at that point.

With some tweaking of the figure I changed him to better fit my needs there, which were to 1) balance the composition and 2) support the narrative. This arrangement also had a unexpected benefit too, which was how the shape of the cat now looked like it was literally stepping on him, as if he was a slave to that cat. I thought it helped to subconsciously push that idea that this was really one high maintenance animal. Plus I already had a composition comprised of many "U" shapes in varying sizes and curves, so putting the friend in a big "U" helped to hold everything together and perpetuate the rhythm.

Voila! Now I felt like I had a composition of dynamic implied lines and shapes that helped to tell the specific narrative, and I could finally move forward confidently with the rest of the character design, drawing, and painting. Below are the other two smaller illustrated spots that accompanied the story. I already decided early on that the rat was going to appear in both of those, which is why I never included it in the initial sketch for the splash image.

Cobblestone Publishing: April Illustrations

Late posting! For the month of April I was happy to have produced illustrations for not just one, but two Cobblestone magazine titles - Odyssey and Faces. The Odyssey assignment called for a vintage-looking ad for geomedicine products by mail order. I like to think my general knowledge of science is pretty good, but I'll admit I had NO idea what "geomedicine" was; but I find learning something new is the beneficial side product of illustrating for a science magazine.

Faces Magazine is Cobblestone's world cultures topics publication for kids and was a new venue for me this month to my delight. The gig called for a series of narrative illustrations showcasing three ancient and witty Arabic folktales told from the point of view of a wise old man named Mullah, who also stars in each story as a character. The settings range from a restaurant, a lavish party, and the open desert. When you think about it, it's funny how so many ancient folktales around the world are based on either food or social statuses...

"What an Irritating Gift!"

New illustration appearing in this month's Odyssey Magazine for an article entitled "What an Irritating Gift! Thank You, Dear!" The story, by Nick D'Alto, talks about the birth of pearls through a process of irritation and layering. The setting for the story called for a charming dinner setting where a young marine biologist uses a chocolate covered cherry to explain the process that a oyster goes through once an irritant is introduced within its shell.

The Hoover Dam

During my very first visit to the Hoover Dam I quickly learned that the structure is one of those things you'll see from afar and think, "Ok, so it's a big wall of concrete holding up a river," but once you go in for a close up and learn about it's history, construction, and influence on the development of the untamed landscape of the West you'll truly appreciate it's place in American history. The concept of humans having the technology to divert and control a powerful river is impressive in itself, but when reminded that this thing was built out in the middle of nowhere under the ridiculously harsh Nevada climate without the use of computers it's really amazing. It was fascinating learning about the types of workers (puddlers, scalers, etc.) and to think about how these Depression-era men were motivated to migrate out to this unforgiving landscape for the opportunity to be a part of something big.

What would it have been like to be a rural settler in the '30s out in the middle of Arizona, Nevada, California or anywhere in the Southwest really and to even hear that a massive dam was going to be built into the mighty Colorado River? And then what if they told you that very dam was going to also eventually deliver electricity to you from hundreds of miles away? Would you even believe it to be possible??

On a side note, one thing you have to get close to the Dam to appreciate is the streamlined, simple, and beautiful Art Deco details of it's architecture; from afar you wouldn't even know the designed in such a style. It's unusual because Art Deco is a look that we usually associate with the big city, so to see it out isolated in this pristine valley of vivid red rock makes for really bold contrast. There's also nice works of art and reliefs all about, including the bronze winged statues and some cool mural illustrations by John Rush.