Robert McGinnis did a lot of wonderful paperback covers and some classic posters for James Bond films, but also a fine series of Old-West paintings. A great gift for creating drama through spatial composition.
[From Golden Age Comic Book Stories — the wonder site.]
Completed between 1883 and 1885, this painting is known as The Sporting Ladies and also as The Circus Lover from a series called Women Of Paris.
As with several images of the circus by Tissot, and many other works as well, the painter has created a number of distinct spaces that draw us into the scene progressively — the space occupied by the gentleman leaning in towards the ladies, with the unseen part of his figure seeming to occupy our, the viewers’ space, into which the central female is peering, the space of the seated ladies, the space of the circus ring, and the space of the background seats.
The space of the circus ring is further articulated into the aerial space of the trapeze artists and the space of the clown in the sawdust and there is, as a kind of punctuation, a glimpse in the distant background of a lighted foyer opening on to the highest rung of seats.
The elegant calculation of the composition makes for a very dynamic and seductive image.
There is something fantastical, ghastly, almost demonic about seeing a corporation as somehow equivalent, existentially, to a human being. Could a religious person, for example, ever refer to Exxon Mobil as “a child of God,” as a “dear soul”? The idea is profoundly unsettling.
It doesn't seem like a view one could arrive at simply by specious legal arguments or moral depravity in the service of a political ideology — it would seem to require something more, some sort of neurological disorder, some actual and fundamental damage to the brain itself.
In the glory days (the 1940s and early 1950s) before the comic book industry began to censor itself, to ward off government censorship, comic books could and would show just about anything of a violent nature. Lurid, gruesome, graphic, they approached Elizabethan drama in their obsession with the bloody and the macabre.
I doubt if any of them that came into the hands of young children really rotted the kids' brains or corrupted their morals. Young children know perfectly well, from their intuitions and their dreams, that the human psyche, and thus the real world, is filled with such horror. It is only grownups who try to pretend otherwise.
A powerful art form was crippled by the state-induced censorship, though. Only today has the comic book reclaimed its right to range over the whole landscape of human experience, in the process producing some of the best fiction of our time.
[Via Golden Age Comic Book Stories, the Internet's wonder site.]
What is it about Vermeer? His virtuosity as a technician is thrilling, of course — but how does he invest his photo-realistic visions with such warmth, such an impression of life? The painting above revels in specificity, it enters the imagination as a place we've actually visited, but it's more than a record. As usual, Vermeer plays with frames, spaces opening onto deeper spaces, drawing us in to the scene, and commenting ironically on the act of painting itself, putting frames around life.
The profound beauty of the most ordinary things, the great gift of “the ineluctable modality of the visible”, seem to have inspired him on an almost spiritual level, and the way he communicates this to us is both complex and totally obvious — some kind of mystery hiding in plain sight.
The classic Coke bottle with the raised-glass lettering was one beautiful piece of industrial design — an eternal rebuke to the age of Helvetica.
An editorial cartoon by the great Winsor McCay from around the turn of the last century — reminding us that mass idiocy is a timeless tradition in America.
[With thanks to Golden Age Comic Book Stories.]
Norman Rockwell
A 1936 magazine ad by the great N. C. Wyeth.
Cover art by Ben Prins.
Image by James Bama.
An illustration by Charles Edward Hooper from a 1903 edition of Jack London's The Call Of the Wild, graciously posted at Golden Age Comic Book Stories, where every day is full of dreams.
