Menn in Black sketch

Recently I heard Nick Redfern, author behind many speculative books. His most recent is about the Men in Black phenomenon. He explores folkloric paths long before what we associate now, thanks to the MIB franchise of entertaining films. This inspired me to start a new painting.

The Observers of Fringe seem to be more on target with what the Men in Black have traditionally been through the decades, before the entertaining movie franchise.

What type of phantoms are they? Benevolent, malevolent, or something in between? The same questions could be asked about another man in black, Bigfoot. I will probably put him in the picture, toward the background.

I wanted some remove from the movie trademark, so I thought it might work to title it Menn i sort, the Norwegian variant. What happens when these shadowy figures poke around in a deciduous Norwegian wood? Can this happen here, where the wavelengths are a bit more prosaic and flat-footed? I got a flat-footed posture from a photo of the enigmatic Gilbert and George duo. (English, rather than Norwegian.)

Men in Black dress the way they do, allegedly, because they need to be generic, able to visit regardless of a period of time. Though their fedoras are unusual, their suits still blend in, a default clothing style that appears to be timeless, though formal.

A side note about the fedoras: I read with mirth that hipsters are supposed to be wearing them now. Perhaps they will become fashionable again, gaining a critical mass. Oddly, current fashion authorities are unaware, or fail to note, that such hats were quite popular among the hipsters in NY only 20 years ago. At that time there were still many original fedoras to be found in used bins. It seems now that they are manufactured in the current century, and of a different cut, with a more compact, Elvis Costellian brim.

Black Bart, Highwayman and doggerel poet of old California, sported a more compact brim, in the form of a bowler. If modern hipsters want compact brims, should they try bowlers?

Old New Yorker

This is a take off of the New Yorker magazine. Living as I do in Europe, I don't take it for granted that the publication is universally known. The wonderful thing about the New Yorker is that it still exists; every week it still comes out, full of long, rambling articles, illustrations, and cartoons. In this bleak media landscape, it surprising that something so good could still be; why shouldn't it be sleeping in the same crypt with all the other hundreds of beautiful magazines? The mag is a gem, the last of its kind.

Now, on to The Old New Yorker. The motif is taken from a neon sign, I think about E. 60^th Street. The sign itself is worth everything, but I have some fond associations of the bar inside, which was a student hangout for Hunter College, some blocks up. Back in those days it was famous for selling draws, frosty mugs of draft beer costing only a dollar. Some years ago I popped in there to revisit and found it had changed typically for the worse, offering instead a grim array of expensive, bottled swill. All charm and goodness was gone—except for the sign on the facade.

No wonder it was featured in Mad Men. (if for a brief instant.) This series has an astonishing attention to detail, evoking the recent past. Rather than slapping some sceneographic sign up, they used the real McCoy, showing The Village Inn's reflections in a taxi. The curved glass of the taxi's window, passing slowly beneath the sign, caused the neon reds and oranges to undulate. This perfectly fits with the era and atmosphere that the series evokes. NY is the city that always changes, I know, but I like it when some little perfect thing can survive, just by chance.

The FugiTimes is the masthead to a broadsheet that can still be found lining the closet shelves of older houses. It is a palimpsest of fugitive events. I just began this painting, a work in progress. How it will end up, no one can tell. What I can tell now is what is moving around in my head at the moment.

I'm thinking of the nature of newspapers, how wonderful they are. But they are a double-edged sword; the events depicted in them rest in the collective imagination only a short time. They flee like the transparent, running colors on a wet canvas. Only a very few artifact-lovers pore over past copies, the journalists and illustrators forgotten by most. I have worked as a freelance illustrator for the NY Times, and the Wall St. Journal. Both were black and white only—and the WSJ, can you believe it, was still fighting last good fight of the the century...the nineteenth century, that is. The paper didn't even publish photos. Talk about good times for illustrators!

My thoughts often go to the The Old Gray Lady, The New York Times. She is putting up a good fight, and her web product is very good. I'm hoping the recently erected pay wall will take root effectively, allowing her journalists to survive; we need news to be written by journeymen, who check sources—and receive a check for their labors!

You could say news ink flows through my veins. Perhaps regular ink runs through my veins too. I got a chuckle when I was painting the black letters, trying to emulate masthead fonts: suddenly I was visited by the memory of my calligraphy teacher, a purist paleographer and former Trappist monk, who loved to rue the grotesque “progress” of the 19c. During that time the calligraphic arts were thrown out the window, and graphic designers used T-squares to draw letter forms, mutating the nature of pen strokes done by hand, so he thought.

Being visited by people from my past is a very common thing in the painting studio. Sometimes the room becomes quite full. I am often surprised by extremely fragmentary types, whose names have long run away, but who offer one quote or action that turns up like a small scrap in a bottle, quickly submerged in the roiling waves of memory. I think I will paint some of these on this canvas; it has just begun, and I am showing only the top quadrant.

For further reading on newspapers, the best book I can recommend is Matthew Goodman's The Sun and the Moon. This brings the age of the newpaper(early to mid 19c.) alive in a very entertaining way, including a hoax that may be the most successful and educational caper of all time.

Ransom Note

I wanted to advertise Forsider, so I painted this picture, celebrating different ages of communication. Though it is just oil on canvas, I now realize that it looks like a collage. Or a ransom note. (It's fun to think of what criminals will have to use these days, now that a wide variety of printed materials are not necessarily lying around; some people don't even care for books, let alone those fusty old things called magazines or newspapers.)

All the letters are talking to each other, and so are the colors and textures—or at least that is what I hope. The dominant letter is a logo in itself, and the guy most happy with the age of digital reproduction. Most of the other letters are more at home in the age of mechanical reproduction, rescued from book or product covers. Others are looking dated or corroded. Some characters may be so old, they don't even know about paper, being more comfortable in ancient clay.

Are they letters or pictures? One of my favorite things to see along a roadside is a billboard whose letters have left. They have gone off into the landscape.

When arriving in a new town, or just passing through it, it often looks alien. I have a strange method of making it part of the world, less alien: I imagine an upstairs window of a house, with a comic book or magazine open on a desk, wind from an open window gently shifting the pages. Suddenly the town doesn't seem alien anymore. The spirit of the publication, and the ideas of those who wrote and illustrated it, are fluttering about the town. No matter how cementy and drab the town is, it has some redemption.

Klan Klatch

Long ago, at a school somewhere, before the age when everyone had a pc, I remember playing around with a basic paint program. It was fun and full of promise, theoretically. Along with most anyone else using it, it was good to explore some possibilities, as long as I could ignore my clumsiness and jagged lines with a mouse. It never went anywhere because there seemed to be little we could actually apply it to. Things couldn't be printed in those days. We still used typewriters to make documents. There was no internet, no digital photos, etc.

Then over the years and decades the computer insinuated itself more into my life. Photoshop and the internet came along. But now all this stuff was so damned complicated. I would use programs for certain projects and then forget how to use them, taking a long break after frying my brain during the eternally long sessions of trying to do some basic thing.

Suddenly it occurred to me: say, what ever happened to that fun paint program? It didn't take an eternity to figure out how to draw a line or color in a shape. I searched a little and found something close: Paintbrush. It's easy to use and basically how I remember.

I decided to do a magazine title with it. Computers are good at squares and right angles, so it seemed good for designing letters. I chose to remix a painting I had done last year, called The Clan. It would work for a magazine or comic book cover. What would the title be? I like alliteration, so I chose Klan Klatch, inspired by a googled image of an old cafe. The style of the letters for Koffee Klatch, the cafe's name, were just the type that I like, vaguely New Yorker-ish. In that era, around 100 years ago, artists redesigned the wheel every time they had a project. Magazine titles, newspaper ads, whatever, were nice and hand made, even though they were straight and vaguely machine-age. These words were hand-made, but also futuristic.

Nowadays, no one reinvents the wheel. Mr. Computer hands everyone thousands of fonts, so there is no call for anyone who likes drawing letters. Not following this trend, using a retro style of paint program, I drew the Klan Klatch title, thinking about every aspect of the name. Both “Klan” and “Klatch” are words whose time has faded. They are in keeping with the style of the lettering, c. 1920. The famous Klan or KKK reached its highest membership in the 1920s, I recall reading somewhere. (Lest one think the good old days were always all that good.)

The word klatch (a social gathering) may be as worn as the klan, perhaps not even known by youth. At one time German influenced American pop culture more than it does now. The old traditions of Vaudeville, where ethnic types were stock and trade, carried on for decades into radio and TV. Beloved rocket scientists, mad scientists of horror films, and “long hair” musicians always spoke in thick accents. Ernie Kovacs had many zany German accents, along with others of the Euro-ethnic soup that was mid-century America pop.

As for the actual content of Klan Klatch, which the painting symbolizes, what is it? This is a klatch of hominids, of an apish type. Or are they more than a klatch—maybe a clan, forbidden to outsiders, ever suspicious? Perhaps Klan and Klatch are contradictions. A gathering infers strangers, or acquaintances meeting socially. Perhaps it is a family reunion. Have you ever been to a family reunion where you were a stranger?

Among the curiosities that have fascinated me recently are the traditions and concerns of families. These concerns are all-important for a few decades, as if they are rules written in stone. Then the elders die off and the rules are forgotten. The house is cleaned out and the goods taken to the dump. It's strange!

City Island and Maxfield Parrish

There are many mysterious places along the waterways of N.Y. One of my favorites is City Island, The Bronx. It is quite far from Manhattan, though the distant spires can be glimpsed miles away. Figuratively, too, it is far from the city. Its ambience is of another time. In the foreground stands a forlorn, abandoned yacht club, seeming to remember the age of Gatsby, who would have partied on one of Long Island's Eggs not far across L.I. Sound.

Though the quiet local of City Island largely furnished the mood of this painting, the time of about 100 years since also did, inasmuch as that I used a color and value strategy inspired by one of my favorite illustrators, Maxfield Parrish. In keeping with what is appearing to be a theme of this blog, and upcoming exhibition, Parrish is an example of transitory fame. Like Al Jolson, (earlier blog) he was a star of his age. I read somewhere that a full TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of households in America displayed a reproduction of his on their walls in the 1920s. That made him perhaps even more popular than than Jesus Christ, even the famous 1940s wallet image given to G.I.s during WWII.

In this era of TV, film, and internet, the idea of such a supremely popular visual artist is beyond our wildest imagination. Equally boggling to the mind is that such a phenomenon would now be forgotten, relatively. Mainly he is remembered by artists.

He had a special talent for clear, atmospheric scenes with heightened colors, often in the keys of yellow and purple. Though he painted in oils, he more often used paper rather than canvas. His results had a lucidity of watercolor, but an intensity and sense for detail that oils foster. I think this was due to his understanding of transparency. In my painting of City Island, I tried to use transparent pigments, such as alizarine crimson, yellow and red iron oxide, and ultramarine blue, though I painted on canvas.

Forsider, Covers, is about magazine covers—print artifacts. Parish's age was the magazine and newspaper age. I grew up at the end of this age—and was influenced by it to the point that I think in terms of magazine covers. I dream magazine covers. Thanks to Mr. Computer, we don't care about covers anymore. But rather than gnash my teeth over a bygone age, I can try to do a project in the new digital medium that has killed off (or killing) the medium I pine for.

Pages and time

This motive has been bubbling around in my mind for a few decades, though I just made this sketch. I'm thinking it would be good for a cover, as it's showing many covers.

I just had the impulse to sketch it when I was reading Erik Von Daeniken's Chariots of the Gods, a book in the air of around 1970, but now being pushed to the background a bit. I mention the air because the smell of it is quite important, having the spirit of energy of a Wyoming basement, where I rescued it last summer. (the smell of a book is the first thing I notice, before I settle my eyes into it.) These particles of smell are the same as the rocks and nature of the times in which Chariots was discussed much, the era of speculation and imagination about ancient astronauts. Von Daeniken discusses the time capsule placed in NY, 1965 (I imagine at the World's Fair.) This world's fair is the inspiration for Mansonia, the last Blog post, and a future painting.)

Sheets and covers are about time, artifacts in the air at one time, since covered up. Sometimes they fall away entirely, lost in the wind, though other times they can be pried from underneath layers pasted over them.

This notion of the time capsule is intriguing and troubling; in a scant 45 years since the capsule was layed down, the world has changed troublingly much, to the extent that we put our artifacts into mainly digital forms. This digital info is highly fugitive and transitory. As I write, I am aware that the form of a blog is becoming archaic. Unlike a book, a blog will vanish entirely, and it has no smell particles that can be rescued. Are we thinking of putting digital info in time capsules? Will we be able to decipher it 5,000 years from now? Or 50?

I have contrarian concerns to most people, concerning the web. Most worry about things like Facebook's lack of privacy, that a person's mistake will be preserved forever, etc. I doubt this: in just over a decade, a huge amount has vanished, never to be seen again. My gallery at paintingsdirect.com, for instance, one of the premier web galleries of the world, folded a year or two ago, most of its pages wiped away, only a few remaining in archives. This was a very high profile site; small blogs and most pages stand an even worse chance of lasting for a long time. Keep it in perspective!

Manson on Prozac?

Mansonia Souvenir Map requires a more mellow view of Chas. Manson. I photoshopped an image that combines two different early perp-walk photos, coming up with a milder look than we usually associate with him.

The idea of the eventual cover is to provide a cartography of a word's fair devoted to Manson. After reading Adam Gorightly's The Shadow over Santa Susana I became aware that Chas. Manson may have a deeper significance for the 1960s than conventional histories chart. Like the events surrounding the JFK assassination, new maps are needed to draw a cosmos that our current times are built on. This will be the inspiration for Mansonia Souvenir Map, the cover painting to follow.

Sketch for Powwow

Powwow Culture is a dream cover, that is to say, a cover that appeared in a dream, arising spontaneously. The difficulty with spontaneous dream images is that bringing them into the waking world is the reverse of quick. Especially with painting, it can be slow. In fact, it took me around a year to even find a way of making the face. That's not even discussing the slowness of the medium of oil paint.

For Powwow culture I needed alluring eyes, especially since there are six of them. The icon that I dreamed of was a man, but the eyes were dark. Some time later I was reading an article about the now un-sung singer Al Jolson in The Saturday Book, my favorite anthology of quirky culture, and it hit me: his were the eyes I needed. The stars of that time were made up dark for the silent film age.

After I had the eyes, it was only to find hairstyles of the 70s/80s, Farrah Fawcett being the innovator for the strange unisex style of the time. At first I wanted to find year book photos of my contemporaries, but these can be actually be surprisingly difficult to find on the web, and I have no old year books, long jettisoned in my many moves. So I went to the source to find a variety of Farrah hair.

Then it was only to do some photoshop work, and I came up with this image, which is reasonably close to a mythic hero personality, a man by the name of Darrell LaFontain. As to he he is, I am not sure quite at this point.