Goodbye 2016, ending in a few hours. 2016, don't come back. What a terrible year!
No word from Dana. I did get the address right, didn't I? From the one on 45th?
I've spent some time lately thinking about old influences, those things that sparked an interest in art, specifically portraiture. The earliest I can recall is a board game one of my older sisters had called "Mystery Date", back in Vallejo when I was two or three. In the center of the board was a plastic device resembling a door. Inside the device was a stack of cards each with a depiction of a potential blind date. Presumably a bunch of girls would play together, seeing who gets the dreamboat and who gets the nerd or the slob. There was probably a jock. This was the late 60s, btw. I was fascinated first by the device itself: the door when clicked would open to a random card in the pack. How did this work? That's the kind of thing I might have pursued in school had any such course presented itself, but none ever did. I had a mind for such things. I was equally fascinated by the full-body artwork of the characters, such a variety of people - though all boys, and now that I think of it not such a variety as to offend conservative family ideals of the era. For example, I don't recall any greasers or bikers in the bunch. No non-Caucasians, certainly. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=mystery+date&FORM=HDRSC2
I can place a set of books from that time as well, because we were in Vallejo. We had a set of readers which sampled stories, and presumably works of literature for all ages. Each volume was a different color, and one was for children. Only one was ever used with me...light blue? I think? Each story was illustrated by a different artist, so there were a great many styles. Stories included 'Me and My Shadow", something about a set of Chinese brothers, one about a dragon with a voracious appetite for balls of cheese...but there was one illustration that fueled my imagination more than any other, and that one I believe belonged not to the story books but possibly to an encyclopedia or dictionary. It was one of the classic series by Henrique Alvim Correa. See the link for his beautifully imaginative pieces for the H.G. Wells novel: http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2015/04/henrique-alvim-correa-war-of-worlds.html . The particular work that I was seeing as a child is labelled "Martian Viewing Drunken Crowd" and is seventh from the top. The night we left Vallejo, California for Portland Oregon, we passed a water tower in the dark. I was convinced the tower was watching us and making up its mind whether to attack or let us pass.
When I was around seven or eight, I had a set of playing cards called "Authors". These were a variation on the game "Go Fish" with classic literature as a theme. As a device for educating, I suppose it must have been somewhat effective in that it made me curious about the life and art of being an author, though looking at the list I have read almost none of the authors or their works. Shame. I was taken, though, with the faces. Some seemed dull, some chilly or distant, some fiery, some stylish. So, each story comes from an individual mind - from a unique personality? Imagine that. Was Robert Louis Stevenson's hair really purple? What must be have said about him when he went out to dinner? And Nathaniel Hawthorne must have dyed his hair to get it so yellow. You can see these are watercolors. I think I was intrigued by the unfinished nature of the clothing and backgrounds, not as a stylistic solution but for the problem itself - how to trail off a portrait, what information is really necessary. For example, the color of Sir Walter Scott's jacket and the cut of his collar clearly indicated antiquity of a romanticized era, I knew that visually alone. The lace worn by Louisa May Alcott suggested gentility and a matronly mind. Stevenson was clearly a gentleman but one (the suit) but one of mystery and perhaps a forbidding or dark nature (the violet that infuses the entire image).
By then I was already well in tune with the more fanciful notions of the mind, ala science fiction nd horror. Horror, that's subject enough for a post of its own as the horror community tends to be viewed with a prejudiced eye, but I can tell you it's not the violence that allures but the quality of the unknown - of what can't be seen or understood easily. It's also a matter of the outliers of society, the secrets, the taboos and inhibitions.
By the mid-Seventies I had been checking out library books about horror films when I discovered Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Perhaps by then I'd already been buying the plastic model kits of classic monsters from Aurora and loving the box artwork - which for my era had been rendered garish for the glow-in-the-dark editions. Those too come into play as artistic influences, mostly in ways that are only now manifesting (well, 'now' being the last two decades, still exploring). The imagery in Famous Monsters lured me in, but it was the painted covers that set me alight. So expressive! Lurid, some of them, yes, but also sublime. I was especially drawn to covers featuring the The Phantom of the Opera, in particular the skeletal face of Lon Chaney's Phantom and the romantic/mysterious mask of Claude Rains' Phantom...the way it suited his face, those eyes like the eyes of the mask Yvonne Craig wore as Batgirl in the '66 TV show.
That was the kind of work I wanted to do. I do not mean the subject matter, necessarily, though I have an affinity for it...but the textures, the style, the expressiveness. I regret not having explored color previously.
Since I am mentioning Famous Monsters, I must also mention the anthology periodicals also published by Warren at that time: Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella. As it happened, I only had a single issue of any of them, which was bought by someone else and fell into my hands. The artwork inside was in black and white, mostly peen and ink, in a variety of voices. That alone stirred me. It was a plus that some of the stories included nudity at an age when I was forbidden such material. I could marvel over the covers, alas that I could never find a store willing to carry Vampirella .
Those works helped lead me to the art of Frank Frazetta and from him to Boris Valllejo. I don't care for the goofy machismo of either, but the women are amazing and so are Frazetta's textures. later I would be taken with the fantasy work of Michael Whelan - beginning with his covers for the Heinlein's Friday and the Pern series of books of Anne Mccaffrey.
Being an avid watcher of television, I bought TV guide when that magazine still had some meaning and style. The covers by Amsel caught my eye, he was another with a strong individual vise I wanted to learn from. What Amsel brings to the table is a style that points to itself, a mix of realism and fancy that I have yet to reach...but then I've not consciously attempted it, rather finding beauty in work that remains "unfinished" as a means of pointing to the work as an art form. One of Amsel's disciples is Drew Struzan, another whose work I love.
That's where most of my inspirations are from, artwork for movies and television. It was in TV Guide that I found Frazettas work for Battlestar Galactica and The Gauntlet (Clint Eastwood movie). I was getting heavily into movie soundtracks and was entranced by posters from the most dynamic of all my favorite artists, Bob Peak.
I'm also influenced by the look of the movies and shows themselves. Irwin Allen had a knack for good concepts and a penchant to let them turn into childish drivel once they hit the air. Lucky for me I was too young to assess the quality of Lost in Space...but it was pretty powerful thing for a child. Home means a lot to children: imagine a home that can take off and land, even travel in space? That was the Jupiter 2. The design of that ship and of the B-9 Robot are classic and very much of their era (the work of Robert Kinoshita, who also designed Robby the Robot. A neighbor's car was a 1959 Brookwood, which to me looked very much of the same visual style as Lost in Space. Our own car was similar, the 1960 Ford Galaxie station wagon, but I always misremembered the Brookwood as ours. Later the designs of artists like Ralph McQuarrie, Ron Cobb, and Syd Mead. Then there's the nightmare sleekness of H.R. Giger.
See also the designs for Gerry Anderson's UFO and Space:1999, Kubrick's 2001...the design of the classic Klingon battlecruiser from the original Star Trek...the Mach 5 from Speed Racer...the Flying Sub from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the Spindrift from Land of the Giants. These are the icons of my dreams.
As a child, the space race filled me with awe. The Apollo CSM may have been our greatest achievement at the time but for looks it didn't have the beauty or mystique of the LEM or the Gemini craft. I've always had a soft spot for the Soyuz as well, which must have been a decent design as it is still in use today.
Don't even get me started on cars...(the '66 Batmobile, classic Corvettes and Thunderbirds, Supervan...)
Devotees of any of these fields may be disappointed that I have not pointed to artists who are more obscure. I'm sorry, I was always a pop culture kid and still am. The point is to be honest, and honestly this is the art that made me want to create.
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