an evening with Al Farrow

Al Farrow (left) and me


In October, I had the privilege of hearing Al Farrow speak at the Corcoran, along the Shepard Fairey.

Al has been a sculptor for many years and has explored a number of themes, but the evening's talk focused on his "Reliquary" series, which was one-third of a 3-man show at Irvine Contemporary in October/November (along with Fairey and Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky) called "Regime Change".

Al's "Reliquary" pieces are powerful statements on the historical link between organized religion and war. The sculptures, which weigh hundreds of pounds each, are fashioned mostly from guns, bullets, artillery shells and human bone. Assembled into architectural models of cathedrals, synagogues and mosques, they evoke strong feelings of violence and death, modern warfare and ancient crusades, evil and reverence. They're creepy and beautiful. His passion for the subject was evident in his talk, but the evening wasn't entirely somber; he also offered funny tales about buying guns and ammo, which he found shockingly easy to do.

It was great to meet him afterward and discuss our similar views on art and politics, a conversation that could have gone on, but was cut short by other commitments. Thanks, Al, for an evening of insight and entertainment. And inspiration.

Above: a sample of Al Farrow's work.

for

"The kids in D.C. are smarter than we give them credit."

In this morning's Washington Post (12.18.08), accompanying an article about a "Festivus" board in Adams Morgan, where people jot down their complaints. This was one of the complaints that was posted.

Photo by Sarah L. Voisin, The Washington Post

a monument to self

[abandoned gas station, Merrifield, VA.]

Group Show of DC Illustrators

The annual Members' Exhibition of the Illustrators Club of Washington, Maryland and Virginia opens this Thursday, Dec. 11, 2008 in Rosslyn. It's always a great show, so stop by and check out the artwork, have some wine and cheese and meet the illustrators.


It's an honor to have my artwork chosen for the invitation postcard and exhibition poster. The illustration was part of a series of five illos done for Germany's Stern Magazine, on the subject of the heart as it relates to emotions. This piece refers to the German phrase "Herzkaspar" which has no English equivalent but translates literally to "Heart Jester."

ILLUSTRATORS CLUB OF WASHINGTON, MD AND VA
SEVENTH ANNUAL MEMBERS SHOW
ART INSTITUTE OF WASHINGTON - First Floor Gallery
1820 N. Fort Myer Drive, Arlington, Virginia 22209
SHOW DATES December 8, 2008 - January 9, 2009
OPENING RECEPTION & HOLIDAY PARTY Thursday, December 11, 2008, 6:00-8:00pm

The Illustrators Club website can be found here.

Handmade Book Show

"Turning The Page," a gallery show featuring Illustrated Books, Handmade Artists Books and original artwork opens this Thursday, Dec. 8, 2008 at the Metropolitan Center for the Visual Arts gallery in Rockville MD. Among the books and original artwork on display are my handmade book "Occam's Razor" and the accompanying artwork. The book is a flag book, which opens up and expands into three long illustrations, and also features a sculptural box containing a sliced up explanation of Occam's Razor as well as an antique shaving razor. Exhibition and gallery information follow the artist's statement.

Artist Statement

As an illustrator, I've created thousands of images, mostly for magazines, and while creating art for others’ manu-scripts may allow for a little personal expression, it’s not enough. So I began exploring handmade books as an outlet to fill the void, enrolling in a Book Arts class at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. My interest in taking the class was not only to find a means of personal expression; it was also an exploration of book construction, both unique and ordinary, as well an exploration of the relationship between image, text, structure and expression.

Midway through the semester the instructor introduced flag books to the class, and showed us examples. A unique feature of flag books is the unfolding of interlocking “pages”— the flags — as the book is opened. My initial reaction was that the construction was fascinating and entertaining, but... ultimately a little gimmicky and maybe even a little pointless. I felt there needed to be a reason for making a book a particular way, a balance of form and function, and I couldn’t find much of a rationale for most flag books beyond being flag books for flag-book’s sake. To me, it was overly complicated as a means of conveying a thought or telling a story.

But, that was the assignment, and I’m always up for a challenge. After giving it some thought, I decided that if the content was going to reflect the structure, then the book should relate to the theme of complexity. So I opted to make a book about “Occam’s Razor,” a philosophical maxim credited to the 14th century philosopher William of Occam that argues for simplicity over complexity. These days the maxim is often reduced to the bite-size “keep it simple,” but it’s more nuanced than that. The “razor” refers to the act of shaving away unnecessary parts of an argument, reducing it to its simplest, and therefore most logical form: Don’t favor a complicated explanation when a simple one will do. In design, it is taken to mean simple design is preferable to complex design.

Being a big fan of irony, I thought a complex book on the virtues of keeping it simple was a worthwhile conceptual approach. Yet the real irony may be that the book, while complex to make, is, in the end, exceedingly simple.

The text, which is limited to the two inside covers, gives an overview William of Occam and his maxim, and describes three different examples. Those three examples are illustrated, with each illustration sliced into seven pieces, or “flags,” which fan out to form the completed image when the book is fully opened. It also features a second, very lengthy (2,884 words) explanation of Occam’s Razor, which I hand-sliced into hundreds of pieces and glued piece by piece, along with an antique straight razor, into a handmade box that is set inside the book.

Three of those 2,884 words are reserved for the cover, where they are inlaid into the front label to form the book’s subtitle (and central message), “Keep It Simple.”

The illustrations depict three examples of Occam’s Razor:

Crop Circles: Crop circles began appearing in England in the late 1970s. Many people claimed they were created by aliens. But, following the principles of Occam’s Razor, it would be more reasonable to conclude that humans rather than aliens made crop circles, because the alien theory is too complicated and makes too many unproven assumptions. Occam was proven right when two men subsequently came forward and admitted to creating them after evenings spent at a local pub.

If You Hear Hoofbeats, Think Horses, Not Zebras: This phrase, often used in medical schools to explain to doctors how to diagnose multiple symptoms in a single patient, means, simply, go with the obvious. If a patient has five symptoms, it’s probably one malady, not five.

The Solar System: Copernicus used Occam’s thinking to explain that the Sun — not the Earth — was the center of the solar system, which made heavenly observations easier to explain and eliminated many convoluted 17th century theories. Copernicus was, of course, correct.

One of the unexpected pleasures of creating the illustrations for this book was the opportunity to break out of my usual 8.5" x 11" magazine-illustrator format. Because the images fan out the way they do, they needed to be decidedly horizontal, and it seemed the longer they were, the more effective they — and the book — became. And so the book grew from five flags to seven. These illustrations have, for me, always been book illustrations, and I’m used to seeing them book-size — and sliced. As such, this exhibition holds a bit of a surprise for me since until now I had never seen the artwork printed larger than what the book called for.



The book: The overall size of the book is 9-1/2" x 12", 1/2" thick. The covers are bookboard covered in black book cloth. The illustrations are printed on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag paper using an Epson 2200 printer with archival inks. The box inside is handmade, wrapped in handmade paper, and the antique straight razor is glued in with epoxy. The sliced text inside the box is a very lengthy explanation (2,884 words) of Occam’s Razor, printed on handmade paper which was then sliced and glued in piece by piece, giving it the appearance of being randomly tossed into the box. The subtitle on the cover, [keep it simple] is from this same text, inlaid into the label, which is handmade paper.



The prints: The giclée prints are 5-1/2" x 36" images printed on 6-1/2" x 40" Museo Max 100% cotton heavy watercolor paper using archival inks. The artwork was drawn by hand in Photoshop, working dark to light in a manner similar to mezzotint.


"Turning the Page" opens December 4, 2008 and runs through February 21, 2009. The Metropolitan Center For the Visual Arts is located at 155 Gibbs Street in Rockville MD, 20850. Some of the featured illustrators and bookmakers are Kinuko Craft, Leo & Diane Dillon, Sally Wern Comport, Alex Bostic, Lynn Sures, Helen Frederick and Kerry McAleer Keeler. For more information on VisArts, click here.

More info and details on the book, including more pictures, can be found on the handmade books section of my website. Click here.

novum: "illustration worth seeing"

novum: world of graphic design is a German magazine covering the work of designers, illustrators and photographers. Each year it publishes a special Illustration issue. The current issue (October 2008) features "a selection of illustrators worth seeing:" nine illustrators from around the world (USA, Italy, Canada, Finland, Denmark, Japan and three from Germany).

I am proud to be one of those nine illustrators. The article, which is essentially an interview prefaced by some truly flattering comments from the editor, can be found on my website.

novum can be found on the web here.

"novum covers the work of designers, illustrators, photographers, studios and schools. It reports on industry trends, news, technology, book reviews, and more. Well illustrated with good reproductions, novum magazine covers the European scene in all its styles - from the traditional to the trendy. It is published in German and English, with articles printed in both languages side by side.”

License to be ironic

This struck me as odd, for 32 reasons.



If the NRA's beloved handguns were impossible to get, it's safe to say these Tech students and professors would still be with us.

1. Ross Alameddine, 20, sophomore, English/Business, Saugus, MA
2. Christopher James Bishop, 35, instructor of German, Pine Mtn., GA
3. Brian Bluhm, 25, masters student, Civil Engineering, Louisville, KY
4. Ryan Clark, 22, senior, Psych/Biology/English, Martinez, GA
5. Austin Cloyd, 18, freshman, Int'l Studies/French, Champaign, IL
6. Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, 49, professor of French, Nova Scotia, CAN
7. Daniel Perez Cueva, 21, junior, Int'l. Studies, Woodbridge, VA
8. Kevin Granata, 45, professor of Engineering, Toledo, OH
9. Matthew Gwaltney, 24, masters student, Env. Eng., Chesterfield, VA
10. Jeremy Herbstritt, 27, masters student, Civil Engn, Bellefonte, PA
11. Caitlin Hammaren, 19, soph., Int'l Studies/French, Westtown, NY
12. Rachael Hill, 18, freshman, Biological Sciences, Richmond, VA
13. Emily Hilscher, 19, freshman, Animal Sciences, Woodville, VA
14. Jarrett Lane, 22, senior, Civil Engineering, Narrows, VA
15. Matthew La Porte, 20, sophomore, Political Science, Dumont, NJ
16. Henry Lee, 20, freshman, Computer Engineering, Roanoke, VA
17. Liviu Librescu, 76, professor of Eng.; Holocaust survivor, Romania
18. G. V. Loganathan, 53, professor of Engineering, Tamil Nadu, India
19. Partahi Lumbantoruan, 34, PhD student, Civil Eng., Indonesia
20. Lauren McCain, 20, freshman, Int'l. Studies, Hampton, VA
21. Daniel O'Neil, 22, masters student, Environ. Eng., Lincoln, RI
22. Juan Ortiz, 26, masters student, Civil Engineering, Bayamón, PR
23. Minal Panchal, 26, masters student, Architecture, Mumbai, India
24. Erin Peterson, 18, freshman, International Studies, Centreville, VA
25. Michael Pohle Jr., 23, senior, Biological Sciences, Flemington, NJ
26. Julia Pryde, 23, masters student, Biol. Sys. Eng., Middletown, NJ
27. Mary Karen Read, 19, freshman, Interdisc. Studies, Annandale, VA
28. Reema Samaha, 18, freshman, Urban Planning, Centreville, VA
29. Waleed Shaalan, 32, PhD student, Civil Engineering, Egypt
30. Leslie Sherman, 20, junior, History/Int'l Studies, Springfield, VA
31. Maxine Turner, 22, senior, Chemical Engineering, Vienna, VA
32. Nicole White, 20, junior, International Studies, Smithfield, VA

ideological flypaper

This newspaper, retrieved from the Louis Geoffroy Archive of Alternate Histories in Lessines, Belgium, reminds us of what will happen if the McCain-Palin ticket had won. Yeah, the tenses are confusing, but that's the nature of alternate history, where past, present and future don't adhere to the concept of sequential time. But traveling to the future of a past that was unchosen can be instructive.


It's hard to deny an image's ability to bring clarity to the abstract and hypothetical. That's why we have illustrations in textbooks and assembly manuals (an art form Ikea took to a new level) and why artists express themselves through pictures.


Even when the image is essentially only words, as is the case in the Washington Post illustration above, it can make the unreal real, taking an intangible thought that exists nowhere but in the artist's imagination and literally breathing life into it, creating something out of nothing.

Images also erase ambiguity. It's one thing to consider a series of turns and appoximate distances, or the size of the planets relative to the sun, but it's quite another to see a map or a diagram. And it's one thing to consider, in some philosophical or abstract way, a hockey mom becoming President, but something else to see it what it might look like if it actually played out.

I make this point simply because so many voters seem to have fallen for McCain’s transparent, cynical ploy to grab the votes of gender-focused women voters and ideologically blinded right wing voters, a diversionary tactic designed to obscure and direct attention away from a lackluster campaign and a platform bereft of ideas. Rather than treat the Vice Presidency as a potentially real next President — nine vice presidents have, after all, become president while in office — McCain saw fit to treat it with contempt, as nothing more than ideological flypaper, designed to generate buzz and lure gullible voters. In falling for this cheap marketing gimmick, I honestly wonder if McCain-Palin supporters have given even on second's thought to the fact that one-half of their vote might end up being for one of the most unqualified, untested, unvetted Presidents ever.

It reaches a point where you just have to say, "Do I have to draw you a picture?!"

Well, maybe so.

on being looked upon with some uneasiness...

This past weekend, a fellow from Ashburn, VA wrote to The Washington Post complaining about editorial cartoonist Tom Toles' partisan Democratic slant.

The letter writer said:

"Ideally, a newspaper's cartoonist would show some degree of non-partisanship and address topics with an even hand. Not so in the case of Tom Toles. He wears his Democratic Party hat almost every time he picks up his pen.
  Once in a while it would be nice to see him sling a little mud in the other direction, let's say, maybe one out of five cartoons, or would that result in his being drummed out of the party?"
  — Jack McIntyre, Ashburn

Tom Toles is an editorial cartoonist whose work appears on the op-ed page of The Post. Editorializing is his job and reflects his view of the world. It is the entire point of his work. Tempering that for the sake of some imaginary token "balance" would be disingenuous, and as unreasonable as expecting George Will or Robert Novak or Fox News' Billo the Clown to suddenly take a pro-Democratic stance. Or Maureen Dowd or Eugene Robinson to suddenly "sling mud" in the Democrats' direction. Why does Mr. McIntyre believe that op-ed artwork should follow different rules than op-ed writing?

I suspect there's a little partisanship at work here. I doubt Mr. McIntyre would have felt the same disdain for the father of American cartoonists, Thomas Nast, a staunch Republican, who unrelentingly went after Democrat Boss Tweed. Nast consistently expressed his own views when putting pen to paper, and it's unlikely a reader complaining to Harper's Weekly would have persuaded him to do otherwise. Further, Mr. McIntyre seems to see only what he wants to see, for Toles does lampoon Democrats; in fact he did so the very next day, skewering the DC government — hardly a bastion of the GOP.

Striking a nerve is not blasphemy
I couldn't help but notice that Mr. McIntyre is from Ashburn, VA. That calls to mind the complaint of another Ashburnite, Cary Cusumano, in The Post's Letters To The Editor on Dec. 9, 2006, regarding an illustration I had done for The Washington Post Magazine a week earlier. Ashburn, VA, it would seem, is home to the headquarters of the GOP Ministry of Artwork Inspection.

Mr. Cusamano said:

"The selection of Michael Gibbs's illustration depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus with a symbol of the Democratic Party is not only insensitive to Christians, especially Catholics, but is also blasphemous ["The Gospel According to Jim Wallis," Magazine, Nov. 26]. Christians should be afforded the same respect for their beliefs as other religions or groups. Sadly, such respect cannot be found in The Post or other news media."
  — Cary Cusumano, Ashburn

Mr. Cusumano doesn't seem to understand three things:
1. Skewering a well-known image is a time-honored form of visual communicaton, closely affiliated with parody and satire, which is "the use of irony... in exposing, denouncing, or deriding ...folly". It only works if the underlying image is well known. A couple of well-known examples are Duchamp's parody of the Leonardo's "Mona Lisa," and the numerous parodies of Grant Woods' "American Gothic."


2. Blasphemy is "the impious utterance or action concerning God or sacred things" or, in Judaism, "the act of cursing or reviling God." What was parodied here was not God or Jesus, but a painting (any number of paintings actually). The paintings of the Sacred Heart first appeared as the result of visions experienced by a 17th century French nun. These paintings are not sacred things. They are a 17th century representation of an abstract concept— "the Love of Jesus."

3. I was expressing my view — a right that even artists and Democrats (the last time I checked) have under the US Constitution. At the same time, I was reflecting the content of the article I was illustrating, which is my job. That view, distilled down to its essence, is that Jesus was, in his heart, a Democrat. (Get it?)


As a Democrat and a Christian (I was raised Catholic) I have long been rankled by the GOP's hijacking and exploitation of Christian values. Those sentiments were echoed by Jim Wallis, the subject of The Post article and author of "God's Politics." What Wallis sees as the true mission of Christianity — righting social ills, working for peace — is in tune with the values of liberals who so often run screaming from the idea of religion. Meanwhile... religious vocabulary is co-opted by conservatives who use it to polarize" [Amazon.com].

A political party that promotes corporate greed over the rights of those with the least among us (including immigrants and the poor), opposes controls on Saturday Night specials, opposes basic rights for gays and lesbians, opposes stem-cell research that could save lives, practices racism (remember Willie Horton?), wages an unnecessary and illegal war that kills thousands of innocents — does not represent the heart and love of Jesus. It is the Democratic Party that does. That sentiment led to the imagery I chose.

What I find fascinating is that in both cases, it is the artwork, rather than the text, that seems to get people in a tizzy. Art is meant to disturb, said the French painter Georges Braque. And it seems to disturb conservatives disproportionately.

I have to admit I took a great deal of satisfaction in reading these Letters to the Editor. They're a reminder that artwork still has the power not only to inspire and reflect the beauty of this world, but to piss people off and illustrate the ugliness of this world. And noting the political direction from which these Letters to the Editor invariably seem to be fired, they're also a reminder of the truth of Social Realist Ben Shahn's observation, "The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society."

life imitates art

On the left is a poster by American artist Ben Shahn, created for the Office of War Information in 1942. It depicts a victim of a Nazi massacre that occurred in Lidice, Czechoslovakia.

The image on the right needs no explanation.

The resemblance is striking.


With the handcuffed wrists, the resemblance in this version, which uses a less iconic image of Abu Ghraib, is equally striking.