16 Tuesday Oct 2012
Posted in EDITORIAL
Tags
2healthguru, artist as brand, Gregg Masters, illustration, illustrators journal, innovation, levinland, Levinland studio, lon levin, social media marketing, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, twitter, xanate media
My good friend and social media guru Gregg Masters talks about Social Media for artists in the article below. Gregg is the CEO of Xanate Media,
a full service social media marketing company.
26 Sunday Aug 2012
Posted in cartoon, Happy Birthday
Tags
artist as brand, cartoonist, cartoons, Disney, innovation, Johnny Hart, levinland, Levinland studio, lon levin, Wizard of ID, xanate media
Half of a great comic strip duo. Parker & Hart. Parker’s work is outstanding with a comic touch that makes me laugh every time I look at the strip. Brilliant stuff.
Brant Parker (August 26, 1920 – April 15, 2007) was an American cartoonist. He co-created and drew The Wizard of Id comic strip until passing the job on to his son, Jeff Parker, in 1997. Cartoonist Johnny Hart, his co-creator, continued writing the strip until his own death on April 7, 2007.
Parker studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. He worked for the Walt Disney Studio before and after World War II, taking time off to serve in the United States Navy. After leaving Disney in 1945, he moved to New York to work as a political cartoonist for the Binghamton Press.
It was in New York that he met Johnny Hart in 1950; Parker was judging an art contest in which 18-year-old Hart was an entrant. The meeting was the beginning of a friendship that led to the two collaborating on The Wizard of Id in 1964. Parker teamed with Don Wilder on the political commentary strip, Goosemyer, which ran from 1981 to 1983. He collaborated with Bill Rechin and Wilder on the strips Out of Bounds, Crock. Early on, Parker left those strips to devote more time to The Wizard of Id.
10 Tuesday Jul 2012
Posted in ARTICLES, Happy Birthday
Tags
artist as brand, cartoons, Christopher Reeve, comics, DC comics, digital painting, George reeve, illustrators journal, innovation, Jerry siegel, superman, technology, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, warner bros, xanate media
Shuster’s story is one of caution for artists in every line of work. It always hard for an artist to hold onto rights when they have to put food on table. I’ve been there and it’s not pleasant to give up rights or originals when you don’t want to but sometimes you have to. In Shuster’s case it’s extreme because of the popularity and the billions of dollars made off his creation. That being said the corporate entities that held the rights should have been a lot more generous than they were. The takeaway is we artists are in business and rights to content is the one chance to make some good money if the work is good and valued. So hang on to them if you can!
Shuster (July 10, 1914 – July 30, 1992) was a Canadian-American comic book artist. He was best known for co-creating the DC Comics character Superman, with writer Jerry Siegel, first published in Action Comics #1 (June 1938).
Shuster was involved in a number of legal battles concerning the ownership of the Superman character, eventually gaining recognition for his part in its creation. His comic book career after Superman was relatively unsuccessful, and by the mid-1970s Shuster had left the field completely due to partial blindness.
He and Siegel were inducted into both the comic book industry’s Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1993. In 2005, the Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards Association instituted the Joe Shuster Awards, named to honor the Canada-born artist.
Shuster became famous as the co-creator of one of the most well-known and commercially successful fictional characters of the 20th century. National Allied Publications claimed copyright to his and Siegel’s work, and when the company refused to compensate them to the degree they believed appropriate, Siegel and Shuster, in 1946, near the end of their 10-year contract to produce Superman stories, sued National over rights to the characters. They ultimately accepted $94,000 to stop pursuing the claim for $94,000 after a court ruled that National had validly purchased the rights to Superman when it bought the first Superman story. But after this bitter legal wrangling, National cropped Shuster and Siegel’s byline. In 1947, the team rejoined editor Sullivan, by then the founder and publisher of the comic-book company Magazine Enterprises where they created the short-lived comical crime-fighter Funnyman. While Siegel continued to write comics for a variety of publishers, Shuster largely dropped out of sight.
07 Saturday Jul 2012
Posted in EDITORIAL, Happy Birthday
Tags
abstract art, artist as brand, artwork, Chagall, digital media, digital painting, drawing, French painter, modern art, modernist, nude sketch, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, twitter, xanate media
Chagall is one of a handful of 20th century masters who change art as we know it. His stain glass artwork is otherworldly and perhaps on a level with the finest glass work ever done. His lyrical painting style and mastery of color is second to none. His fierce adherence to his heritage as a Jew is something to be admired and celebrated. Certainly it is a lesson to any artist to remain focused and true to what they believe despite any influence that would tell them otherwise.
Marc Chagall (7 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 – 28 March 1985), was a Belarusian-Russian-French artist associated with several major artistic styles and one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He was an early modernist, and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.
Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century”. According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be “the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists”. For decades, he “had also been respected as the world’s preeminent Jewish artist”. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.
Before World War I, he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country’s most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avante-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.
He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism’s “golden age” in Paris, where “he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism”. Yet throughout these phases of his style “he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk.” ”When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is”.
06 Friday Jul 2012
Tags
artist as brand, creativity, digital media, illustrators journal, innovation, levinland, lon levin, Phil Stutz. John Lennon, social media, technology, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, xanate media
I picked up this quote from a new twitter follower Katie Herman @artfoodtravel
“But for most people, true creativity is pretty scary. It demands things of you. I requires attention and sacrifice. Think how much easier it is to take a regular nine-to-five job, do the things most people take for granted: spending the evening watching TV, sleeping through the night without waking up to scribble or sketch or check on the progress of something drying in the studio. Think of that, and then think about how flat your life would be. Creativity, if it holds you in its thrall, is worth every sacrifice, every risk, every moment of looking at life from a slightly different perspective from your family and friends and neighbors. It is, in short, life itself.”
This is a good way to start your day. As John Lennon used to say. “All cannot be Happy Chocolate” And as a therapist (Phil Stutz) of some note used to tell me, “Embrace the chaos, welcome the problems, the angst, the heartache.” This is what makes you stronger and able to be a fully integrated human.
05 Thursday Jul 2012
Tags
action photography, artist as brand, digital media, illustrators journal, innovation, surfing, technology, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, twitter, xanate media
Cover Art Photography by Lon Levin
17 Sunday Jun 2012
Posted in Happy Birthday
Tags
alhambra castle, artist as brand, dutch, escher, Haarlem, illustrators journal, innovation, levinland, Netherlands, Spain, technology, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, xanate media
For those of us who grew up with pyschedelic posters and etchings of Escher plastered on our walls the meaning in his work has a certain flavor to it. But each person who gazes on these wonders of draftsmanship, creativity and mathematics has his or her own take away. The windup is Escher is among the most unique artists ever. His category of art is almost by itself. When I look at some of this dumbfounding work I am taken to a place of infinity where you never resolve anything but enjoy the experience nonetheless.
Escher 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972 usually referred to as M. C. Escher, was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.
aurits Cornelis, nicknamed “Mauk”, was born in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, in a house that forms part of the Princesseh of Ceramics Museum today. He was the youngest son of civil engineer George Arnold Escher and his second wife, Sara Gleichman. In 1903, the family moved to Arnhem, where he attended primary school and secondary school until 1918.
He was a sickly child, and was placed in a special school at the age of seven and failed the second grade. Though he excelled at drawing, his grades were generally poor. He also took carpentry and piano lessons until he was thirteen years old. In 1919, Escher attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. He briefly studied architecture, but he failed a number of subjects (partly due to a persistent skin infection) and switched to decorative arts. Here he studied under Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, with whom he would remain friends for years. In 1922 Escher left the school, having gained experience in drawing and making woodcuts. In 1922, an important year of his life, Escher traveled through Italy (Florence, San Gimignano, Volterra, Siena, Ravello) and Spain (Madrid, Toledo, Granada). He was impressed by the Italian countryside and by the Alhambra, a fourteenth-century Moorish castle in Granada, Spain.The intricate decorative designs at Alhambra, which were based on mathematical formulas and feature interlocking repetitive patterns sculpted into the stone walls and ceilings, were a powerful influence on Escher’s works.He came back to Italy regularly in the following years. In Italy he met Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924. The young couple settled down in Rome where their son, Giorgio Arnaldo Escher, named after his grandfather, was born. “In 1935, the political climate in Italy (under Mussolini) became totally unacceptable to him. Escher had no interest in politics, finding it impossible to involve himself with any ideals other than the expressions of his own concepts through his own particular medium, but he was averse to fanaticism and hypocrisy. When his eldest son, George, was forced, at the age of nine, to wear a Ballila Facist Youth uniform in school, the family decided to leave Italy. The family moved to Château-d’Œx, Switzerland, where they remained for two years.
Escher, who had been very fond of and inspired by the landscapes in Italy, was decidedly unhappy in Switzerland, and in 1937, the family moved again, to Uccle, a suburb of Brussels, Belgium. World War II forced them to move in January 1941, this time to Baarn, the Netherlands, where Escher lived until 1970. Most of Escher’s better-known pictures date from this period. The sometimes cloudy, cold, wet weather of the Netherlands allowed him to focus intently on his works, and only during 1962, when he underwent surgery, was there a time when no new images were created.
Escher moved to the Rosa Spier house in Laren in 1970, a retirement home for artists where he had his own studio. He died at the home on 27 March 1972, at age 73.
12 Tuesday Jun 2012
Tags
artist as brand, artwork, David Cohen art critic, digital media, Hunter Colege, illustration, illustrators journal, Jonathan Kalb, Julie Heffernan, levinland, modern art, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, UC Santa Cruz, xanate media
In my ever growing quest to find different and interesting artists and art I came across Julie Heffernan. And I am glad I did. Her work is simply terrific. It spans illustration and fine art well and can be utilized for both as far as I’m concerned.
Julie Heffernan (born 1956 in Peoria, Illinois) is an American Painter. David Cohen, art critic of The New York Sun, aptly describes Heffernan’s art: “These paintings are a hybrid of genres and styles, mixing allegory, portraiture, history painting, and still life, while in title they are all presented as self portraits.”
Heffernan was raised in Northern California and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She received a B.F.A., at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.F.A. in painting at the Yale School of Art. Heffernan is an Associate Professor of fine arts at Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, New Jersey.
She is married to Jonathan Kalb, chair of the Theater Department at Hunter College and theater critic for The New York Times. Heffernan is the mother of two sons: Oliver, the eldest, and Sam.
In her 2007 self-portrait series, Booty, Julie Heffernan painted herself dressed in creepy dresses made from dead animal carcasses. In this colorful collection of portraits, the artist presents herself draped in pompous dresses made of dead animal carcasses, flowers and fruits. Like Heffernan’s other art series, these bizarre-yet-beautiful paintings are a constant dilemma between the gorgeous and the grotesque, attraction and repulsion.
09 Saturday Jun 2012
Tags
artist as brand, cartoonist, cartoons, digital media, digital painting, drawing, illustration, illustrators journal, innovation, Levinland studio, lon levin, technology, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, xanate media
Over the last year or so I’ve been working on portfolio pieces and some new jobs that produced new portfolio pieces. While the jobs produce mostly “kid oriented” work my portfolio work has been heading towards expansion of what I do. In this economy I thought it necessary to go after anything that my skill sets would handle. One has to eat?, right? As I started to rework my portfolio I realized I need representation (if possible) in areas that I am not already represented in.(I have an agent for children’s book work primarily) I didn’t quite know how I would go about this but it kept rattling around my head. At the same time I was and I am marketing myself through emailing campaigns, videos and postcards. I use Mailchimp to send out campaigns every 4-6 weeks with a list of 1800 or so contacts. What I like about Mailchimp is you get metrics that tell you how the campaign performed. You know how many opened the campaign, how many clicked through to your website, etc. I found that makes me feel good that I’m reaching people but I’m still not sure how many times you need to make an impression on someone before they may use you or how long it takes before you can convert a contact that showed interest into a sale. I will find that out sooner or later.
Okay so back to the representation issue. I asked my good friend Joann Miller at The Directory of Illustration what she recommended. She told me any rep who buys ad space in the directory is probably making money for their clients and those would be the first ones to approach. Logical. So I put together an email campaign along with a carefully picked subject line and I sent off my first six inquiries last Friday. All six reps that I chose were different. Big reps from New York, one from Oregon, one with offices in Paris, Hong Kong, New York and San Francisco, etc. The breakdown: I composed a short letter saying who I was with relevant links to my websites or blogs and I had an email promo like the one posted above and another one that had newer less “kid oriented” work.
Within a day I had three responses. One, the sole proprietor from Oregon politely told me she was stocked with the correct amount of artists and could not take on anyone else. The second, Simon Bollinger from Shannon and Associates wrote me back that he was aware of my work. Usually unless his agency had interest in an artist they would not. FYI, I asked Simon if I could post his comments and refer to him specifically in my blog. This is his response “Thanks for being gracious enough to ask (most would just go ahead and blog away). I don’t have any problem with you mentioning this exchange, but you should know that our normal process isn’t to respond to every submission. We get dozens of submissions every day and at the moment we’re only able to respond to the ones we’re interested in. I responded to you because I know of your work and because Jo Ann referred you and I felt you were owed an explanation.” I’ve included this to let you know that it is imperative that you ask for permission to mention someone in your blog. The consequences of not doing so could be harmful to you and it’s not mindful. The third agency said they had some interest and my portfolio would be reviewed by their committee and they would get back to me. The other three have not responded yet.
I’m writing about this process because at some time or another we illustrators go through this process and since I’ve done it a few times and I’ve had three agents over the years I thought you may benefit from following my journey to find a new one. So, I will keep writing about this process until it’s logical end updating you with as many views of the process as I can. Along the way I am going to ask the agents about their process and see if I can get some good information about picking an artist, going after clients and follow up as well as any aspect of the process we all as illustrators can benefit from. Perhaps my study will turn into an article for the Illustrators Journal digital magazine, we’ll see.
My last thoughts on this process is this, Artists Reps and their companies are in business. They are not there to coddle artists or hold their hands. They are trying to make money for their clients and themselves. They don’t know who you are so their response should not be taken personally. The better reps know their business well and they know the clients well and if they think you can help them and they can help you they will respond to you. Don’t be discouraged by rejection, it is not personal. And do not depend solely on an agent to find you work. You need to be extremely pro-active. Work on your portfolios, create postcards, email promos and videos. If you don’t know how to make a video learn how. iMovie is very easy to use and all the information needed to learn how to use it is out there, just google for it. Lastly, I welcome you comments (Susan and Liz) and if you need my help in anyway let me know and I will respond. Oh and if you’re an artist’s rep and you like my work contact me. (never pass on an opportunity to promote!)
06 Wednesday Jun 2012
Posted in Profile
Tags
art, artist as brand, artwork, balthus, digital media, digital painting, drawing, French painter, illustration, illustrators journal, innovation, levinland, lon levin, nude sketch, nudes, painter, pen and ink, this week in digital media on blogtalk radio, xanate media, young girls
I have taken note that my article about the french painter Balthus gets quite a lot of traffic and I wondered why. I started to dig deeper into Balthus, his life, his work and attitudes he possessed. It’s well known he had a “thing” for underaged girls and young women who were at most half his age. He didn’t seem to care and his attitude made him more controversial, dangerous and perhaps marketable.
Below are some of his quotes from “Brainy Quotes” and they do reveal a little about Balthus the man.
I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.
Balthus
I refuse to confide and don’t like it when people write about art.
Balthus
I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.
Balthus
One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.
Balthus
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.
Balthus
Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.
Balthus
Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.
Balthus
Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.
Balthus
The best way to begin is to say: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at his paintings.
Balthus
The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.
Read more athttp://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/balthus.html#rHa0GhosW5fqQRte.99
