Interview with: Jack Foster

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Interview with Jack Foster

When did you first think about art as something you wanted to do? Were you encouraged or discouraged by family, friends, teachers, mentors?

When I was in first grade, the teacher, Sister Rose, asked the class to draw a self-portrait. I drew myself walking home from school. At a parent teacher conference, Sr. Rose showed the picture to my mom and told her that she thought I had artistic talent because in the picture, I was leaning forward as I walked against the wind and my tie (yes, we wore ties to school back then), was blowing over my shoulder. Sr. Rose told my mom that knowing how to draw was just a small part of art. Perception was the rest. So my mom hung my self-portrait on the fridge and told me what Sr. Rose said. I knew that I liked to draw, but the encouragement I received from my mom and Sr. Rose ignited a passion in me that has never died down. My dad on the other hand was a hard working sheet metal worker and tried to discourage my art and pushed me to focus on a trade where I could make money.

To this day, I’m not sure if the motivation to succeed as an artist came from trying to prove my mom right, or trying to prove my dad wrong.

What kind of kid were you? Where did you grow up? What were your influences?

I was a very quiet kid, the eldest of seven. We were raised just northwest of Chicago. I loved baseball. Every day during the summer, we would walk around the neighborhood with our bats, balls and mitts, gathering the “regulars” together for a game. In grammar school, I was a bit above average, but excelled in art and would volunteer to do posters for library events. In the evenings, my family would gather around the TV. I would take the Sunday paper comics, which I guard- ed with my life all week, lay them out across the kitchen table and trace them or draw them freehand. Drawing a daily comic strip for the newspapers was my dream. So naturally

some comic strip artists became a big influence in my art, which is still obvious in my work. Mort Walker was my biggest influence in my early days. He drew a strip called Beetle Bailey and another called Hi and Lois in which he teamed up with Dik Browne. The strip is still going today being produced by his sons Brian and Greg along with Browne’s son, Chance.Of course Walt Disney was a huge influence. I read his biography at a young age and wasfascinated by him. And the fact that he grew up in Chicago was even more of a “draw”. When I was about 13 years old, the Muppets came on the scene. I loved how Jim Henson could get his puppets to show facial expressions with just eyebrows and a mouth. Jim Henson has really influenced the large eyes, bright colors and char- acter design in my work. 

Your style is very unique. Did you work on developing a style or is that what naturally came out of you?

Throughout the years of submitting  to the newspaper syndicates, my  style changed drastically. I would  send outpacket of 30 strips every other week, and when they would be rejected and returned, I would redo the strips, altering my style a bit. Some rejection letters would be the standard “No, thanks. Good luck.”  But once in a while an art director would give me some advice. One director pointed out that my characters were “too cute” for the   comics. So of course, I tried to ugly them up a bit, but they kept coming out cute and kept getting rejected. I submitted for 25 years, so you could imagine the metamorphosis my style went through. Ultimately I landed on my own style which was the most comfortable for me to draw, made the most sense to me and was easily recognizable.

There isn’t any of your political artwork on your site. Why is that? What inspired the change in the direction of your work?

Yes, you are right. In my pursuit to be a comic strip artist, I took a job as a political cartoonist. It didn’t pay much, but I thought it was a foot in the door. I did it for a few years, how- ever, even though I have a good sense of humor, satire didn’t really suit me. I have filed away all my political cartoons. Maybe one day I will revisit them. Even though my politi- cal cartooning stint didn’t open any comic strip doors for me, working for/with an editor did give me valuable experience in the publishing world, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything

For more of this interview

Happy Birthday Warwick Hutton

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A deft touch and a whimsical style made Hutton’s work a perfect style for children’s books. Although he died too young we have his wonderful works to keep our children engaged for generations to come.

Warwick Hutton (17 July 1939 – 28 Sep 1994) was an English painter, glass engraver, illustrator, and children’s author.

He is most widely known for elegant pen and ink and watercolor illustrations for children’s books. His subjects were Biblical, folk, and mythological stories which Hutton retold, such as Noah and the Great Flood, The Nose Tree, and Theseus and the Minotaur. He also worked with texts by Hans Christian Andersen (The Tinderbox) and with retellings of traditional stories by author Susan Cooper (The Silver Cow, The Selkie Girl, Tam Lin).

The Nose Tree and Jonah and the Big Fish were chosen for the New York Times’s annual list of best-illustrated children’s books. Jonah and the Great Fish was also the recipient of the 1984 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Best Picture Book.

Hutton died of cancer on September 28, 1994, in Cambridge, England. His father was the artist and glass engraver John Hutton

Illustrator A.B. Frost Died On This Day

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A B FROST is one of the most under appreciated illustrators of I know of. His pen and ink work is as good as it gets and his characterizations are superb. His work influenced many illustrators over many generations.

Arthur Burdett Frost (January 17, 1851 – June 22, 1928), was an early American illustrator, graphic artist and comics writer. He was also well known as a painter. Frost’s work is well known for its dynamic representation of motion and sequence. Frost is considered one of the great illustrators in the “Golden Age of American Illustration”. Frost illustrated over 90 books and produced hundreds of paintings; in addition to his work in illustrations, he is renowned for realistic hunting and shooting prints.
Life

Frost was born on January 17, 1851, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the eldest of ten children; his father was a literature professor. He became a lithographer, and in 1874 he was asked by a friend to illustrate a book of humorous short stories, “Out of the Hurly Burly”, by Charles Heber Clark, which was a commercial success, selling more than a million copies.
In 1876, Frost joined the art department at the publisher Harper & Brothers, where he worked with such well-known illustrators as Howard Pyle, E. W. Kemble, Frederic Remington and C. S. Reinhart. While there, he learned a wide variety of techniques, from cartooning to what later came to be called photorealistic painting. Frost’s color blindness may have helped his excellent use of grayscale. In 1877 and 1878, Frost went to London to study with some of the great cartoonists of the time. Later, he returned to Philadelphia and studied under painters Thomas Eakins and William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Soon after returning, he published several stories formed of sequential drawings with captions, pioneering the form that would later develop into comic strips and comic books. In 1884, Frost published Stuff and Nonsense, an anthology of his works that advanced the concept of time-stop drawings and contained other innovations.

Personal life

Frost married another artist, illustrator Emily Louise Phillips, in 1883. From 1906 until May 1914, Frost and his family lived in France, attracted by the Impressionist movement. Returning to the United States, he continued work as an illustrator and comics artist, mainly for Life magazine. Frost died on June 22, 1928.

Happy Birthday Mad Magazine’s Dave Berg

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Another one of my favorite artists from my youth. An old school cartoonist with a terrific sense of humor.

Dave Berg (Brooklyn, June 12, 1920 – May 17, 2002) was an American cartoonist, most noted for his five decades of work in Mad.
Berg showed early artistic talents, attending Pratt Institute when he was 12 years old, and later studying at Cooper Union. He served a period of time in the Army Air Corps. In 1940, he joined Will Eisner’s studio, where he wrote and drew for the Quality Comics line. Berg’s work also appeared in Dell Comics and Fawcett Publications, typically on humorous back-up features. Beginning in the mid-1940s, he worked for several years with Stan Lee on comic books at Timely Comics (now known as Marvel Comics), ranging from Combat Kelly and The Ringo Kid to Tessie the Typist. He also freelanced for a half-dozen other companies, including EC Comics.

Berg began at Mad in 1956. For five years, he provided satirical looks at areas such as Little League baseball, boating and babysitting. In 1961, he started the magazine’s “Lighter Side” feature, his most famous creation. Berg would take an omnibus topic (such as “Noise,” “Spectators” or “Dog Owners”) and deliver approximately 15 short multi-panel cartoons on the subject. In later years, he dropped the one-topic approach. Berg often included caricatures of his own family, headed by his cranky, hypochondriac alter-ego, Roger Kaputnik, as well as the Mad editorial staff. His artistic style made Berg one of the more realistic Mad artists, although his characters managed to sport garish early-1970s wardrobes well into the 1990s. The art chores for a 1993 article, “The First Day of School 30 Years Ago and Today” were split between Berg and Rick Tulka, since Berg’s old-fashioned appeal made him an ideal choice to depict the gentle nostalgia of 1963. The artist’s lightweight gags and sometimes moralistic tone were roughly satirized by the National Lampoon’s 1971 Mad parody, which included a hard-hatted conservative and a longhaired hippie finding their only common ground by choking and beating Berg. However, “The Lighter Side” had a long run as the magazine’s most popular feature. Mad editor Nick Meglin often did layouts of “Lighter Side” panels. Sixteen original collections by Berg were published as paperbacks between 1964 and 1987.
Berg held an honorary doctorate in theology. He produced regular religious-themed work for Moshiach Times and the B’nai Brith newsletter. His interaction with Mad’s atheist publisher Bill Gaines was suitably irreverent: Berg would tell Gaines, “God bless you,” and Gaines would reply, “Go to Hell.” Berg’s other work included the comic strips Citizen Senior (1989–93), Roger Kaputnik (1992) and Astronuts (1994).
His characters occasionally made their way into other artists’ works, such as Kaputnik finding himself a patient in a Mort Drucker spoof of St. Elsewhere, tagged “with apologies to Dave Berg”.
Berg contributed to Mad until his death, a total of 46 years. His last set of “Lighter Side” strips, which had been written but not penciled, were illustrated after Berg’s death by 18 of Mad’s other artists as a final tribute; this affectionate send-off included the magazine’s final new contribution from Jack Davis. In recent years, Berg’s Lighter Side strips have been rewritten for Mad with inappropriately “un-Berg-like” humor by long time Mad writer Dick DeBartolo and others; this irregular feature is called “The Darker Side of the Lighter Side.

Happy Birthday Gauguin

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One of the few iconic artists who ever lived. Just to say his name conjures up imagery that is both brilliant and entirely unique to him. His passion was well noted as was his life. He lived the fantasy of giving up everything and going primitive. The works he created while living in Tahiti are sublime. Here in his own words he describes a painter.  “The painter hasn’t the task, like a mason, of building, compass in hand, a house to a plan furnished by an architect. It is good for the young to have a model, but let them draw a curtain over it while they paint it. It is better to paint from memory. then what is yours will be yours; your sensation, your intelligence and your soul will get across to the beholder.”

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin  7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist who was not well appreciated until after his death. Gauguin was later recognized for his experimental use of colors and synthetist style that was distinguishably different from Impressionism. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Gauguin’s art became popular after his death and many of his paintings were in the possession of Russian collector, Sergei Shchukin.  He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer. His bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.

He was born in Paris, France, to journalist Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal, daughter of the half-Peruvian proto-socialist leader Flora Tristan, a feminist precursor. In 1849 the family left Paris for Peru, motivated by the political climate of the period. Clovis died on the voyage leaving eighteen-month-old Paul, his mother, and sister, to fend for themselves. They lived for four years in Lima with Paul’s uncle and his family. The imagery of Peru would later influence Gauguin in his art. It was in Lima that Gauguin encountered his first art. His mother admired Pre-Columbian pottery, collecting Inca pots that some colonists dismissed as barbaric. One of Gauguin’s few early memories of his mother was of her wearing the traditional costume of Lima, one eye peeping from behind her manteau, the mysterious one-eye veil that all women in Lima went out in. “Gauguin was always drawn to women with a ‘traditional’ look. This must have been the first of the colourful female costumes that were to haunt his imagination.”

At the age of seven, Gauguin and his family returned to France, moving to Orléans to live with his grandfather. The Gauguins came originally from the area and were market gardeners and greengrocers: gauguin means ‘walnut-grower’. His father had broken with family tradition to become a journalist in Paris. He soon learned French, though his first and preferred language remained Peruvian Spanish, and he excelled in his studies. After attending a couple of local schools he was sent to a Catholic boarding school in La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, which he hated. He spent three years at the school. At seventeen, Gauguin signed on as a pilot’s assistant in the merchant marine to fulfill his required military service. Three years later, he joined the French navy in which he served for two years. He was somewhere in the Caribbean when he found out that his mother had died. In 1871, Gauguin returned to Paris where he secured a job as a stockbroker. His mother’s very rich boyfriend, Gustave Arosa, got him a job at the Paris Bourse; Gauguin was twenty-three. He became a successful Parisian businessman and remained one for eleven years.

In 1873, around the same time as he became a stockbroker, Gauguin began painting in his free time. His Parisian life centred on the 9th arrondissement. Gauguin lived at 21 rue la Bruyére. All around were the cafés frequented by the Impressionists. Gauguin also visited galleries frequently and purchased work by emerging artists. He formed a friendship with Pissarro and visited him on Sundays, to paint in his garden, and Pissarro introduced him to various other artists. In 1877 Gauguin, “moved downmarket and across the river to the poorer, newer, urban sprawls” of Vaugirard. Here, on the third floor at 8 rue Carcel, he had the first home in which he had a studio. He showed paintings in Impressionist exhibitions held in 1881 and 1882 – (earlier a sculpture, of his son Emile, had been the only sculpture in the 4th Impressionist Exhibition of 1879.) Over two summer holidays, he painted with Pissarro and occasionally Paul Cézanne.

Poster of the 1889 Exhibition of Paintings by the Impressionist and Synthetist Group, at Café des Arts, known as the The Volpini Exhibition, 1889.

In 1887, after visiting Panama, he spent several months near Saint Pierre in Martinique, in the company of his friend the artist Charles Laval. At first, the ‘negro hut’ in which they lived suited him, and he enjoyed watching people in their daily activities. However, the weather in the summer was hot and the hut leaked in the rain. He also suffered dysenteryand marsh fever. While in Martinique, he produced between ten and twenty works (twelve being the most common estimate) and traveled widely and apparently came into contact with a small community of Indian immigrants, a contact that would later influence his art through the incorporation of Indian symbols. Gauguin, along with Émile Bernard, Charles Laval, Émile Schuffenecker and many others frequently visited the artist colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany. By the bold use of pure color and Symbolist choice of subject matter the group is now considered a Pont-Aven School. Disappointed with Impressionism, he felt that traditional European painting had become too imitative and lacked symbolic depth. By contrast, the art of Africa and Asia seemed to him full of mystic symbolism and vigour. There was a vogue in Europe at the time for the art of other cultures, especially that of Japan (Japonism). He was invited to participate in the 1889 exhibition organized by Les XX.

Gauguin’s relationship with Van Gogh was rocky. Gauguin had shown an early interest in Impressionism, and the two shared bouts of depression and suicidal tendencies. In 1888, Gauguin and Van Gogh spent nine weeks together, painting in the latter’s Yellow House in Arles. During this time, Gauguin became increasingly disillusioned with Impressionism, and the two quarreled. On the evening of December 23, 1888, frustrated and ill, Van Gogh confronted Gauguin with a razor blade. In a panic, Van Gogh fled to a local brothel. While there, he cut off the lower part of his left ear lobe. He wrapped the severed tissue in newspaper and handed it to a prostitute named Rachel, asking her to “keep this object carefully.” Gauguin left Arles, and a few days later Van Gogh was hospitalized. They never saw each other again, but they continued to correspond and in 1890 Gauguin proposed they form an artist studio in Antwerp. In an 1889 sculptural self-portrait Jug in the form of a Head, Self-portrait Gauguin portrays the traumatic relationship with Van Gogh.

The vogue for Gauguin’s work started soon after his death. Many of his later paintings were acquired by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin. A substantial part of his collection is displayed in the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage. Gauguin paintings are rarely offered for sale; their price may be as high as $39.2 million US$.

Gauguin’s posthumous retrospective exhibitions at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1903 and an even larger one in 1906 had a stunning and powerful influence on the French avant-garde and in particular Pablo Picasso’s paintings. In the autumn of 1906, Picasso made paintings of oversized nude women, and monumental sculptural figures that recalled the work of Paul Gauguin and showed his interest in primitive art. Picasso’s paintings of massive figures from 1906 were directly influenced by Gauguin’s sculpture, painting and his writing as well. The power evoked by Gauguin’s work led directly to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907.

For the rest of the story…

Source: Wikipedia

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Some Very Revealing Balthus Quotes

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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

Happy Birthday Daumier!

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Daumier is one of my favorite artist and an artist whose work has had a great influence on some of my work. He is one of those rare artists who is not only a great technician, but his work has the added value of being political and useful in its depiction of French society in it’s time. The great thing about viewing his work now is it stands as a historical documentation of life in France in the 1800’s.

Traits of Daumier’s ancestry—a violent temperament, a generous and rather fanciful turn of mind, and an easily aroused capacity for pity—all form part of his character. His mother’s family was from a village in which samples of unique ancient sculptured reliefs—fierce primitive human heads—had been found. His grandfather and father both worked in Marseille as “glaziers”—that is to say, dealers in frames (or passe-partout pictures) and decorative tableaux that they painted themselves. His godfather was a painter. When Daumier was seven, his father abandoned his business in order to go to Paris and, like so many Provençals, seek his fortune as a poet. He was presented to the king, Louis XVIII; but his swift fall from favour—he was famous only for a fortnight—unbalanced him mentally. After apparently being confined for many years, he died in the Charenton asylum.

artwork by Lon Levin (influenced dy Daumier)

Daumier received a typical lower middleclass education, but he wanted to draw, and his studies did not interest him. His family therefore placed him with an old and fairly well-known artist, Alexandre Lenoir. Lenoir, a student and friend of Jacques-Louis David, a leading classicist painter, was more an aesthetician than a painter. He had a pronounced taste for Rubens, one of whose works he kept in his collection. A connoisseur of sculpture, he had saved the most beautiful medieval and contemporary sculptures from the Revolutionaries, which inspired a lasting interest in Daumier.

Daumier was then not at all the uncultured, self-taught genius that most art historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have depicted. He did not rise from an artistic void—he was the child of artists, however modest and unsuccessful they had been in making a name. Added to the advantage of this ancestry, he also benefitted from a more interesting artistic education than his contemporaries.

As a cartoonist, Daumier enjoyed a wide reputation, although as a painter he remained unknown. His fame was not based, any more than it is today, on critical appreciations but, rather, on the smiling or laughing admiration of those who read the satirical journals.

 

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

 

For more…

 

Interview With Murray Tinkelman: Part 2

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artwork by Murray Tinkelman

The second part of my conversation with Murray had to do with his own work and what he’s doing now.

Are you doing any gallery work now? No, no I’m not interested in that. I get invitations to gallery shows and if it’s a group situation I’ll submit something or by invitation I contribute something. But my projects, my self-initiated projects are about things I’ve been in love with since I was a kid. A pre-pubescent that grew up in Brooklyn. So when you say Dodgers I’m not thinking about the imposters that are out here…I have have friends that are my age pushing at eighty shifted their allegiance to the LA Dodgers. I said you’re a schmuck. How irrational is that? It’s like rooting for your accountant when he runs off with your wife! It makes no sense!(Much laughter followed)         So back on subject….The projects I come up with are the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950’s. So I did portraits mainly of the living Dodgers and had the players sign them. I met Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider and I had a one-man show at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, which was…I died and went to heaven. So you just initiated that and went to them. Yes yes and it’s all part of the phenomena of baseball card shows . I have every Dodger baseball card from the year I was born in 1933 to 1957 when they left for LA.

Wow, My mother threw most of mine away. That’s what mothers are for! (more laughter) ..So I would go to the autograph shows and I had Carl Erskine and the others sign the prints. I met Don Newcomb and Roy Campenella before he died. He signed with that electronic device he had because of his paralysis. One of my greatest memories…I did a 16×20 print, of Ebbets field with three ovals above it and I had the three winning pitchers of the 1955 World Series in each oval; Johnny Podres, Clem Labine and Roger Craig. That’s when the Dodgers finally won the series in Brooklyn. I was in a motel room with a stack of prints with the three of them signing. I paid them a fee to do it.
What about other projects? I did a series of 1950’s boxers like Jake La Motta and Carmen Basilio, Willie Pep great champions and I had them autograph the entire edition. And the editions were 150 and here I’m in a room with Jake La Motta the “raging bull” who was really a dufus…I mean he wasn’t stupid but he was mean-spirited. He hijacked me..raising the price at the last minute.
I also had a show about artists who ride motorcycles at the Society of Illustrators and it was featured in the magazine Upper and Lower case. So I just come up with something…what do I want to do and I do it.
My last series…I haven’t done anything with it yet.. is movie monsters, like King Kong who was born in 1933 the same as I was. And the Creature of the Black Lagoon and Dracula… Will you have King Kong sign the print? Just a paw print.

And do you have to get the rights to do the prints? … Let me tell you a great story. The LA Dodgers brought suit against an artist I know who did some Brooklyn Dodgers prints…a cease and desist, you cannot do this, we own the Dodgers. The case came before a judge in Brooklyn and the judge said NO…you do not own Brooklyn, you’re from LA…go home.
I’ll stop here and I want to make a comment about rights. If you choose to do something like Murray did it may be a good idea to run this issue by an attorney to be safe. There is no way to know if someone will do anything about you using images you don’t own or not but it is always best to be safe and not to take chances where you risk heavy financial fines.

To see more of Murray’s work

Happy Birthday art spiegelman!

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Maus 2 by art spiegelman

I would be remiss to not wish art a Happy One today. His groundbreaking book Maus set the tone for many comic and graphic novels that came after his. 

Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic bookmemoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.

Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews Vladek Spiegelman (1906–1982) and Anja Spiegelman (née Zylberberg) (1912–1968). Spiegelman grew up in Rego Park in Queens, New York City, New York and graduated from the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. Spiegelman attended Harpur College, now Binghamton University. He did not graduate but received an honorary doctorate from there 30 years later. At Harpur, Spiegelman audited classes by the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and became friends with him. Spiegelman has acknowledged Jacobs as one of the artists who inspired him, though he claims Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of Mad as his true spiritual father. (I second that emotion with my own work along with “spiritual uncles” Sergio Aragones and Mort Drucker)

He had one brother named Richieu who died before Art was born. Richieu was caught in the conflicts of World War II and was sent to live with an aunt, Tosha, since the Zawiercieghetto where she resided seemed safer than the Sosnowiec ghetto. When the Germans started to deport people from the Zawiercie ghetto, Tosha poisoned herself, Richieu, her own daughter (Bibi) and her niece (Lonia). (Maus, Volume 2) Art mentions in Maus that he felt like he had a sibling rivalry with a photograph, since his parents were still upset over the death of their first-born son. The second volume of Maus was dedicated to Richieu and to Spiegelman’s daughter Nadja. He also has a son.

In the late winter of 1968, he suffered a brief but intense nervous breakdown, an event occasionally referred to in his work. After his release from a mental hospital, his mother, Anja, committed suicide. Spiegelman was a major figure in the underground comix movement of the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to publications such as Real nulp, Young Lustand Bizarre Sex. He co-founded a significant comics anthology publications, Arcade (with Bill Griffith) in San Francisco during the early 1970s. In 1973 he co-edited with Bob Schneider Whole Grains: A Book of Quotations, featuring the notable words of countercultural icons like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan before they got much play in such mainstream reference works as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The book was mistakenly racked on the “Cookbook” shelves at some bookstores.

In 1976, Spiegelman moved back to New York, where he met Françoise Mouly, an architectural student on a hiatus from her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. They married and he moved into her Soho loft in 1978. He lobbied to see Breakdowns, an anthology of his formal experiments in comics published around that time; it eventually came out from Belier Press to “resounding indifference”.

Undaunted, Mouly insisted on launching a new magazine with Spiegelman, parts of which she would print on the printing press she had brought into her loft, so together they started RAW in 1980. Among many other innovative works, RAW serialized Maus, which retraces Spiegelman’s parents’ story as they survived the Holocaust. In 1986, he released the first volume of Maus (Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, also known as Maus I: My Father Bleeds History) The second volume, Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began followed in 1991. Maus attracted an unprecedented amount of critical attention for a work in the form of comics, including an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Spiegelman has also worked in more commercial forums: after a summer internship (when he was 18) at Topps Bubble Gum, he was hired as a staff writer-artist-editor in Woody Gelman‘s Product Development Department.During his 20 years with Topps, Spiegelman invented Garbage Candy (candy in the form of garbage, sold in miniature plastic garbage cans), the Wacky Packages card series, Garbage Pail Kids and countless other hugely successful novelties. He farmed out Topps work to many of his friends, such as Jay Lynch, and to his former students, such as Mark Newgarden, collaborating on some products with Lynch and Bhob Stewart.

After 20 years of asking Topps to grant the creators a percentage of the profits, and after other industries (such as Marvel Comics and DC Comics) had grudgingly conceded, Topps still refused. Spiegelman, who had assigned Topps work to many of his cartoonist friends or students, left over the issue of creative ownership and ownership of artwork. In 1989 Topps auctioned off the original artwork they had accumulated over the decades and kept the profits.

Hired by Tina Brown in 1992, Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker for ten years but resigned a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The cover created by Spiegelman and Mouly for the September 24 issue of The New Yorker received wide acclaim and was voted in the top ten of magazine covers of the past 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

At first glance, the cover appears to be totally black, but upon close examination it reveals the silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers in a slightly darker shade of black. Mouly repositioned the silhouettes so that the North Tower’s antenna breaks into the “W” of the logo. The towers were printed in a fifth black ink on a black field employing standard four-color printing inks, and an overprinted clear varnish was added. In some situations, the ghost images only became visible when the magazine was tilted toward a light source.

Spiegelman states that his resignation from The New Yorker was to protest the “widespread conformism” in the United States media. Spiegelman is a sharp critic of the administration of former President George W. Bush and claims that the American media has become “conservative and timid.”

In September 2004, he released In the Shadow of No Towers, a book relating his experience of the Twin Towers attack and the psychological after-effects. Beginning fall 2005, Spiegelman’s new series “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!” appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review.

In 2005, Time Magazine named Spiegelman one of their “Top 100 Most Influential People.”

In the June 2006 edition of Harper’s magazine, he published an article on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy which had occurred earlier in the year. At least one vendor, Canada‘s Indigo chain of booksellers, refused to sell the particular issue. Called “Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage” the article contained a survey of the sometimes dire effect of political cartooning on its creators, ranging from Honoré Daumier (who was imprisoned for a satirical work) to George Grosz (who was exiled). The article raised the ire of Indigo because it seemed to promote the continuance of racially-motivated cartooning.

Spiegelman is a prominent advocate for the medium of comics. He taught courses in the history and aesthetics of comics at schools including the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. He tours the country giving a lecture he calls “Comix 101.” An anthology of interviews with Spiegelman, spanning 25 years and a wide variety of printed venues, was published by University Press of Mississippi in 2007 as Art Spiegelman: Conversations.

Source: Wikipedia

Happy Birthday Mary Adshead!

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self-portrait by Mary Adshead

Mary Adshead (15 February 1904 London – 3 September 1995 London) was an English painter, muralist, illustrator and designer.Adshead was born in London, the only child of Stanley Davenport Adshead, architect, watercolourist, and Professor of Civic Design first at Liverpool, and later at London University, and his wife Mary. Mary Adshead enrolled at the Slade School in 1921 under Henry Tonks, who recognized her ability and arranged her first mural commission in Wapping, working with Rex Whistler. Her next mural, carried out in 1924, was for Professor Charles Reilly at Liverpool. Fortuitously it still exists on display at Liverpool University.
Another commission was for Lord Beaverbrook’s Newmarket house. Her mandate was to decorate his dining-room with Newmarket racing scenes and portraits of his friends, such as Arnold Bennett, Lady Louis Mountbatten, and Winston Churchill, on their way to the racecourse. The project was never completed as Beaverbrook became concerned that he would be daily faced with the portraits if he ever fell out with any of them.
In 1929 she was married to Stephen Bone, son of the artist Sir Muirhead Bone. The marriage produced two sons and a daughter.

painting by Mary Adshead

Her first solo exhibition was held in 1930 at the Goupil Gallery. Working with her husband, she illustrated two children’s books. She designed some pictorial issues of stamps for the GPO in 1949, followed by the 2s 6d and 5s high value definitive stamps in 1951, and she designed the frame around the portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on the 8d, 9d, 10d and 11d Wilding series definitive stamps. In 1950 she decorated the fourth-floor restaurant of Selfridge’s with jungle scenes. Despite her busy work schedule, she also found time to organise the Society of Mural Painters.

 

Source: Wikipedia