Poe: A Dream Procession

A Celebration For The Existence Of The Divine Joke, 14.5 X 17", copr William Cook, 1982

This scene looks across a parking lot from the University Of Maryland Hospital, to the 

intersection of Fayette and Greene. The buildings are accurate enough to mention 

that the church in the upper right is Westminster Church, site of the grave of 

Edgar Allen Poe.  This view is no longer possible because they built a

building in the lot. Anyway, the significance of all this is that 

I must have snapped this shot while parked next to the 

Hospital, waiting for my wife to get off work.

I may have known about the Poe thing, hence the snapshot. And many moons later, 

I thought this would make a great backdrop for the procession idea I had for this piece.

I mean what a cool conjunction of weirdness.  Even without the Poe thing the buildings 

are creepy enough, but Edgar was icing on the cake. 

This was all reminiscent of a dream I once had of a procession of weirdos, celebrating

something I didn't understand, but I had better get away from.  But I couldn't leave--too 

wicked and wonderful.  They carried shields with this funny emblem, and had 

tassels with sixes embroidered, there were signs, banners, flags--and 

throngs of onlookers all worked up witnessing their holy "priesthood"

 marching along.  

They're celebrating a God who, among his other duties ultimately 

tells the Divine Joke.  The punchline is that there's no joke, he will 

roast you over the coals throughout all eternity if you make a mistake.

How I hoped this wasn't so.

Then I woke up.  

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The Black Madonna

The Black Madonna, 14 X 17, copr William Cook, 1982

So I'm innocently walking around the corner,and this spectacle catches my eye.
Couldn't whip out the camera quick enough.  How odd that that everything in
this doorway was spotless exceptfor the statue's face.  I actually thought it
was a little strange--the Queen Of Heaven in blackface.  Had the
thing been vandalized or was this an accident of nature?  I dubbed
her the Black Madonna, and did this piece--knew nothing of the legends.

Years later, to my surprise, I ran across references to the Black Madonna,

and that there has been a great deal of hoo ha made of Mary statues
with black faces for hundreds of years all over Europe.  Much of it consists
of local legend or superstition, some of it is mystical and 'dark',
some of it just sounds ridiculous--like the warning not to get her
upset or she'll throw your kid off a cliff.
  

I must have stumbled on some weird coven--a sort of Baltimore branch
office of ever greater reaches of strange.  Baltimore has its share
of kooky legends. I mean it is possible. We're prepared
for this here, and my imagination was doing handstands
--like this guy.  

Then I ran across a study from back in the thirties that concluded these

poor statues had probably just gotten filthy over the years,
and that started all the goofy legends.  Apparently, whoever
went to church here agreed. Today she's all
cleaned up, good as new.

So much for the legend of the Black Madonna.
But I still wouldn't get her upset.
What do you think? 

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Creeping Past Roger B Taney

Statue At Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore,  copr 1982 William Cook

This piece was done on April 5, 1982, and is the last of thirty pieces
 in the series.  Below is the first, from December 10, 1981.  Just thought
the progress was interesting enough to blog about, since the motivation
was to try to figure out how to use the pen for something other
than  pure scribble pieces that characterized the
period from 1977 to 1981.  

Each piece in the monuments series was a studio piece
based on that walk in the snow with the camera.  I really had no
idea who these monuments were in honor of, especially this one
of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.  There
was something dramatically huge about this angle [from behind]
and the striking light composition.  What do I 

care of content--I'm just snapping pictures.

Pine Tree At Lake Montebello, copr. William Cook, 1981

As I went into representational mode, the techniques included the
black pastel wash, as I came to call it.  It was applied as dust with a
rag and then worked into with an eraser to pop out highlights.  As the
drawing techniques developed, all this tonal stuff was abandoned.
 It crept back in later as the style took on color (another story).
This represents my first attempt at representational pen and ink
drawing that worked (IMHO).  Oh, there were many train-wrecks
way too painful to show.  

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Sidney Lanier and the Black Drape

Sidney Lanier, 14.5 x 17", copr William Cook, 1982

I've decided to go back and revisit the Monuments Series from 1982.  And perhaps it might
be time to revisit the style and work like this for a while.  Thirty two years ago I came to
this style of drawing from the other direction.  I was working in abstraction with the
horizontal image I've been posting---and it's variations--and was eager to get some
representational imagery back into my work.  Much of the crazy scribbling and
scrubbing remains in these images--I was always invigorated by the
result--all that drama coming out of a simple pen point.

Many of the pieces from this era have never been seen--like this piece.  It's about  25 degrees
out with about two feet of snow.  I'm trudging down Charles Street next to the Johns
Hopkins Homewood campus, Baltimore.   I brought my trusty old SLR, and was scoping
out interesting imagery to work with.  This poor old soul trying to read a book while
getting covered up with snow set off all the alarms as artworthy.
 It had everything I'd hoped to find.

On another level, I hadn't a clue what I was looking at, other then this was Johns Hopkins
University, and someone thought enough of this guy to put this statue here.  This
 is Sidney Lanier, the poet, composer, musician, lawyer, educator Hopkins faculty
 and many etcetras.  What a guy.--of course he got a monument.  And he died at 39.

The sculptor is Hans Schuler.

I always felt like those nasty frat boys that lived in the dorm behind  showed great
disrespect by hanging that black drape out the window, and leaving the windows
open in such cold weather.  I always blamed them for spoiling my picture,
 so I never showed it.  My apologies.

\\///\

Same Clowns Different Circus

The Gotelli Dwarf Conifer Collection, US National Arboretum, Washington DC,
copr William Cook, 2008

OK, something a bit different.  Same media--pen and ink, colored pencil, graphite.  Only difference is that there is nothing random.  This is an architectural piece.  Each off those squiggly blobs actually looks like the plant that's there.  Some licence has been used to keep the pathways visually open.  After all, primary usage was as a wayfinding map.  Still, it's not that different than the work I've been showing--dots and dashes.
Go ahead and enlarge it.  There's a lot there.     

"Originally located on the property of William Gotelli in New Jersey, the core of the collection was donated to the Arboretum in 1962. It is now one of the most comprehensive collections of dwarf conifers in the world."  (USNA Website)



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Geometrical Contemplations

Five Fourteen Twelve Flower, ink with pastel wash, copr 2012

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The Viewpoint School Project.

Viewpoint School is a long, thin campus, situated on a valley floor.  A football field wouldn't fit across it.  This Google Earth shot including the suggestion of topography, has been carefully selected to show the best view of the campus.  Three of the four main buildings in the center area are presently under construction, and will have to be added.  But the important promenades and other features both existing and future, have all been accounted for in this point of view.  The elevation is perfect--everything will show up just fine.  

The only problem will be the oversized foreground due to perspective.  The football program is overshadowing the academic program--not that the kids would complain, but maybe the parents would care a little.  So this natural, correct perspective will have to be altered in such a way that the campus still looks like the campus, and the academic program gets a fair share of the space.   

Time to break all the rules.    

Add caption

This shows these major compositional adjustments.  I've also applied all this to the layout being used for the primary usage--a brochure.  This shows where the gutter (center fold) will lie, and the rough shape of the illustration perimeter.   The vignetting is typical of my aerials, and the colors have been quickly saturated to feel like my work.  This image is a combination of an existing campus map and the Google Earth shot.  Things have been pushed, prodded and lovingly caressed into this state rapidly, with absolutely no attention to detail.   In this way the success of the composition is assured, but it wouldn't be any great loss if the whole thing was rejected.  In this case the graphic designer, the school development office, the headmaster--everyone involved concurred and approved this quick but crucial step.  I think of it as a thumbnail where all the major stuff comes together.      

The next step is to establish the "footprints" of the buildings.  Most of them are represented, but the new buildings will have to be added using architectural plans and diagrams.  Here is the basic "footprint" plan.  Again, a little more labor intensive, but still quick and very crucial, this step establishes a solid foundation for the illustration.  

Out of these "footprints" I will "grow" each of the buildings using the many ground shots I gathered during my visit, and renderings of the future buildings.  Some tweaking is going on with the football field still, the art director thinks it doesn't have enough perspective--picky, picky, picky.  On the other hand this is where all this stuff needs to be addressed, and as it turns out he was dead on correct.  By this time the tweaks are very minor.  

The preliminary rough is the first glimpse of how the illustration will hang together.  In addition to the actual buildings in position, the hills around the campus are being suggested.  This is what makes this campus unique, and was on the wish list of things to show in this piece.  These hills are most famous in that all the old westerns were filmed here.  Hollywood is not that far away.  I thought that was very cool indeed.  

The bulk of the work on the illustration takes place here.  This is the detail rough where all the details are shown correctly.  More tweaks to the football and softball fields.  We'll get there.  I'm also beginning to think about the pen and ink work, and how to "render" it all down so that everything is there or implied without coloring the whole thing black (this original meaning of "rendering" as applied to art--a simplification process).  There is so much detail to be dealt with, but all must be believable and pleasing to the eye.  Also some of the trees are moving and getting shorter or disappearing altogether for the sake of clarity.   

This is the final illustration underway.  The pen and ink work is all in place, featuring a duotone pen and ink effort in black, and then brown ink, a sort of grasailles translation into the ink media.  I feel it is the perfect underwork for coloring, in that all the primaries are already represented.  A colored black ink drawing seems inadequate, and does not feel right to me.  Sometimes I increase the effect by rubbing burnt umber pastel onto the surface and then using an eraser to knock out highlights.  This step increases the drama, and does all sorts of neat things to the color, as one might expect.  I elected not to do that here; too much going on to keep it all under control.  Went right to the coloring--very sharp Prismacolor pencil points.  

The Viewpoint School, Santa Monica Hills, California (click to enlarge)

And finally, the illustration complete.  Six weeks, a really cool trip, lots of friendly banter, instinct, art and lovin life.   Had a blast start to finish, I hope that shows.  

\\///\

Visual Decisions

Carla Jean,  6X9",  Mixed media with pen and ink

Hatching Indigo,  6X8",  Mixed media

I've been working on these 11 little panels, some of which I've shown in past postings.  They just keep changing as I meander through tests and experiments.  Some of them got very deep with all the layers, some of them failed as presentable pieces and await further layers.  These two completed themselves early on-- I can't touch them for the time being, at least until some flash of inspiration strikes to alter them.  The Carla Jean without the slab seemed too wanting, and the Hatching Indigo had no structure--a textural extravaganza with no point.  It's  amazing how a little thing like some hatch marks and a purple haze can order a whole painting around.

Well.  The old computer bit the dust.  Here it is in it's last gasp.  She was a fine old dinosaur, all 20 gigs.  She was replaced by that slim black thing to the left of the flat screen-- Dell 580S--a terabyte--50 times bigger.   It hasn't been a terrible nightmare, I had everything backed up well enough--just time consuming.  I think I'm back, sorry for not being very attentive in the last couple of weeks.  

  

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Relief Valve: Rivers And Tides--Know Thy Medium

The Phillips Collection, DC, copr. Cook, 2009. Click to enlarge



The Bonsai and Penjing Museum, US National Arboretum, DC, copr. Cook 2005.
Click to enlarge

 


Red Cockaded Woodpecker, for Georgia Pacific, copr Cook,1993.

Red Cockaded Woodpecker, for Georgia Pacific, copr Cook,1993.

With all the recent posts of scribble drawings, gesturals, and blessed mindless sheets of marks, I thought it might be interesting to put some of this into context. 

My illustrations are meticulous, and accurate in terms of content.  My wayfinding aerials are exceedingly clear because they need to be—they're used in visitor’s guides.  Often I work with surgical loops.  The work takes weeks and months to complete.  Many times I am under extreme deadline, and scrupulous direction as a team creative.  There are art directors, creative directors, copywriters, photographers, not to mention the end clients, all with their mitts in the pie and their reputations on the line, offering input—extremely valid input, too—everything must be considered.  Every step is scrutinized and approved before proceeding to the next.  All this, and to still be required to produce cutting edge art that communicates specific visual messages instantly—without being overworked—is my world—and we haven’t touched on all the marketing effort to get enough work to eke out a living.

My fine art is the relief valve for all this.    How wonderful it is to let it all out once in a while—go all over the place—go inside (visual meditation) —go outside (plein air) —hand eye sketching—paint smearing—mudpies—splatter—3 dimensional scribbling—pastel dust rubbing—its all so delicious.  Art academics, what I call "artspeak", goes out the window, followed by all the books and accoutrements of a well-stocked studio.  Free at last--thank God I'm free at last.  Fine art is like getting out of school for the day. 

Anything will do for art making.  Watch Rivers and Tides, a documentary about an artist, Andy Goldsworthy, who experiences art on the purest levels, using natural found materials, and then enjoys the momentary feeling of accomplishment before it all blows away.  Unbelievable!   I found myself admiring the stunning crazoid hodge-podge of utility company marks, paint splatter, oil stains, cracks, weeds etc. on a sidewalk.  What bliss!  I hate graffiti, the bastards.  But inside, I’m trackin with em, baby.  Sometimes what’s going on the floor in my studio looks better that the art. 

Calm down—get back in your box, Bill.  I have to now execute the final for the new aerial view of the US National Arboretum Dogwood Collection.  Failure is no option.  No more Mr. Nice guy.  Edgy blossoms.  Humph.

I love all you fine artists out there and am honored to be in your presence.

Wm

"Meek, Like A War Horse", Klahn

Christ As Horse Rider, 14 X 18, Ink, inquire here for print.

I was so taken by Casey Klahn 's comment in the previous post, that I couldn't resist using it as the title here, and showing the second of the Hittite triptych.  His comment is incredibly insightful--as it always is--that's definitely a war horse. 

The third of the Hittite Triptych was sold to the artist Jill Dodson, an equestrian, equestrian portrait and plein aire painter.  She admired the movement of all that horseflesh, and wanted to know where I studied horse anatomy.  Horse anatomy?  Where do you study that?  I pled ignorance as usual.  Something tells me Casey's going to say, "Stop whining already and just call it a diptych".

Anyway, the image emerged from rapid scribbling--whole arm movements--gesturals.  I used a rolling writer because, well, the ink could fly out of it fast enough.  Many times in this kind of drawing I would actually wear the ball down and part of the pen tip by shear abrasion.  The ink would run out and the resulting friction would cause this.  The fouling effects are made with charcoal dust and an eraser. 

Wm