by Marty Coleman | Oct 31, 2018 | Halloween |
Tired Jack
Jack was always tired. He never slept, burning the candle at both ends. That was a problem because it caused wax to drip everywhere and that made the partners in the law firm where he worked very angry. He got fired and spent his October either watching the baseball playoffs or sitting on the stoop outside his walkup wondering what to do. He was depressed and got lit often. It was a very scary time for him.
But eventually he died, became compost, was spread across a garden and helped grow a new batch of happy pumpkins the next year.
The End
Drawing and story © 2018 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
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by Marty Coleman | Oct 24, 2018 | Art |
One of the most frustrating things for many artists is when someone is so sucked in by technical virtuosity that they pay no attention to anything else. They don’t care if it’s a lame, derivative and unimaginative image of a B list celebrity, all they see is that ‘it looks so real, isn’t that amazing!’. It becomes the end all and be all of artistic value.
But for me, it is first off, a technical feat that isn’t as hard as people think it is. It looks impressive but having done photo-realism myself back in graduate school days, I know it can be done with repeated practice and not much else. It doesn’t, in and of itself, take a lot of imagination or creativity, it just takes technical practice. Don’t get me wrong, it can include those things, it’s just that often times it does not.
Secondly, admiring that over all else shows a simplistic understanding of art and what it can be and do in society. If the only art that is great or worthy is art that is a direct copy of a photograph or of a real scene, then it cuts off the value of the creative impulse in art that goes beyond realism, like expressionism, abstraction, impressionism, conceptual art, etc.
Thirdly, we already have the photo. What is the value of making something look like a photo when you already have the photo? It becomes just a way to prove virtuosity, which means it becomes a gimmick. Gimmicks in art fall flat after a while.
Fourth, it creates a group of artists who feel like the only valid work is realistic work, that they have to stay in that realm or they are discarded as being not very good. This is especially damaging to beginning artists in their teenage years where they are often pushed to make things look ‘realistic’. But art doesn’t need to be realistic to be valuable and good. But these teens, frustrated with their inability to make something look real, which might be being taught by their teacher and expected from their parents, give up on art never knowing they were perfectly ok just working in whatever vein they were working in.
My teaching philosophy is to teach creativity development and imagination building alongside technical expertise. If one does that then the artist will be able to create technical masterpieces but will have something unique and original within them that make them more than just dead copies of something else.
Drawing, photo and commentary © 2018 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
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by Marty Coleman | Oct 10, 2018 | Adventures of Young Medusa |
Medusa Studies for an Exam – The Adventures of Medusa
Medusa needed to read her Greek Mythology book for her Ancient Religion class so she went to a local coffee house to study. She was minding her own business, drinking her cappuccino and eating her gluten-free caramel brownie when a man came up and started to talk to her. She was polite and said hello but then said she needed to study and wasn’t able to talk right then. He didn’t get the hint and kept talking to her as he leaned up against the fireplace. He started to compliment how beautiful she was and what a great body she had. He started asking her questions about her relationship status and if she came there often. She didn’t respond to him, keeping her nose squarely in her book. He got annoyed and called her a cold, snobby bitch. She turned around to look at him. He was stone cold silent from then on.
She finished reading, took the test and passed with flying colors.
The End
Drawing and story © 2018 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
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by Marty Coleman | Oct 3, 2018 | Sketchbook History Tour |
Real to Imagined
I draw the majority of my images from my imagination. But many of the drawings may start with something or someone I see as an inspiration point. It might be a long straight nose, or the uniformity of choir robes, that I remember and start with. But after that initial inspiration I am not trying to recreate the look of a person or place. I am then much more interested in the marks on the piece of paper and what they represent. This usually doesn’t happen with designed intent beforehand.
Where the Light Was On
For example, I didn’t start out wanting to show a woman looking off to a high rise in the distance. I started out wanting to echo the long vertical line of her nose with another long vertical line in the distance. It was after I made that second line in the distance that I started wondering what that could be. Then I started designing the scene with intent. Her look was so intensely focused off to my right that I didn’t think the high rise by itself would be a sufficient reason for her to be looking in that direction. A light on would make the difference and create the loop between the woman and the building. That in turn makes one wonder, what is happening in that building?
She Had A Little Work Done
I often start a drawing of a person with their nose. But I tend to do long noses or really big curved noses. I do this because I like making a big first mark on the page. But I got tired of doing that and was thinking about what sort of nose I could draw that I don’t often. So in the middle of the page I put the smallest nose I could. The moment I did that I thought about someone getting a nose job to reduce the size of it. The phrase ‘she had a ‘little’ work done’ came to mind. I built around that idea with other elements that were outsized instead of small, to allow for a big contrast. In the end though the drawing really wasn’t about the nose and the ‘little work’ it had done, it was about the eyes and lips and the BIG work that was done. As a matter of fact to me it looks like the only part of her that wasn’t worked on is her nose since the line is simple and uncolored. Sometimes what you think you are going to drawing isn’t what you end up really drawing.
Asparagus
I have a real penchant for art movements of Surrealism and and Dada from the early to mid twentieth century. I don’t know why but I like things that make me go ‘huh?’ and art from both those movements make me do that. In this drawing it really isn’t the image that does that, but the words. There’s no reason for them to be connected and that is the whole point. Thoughts and life don’t always make sense, but that doesn’t mean they don’t occur.
The Woman Who Drank Too Much Coffee
I showed this drawing to a friend in another country via live streaming video and she didn’t understand what all the marks were about. I explained it by telling her the title, then she understood completely!
The Choir Sings About Tools
The whole idea behind a choir (or any group in a uniform) is to present the group as being more important than the individual. It’s a powerful way to put something out into the world that wouldn’t be possible as individuals. But yet, without the individuals the group could never exist. Yes, each person here is drawn as an individual in the facial features and hair, but when it came to coloring them I decided it would be more interesting to show what was coming out of their mouths as being what made them individual, instead of their skin color.
Why the tools? Well, I couldn’t really think of a great quote or song lyric at the time and I thought icons of tools would be an interesting challenge to draw.
I Feel So City
The idea for this drawing was observing a woman reading at a coffee shop. I was barely able to get the lines of her face and body in before she left. What I was left with was someone who, without the book in the picture, looked rather depressed. I colored her in bright colors to compensate for that depressed look but still saw it. I then drew the background to match her look, not her color. Adding the word play came to mind at that point.
Drawings and commentary © Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
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