Getting the feeling in

Jeffrey Jones said on his site that when he's painting he becomes super aware of sensations - the way things feel on his skin, the smell of the air, etc. That might have something to do with why he was able to get so much feeling into the work, or rather to express so much through it. 

I feel like most of my work is little more than exercises. I don't usually get much feeling into it, or express it anyway, but when I go back and look at my drawings and paintings they always remind me of things - I suppose it's because I mostly draw things and people that I know. I was a bit surprised when going through and scanning my work recently to realize how many of them show places or people I know - it's like a journal of sorts. My life in pictures - handmade pictures filled with memories. I was really glad to have the ones of the restaurant where I used to work because not only is it shut down now (still standing but vacant) but shortly after I did those drawings they gave it a 'face lift' and the whole interior changed drastically I'll always remember it the way it originally looked, and now I have a pretty good record of it (even though I drew it after getting home, strictly from memory - but I did spend some time studying it each day for the purpose of being able to draw it better). I also now have a record of what our uniforms looked like at various times and some of the people I worked with. As well as drawings of the house I used to live in, which also at the moment stands vacant and empty. 

But that's only got meaning to me personally. That isn't the focus of this entry. I'm talking about being able to express a feeling or a state of mind or an atmosphere to viewers. Some artists do this even before they learn the mechanics of drawing or painting. I think Kent Williams is one of those. Myself, I think I'll be able to express myself better as I get better at the basics that I'm concentrating on learning now. It's an old axiom in acting, as well as I'm sure just about every other branch of art - before you can express it fluidly you have to internalize it. Meaning you have to learn the basics so well that they become second nature, and then you don't have to think about them consciously anymore. The conscious mind is a slow, awkward cumbersome beast, and it gets in the way a lot. The subconscious on the other hand is graceful and fluid. It can express things effortlessly. Artists who get caught up in technique and never let go to work through the subconscious will probably have a lot of trouble being able to express anything really powerfully. 

This is why I'm concentrating now on working in color a lot and developing my techniques for it - I'm ready to move out of this awkward 'just learning' phase of painting and move on to where I can paint from the subconscious. In order to get there you have to have some well-developed techniques and methods for approaching color work, and some experience to fall back on. That's what I'm doing now, developing those techniques and gaining that experience. 

I want to talk briefly about the type of person who might be able to express themselves before they know technique. I used to know a guy like this - a friend named Keith that I grew up with. A super high-energy person. Actually he suffered from manic depression, which was probably a key factor, but this guy was like a natural born comedian and actor, always 'on'. His life was like one endless improv, and he'd move effortlessly from one mood to another. You never knew when he was being serious, sometimes you'd swear this was the real Keith but then all of a sudden he'd crack up and go into another improv, revealing that what he had just been saying was all a performance. He drew a lot, and he never bothered to learn any kind of technique - he didn't need to! He could express everything through is lines and shapes. They could be jagged and electric, or fluid and graceful, or staccato or whatever he needed depending on the mood he was in. Though I don't think he was in control of it at all, it was the other way around. 

I seem to be the opposite - I'm a very reserved person who never reveals any emotions even if they're just about tearing me apart. I think I learned that as a survival mechanism when I was young, so people couldn't manipulate me through my emotions (yes, there was somebody who would do that every time). I was never consciously aware of developing this strategy, and it took me until I was somewhere in my 30's or maybe even early 40's before I began to really become aware of why I probably did it. Maybe this explains why my drawing and painting is more about technique than feeling? I don't know. But I am good at creating a sense of atmosphere in my environments. Maybe that's a different way of expressing the feelings I'm afraid to let out in front of anybody? 

I am not saying people who freely and naturally express their feelings or are like natural improv actors on the stage of life can somehow be artists without needing to learn technique - though some of them can I'm sure. I also don't think it's necessary for a person to be like that in order to get feeling in their visual art. I was just exploring the idea of expressiveness in different forms. 

But I hope that as I internalize the process of making art and begin to be able to do it unconsciously I'll start to be able to express feeling through my work more. 

I think I'm the type of person who needs to do it this way - which gives me plenty of time to develop my techniques and practice the basics as I work on gradually breaking through my internal baffles. And I'm not sure it's really necessary to express what I'm feeling - I think it's totally possible to express feelings or moods that you aren't necessarily experiencing at the time. A good artist can do this, just as any good performer can. Or maybe it's more a matter of being able to 'access your emotions' like they talk about with acting. Meaning at any time you can bring up the needed emotion or feeling or mood and let it guide you. 

Interestingly, on a completely unrelated note I was reading an article about the stages of development of self-awareness in children and adults today, just after writing the above, and ran across this extremely relevant section:

"As adults, we do indeed manifest all of the levels of self-awareness developing early in life: from our immersion in skilled actions such as competitive sport which entails a great deal the implicit self-awareness of Level 1 (differentiation) and Level 2 (situation). Interestingly, if one rises to the next levels of explicit self-awareness (Level 3 and above) while engaged in skilled actions such as playing tennis or golf, this transition is associated with dramatic changes in performance, typically a deterioration. Tennis and golf players will tell you that if they step into explicit self-consciousness, erring into explicitly thinking and reflecting on what they are doing, their game tends to collapse. There is nothing worse for tennis players than self-reflecting on the shape of their backhands. The same applies for people engaging in meditation. People meditating and teachers within the Buddhist tradition for example, will tell you that certain states cannot be attained without emptying oneself from self-reflecting mental activities."

 ---- It's really talking about the phenomenon known as Flow. 

Sometimes also called "being in the zone" - it happens a lot when playing sports or video games or anything that requires your full undivided attention and action without conscious thinking . In order to experience flow while painting you need to have already fully absorbed the lessons and practiced to such an extent that you no longer need to think about what you're doing, you can do it on automatic. That's when you can do it without the need for conscious self-reflection, and let the inner artist take over. And I believe that's when Ill be able to stop thinking so much about technique and anatomy and composition etc and just make decisions intuitively, and when I'll be able to really get the feeling in. 

Starting to get serious now...

This is an old painting I did in 01 - pencil and oil on watercolor paper. Below is the original scan, and above what I've been doing to it in photoshop, starting with a sepia photo filter to neutralize the harsh cartoon-colored background, and punching up contrast. I've also been adding complementaries to neutralize and grey down some of the colors on the figure where it's needed. I just spent 2 days digging out a crapload of old drawings and scanning them (coming soon) and I got disgusted with the cartooniness of my lines, shapes and colors. I used to really go all loose and sloppy and rough, and distort way too much. I looked through Amalgam and surprisingly, Williams doesn't really distort nearly as much as it seems like - it's very controlled when he does. And his colors are pretty realistic and toned down, except in some of his graphic novel stuff that's intended to look a bit comic bookish.   Plus I'm taking to heart what he said about no trying to artificially develop your own style, just do the best most honest work you can and your real voice will come through. I love the way this is starting to look! My new bywords are Careful and Controlled. And I quit trying to become Kent Williams jr - he has his way of working that's natural to him, and I have mine. 

** Edit:
I was just looking at some Kent Williams (found a big folio-sized book containing a few of his paintings and drawings while I was digging out my old stuff) and got disgusted with the meticulousness and precision of what I'm doing - but then I started to remember what it was like when I first learned to draw really well - it takes a long time and I had to go through a meticulous phase to get there. So I figure it must be the same when you're learning to work in full color - you have to become methodical and meticulous for a while in order to learn the principles and fully absorb them, and then once you've done that you can start to get faster.

About "Style" - and a few vids featuring Kent Williams

Paraphrased from Kent Williams:

He says he dislikes the word style and the very idea of it because it sounds like something from the fashion industry - something you can put on and take off. He prefers to think in terms of growing as an artist, becoming ever more honest in your work, and expressing yourself through your own language.

My own thoughts -

Too many times I've seen young art students use style as a crutch - their instructor shows them something they're doing wrong and they say "Dude - that's my style!". Then they refuse to listen or to try changing. It blocks growth and progress until they outgrow it. And what they're calling style is actually just an affectation - probably adapted so they can pretend like they're better artists than they actually are.

Here's the video where he talks about it, along with a lot of other things - its an hour and a half long ( ! ) and shot in the Philippines, where Kent hails from:



Here are 3 more (much shorter) ones:





And a correction on something I wrote earlier - Williams didn't meet Jeff Jones until he moved to New York for art school. That was when they would talk in Jones' studio, not when Williams was a kid. Weird factoid that makes me kind of sad - Williams is the same age as me, and was already having amazing short graphic novel work published in Epic Illustrated in the early 80's, while he was still in art school - when I was just about to experience my first artistic growth spurt.

Face

It took me a long time to decide what I wanted his face and hair to look like. I went through a lot of people that might serve as inspiration, and strangely enough, I ended up with a young Roman Polanski. Surprised the hell out of me, but somehow it works. Using a simple 3 tone system, mid, light, and dark to define the big forms of the head and face. And yeah, now that I've posted it I can see the nose is a bit too long, it's crowding the mouth down onto his chin..

Calligraphic Shorthand

Williams is a master of calligraphic shorthand. No extra lines, no extra brushstrokes - only the absolute essential, and he knows how to get an amazing amount of mileage out of the essential. He makes each line say an incredible amount - carrying loads of information all at the same time - similar to the way a symbolic image in a dream can carry amazing amounts of information on many fronts at once. 

This carries through into his painting as well. My thinking is that it originates from gesture sketching. That's where an artist learns to express himself rapidly and forcefully with the bare minimum of time and mark-making. I marvel at the way he depicted the buildings in the image above. So rapidly done, and yet so expressive of complexity without being at all labored. It looks like he made his decisions almost instantly (sometimes I;m sure that's not true). Just by changing tone or color slightly he suggests plane breaks or breaks between slabs of material - all appearing time-etched and grungy. Everything also has an organic feel to it - straight lines aren't actually straight, but we never question that because it's clear it's an artist's rendering and needn't be perfectified as long as it looks good. I need to break free of my current slavery to perfectification (though it's mainly just because I'm doing my classical period right now - the classical places an emphasis on imitating nature and on detail). As I gain experience and facility Ill be able to start working faster and make my choices more rapidly. 

When he does environments it's clear that they're sort of an extension of the figure - the figure is always primary in his world. This is another indication that's he's an artist who derives most of his technique from gestural sketching.

New thoughts on Kent Williams

Recently I got in Wolverine Legends: Meltdown (formerly Havok and Wolverine: Meltdown) and Amalgam, both books of KWMS art, and I read in Amalgam that when he was a kid he used to draw Bruce Lee obsessively. Somehow that seems perfect - not only is Lee an iconic Asian figure with amazing physical anatomy, but he's also the perfect  - erm - amalgam (sorry) of character and physique - through an act of sheer sustained will he sculpted his body into an amazing machine of pure strength and grace. I can see this being where Williams started to get the idea of a human body distorted by an energy flowing through it, seeming to reshape the very bones and muscles. And that same incredible will flowing out directing a pose down to every last detail moment by moment - dictating gesture, flourish, expression.. even seeming to distort the very space and colors around it. Yes, indomitable human will seems to be at the center of Williams' artistic world. Maybe not always will - but always the figures and environments express the person's inner state. Expressionism through figure painting, but not as distorted or crazy as most of the old German Expressionists and their ilk liked to do - much closer to realism.

I did a google bu can't find any of the drawings - though I did run across his Crow cover paintings (I've been searching for my comic books and haven't found them yet) and suddenly realized how perfect it is that he's painting Brandon Lee, Bruce's son.

Ran across a lot of Wolverine and Batman drawings by various artists, and the vast majority of them seem perfectly content to settle for generic figure and anatomy - as if they're afraid to freely express themselves through even slightly distorted form. Also the conservativeness (sp?) of the shading/coloring etc is endemic - wow, comic art is full of extremely timid artists! Except for a handful like my favorites Jae Lee, Frank Miller, Mark Texiera, and Sienkiewicz.

These qualities are what really draw me to these artists - the boldness and fearlessness to distort form and figure freely and expressively. It only comes when you've fully absorbed and conceptualized the figure and anatomy and can now scrawl it out rapidly - bold gesture sketches.

I think after my little stint here doing Fafhrd and Gray Mouser paintings I definitely need to get to work on some figure drawings - I suspect it'll work best to start at my own speed and gradually get faster. Hell - no reason I can't do figure drawings even now.

Couldn't help noticing this Wolverine seems to have Bruce Lee's body..

Documenting the process - working out the pose for 2nd figure

Now I knew where I wanted to put him and decided he'd be crouching rather than sitting - I want him to look active and athletic. So I deleted the colorforms layer and roughed in a sketch. It's still tentative at this point - I'm trying it out and seeing what needs changing.

Here I had flattened the sketch and the grey blob layer and just started painting right onto it. That's necessary before you can start cutting it up and moving parts around.

Wow, that white was hurting my eyes! A neutral color is so much nicer to work over. It's a separate layer that'll be deleted once it's served it's purpose.

Most of the re-adjustments were done using photoshop's Free Transform and Distort tools.