surrealism

While the sci-fi paperback genre has always been replete with busty warrior women who are impossibly ill-equipped to deal with marauding dragons, or impractically designed space vessels hovering above rainbow-hued planets, or if you’re lucky, a really freaking insane monster that’s mostly made of teeth, some of my favorite covers include none of these obvious things. While I’ve had a difficult time finding any that were published after the 1970s, I’m a fan of the ‘human abstraction’.

There’s no doubt that once you see a warrior chick or crazy beast on the cover of a sci-fi book, it’s the image that’s planted firmly in your head from introduction to final chapter, whether or not these descriptions fit what the author actually describes. Much of the time, the illustrator is given a brief synopsis of what the story entails, and a quick outline of what the main character may look like. There’s little nuance, and an illustrator on a deadline usually won’t have time to sit down and read through the entire book to seek all of the vital details out.

While Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Food of the Gods‘ (1964 Popular Library Eagle Books edition) isn’t an ‘abstraction’ as much as a non-literal interpretation of a human head, it doesn’t ruin the form of what might be inside of the book itself. This particular painting, ‘Head’ by Pavel Tchelitchew, was not created specifically for this book, but the publishers thought that it fit. Tchelitchew was actually a well-known Surrealist painter who died seven years before this edition of ‘Gods’ was even published.

‘Earthblood‘ by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown uses another abstracted humanoid figure on its 1966 Berkeley Medallion edition. A little bit of digging reveals that the artist of this cover is Richard Powers, who dabbled equally in Surrealist designs and the obligatory ‘hot alien’ chick cover. He’s considered revolutionary enough, and justifiably so, to have warranted a book completely about his artwork.

‘Odd John’ by Olaf Stapledon is regarded as a fairly important work of science fiction, and if the blurred signature in the corner of the image says what I think it does, this is another beautiful work by Powers. There aren’t many reliable web resources about Powers.

This is also a title that saw a few more interpretations which aren’t quite as creative. We have the alien-faced cover…

… and the sensationalist, sexy cover. The fact that one book can be interpreted so many different ways is either a really great, or really terrifying, thing.

Early Penguin paperbacks also explored a more abstracted view of science fiction also, with beautiful results. Forget about the starships – I want the vague implication of a human head and my imagination.

And for no really good reason, except that it’s my new favorite paperback cover, I present to you ‘Who?‘

I’m a big fan of Juxtapoz Magazine, because reading through the pages always feels a little like finding friends and coming home. During my long-fought battle to find an artistic identity for myself, Juxtapoz visits with artists who find themselves fighting the same creative fight as myself, and that’s comforting.

Juxtapoz has been acting as a chronicle of a the lowbrow / pop surrealist art movement since 1994, allowing spectators and participants alike to watch as the art collective evolves, transforms, and incorporates more and more into itself, with editor Robert Williams acting as the post-modern André Breton. Fortunately, Williams has been a lot more forgiving and accepting of the transformative nature of Surrealism than the dismissive Breton, who shunned more artists than he accepted into his clique. The result of Williams’ approach is a diverse magazine that addresses a very wide swath of creatives, from urban to rural, with their divergent influences and inspirations.

The magazine has recently begun to publish hardcover books, the first two being Juxtapoz Tattoo and Juxtapoz Illustration. In true Juxtapoz style, they’re handsome as hell. Juxtapoz Illustration has already made itself an essential inspiration and a bookshelf necessity, as well as something I plan on selectively using in my art classes. You know, skipping the pages with nipples and such – gotta keep it PG-13 when you have easily distractable, teenaged boys around. It’s like they have some kind of nudity radar.

Readers of Juxtapoz magazine will already be familiar with many of these 23 included artists, though the organizers of the book were careful to not repeat many pieces that were already featured within the magazine’s pages, and have even included a few artists that haven’t been featured in the magazine at all. After a half-page bio and artists’ statement, each artist is given eight quiet pages, full of beautifully printed artwork. No premise, no explanation – just art for the sake of art, unified under the nebulous idea of ‘illustration’. There’s a purity in this structure that’s exciting, and which isn’t allowed in a traditional magazine format. The translation is great, and every artwork is well-chosen.

No modern illustration book would be complete without the inclusion of the amazing James Jean, who I view as an essential 21st century illustrator to know – whether you’re an artist or just someone with eyes. Jeff Soto is also another name that’s thrown around a lot, and the tranquil artwork of Amy Sol (which was recently profiled in Hi Fructose magazine) is also featured here. Barron Storey is an oldschool illustrator and creative chameleon, whose dense, semi-abstract artwork has always been fascinating. The stark black and white of Mike Giant, the epic texture and motion of Nate Van Dyke, the supercomplex and unexpected vistas of San. What all of these people have in common is that they take the underappreciated world of ‘illustration’ and elevate it past the simple idea of ‘drawing a story’ and into places more painterly or abstract or energetic – many, many miles away from the rampant Photoshoppery that we’re assailed with on a daily basis.

While the collective work sometimes travels under the term ‘lowbrow’, I think that we now embrace the term as a way of ‘owning’ it. Anyone who gives these works even a cursory look will see the intellect, effort and artistry inherent in every one.

So, while there are many annual hardcovers that address ‘illustration’, Juxtapoz book eschews the commercial angle that runs through most of them, and gives the readers a brief but powerful look at the potential of the genre. It’s become a vital part of that indispensable shelf of inspirations in the ol’ studio space.

According to The Bible, God created just about everything in a week. Obviously, he didn’t have a day job to get in the way of his creative impulses, because it takes me about a week just to finish up a single comic page. When you don’t have to eat or pay for car insurance, you can pretty much rock ’til the break of dawn without any consequences. So, what did this God do BEFORE he slapped together The World As We Know It?

Dave McKean asked this back in 1998, and it pretty much changed my perception of film forever. He answered his own question with a 23-minute film called ‘The Week Before’, which I subsequently passed around to all of my family, friends, girlfriends, classmates, congressmen and pets. Seriously – I was merciless, because I felt as if I’d found gold. After a while, my VHS copy did what all VHS copies do and started to fuzz out, losing definition and the return on my investment, but I’d seen it enough times to pretty much be able to reenact it myself if I had to. For a while, the VHS was even worth a whole fistful of money.

As an (over)active Dave McKean collector, I found that his books were always relatively easy to hunt down and purchase, either through Amazon or contacting his publicist, Allen Spiegel, directly – but McKean’s films were not easily accessible. I ended up purchasing enhanced-CD singles from the UK by obscure bands because the Dave McKean music videos inside, or CD-Rom projects by The Residents because McKean had illustrated a short story hidden somewhere on the disc. Mostly, I hit a thousand dead ends – grasping at rumors of new McKean projects, scanning press shots for clues, and finding nothing. Even as the age of the internet rolled around, there was very little to find. It wasn’t even until this month that the computer adept McKean even had a website of his own.

So, I’m pretty thrilled that McKean has finally released Keanoshow, a DVD compilation of all his major works, even if it duplicates my hard-fought collecting victories of the past decade. You might recognize his work from the film ‘Mirrormask‘, or the occasional CD or comic cover – but even as you recognize it, it shifts into something completely new and beautiful.

McKean’s film work has many recurring visual themes – a layering of images so dense that it’s almost unfathomable, scrawling ink drawings on things that aren’t usually drawn on, wrinkled paper, expressionless masks somehow emoting, and a cloud of dark surrealism surrounding everything. Sometimes he’s narrative in his works, and sometimes he goes relatively abstract – but he never completely abandons the narrative that’s inherently implied by juxtaposing objects, and the way that they are observed by the camera.

The DVD includes just about every major and minor work that McKean created since 1998, including commercials, music videos, a few odds and ends, and his five ten-minute-or-more short films.

‘The Week Before‘ is the first on the disc, and reproduced great clarity – so much so that certain portions of the film that I was never able to clearly make out on the VHS (even before its ritualistic abuse) have finally presented themselves. Also included is ‘N[eon]‘, a plodding little film about a naked ghost wandering the streets of Venice, and the man who loves her, mostly inspired by McKean’s love of Venice and the font of artworks that came from his visit there. ‘Displacements‘ is a set of six digital ‘rooms’ that McKean constructed for another filmmaker, who subsequently tore them apart and filmed the results. They present themselves as these claustrophobic, slow crawls through the finite landscapes – and are somehow a lot more fascinating than I expected. Because of the digital nature of the rooms, things change while they’re out of view, and the ‘viewer’ can zoom infinitely into any detail, finding secrets and losing them at the same time.

Also included is ‘Whack!‘, which you probably won’t want to watch after dark. Inspired by McKean’s work with Neil Gaiman on the graphic novel Mr. Punch, Whack! is a live-action staging of the ultra-violent Punch & Judy show. Hilarious when it’s made of puppets (as most things are), but terrifying when it’s made of people – made moreso by the camerawork, which darts around the room as if trying to avoid the spastic violence – all taking place in a small tent, which feels smaller and smaller as Punch progresses through his serial killings. Finally, there’s ‘Dawn‘, which is a typical (excellent) McKean narrative about thought, the nature of the universe and our place in it, presented with McKean’s grace and humor, and narrated by McKean’s genuinely soothing voice. For all of his work illustrating things for Neil Gaiman, I’ve always found McKean to be a vastly superior author. Dangerously obsessive Gaiman devotees, please direct your rage to the comments section below and you will be dealt with in kind.

Not to be concluded there, there are four very short commercial works, 2 semi-sarcastic mini-documentaries that McKean made about his artistic process for Kodak and Adobe, a sampling of film from other incomplete projects, four music videos, and absolutely best of all – Show and Tell, an hour-long film that Dave McKean shot of himself without the usual subterfuge of surrealism and layered imagery that he usually shrouds himself in. He unpretentiously talks about his entire filmmaking career, even sharing super-8 clips that he made with his friends as a kid, running around in superhero costumes. Within the ‘Show and Tell’ segment, he answers every question I’ve ever had about his rumored half-projects and even shares what they would have looked like were they completed. I find myself unable to want anything more.

Keanoshow is absolutely an essential part of my library of great and inspiring film shorts – the Wholfin collection, The Brothers Quay, The Animation Show, The Director’s Series Michel Gondry. Plus, obscure artsy DVDs are always a great way to get a girl back to your room and impress her with your sensitivity to alternative film. You know, at least the worthwhile girls. It was worth the decade-long waiting period.

For the DVD. Not the girls.

There was a time during my early career as an art-guy that the ‘Spectrum : The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art‘ series of books played a fundamental role in sculpting what I’d later pursue artistically. Annually, Spectrum would appear on the shelf at Barnes and Noble (and later, in the pages of the Sci-Fi Book Club newsletter), and I’d hungrily devour every page. Every dragon, every busty warrior-elf-woman clad in something completely inutile, every monster and every cyborg would be internalized by me as I’d think ‘I want to do this!’, or at least something similar. I was immersed in Dungeons and Dragons and ‘Hour of the Octopus’ by Joel Rosenberg at the time – what did I know? Dragons were everything and I could still tolerate Renaissance Faires. Which I went to. In costume.

Spectrum is, and has been for 14 years, nothing short of a perfect survey of mainstream mystical, technological or surreal fantasy narrative images that had happened within the past year or so. As a new illustrator interested in keeping up with the latest ‘lowbrow’ and fantasy trends, I kept abreast. And with Spectrum, ‘abreast’ could always be taken a bit literally. For the uninitiated, you can tell the ‘fantasy’ art from everything else by one factor : D-cups. There’s no need to every confuse the art movements again if you keep that one element in mind.

Of all of the annual art surveys, Spectrum was always the most handsomely put-together, and in a style that’s remained consistent between every volume I own. Everything is large, bright images – only a few on each page – with easy to read information on how to track down more info on the artists involved, and an index.

I’ve had a love / hate relationship with the Spectrum series since I’ve been reading and collecting it, and this is mostly because I’m am art purist. Regardless, I’ve always had ‘love’ to continue to collect the Spectrum volumes every year. My relationship it was personal, even if the Spectrum folks had no idea who I was. At least two girlfriends endured my vociferous ranting and praising as I flipped through each page in that year’s volume, picking every image to shreds.

As Photoshop became a tool in the arsenal of the fantasy artists, I wanted to take part in the digital age too. I convinced my high school to get a computer and a copy of Photoshop for the art studio space because I wanted to be Dave McKean at any cost. What could be better than art that didn’t require any messy paints, brushes, or space?

After another year or so in the evolution of the fantasy art world, Spectrum inadvertently made it clear that Photoshop was becoming TOO dominant a tool for their artists, who were so fascinated with it that they slapped something digital, and genuinely distracting, into every other image. I was disillusioned and disappointed and thought I’d put down Spectrum forever – or at least the nefarious computer. How could a panel of professional judges accept such mediocre art into these beautiful pages? In retrospect, after watching as the book and the art scene had both evolved together, those few years of overpowering digital ‘art’ WERE a perfect representation of what was going on, take it or leave it. It had turned be back to my pencils and paints anyhow, which was a personal move that was empowering. Thanks, Spectrum.

Still, I rebelled and sent in completely out-there paintings of my own, none of which were exceptional in skill or subject matter. I just wanted to show the judges that I was at LEAST better than that shoddy computer Korn fan-art that I had to look at last year and still hadn’t forgiven them for. I never made it into the pages of Spectrum, but that was never really the point. I was just an angry teen artist, and who did that guy personally know to get a full page in an otherwise acceptable book?

Spectrum 14 has cleaned up its act – or rather, quietly observed the fantasy art world cleaning up its act and followed suit. I can look through the pages and see that digital artwork has finally reached a point where it doesn’t make me recoil in horror, and that most artists have gotten over their fascination with the computer and refocused upon the artistry of art, instead of the technology of it. Sure, there’s still way too many digital artworks for my personal taste, but they appear next to things listed as ‘oil on wood’ and ‘acrylics’ – and the organic, real stuff always wins for me. Still, Spectrum represents the fantasy art world as it stands today, as it always has. Even the collection of painters who mercilessly rip off Phil Hale’s amazing style. Those guys’ll find their own voices eventually – but do they really deserve a whole page just because they can copy someone else’s painting style and subject matter expertly?

Pop surrealism is slowly creeping into the pages, alongside the usual childrens’ book illustrations and fantasy stuff. It’s great to see more of James Jean’s work, and the annual nods to Kent Williams, Brom, and Dave McKean, all of whom I love. It was the prevalence of the aforementioned D-cups in Spectrum that drove me away from personally continuing to pursue fantasy art and turned me towards the world of pop surrealism, which I related much better to as this past decade progressed. It’s all interrelated, and it’s come full-circle, and I’m home once again in the pages of Spectrum 14.