Birgit’s post brings up some troublesome memories.
My three boys, in their earlier years, drew a lot. Much of it consisted of takes on what they saw in the media with some creative things here and there. In the late nineties I began to eye these drawings, curious about their potential as subject matter: what if I projected them on boards and applied paint..?..
I felt a need to ask permission of the boys. Theirs was a “whatever” attitude, most of the drawings beyond memory or caring. I tried to find examples that didn’t include Stars Wars episodes or Batman, and which had the aspect of a personal narrative. There were, among the hampers full of these things, a limited number that were fairly well composed.
How to paint the images? Most had few spatial cues, with elements positioned where space allowed. The boys were not colorists by nature, so I had little to go on in that regard. Should the cast of characters occupy some sort of floating world, or should they be grounded in some fashion? I labored through a dozen or more attempts in a quest to find common ground between the originals and my own ideas.
One of the few that emerged as a somewhat satisfactory composite was this depiction, by Bret, of two characters engaged in a public arm-wrestling match. I scored a masonite surface with a Dremel and rubbed in the color. The negative spaces were given a gold finish. The painting is about four feet long.
A quick comment: I’m finicky about layout, yet the post looks ragged. For some reason the program becomes unresponsive to space bar and margin commands and I’m left with what you see. Is it something I’m doing?
Jay,
The arm-wrestling match is great, with all those faces watching.
What a good idea to make copies of the kids’ art and then develop the pictures further. It makes me think of doing collages with some of what I collected from my children’s early years.
Birgit:
Those faces are one of Bret’s better moments.
Please do them and put them up. I know I’d like to see them.
Thanks, Jay,
The project will have to wait until May because I am now leaving for Germany.
Both you and Brett are into faces! It runs in your family
Birgit:
Every member of the family has one – and on occasion, two.
I thoroughly approve of appropriation as an approach, though whether it results in interesting work is a very different question. These paintings seem more like a collaboration and are quite compelling. No, it’s not entirely yours, but why is that a problem? It certainly still is yours. And I would think the process would have been very interesting from a personal point of view.
The “cave” looks as much a creature as the thing under it. And the red hat, if that’s what it is, in the first one reminds me of the crow on David’s shoulders (here and two following images) in his American Dreams series.
We would like to invite all your children to participate in a global online art community for children.
Artfully yours,
Marc Bragg
http://artshowforkids.com
Steve:
The “boys”, as I have been calling them, are all in their thirties, and whatever prompted their images is quite gone. And it might not be a cave at all but maybe more a sort of frieze. As for the red object, I might surmise that we are looking at a toupee. I have always liked the way it interacts with the head, leading down to the small, caricatured bodies.
This was part of the challenge in that I tried to avoid interjecting too many of my own reactions into vague aspects of the images.
Jay,
These are fascinating studies, and they certainly are yours — as are the boys, in some sense, too. That is, the paintings were their images, they whose genes came partly from you and they who spent formative years watching you work your color and art and make your inimitable comments and faces and so forth; moreover, you chose these particular images, not others that you might have chosen. And I see your specific artist’s touch, especially in the first, by Bret.
What also interested me was that you said you were looking for something “that had the aspect of a personal narrative.” Since the boys were into “whatever” it was up to you to work out the narrative — I see skulls and munch-like heads laughing, gasping, grimacing at the contest — a contest between whom, I wonder. And what Freudian notions come up when I think of you, “appropriating” Bret’s drawing and making it your own — reverse the usual narrative, indeed.
I know I’m just making stuff up, as Bob would put it. But it’s there, too, the narrative, the heads — and you supply the father-son context.
Jay,
Having left the intelligent comment to June, I’ll respond to your formatting issue (comment 1). Spaces are generally stripped to one, so you can’t really use them to arrange things. The other thing I find frustrating is paragraphing: sometimes that gap gets too small. The way I fix that, for example to open the gap between your last two paragraphs, is to backspace from the start of the second one until the two are run together as one paragraph, then hit the return key. Hope that helps…
Steve:
AS is so often the case when one takes one’s ailing auto to the shop, and the offending symptom refuses to show itself, we may see no more of this particular WordPress balkiness. But if it does come up them I will be prepared. Thanks.
June:
I’m happy that you aren’t narrowing your eyes at this exercise in appropriation.
What’s funny is my assumption that Bret’s image was a personal narrative as he could have lifted it, whole cloth, from some book or show. But I like to believe otherwise. It’s kind of you to allow me room to take the kids’ stuff as I did, as the question of inheritance is often contentious.
An interesting phenomenon for me was how some of the dozen or more exercises that I undertook simply came into being, while most were frustrating and ultimately inconclusive. But I don’t see myself as unique for all that, as you often report on the same in your work. Simplicity in the chosen format made a difference as the two illustrations show. In both cases there is an interaction between two themes: the arm wrestlers and the audience in the first and the figure and the overarching complex in the other. In many other instances there would be a bunch of elements jostling with each other and filling space, and I wouldn’t be able to read the medley in any coherent way. In fact, some of these will be visiting the tree lawn this coming week.
And I do have to ask about your Freud comment as I’m not all that versed in the esteemed Dr. He may have said something about the son needing to overcome the father – or maybe not. Elucidate por favor.
My knowledge of the Oedipus complex is tainted by a comment one of my undergraduate professors (may have) made: “Don’t we all want to kill our fathers and marry our mothers?”
Well, no, at least 50% of the population isn’t likely to evince this kind of deep-seated, or even quite-on-the-surface-obvious impulse. But that may have been a different generation anyway, one that your boys skipped.
June:
Actually, at least one of the boys did not miss that. But judging from the creatures that inhabited his drawings, you might decide that he had something of an octopus complex.