Artist Elise Engler is like all of us who love to document. It seems that we all want to have our say and tell not only our story but contribute to the bigger story. But only a few generations ago, the whole idea of self-expression, let alone self-portraits, was mostly in the artist’s domain. So, now everybody documents. A lot of it is ephemeral and only some of it has that everlasting quality, like the daily dispatches of news items collected in Engler’s book that chronicle the events of that infamous year, 2020. A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020 is out now. You can read my review here. And I invite you to my conversation with the artist.
Double Portrait of the Artist
It’s the persistent vision that wins out in the end. An artist engaging in a process for an extended amount of time is like mining for gold or anything else with a less than certain outcome. There will be trial and error efforts but a person with a certain mix of qualities, like sheer determination, will reach a breakthrough. Engler’s art is about keen observation from collecting data: everything in her apartment; or everything in a series of purses; or everything on every block of New York City’s Broadway! Each of these, and many more, have been subjects for Engler’s work.
Medical tents set up in Central Park in 2020 near the artist’s studio.
So, it is a pleasure to have a chance to chat with this artist. We have gone through so much in the recent past. It’s good to have an artist of this caliber to create this special record.
Highlight from The Cathedrals of Art (1942) by Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944)
A traditional question that I don’t always ask but had to in this case was to ask about influences. Engler’s choices, once I had time to consider, suggested to me a more earthy approach with Marsden Hartley; perhaps a spiritual connection with the Sienese School; expressive with Philip Guston; and whimsical with Florine Stettheimer. Well, I hope I got it right. Suffice it to say, Engler has a very emotive and energetic style.
I invite you to view the video interview. I also happen to have created a brief movie introduction so the interview begins right after that. In our interview, we cover all you would need to know before reading the book. We chat about the whole idea of documenting and the concept of a news junkie. As I suggest, documenting, as well as an interest in the news, is something we can all relate to. Elise Engler proves to be an exceptional participant, taking bits of data, giving them a sense of order, and finding something transcendent.
A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020 is available now.
The Best American Comics 2019, series editor Bill Kartalopoulos, editor Jillian Tamaki, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 400 pages, $25.00.
All in all, the goal of the annual Best American Comics is to represent the overriding impact of significant and notable comics during the last year and say something about comics that is fresh and new. Well, among the most fresh and new, is the work of 81-year-old Jerry Moriarty. In this new edition, you’ll find this example, an excerpt from Whatsa Paintoonist? published by Fantagraphics Books. We see the artist chatting as he goes about his day in his studio. The featured pages depict a wonderfully eccentric and talkative artist with his creations having come to life.
WHATSA PAINTOONIST? (excerpt)
Painting with acrylic and drawing with a Papermate pen, Moriarty epitomizes what is takes to cut through barriers and pretense and get on with creating art. You take a look at his paintings about sexual awakening and you see direct and incisive work. After graduating from Pratt, he went on to teach at the School of Visual Arts for fifty years. In 1984, his first comic, Jack Survives, was published by RAW. Put it all together and Moriarty’s artistic activity is genuine and authentic. Moriarty definitely fits into my criteria for what belongs in a collection of the best comics: work of quality; work that advances the comics medium; and work that speaks to the current state of comics. I have always maintained that the ideal cartoonist is the auteur cartoonist, a sole creator who treats comics as the art medium that it is. If such a person is so fortunate as to be able to build a career solely upon their comics and graphic novels, that’s great. But, all too often, you just do what you need to do because you’re compelled to create the work, in the same way that a genuine poet creates poetry. That is what Jerry Moriarty has done.
WHATSA PAINTOONIST? (excerpt)
The goal of Best American Comics is to feature the wide spectrum of the best work of the previous year. And while seeking out the best can become quite subjective, the goal is to overcome that. Honestly, if it’s not overcome, then you end up with more of a promotional book of commercial artists or an overly self-indulgent exploration of experimental work. Neither extreme is welcome to carry a whole book. There are other venues for that. Of course, one needs to try to cover as much as possible. Best American Comics has a pretty good system in place where the series editor gathers up work throughout the year and hands it off to that year’s guest editor. In the end, you get a collection that includes industry leaders and quite a few intriguing discoveries. I think it’s fair to say that this is an imperfect process but one can keep striving to do better. The good news is that each year brings a collection with wonderful new work to discover or rediscover like the work of Jerry Moriarty, who has been in the business for well over fifty years. Nice to see that he made it into Best American Comics this year!
WHATSA PAINTOONIST? (excerpt)
The Best American Comics 2109 is a 400-page hardcover and is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Francis Bacon was certainly on my radar during my time in art school. Just as I was completing my formal training at the University of Houston, I was aware of Bacon’s continued presence and activity. And then he died. I earned my BFA the year he passed away, 1992. Yes, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was acknowledged as a heroic figure, a painter in the great tradition of towering romantic and angst-ridden artists. But what were we as art students doing with that information? What were our professors sharing with us about him? I mostly recall the awful jokes that he was Bacon the contemporary artist and not Bacon the great philosopher. So, in a nutshell, we didn’t do much of anything with Bacon looming in the background. Maybe I did more than most. I know a lot of students were lost in their own uneducated and overindulgent worlds or absorbed with the hotshots of the recent era as we understood it, people like Francisco Clemente, David Salle, even Julian Schnabel, especially Schnabel since he’d gone to UH for a short time. And, of course, there was no internet as we know it today and, in hindsight, I damn well could have used it back then!
Second Version of Painting from 1946, Museum of Modern Art, 1971.
After 1992, life’s circumstances gave me a bit of a bum’s rush from school and out the door. I’ve been cartwheeling ever since. Not to digress too much, but I’ve come out on top in a number of ways such as having the opportunity to gaze upon this dazzling show of Francis Bacon paintings at the Pompidou Centre! From the little I could glean from glossy art magazines, art history books and a few lectures, I was aware of Bacon’s raw and tortured energy. He was a rough cut fellow, is how I would casually put it if I was attempting to introduce him to someone unfamiliar with him and his work. Bacon’s career began in the 1940s and blossomed in the next two pivotal decades. Many an art student was familiar with Bacon’s landmark painting of the screaming pope, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. What did it mean? Where did it come from? We mostly chalked it up as subversive. That much we knew for sure and we loved it.
Gathering among Bacon.
That brings us to this current show at the Pompidou Centre. Jennifer and I had managed to arrive just in time to settle into it with little else than an introductory pamphlet. So, there was some adjusting to do as we both gorged upon Bacon. We were certainly not alone. There was a nervy energy running throughout the crowd of people. The show had recently opened for its run of 11 September 2019 to 20 January 2020. They had all come to see Bacon! But what did it mean to them? They knew his name and they knew about the famous work and the raw energy. There was that and there was a theme attached to the show–but gathering up so many Bacons in one space was more than enough, theme or no theme. It wasn’t until I’d made the turn into another room that I sniffed out the curator’s ardor for organizing, labeling, categorizing and zealous need to impose their ownership upon another’s work. After all, Francis Bacon was first and foremost a painter. He was self-taught. He, unlike countless academics and so-called scholars, got dirty and actually did things. This is not to say that a finely-articulated analysis is not welcome from time to time but it is often best to be taken with a grain of salt. Anyway, the idea for the show is to tie Bacon’s choice of reading with his painting. That’s why this show has rooms where all you have is a book on display and an audio of someone reading.
Oedipus and the Sphinx, after Ingres, 1983.
It does make sense to link Bacon to his reading habits given the fact he was such an avid reader. He loved books. They came naturally to him as they did for many a young rebel of his time. There are a number of choices on display in this show that would have been catnip for many a young artist back then and even today. At least, one hopes young artists haven’t changed so much now that they are, on the whole, bypassing gorging upon the works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Jean Racine, Balzac, Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Freud, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Proust and many others. Well, that is the formal tent under which all these Bacons have been arranged. Process that however you like.
Walking towards Bacon.
One thing that struck me about this show is how it feels like it is stretching past its own time, as if it is still pulsating, still preening upon the gallery wall space and not ready to succumb to a timeless role as a museum artifact. I mean, the work still feels “contemporary” to me. While I was an art student, we had to suffer through all the prattle from critics and tastemakers over whether or not figurative painting was dead or not. To think we were getting this kind of talk even as we’d been experiencing a bunch of interesting “new” approaches to figurative work by the likes of Eric Fischl and Jonathan Borofsky. Finally, fast forward to today, the big secret is that figurative painting will never die. It’s just too vital, too primal, too essential. I guess, seeing this show takes me back to sometime before Bacon’s death, a world where there was a Francis Bacon still making new paintings and even making definitive versions of previous work. That is what this show is about: Bacon’s last two decades of his career (from 1971 to 1992). I can feel that artist raging and creating, knowing time was running out. So, ultimately, this show is more than about books and painting. This show is about an artist taking what he’s learned about painting and setting forth with his final explorations.
Bacon was always raging and rebelling, seeking a way to be the next Picasso. He was being himself when it was against the law in England to engage in homosexual acts. It wasn’t until 1967 that sex between two adult men (21 years-old) was decriminalized in the UK. What’s a “British artist” like Bacon to do? Well, that’s easy enough, go where you are welcome: Paris, the city that is open and fluid, revels in bohemian excess, and welcomes sex in all its many flavors. It was at the Grand Palais show at the Pompidou Centre in 1971 that Bacon delivered a landmark show that earned him critical praise, and raised him to the rank of a Picasso. And the show was more about love and sex than books. You can add a variety of erudite references but, at some point, you need to acknowledge the human being writhing upon a toilet! The Grand Palais show revolved around Bacon’s lover, George Dyer, who killed himself the day before the opening. As Jonathan Jones describes in a wonderful piece in The Guardian, it was Bacon’s muse, in the form of Dyer, who made the show what it was and, with his suicide, nearly brought it all tumbling down. The new show at the Pompidou Centre, interestingly enough, covers the time after the celebrated Grand Palais show of 1971. Again, this has nothing to do with the connection of books to paintings, but it’s a nice theme to wrap around a body of work that defies the curator’s nimble touch.
The artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is a monumental figure in contemporary art for a number of reasons. To say that Basquiat was at the right place at the right time is a great understatement. In his case, he seems to have been born to conquer the art world despite the drawbacks of starting out with zero connections and zero money. Personally, for me, I had filed away Basquiat in my mind many years ago and hadn’t looked back. I look back fondly, and return regularly, to a number of artists ranging from Edward Manet to R.B. Kitaj but not Basquiat…not until recently. I happen to have been in New York and got to see a spectacular Basquiat show. It then dawned on me that, the further away one is from New York, the less is known or understood about Basquiat. Like it or not, Basquiat is an obscure household name! Some people love him and some hate him and probably for all the wrong reasons. I wasn’t sure if one graphic novel could help shed sufficient light on the subject but I decided to find out by reading Basquiat: A Graphic Novel by Paolo Parisi, published by Laurence King Publishing. This new English translation by Edward Fortes will be a welcome addition to anyone interested in better understanding one of the most celebrated and enigmatic of artists.
Basquiat: A Graphic Novel by Paolo Parisi
Paolo Parisi is in many ways an ideal artist to create a graphic novel about Basquiat. Parisi has proven himself to have the right temperament for the job. His previous graphic novels include a book on John Coltrane and one on Billie Holiday. As he puts it, his graphic novels all follow a common thread that includes “jazz, art, painting and process, rhythm, rigor, improvisation, and spontaneity.” Well, you can find all of that with Basquiat, an artist that jumped feet first into his art at an early age and never looked back, as if guided mostly by instinct and sheer will. His was an original and singular vision.
Basquiat: A Graphic Novel by Paolo Parisi
Within this biography, the reader will come away with a good sense of the trajectory of Basquiat’s art career, from his early forays into street art to his mugging for the camera on cable access to his navigating the highest levels of the New York art world. Parisi does a great service to Basquiat by generously quoting directly from him and from the people who knew him best. Much of this book is made up of quotes, transcriptions from letters, and just the right amount of carefully composed dramatization. The bold use of color in this graphic novel is supposed to evoke the same bold use of color that Basquiat used in his own paintings. Alas, we somehow don’t explore any of Basquiat’s actual paintings! Diego Cortez, the curator of the famous Times Square Show that helped to launch Basquiat is quoted: “Jean had something different. He reminded me of Cy Twombly and Franz Kline. He didn’t even know who Kline and Twombly were, but he had instinct, charm, and energy on his side.” There is plenty of instinct, charm, and energy on display in this book. And you can take it any way you like: for beginners, it’s a wonderful first step; for those familiar with Basquiat, it’s a great New York fable.
Basquiat: A Graphic Novel is a 128-page hardcover, in full color, published by Laurence King Publishing, English translation edition (May 14, 2019).
Camilla d’Errico has something for you: graphic novels, how-to creative books, coloring books, paintings, prints, and so much more. Welcome to the world of Camilla d’Errico! If you’re into manga, Pop Surrealism, or even classic Italian painting, this artist is for you! You can call her a commercial artist or a fine artist. She’s definitely both. In this interview, we explore as much as possible in a brief video format. I offer up a new buzzword in Pop Surrealism, the idea that we’re living in the era of the Anthropocene, a time when us humans are dominating over the climate and the environment. Hope you like this short and sweet interview. Just click above.
Camilla d’Errico at ECCC 2019
If you’re heading out to Emerald City Comic Con, March 14-17, be sure to visit Camilla d’Errico on the main Exhibitor Floor at Booth 108!
In the Studio.
As I say, there is so much to love from the world of Camilla d’Errico, which includes melting rainbows, fuzzbutts, and albino rhinos! Be sure to keep with her in 2019. She has a new book out and new gallery art show!
POP MANGA DRAWING
POP MANGA DRAWING is a new how-to book detailing how to draw in the d’Errico style with pencils, available July 2nd from Watson-Guptill.
ZODIAC
ZODIAC is a new art show at Haven Gallery in New York that will run from May 11 thru June 16, 2019.
Femina & Fauna, by Camilla d’Errico, published by Dark Horse Comics
Camilla d’Errico has been making waves in the fine art and comic industries with her manga-influenced style. Ever the prolific artist, d’Errico is an urban contemporary painter, illustrator, designer, character creator, and comic artist residing in Vancouver, Canada. Nominated for both Eisner and Joe Shuster Awards, she has worked with Random House, Dark Horse Comics, Image Comics, and Tokyopop. Her creator-owned properties include the graphic novel BURN and SKY PIRATES OF NEO TERRA. TANPOPO, d’Errico’s passion project, has been embraced by fans and independent comics collectors for its highly original combination of classic poetry and literature blended with her unique “West Meets East” drawing style. She has collaborated with Neil Gaiman, Sanrio, Disney and Mattel. d’Errico has distinguished herself through her ability to seamlessly weave manga and western comic art, creating a unique style that bridges cultural and geographical boundaries, while remaining totally relevant to today’s varied audience.
“Discount Demon Deals” is a hilarious mini-comic devoted to demons by Michael Koehler. Done is a wacky style that would fit right in on Cartoon Network, Koehler’s demons are at once hideous and whimsical. The idea here is that this is a catalog presenting the latest in appealing demons. All you need is your demon credit card and a reasonable number of souls in stock in order to properly catch up on this season’s demons. For more details, visit Michael Koehler right here. And, if you are in Tacoma, be sure to stop by and see an art show featuring Koehler’s artwork this Saturday, February 3rd, from 6-8pm at Destiny City Comics:
Lore of the Lords – Showcasing the Art of Michael Koehler
Here are some more details from Destiny City Comics:
Lore of the Lords – Showcasing the Art of Michael Koehler
February 3 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm Free
A strange look into the modern folklore and fantastic characters imagined by artist Michael Koehler, Lore of the Lords takes a tour through the tribes residing within the elusive cult realms.
“You enter through a dark whirlpool to find yourself at the mouth of a great trench. As you look around, you find this world is full of strange and mystical creatures. They seem to be some sort of ancient looking, animalistic people. Suddenly a large reptilian scout spots you and bellows out a deafening screech as you try to find your footing along the loose, rocky chasm. You see flying in the cloudy sky above, a bat like figure quickly descending upon you. You scramble out of the way just as it swoops down at your feet. Looking up at you with three crazed eyes and psychedelic features, it lets out several high pitched chirps and begins lurching toward you. A gang of grotesque bat faced creatures surrounds you as you look for an impossible escape. Each wretched bat drips with slimy plasma and is armed with arcane tools and primitive looking weapons. As a tall, fiery red faced man-bat leans into your face and sniffs piggishly, you utter, “What… where am I?” It lets out a wild cackle and replies, “You have entered our world through the black void, and so now, you are ours. Just as everything that enters… Into the Cult Realms.”
Be sure to visit and experience this highly original art firsthand. Facebook Event Page is right here.
