HOW DID I MISS THIS?! ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL

 

   How ever did I miss 2006's Art School Confidential the first time 'round? Every single scene in the first half of the movie found me howling with laughter, recognizing every stereotype portrayed (the plot darkens later, mirroring the protagonist's life lessons.) Yay, narrowcasting! Note that strong cast with John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent and Anjelica Huston. Two arty pals of ours, upon my recommendation of this film claimed "we laughed ourselves silly." This is badly needed these days.

  Comic strip panel from "Art School Confidential," Daniel Clowes' comic novel that predated his film of the same name.

During my first week of UCLA art school, here's how I ran the numbers a little differently: 6 self-supporting, full time fine artists in the U.S.; out of any of our art classes of 20 students, only 5 were any good at art, and only 1 of those excelled (and it was usually Phil Savenick, who went on to a successful career in film retro-archives.)  I tried to be 1 of that 5 in every class. I also broadened my goals to art direction as well as photojournalism immediately.

 

Even though this is based upon art school insider humor, there are
lotsa art school universal truths out there.  As an example, here are art school girls from 1930s Bauhaus School of Design, looking like art school girls any time, any era, anywhere...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are pix of  two of my art school assignments, the 6 ft. plaster man holding a spoon completed for a Stanford University sculpture class, and the 6 foot x 6 foot photo-realist oil painting of the Oscar Meyer weinermobile for UCLA. The plaster man was too big to retrieve, and the weinermobile painting was immediately stolen, so no in person evidence remains of these two works. I did illustrations for the UCLA newspaper's entertainment sections like the one below left, ( I later was selected editor of same) and I do retain my 1970 copy of Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Sonja Knipps (to study undercoats) and the 1968 pen and ink wash drawing, both seen below the illustration..

MORE EXCAVATED ART by me

More of the 1970s archaeological excavations through my tearsheets archives. The less detailed drawings I did on the spot to fill in column space. This one depicts, obviously, vampire films, which I interpreted as made by vampires for vampires. The couple mimic the most omnipresent graphics of that year, that Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw in the film "Love Story." And I never could resist a pun...

Below, this probably is the most elaborate one I did, but in imitation of an animator's style when I reviewed a film festival of animation.

R.I.P. DAN HICKS

I'm saddened to learn of the passing of Dan Hicks (of & The Hot Licks, and The Charlatans (original San Francisco version.) He was the first rock star I ever interviewed circa 1970, and seemed very cross at my lack of musical history knowledge sufficient to distinguish the harmonies of the Boswell Sisters versus the Andrews' ones. 

Nonetheless, he gallantly jumped in the Tropicana Motel pool for my photograph (which would take major archaeological home excavation to offer herein...) Hicks' Hot Lick music was catchy, lilting, retro, occasionally quite humorous and always with a groove or swing, despite its odd for the era arrangements with violin and the Lickettes' female harmonies, upon which the tunes depended.

(TIME LAPSE)No, an hour search through the archives did not reveal my pic of Dan Hicks leaping into the Tropicana Motel swimming pool. I did however find some artwork I did for the UCLA Daily Bruin entertainment sections at the same time, 1970. Stoneground featured what seemed like dozens of performers onstage, established songwriter Sal Valentino (seen in front of upright piano) and featured female backup singers as essential parts of the arrangements and songwriting. Sort of like Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks...

 Sorry, Dan...

AFTER KLIMT

Look, you just can't read three books in one week about Gustav Klimt and not want to experience the exuberance first hand if you can at all paint or draw. I painted the above oil and mixed media on cardboard* from a photo of Klimt's teenage girlfriend Mizzi Zimmermann and made it late period unfinished Klimt, remembering the key to decorative elements is knowing when to stop. He worked from live models not photos, 

so this is not a copy of anything whatsoever by Klimt.

Mizzi was pregnant with his child when she posed for Klimt's Schubert at the Piano, oil on canvas, 1899, seen far left. This gorgeous work was destroyed in WWII (fortunately Kodachrome had been invented prior to same and we have its image in color.) Below, Klimt's The Bride, unfinished oil on canvas, 1917-18.

*the cardboard in question is a photographic mailing envelope proclaiming "DO NOT BEND" which I left in the composition as a random Marcel Duchamps factor a la the glass broken in transit of his The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even.

Trivia: my better half Mr. Twister's favorite "Klimt" is a cartoon (left, fair use © Lessing Images) by the latter's pal, Austrian illustrator Remegius Geyling, of Klimt pausing from painting on his scaffold to be be served lunch by his nude models, also spoofing the artist's penchent for floating nudes with limbs akimbo (right, study for the now destroyed Medicine mural, oil on gesso on canvas, 1899.)

The Klimt is appealingly wry in the same fashion as the photo, fair use © Julian Wasser, above of author Eve Babitz with Dada artist Duchamps, referenced above.

1965 POSTER ART JUVENILIA

Juvenilia from my past, parts of a tempera poster I did at school on the subject of what would benefit selfsame school. My thought: having fun to contemporary music. Two sections and the entirety of the 1965 poster. To wax clinical about the drawings with forty-eight years hence of hindsight, the lack of accurate physiognomy is balanced by the sure touch of action poses. I was showing off... Paisley-clad girl at top is doing the Frug.

ROAN ANTELOPES

Ink wash printed on textured paper, circa the 1980s by me from a photo in a library book. I've always drawn from photographs since I was three years old, then I took the photos myself for same having discovered copyright laws at age twelve, then the photographs took over professionally since they're superior quality to my fine art. So... 'just drawing for fun occasionally.

Art ruminations: Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS

Above, my monochrome drawing isolating one horse's head from a herd of four as depicted in Chauvet Cave, France. Below left, my monochrome drawing of a typical horse at Lascaux Cave, France for comparison.

Cinema's most skilled director of insanely driven protagonists and its documentarian of some of humanity's weirdest outsiders, Werner Herzog somehow made his most universal study yet in 2010. His "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" explores the birthplace of all humanity's Art, Chauvet Cave in southern France (about halfway betwixt Avignon and Marseilles.) Encompassing Animalier Fine Art, zoology, history and paleoanthropology, of course I adored it.

Chauvet lion pride hunting aurochs, rhinos and wisent bison

The interior murals have been verified by carbon
dating its charcoal medium at 30,000 years old, far
older than Lascaux's. Discovered as late as 1994 by three French spelunkers, Chauvet Cave's astonishing excess of riches in Ice Age art remain in pristine preservation due to A) an ancient landslide which blocked off the only entrance with an entire mountain coming down on it and B) it allows extremely limited access to scientists but remains thankfully closed to the public (Lascaux,
which allowed over 1,000 visitors a day has
succumbed to lichens and mold starting to
destroy its cave paintings.)

Chauvet rhino bellowing as it gallops

To make this film the director cajoled one
week of 4-hour production days from the French government, bringing a 4-person skeleton crew with collapsible 3-D movie cameras invented for the shoot, since the space is cramped. (The resultant film is available for purchase, rental or streaming in regular digital, for those of us without the latest toys.)

Herzog's narration brings his own keen art
sense of observation to the table. He shows how
these cave artists surpassed anthropology's acceptance of mere totemistic hunting portrayals with such realistic attention to details of the animals, indicating pride of artistic achievement as well as wishful thinking for the tribal hunts. Chauvet's 32,000 BC drawings are rendered far more skillfully with shading/modeling than those of the 13,700 BC Lascaux artists (see my comparison studies of same at top,) which more resemble a talented child's efforts posted on the family refrigerator.

Furthermore, since expert art historians identify the fabrication of a single hand at work here and there amongst all the cave's myriad fauna presention, Herzog rightly implies the singular artist herein should be considered the Michaelangelo of Paleolithic art. This artist's horses even snort with well-defined lips and nostrils!

In general, the Chauvet artists used economy
of outline as would Japanese and Chinese master artists tens of thousands of years later. A bear (my study above) shows a 3/4 profile angle unlike the far-easier-to-render profiles of all the world's primitive art. Poignantly as well as unusually for a depiction of a future meal, one wisent bison is turning its face to look directly forward at the humans or lions threatening it, such 2-D frontal perspective absent even throughout future landmarks of representational art in
Pharaonic Egypt.

My own artist's ruminations:
--most are drawn by right-handed artists. For some reason we're all inclined to face subjects from the right profile looking left unless one makes a special effort not to.
--outstanding observation afoot of natural life. This scientific LINK  delineates Chauvet's lion behavior as accurately portrayed; i.e., snarling subordinate lion with ears pressed back hunkered down next to taller, dominant hunting male.
--abject realism: so many of the animals are depicted calling out (see rhino) in their distress if prey or excitement if predator.
--the modeling/shading really does have this much detail if you draw it yourself as I (artist's trick to understand another's style.)
--as for the depiction of a bull-headed humanoid about to, euphemism, "mess with" a schematic human female representation, I offer an artist's simple explanation for any human/animal mash-up in art, regardless of mythology/religiously inclined tenets. An artist carved a lion's head on a man's body (as with a similar Paleolithic German example) to convey "I feel as strong as a lion!" This artist proclaims the virility of a bull.

Lastly, I felt far less ingenuous about my own commercially useless talent for drawing animals after seeing this film: it turned out to be wired in our ancestors' brains to incubate all artistic expression!

Bestiary of Chauvet Cave animals: European wisent bison, (extinct red cave) bears, (extinct mane-less) European lions, aurochs (extinct giant cattle, progenitors of modern cattle. Imagine a long-legged bull the size of a moose,) (extinct Tarpan) horses,(extinct Irish Elk with a hump like an eland and 12 ft. antlers) Megaloceros, (extinct European) rhinoceroses, spotted hyenas; (extinct) Wooly mammoths; and one wayward horned owl.

Visual bestiary of recently extinct animals depicted in Chauvet Cave: above right, auroch (extinct 1627) as used in gymnastics by the Minoan civilization, this sport persisting today for equestrians, called Vaulting.

Below left, 1884 photo of a (very groomed) Tarpan horse (extinct 1918;) below right, selective breeding reconstruction of Tarpan horse from Polish Konik ponies and other primitive-type equines.

Worth it!
sample review snippet:
"If you're a member
of the human race then
you owe it to yourself
to see this movie..."





 

NEWS FLASH ADDENDA!!
A $65 million facsimile of the Chavet Caves and its paintings has been built and opened for tourists nearby. This saves the original forever from the damage even inadvertantly caused by human proximity to these fragile painted murals. Seeing this is now on the bucket list for Mr. Twister and me!  Click LINK   



Link:  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/france-chauvet-cave-makes-grand-debut-180954582/

MY DOPPELGANGER INK DRAWING

Somewhere on this planet there is another ink drawing that looks exactly like this. I painted it twenty minutes before I painted the one scanned above. Perhaps an explanation is due.

In 1968 I attended summer school at Stanford University taking all fine arts classes-- clay sculpture, painting and life drawing (For the uninitiated, that means nude models daily. Cumulatively with my later UCLA Fine Arts Degree, that means I've seen more naked bodies than most rock stars.)

I painted the doppelganger to the above art for a painting class with a Rapidograph India Ink drawing style for the tree trunks incorporated into the overall ink wash painting technique for more visual interest. The assignment had been plein air landscape, and my chosen subject was harsh noonday sun over a promenade of a glade of trees overlooking an escarpment (many Stanford habitues said they recognized the locale immediately. I wonder if it's still there?)

As with my recent Cleo Viper photograph (LINK) I recognized the rare-for-me attainment of perfection (to dispell accusations of hubris, I'll define as art which cannot be improved.) No sooner had this realization materialized than so did an ad hoc buyer. The passerby offered me an amenable sum and I sold it to her on the spot. To fulfill the assignment I immediately painted its identical twin, the one in the above image, in the next twenty minutes.

Mr. Twister has oft chided me that I've had been a good artist if I'd ever spent more than twenty minutes on a painting...

more of my ART

I drew this for the ABC Records house organ in 1975 and was told to use certain buzzwords in the balloons, which I fashioned into war-related non sequiturs. This is an uncharacteristically butch drawing style for me, but hey, I'm versatile. Insider jokes at the time were the cockpit resembling a recording studio, General Nuisance obsessed with Coke, and the jagged slopes of the sales wall chart sporting its own skier down them.

I always preferred to photograph people and draw animals. Above two dik-diks, below, an impala.

Media? the dik-diks: ink drawing with watercolor infill. In art school classes I used to love squishing the linseed oil into the oil paints on the palette, but then I'm a closet sensualist. However, my alltime favorite medium was a hugely soft pencil brand no longer made that had so dark a black (Spinal Tap's None More Black?) that it was completely uneraseable, and I used to like showing off that I didn't need to erase. The impala drawing is an example of same.

HEATHER'S RHINO ART (not the perissodactyl)

In the beginning, Rhino Media Empire of All Things Retro (that aren't RetroKimmer) was Rhino Records, a UCLA campus-close record store somewhat similar to the fictional one seen decades later in the film "High Fidelity" starring John Cusack, as was every other one staffed by real rock afficianados in the U.S. and the U.K.

I drew the above immortal art for their April 1 - May 15, 1976 calendar flyer (based upon a nearby midnight movie theatre one, you know, "Rocky Horror Show" Friday, "El Topo" Saturday) and brainstormed the weirdest of their commemorative days for filler, such as John Denver Silly Walks Day, Our Unsung Idiots Day, ad Monty Python nauseum (which admittedly, thirty four years ago, was still fresh.) Trivia: my May 3rd drawing was based upon David Bowie's ISOLAR, a project with which I dubiously was connected (that is a LONG, whole other whale of a tale.)

When Rhino Record Store begat Rhino Records, I did the photography and art direction for their second, third and fourth ever releases: Rhino Royale (a professional wrestling themed compilation which found me stationed at the Olympic Auditoriuim in downtown L.A. photographing Andre the Giant;) Twist Again with the Low Numbers, and Saturday Night Pogo (the first L.A. punk compilation, with my photo of gonzo rock writer Richard Meltzer as the John Travolta. And please view the last of this trio, with my annotation here LINK.) Anal trivia: their first release which darkened neither my drawing table nor camera lens was An Evening With Wildman Fischer. (No personal computers to darken in those dark ages.)

For jolly insider descriptions of the original phenom in both Westwood Village CA and Claremont CA, click these tres amusing links by ex-Rhino employees Jeff Gold (future media exec, now CEO of RecordMecca.com) and Mark Leviton (future media exec and now in retirement full time radio DJ) respectively: LINK and LINK.

Stop the online presses! My drawings and graphic design are featured in this new (7/11) Rhino documentary feature teaser...

MY AD HOC CARTOONS printed in the underground press

You're going to have to click on each of these three cartoons individually to enlarge them for maximum humor effects. The third was based upon a rightfully short run of a real musical originating in Japan. Peopling it with turkeys and dogs was deliberate. No animals were harmed.

My first job after graduating UCLA found me employed as an assistant art director for an underground newspaper The Los Angeles Weekly News, a spin off of the Los Angeles Free Press, run by its founding editor Art Kunkin. It was a three-day job (literally. I worked 72 hours in a row. You can do that in your twenties. Then sleep one full day, then catch up, lather, rinse repeat.) It involved graphic organization, putting the newspaper to bed i.e., final preparation for printing, shameless infill with my own photographs, and filling in space at the last minute where advertisers had reneged or copy editors had miscalculated column inches.

For this last duty I created the above series of panel cartoons on the fly. I was much influenced by a) "Summarize Proust" by Monty Python; b) the artists at National Lampoon magazine; c) Joe Moshcitta's "10 Classics in 10 Minutes" and d) the first Saturday Night Live. It was, after all, 1973, and the last panel of the Biblical one spoofs the now late John Lennon. The series ran the three times indicated on the above tear-sheets. I drew each of them on the spot in black felt-tip pen to fill in the aforementioned space quotients.

CIRCA 1968

From a continuing or indeterminate series of my drawings from a troubled teenaged past, this one circa 1968.

Yes, things were meant to be askew.

X-mas

As fellow blogspotter Evanesco so noted, it's not Christmas until I post "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear" (yes, I draw too) and my Goth tree, both from my daze of sending Xmas cards.