Author Archives: Mahendra Singh

The Good Draftsman: Of Mice and Men

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The word “draftsmanship” is the loud, boozy, best-friend’s-sister of the artistic lexicon; available to all, understood by few. It’s a word which has come up in recent reviews of Art Speigelman’s exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. Some critics have raved over Speigelman’s draftsmanship, others have pooh-poohed it. The word itself seems misunderstood by some readers and critics or perhaps its older meaning is no longer even applicable in modern comix and illustration.

Draftsmanship is the quality of someone’s drawing (not just their rendering or painting). Like many qualities, it is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain of heaven and soaks the pages of both those that give and those that take. There is both good and bad draftsmanship and here’s the crux: how do you tell them apart?

In our post-modern, relativistic times, where nothing is certain except the fact that nothing is certain, readers of a philosophical bent will spit up their breakfast pablum at the implications of the above question. My reply to them is simple: if you refuse to make judgements, that in itself is a judgment and you’re probably oppressing someone, somewhere with your double-plus-judgemental refusal to make judgements. Naturally, my own judgements are non-judgemental, that’s the temporary prerogative of all soapboxes. I have no doubt that many HU readers will bring their own, equally sturdy soapboxes to the party later on and deliver some equally non-judgemental counter-judgements.

Good draftsmanship is an accurate, visually logical and harmonious depiction of reality. No genuine, long-term success in drawing is possible without first mastering realistic figure drawing, no matter how symbolic the style. The ability to make a human being look human or a horse to look horsey or a Princess telephone to look princessy — regardless of the level of symbolic distortion and compression — that is the basis of superior draftsmanship. But that is only part of it.

Draftsmanship is not just making clean contour drawings, and it is not at all about copying photographs. Good draftsmanship is the harmony, accuracy and design of reality processed through the eye and expressed through the hand. It can be as telegraphically crisp as a Japanese ukiyo print or as exuberantly messy as one of Blutch’s brilliantly inked pages.

Blutch_MilesDavis
Blutch: Miles Davis

Good draftsmanship means that everything looks good, even when it looks ugly. This is where things get slippery. Our eyeballs operate by the logic of a non-verbal grammar and a good drawing is always, without exception, “spoken” in this abstract language — otherwise it is visual gibberish. I think that for comix readers and critics — many of whom seem to prefer using literary techniques to analyze comix — this concept is a head-scratcher. Perhaps this is one reason why so few artists write comix criticism; the verbalization of visual rules for even a professional audience is tricky, for a general audience it’s nearly impossible at times.

So, in art-school parlance, good draftsmanship means depicting reality with complete design fluency on every level. Any symbolic compressions of reality are designed so that the trained, so-called good eye is always satisfied by the parts and the sum of the parts. The core mark is always reality.
 

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In any case, let’s look at a page from Maus, a page specifically posted by one critic as an example of the high quality of Spiegelman’s exhibit. Maus is many things, most of them good … but the draftsmanship is not.

The drawing of individual elements, such as the mouse-heads, is ungainly, even for cartooning. It is not that they should look more like real mice, that would be silly. The shapes/textures/lines are all where they should be to facilitate general navigation but they seem somehow squeezed into place. Taken individually, many of the shapes are inelegant and unsteady and note one thing: there are precious few lines of beauty.

Much of the detailing — clothing, hands, shading — is turgid and clotted, an effect exacerbated by the mono-width linework. Monowidth line-work needs air to breathe, and if you must cramp it, it must be fastidiously designed on every level, not just the over-all page level.

The rendering of volumes necessary to show the thrust of objects in space is often crude … example: the far-left mouse in the final panel needs his cheekbones and orbital bones indicated fluently. Yes, it’s a cartooney mouse but then why is it hatched? It would have been better to use a few simple interior contour lines to delineate the subsidiary planes.

In general, if one wants to use a weak, monotone contour system with fast, cursory crosshatching, the accuracy of shapes must be perfect. Here, the optically long lines (mostly describing backgrounds) are trembly and indecisive, the curved lines (mostly describing animate objects) lack the snap and bravura of the classic line of beauty. With pen and ink, one must always make a decision about how much of the hand’s presence should be visible on the page. You can go the slow Hergé route and hide the hand entirely or you can take the fast Herriman route and let the hand’s muscularity and nimbleness run amuck. Spiegelman’s inking style favours expressiveness but his draftsmanship betrays his aims. His hand is going faster than his eye can think.
 

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kley2

 
Heinrich Kley comes to mind as the successful epitome of this style of draftsmanship (see the two illos above). His hand is nervous but his eye is confident, thanks to his draftsmanship, his mastery of reality. In Kley, one senses the shape governing every line, even if the line is still searching for it. His hand is confident of the eye’s automatic guidance. Shapes and lines are rhythmically linked — a basic tenet of good visual grammar.

But in this Spiegelman page, the shapes are not “magnetizing” the lines in the same way, his nervousness stems from a lack of confidence in internally visualizing the reality being described. Roughly speaking, the visual, reality-based grammar governing the naturally pleasing agreement between contours, volumes and lines is too weak to please the eye consistently.

Spiegelman is not a superior draftsman, and I doubt if he himself thinks that he is one. Frankly, who of us are really good draftsmen? Not I … and it is not even necessary for Spiegelman’s purpose. He has made a living in the publications field for a long time and knows the score: do the best page you can at the time and above all, make it fit the story. There are better looking pages in Maus and in other works of his.

In fact, his usual style of story-telling does not require good draftsmanship and in a work such as Maus, a certain visual crudeness is more emotionally effective than a cleaner, crisper hand would have been.

Spiegelman’s work has never been about draftsmanship anyway, he’s a verbal illustrator, especially pre-Maus. He is also, to the eternal gratitude of everyone who makes comix in North America, the guy who made us at least semi-respectable to both a better class of reader and the people who send us royalty cheques. Younger readers have no idea how difficult it was to get the NYC suits to take you seriously before RAW began cracking the glass ceiling.

Most American golden and silver and iron-age corporate comix were nothing more than the step-and-repeat of modular, symbolic marks designed to rubberstamp the reader’s eyes into a stupor. Draftsmanship took a backseat to speed. And the draftsmanship of many contemporary comix is even more laughable in its absence. Too many North American comix are made by talented writers who cannot get into print by writing alone and must take up cartooning to tell stories. And the bar for comix submissions is lower than other fictions simply because the bar for visual competency is often set by non-visual editors, readers and critics.

Cartooning is now the default mode of drawing in North America, in both illustration and comix. It’s cheaper to purchase because it’s easier to execute and doesn’t require expensive, specialized training. And most cartooning is poorly drawn since the level of symbolic reduction is usually so extreme that the slightest defect is multiplied ten-fold and spoils the entire effect.

In any case, as I get older and crankier, I care less and less for the stories and thematic concepts of most comix, I look at only the pictures. My Holy Grail is a sequential art where the drawing is the meaning* as much as the story or words, perhaps even more so, to the point where the visual grammar will express a story in its own universal language. In fact, sequential art is the only popular visual art form which has the potential to utilize draftsmanship at this level, to make the medium and the message precisely the same. Music, architecture and dance still do this regularly. Why not comix?

*I think that Matt Madden’s experiments in constrained comix, his Oubapian work, is a major step in this direction. The implications of what he and others like him are doing may result in comix evolving into genuinely visual, absolute art at last. And to those that think that contemporary gallery art has this absolute value, I beg to differ. Any visual art form which requires a verbal explanation to understand the “message” is not visual art at all.
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Mahendra Singh’s website is here.

Jeffrey Catherine Jones: The Good Draftsman

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The late Jeffrey Catherine Jones (authorized website
here) was not only one of the best painters in North America, she was one of the best draftsmen of the North American comix scene. Idyl and I’m Age, which appeared in the National Lampoon and Heavy Metal, were high-water marks in the now-ebbing comix cult of beautiful draftsmanship. The modern comix renaissance, at least in North America, still prefers to focus on story instead of art and younger readers might be surprised by the bravura virtuosity of Jones’ work. She demonstrated over and over that Beauty was not a shell to put stories into, it could be the story itself.

Why are so many contemporary comix so ugly to look at? Why is there so little pleasure in drawing anymore? Comix artists take such pains in devising interesting, clever plots but visually they’re often rather … disinterested might be the politest way to put it. Perhaps minimalism is the new baroque and Beauty is passé; perhaps it’s a business decision, drawing with one eye on the clock and not worrying about giving readers full value for their money.

Some of these readers are probably wringing their hands over this insinuation that Beauty can be objective. Doesn’t this author know that self-expression has no rules, that we’ve evolved into a brave new world where you can just do it® and be all that you can be® and have it your way®?

But the Bitch Goddess of Art is sparing with her favors and she accepts only one sort of offering at her infamous altar: the development of talent through endless study and practice. An abundant faith in oneself, by itself, means nothing to her, especially in these times when everyone’s above average. Good draftsmanship requires knowledge, skill and a faith in Beauty. The latter is not as subjective as some think. It’s wired into our genes; our eyes and hands do it instinctively if circumstance lets them. And this is not about merely looking pretty. On the contrary, Beauty in art is always harmonious, even when the subject is grotesque or ugly.

Jeffery Catherine Jones’ comix were few but extraordinarily beautiful. She moved fast around slow shapes, letting the physical happiness of drawing suffuse every mark she made on paper. The contrast of loose gestures atop thoroughly composed panels gave her pages a languid, musical dissonance, the connoisseur’s dissonance of Betty Carter or Leos Janacek in their late prime. And unlike most of us ink-stained wretches, her inking and draftsmanship were seamless and in effect, the same thing. This economy of means is the very essence of good draftsmanship.

Making and recognizing good draftsmanship means possessing what’s called a good eye, the ability to see the universal grammar of the visual world. A good eye is not wholly intuitive, it needs to be nurtured through constant exposure to good art.

And there’s the rub — never before in human history have so many artists been so unrelentingly exposed to so much visual rubbish from childhood onwards. As adults, they’re doomed to making marks on paper which are devoid of visual meaning. This is no accident, it is marketing. If one exposes kids to nothing but crap, they will grow up loving crap, talking fervently about crap and passionately defending its crappy reputation, usually with an obligatory dollop of hipster irony. This pop-culture irony, unlike its literary ancestor, reveals nothing of interest though, for it’s a stance without meaning or history or even relevance.

We are what we look at. If we look at garbage we will make garbage and in time, the cycle will close and become self-perpetuating, an endless karmic hell of breakfast-cereal cartoon super-heroes and high-school yearbook doodlings papering over the abyss of a forgotten, glorious past.

Jones’ comix drew deeply from the heady well of fin de siècle Symbolism, the Salon Pompiers, Art Nouveau and the Golden Age of American illustration. This is what her personality and taste preferred although her eye was above illustrative fashions and gimmicks. Good draftsmanship is most timeless when the draftsman understands their past.

This may seem an odd way to eulogize someone but it’s not, it is the best way to celebrate a great draftsman. Life is short for everyone and for comix artists and illustrators, the money is laughable and the hours dreadful. Doing hack work for money is something we’ve all done but to throw up our hands in cynical despair and make it into the dominant fashion of modern comix — why bother to make art at all then, if it’s all about being practical?

So why not go broke with style? Why not make comix that are fun to look at? Why not make comix that make young people want to draw and read and think, instead of becoming cynical about art and craftsmanship and Beauty?

Why not draw like hell, like you really mean it, as if your life and reputation are on the line? Because they are. That’s the essence of being a good draftsman, of using your good eye: everything counts and everything makes it onto the page. Jeffrey Catherine Jones may be gone but her work is glorious, it is a bravura, draftsman’s performance and her comix still make me feel that drawing is worth doing well.