Author Archives: Tom Crippen

The Extended Laces; or Drusilla’s Fatal Brochure

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The Extended Laces
or, Drusilla’s Fatal Brochure
By Claudia Fonce Earbrass

Author of The Unsprung Trampoline, A Thousand Pins, Why?, The Applecramp Sextet, Did She Remember?, The Fantod Regrets, and A Scent of Cedared Fields

 

Hello to everyone at xL Design Studios. Neil here and very happy we have this chance to work together. So, the title page. Very much suggest central image plays on sneaker and laces, with the laces in advanced state of extension, just sprawling out there. That’s recto. Verso, we have the comic book, and that’s tattered and it looks like it’s been flung wherever it is—pages splayed, whatever. Placement of the title and byline and the “Author of” book titles: entirely up to you. Whatever works, and never mind about using all the book titles – we’re perfectly comfortable with their serving as design elements at your disposal. That being said, Scarlett said to tell you she likes The Applecramp Sextet.

 
Drusilla was left for the day in her family’s unexplored new home.

All right, first page. Think we discussed the kinetics, the set up for the flow we want from page to page. Kieran’s handling that, am I right? Hello, Kieran.

Drusilla, house, car. Car’s taking off, house looms, Drusilla looks at it, her back to the car. Car: mid-’70s vintage Volvo. House: not a teetering wreck, not necessarily a haunted house, but a big pile with many windows and ledges and little roofs, and so on. Drusilla’s look: as discussed. Skirt, sweatshirt, sneakers. Alinor, did you send the studio the character profiles? She says yes, so I expect you’ve got it. If not, text her, she’s on duty to look out for such things.

Just want to reiterate here that Drusilla’s sneakers and laces are in view from the outset and page by page. Always in view, laces always untied and getting longer.

 
Her parents absented themselves to join in a sordid debauch.

Tricky one. We want a very post-hippie, mid-70s feel: longish hair, wine glasses, joints,, jeans, tennis shorts. Perhaps a stereo with speakers out on the lawn, if feasible with regard to panel space. But here’s the balancing act I was talking about. As discussed, we want all that in the idiom of our source artist. At the very least, probably kohl darkening around the characters’ eyes. Anyway. When we see them, the participants are sprawled on the lawn in a sodden tangle. And there’s suggestiveness, what with shorts, blouses, etc., tugged awry.

 
Drusilla set herself to know her new surroundings.

Hi. Alinor here. Neil has to field a thing, so I’ll be passing on his notes and so on. All right. All … is this page 3? All right, his notes say: “inside house, big stairs leading up, dark, Drusilla at foot of stairs, one foot edged to ward them, expression dubious—posture like p. 1, Gilded Bat.” And he has “Period detail, if poss: ’70s again.”

 
There was a box under a bed she did not like to think about.

All right, that’s pretty clear. Bed, box under it. A cardboard box, quote, “as from a liquor store,” but Neil says no brand names, etc. Unmarked box. “Packed full a long time, strained at seams, flaps dented and wrinkled.”

Drusilla looking at box, Neil says: “expression similar to-—“ Oh, sorry, can’t make it out.

 
But its attraction proved too powerful.

Neil just texted to say Professor Bloom very much likes Scent Cedar Fields. I don’t know. I guess you know what that is.

Anyway, Drusilla pulling out the box.

 
The pamphlets she found baffled her understanding.

Now we have the comics, magazines, etc., that are in the box. Neil says, “Tricky, the balance again.” I guess you know what that is. Okay, quote, “suggest no pictures, titles on covers, except House Mystery, H. Secret, 1 of each.” And he says have the comics, quote, “really flung about, a couple small drifts of them.”

 
She read them with an undeniable fascination.

And this is like before, but now she’s on her stomach and reading one. And, because this is triple underlined, and behind her, in the doorway, the doorway’s left side, we see the last bit of a superhero ankle and heel, like, quote, “a superhero was just passing by and this is all we glimpsed.” Drusilla doesn’t see, and that’s underlined too: “Drusilla no idea.”

 
Her parents’ return startled her. Pushed by an instinct she could not name, she hid the booklet.

And now she’s moving about, getting the comics back in the box. Neil’s note says, quote, “Drus’s posture v.v. Gilded Bat. Visual humor from contrast of frenzied activity and elongated, immobile posture. Gilded Bat good reference.” So he wants you to look at Gilded Bat. And the “v.v.” means “very, very.”

 
Henceforth, she regarded the whole matter with misgiving.

Hallway, the doorway, Drusilla. I mean, Drusilla’s out in the hallway and looking through the doorway, and we can see a corner of the bed. Drusilla’s expression, the notes say, her expression is, quote, “the comic, blank foreboding found on G’s children, white faces, slit eyes, features minimal.” And then he has “Wugg-Ump.” I don’t know.

 
Years passed.

Note says “Drusilla. Same skirt, sweatshirt as before, but she’s teen. Dinner table, parents, rec parents from crowd on p 2, the sordid debauch. Refer character profiles.” Okay, and I sent you those, so we should be okay. He has “Kieran: D seated panel right, profile left.” So if there’s a Kieran, I hope you get that.

 
At college she made difficult friends.

Neil, quote: “Spooky, emptied-out coffee shop, student hangout but depopulated. Suggest great elongation, extension of decor—not just an unhealthy-looking rubber plant but one that twists its way higher up than it should and looks like it may collapse of its own sickness. And on like that. Standard items found in a college coffee shop, but seen a certain way.”

Okay, Drusilla and two friends at center but in the background … Oh, hi! Should I …

Hi, Neil, here. Yeah, okay, Ali, thanks for that. All right, page 11. They have the character profiles, right? Okay, two friends as described in the character profiles, use your design judgment as to where they’re placed in frame. But, and this is key, Drusilla’s laces are getting long now. We start to notice.

 
She searched for her creativity.

Drusilla at a performance art piece by students. I mean, she’s one of the students, taking part. Knock yourself out on this, re: costumes. Note: all girls more elongated and slinky than Drusilla, who looks a bit slumped around them. And there’s the laces. By this point, looking at them, one might wonder how she walks without tripping.

 
The childhood pamphlets sometimes returned to her mind, always at unexpected moments.

Right, same performance. Drusilla, foreground and to the right, eyes on one of the tall, elongated girl students striking a mock-Superman pose, a generic superhero sort of thing, with cape behind her, leg flung back, arm flung forward, all this suggesting flight. Nothing else to suggester superness, just the cape, which is blank, and the posture.
 
And there’s Drusilla looking. Laces in view.
 
In the background, as if peeping in from backstage behind the performance art show, there’s a superhero’s gloved hand and the edge of his caped-and-cowled shoulder and side of the head. Just enough so that a sharp-eyed reader can see.

 
Her parents remained irritating.

The dining room table, as in the “Years Passed” picture. Drusilla home from college. Parents older, squabbling, entirely caught up in each other. Maybe D has a Discman on and its playing. Laces longer; we can see one or both lying along the floor like a snake sunning itself.

 
In the city she found a career.

Drusillla, same posture, same place in panel as on page before. Now she’s at an office, computer screen in front of her. The monitor is one of those clunky jobs from the 1990s. Scarlett adds, quote, “Very then.”

 
And spent time alone.

Now in a movie theater. Same posture as last two pages, but now she’s angled toward the panel’s rear, toward an out-of-view movie screen. Empty seats on either side of her, other people spotted here and there in the hall—some couples, heads together. Suggest focus on the thin carpet peeling up at one corner, laying bare cement floor. Certain shabbiness so extreme it’s desolate—think that’s a G sort of thing to do, visually.

 
Her difficult friends became too difficult or too successful.

Drusilla at happening sort of downtown art party. She’s in foreground. One of her friends is there with her, sulking at her. The other is in the panel’s background, surrounded by a crowd of limp-looking hipster types, being lionized. Lot of room here to play with ’90s hipster accoutrements and decor in a G idiom. Want to stress elongation wherever possible, especially upward. A sort of pinched, unhealthy, looking-like-it’s-about-to-topple upward growth in all things, except Drusilla.

 
Parties confused her.

Okay, same party as before, different angle. The two friends still in view but off to the sides, one still being lionized, the other getting chatted up by a dubious type of some sex. Drusilla front and almost at center, looking toward us, face bleak. More with the ’90s hipster decor. Laces.

 
She became a waif.

Now Drusilla, still at the party, same place in frame, same clothes as ever—the sweatshirt, skirt and sneakers—but she’s sitting down with legs stretched in front of her. Still looking straight at us. Laces are distinctly longer than ever.

 
None of her poems were published.

Drusilla in her apartment, facing left—you have that, Kieran?—and an opened letter in her hand. It’s a rejection slip. Maybe a pile of them on kitchen table, but don’t overdo—sparseness important in all things with G. Apartment: sticks of furniture, little portable TV, Discman and scattered discs, scattered posters on wall for Lalique, Russian ballet, Nirvana.

 
She decided to work from home.

Drusilla trudging out of the office, with a box for her belongings in standard fashion. Box is almost empty, though. Coworkers look on grimly, supervisors frown, etc. Really she’s been fired, that’s the message.

 
She endured seeing her parents for the weekend.

The dinner table again, but with angle flipped—D now at panel left, the left end of the table, not the right. Parents older, quarreling harder than ever.

 
She found the thought of her journal burdensome.

Drusilla in her room at her parents’. Notebook and pen in foreground on table, Drusilla in background, to left, sitting by window. She’s trying to look out the window but can’t—her eyes are pulled unhappily toward the notebook.

 
Basic cable appalled her.

Downstairs in the dark, on a big couch. White glow from the screen. D on stomach, one leg folded so foot sticks up in air behind her; laces dangle a long way down. She has chin propped on hands and as she looks at the screen with a blankness that would appal one.

 
She found one of the pamphlets again.

Her room. She’s rooting about in a closet and finds a comic.

 
Without knowing why, she sat down to read.

Drusilla same position, same spot in panel as on page 8. On stomach, doorway behind her. Same clothes. But now she’s old and we see it: gray bits in hair, lines near mouth. One leg folded, foot up in the air behind her, and now the laces are spilling everywhere, a life of their own.

 

fin

And as before. Differences: her face isn’t propped up anymore, now it’s flat with the comic; shadows growing everywhere, especially among the folds and tangle of the laces; and in the background we have the fingers of a superhero gauntlet clutching the upper right side of the doorway, and the edge of a superhero cowl in view above the fingers, as if the creature were about to come and get her.

All right, that’s it. The professor just this instant texted to make sure we have all that about the superhero’s hand and cowl. “Job done, Hal, don’t worry :).” And Scarlett texted to say she likes, for the visuals, she likes a, quote, “Clean look, ex. Epileptic Bike, Rem Visit.” So there’s that.

Ali, you sent them the character profiles? All right, I’m off, thanks, looking forward to the magic I am sure you will—”

 
________
… collaborated with the actress and the professor to come up with an appropriately Gorey-like text. “The three of us developed a sort of electronic round robin,” Mr. Gaiman explained. “There was much buzzing of ideas back and forth via pocket devices.”

“The Extended Laces” recreates Mr. Gorey’s drawing style by means of digital techniques. Mr. Gaiman said, “They tell me we have some 15,000 signature lines and curves in the memory banks, and these are recombined.” He added, “It’s a painstaking process and, in the final analysis, really quite like an art.”

… early on the collaborators decided on updating the time setting, which for Gorey was typically Victorian or Edwardian. “Scarlett felt strongly that the 20th century was the new ‘creepy day of yore,’ to use her phrase,” Mr. Gaiman said. “Having spent so much of my life in that century, I could not say she was wrong.”

There is the possibility of a “syntha-Gorey” series, but no products are due to appear beyond “I am a Waif” t-shirts and sweatshirts. These feature the book’s heroine looking dejected and unsettling in the Gorey manner, and with overgrown sneaker laces. “We adamantly rejected the idea of marketing actual extended sneaker laces,” Mr. Gaiman laughed.

“There are these odd moments when one sees around corners,” Mr. Gaiman reflected when asked what attracted him to Mr. Gorey’s work. “I expect everyone has those. Mr. Gorey can in part be described as someone who was always seeing around corners, from one to the other, and who never learned how to stop.” He added, laughing, “If he wouldn’t find it presumptuous of me to say so.”
__________

Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Robert Binks: More Works by an Unassuming Master ( part 4 )

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Hello! We come to the end of our second round of posts devoted to Robert Binks, illustrator and artist extraordinaire. Illustrations will be our focus this week, with a sampling of Mr. Binks’ freelance, private and on-staff work (for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.).

As always, work done for the CBC is © CBC/Bob Binks, and Mr. Binks’ private works are © Bob Binks. Our previous posts can be found here, and scans of his illustrations for a book of  Ogden Nash’s poetry are here.

First, an illustration done for the Toronto Star newspaper during the 1970s:

 

 

The picture grabs the eye, as a newspaper cartoon has to, but it does the job in a way that’s quite unusual. The drawing is built around two sets of steps — the products rising up from the TV, and the animals making up the audience — that zigzag up from the lower right to the higher left. How often do you see that? And the shapes making up each group tend to get bulkier as the group rises.

More dogs, this time in a card Mr. Binks made for a friend who had lost a pet:

 

A pair of subtle, unorthodox touches: the tiny drop of the composition’s central line from left to right, and the spare but warm placement of color among the picture’s gentle grays. The red motto and polka dots are presented front and center, then left on their own until color reappears at the far right of the drawing, just where the gently dropping central line comes to rest.

Now for six drawings taken from a group of nineteen. As we have seen before (that is, here, here and, if you scroll down, here), Mr. Binks finds something provocative about cows, and especially cows  juxtaposed with such unexpected settings as the typical modern metropolis. Or, as he puts it less pretentiously, “Recently I felt I just had to write and illustrate a cow story for my grandchildren. Again, the theme is about a cow and the big city.”

Below is a selection of illustrations from his privately made book and its story of one cow’s heroic odyssey:

 


 

A triumphant sequence! Which brings us to our clean-up pair of pictures. First, from the Toronto Star, a drawing that Mr. Binks has also used for cards congratulating friends on their birthday:

And a studio graphic that the CBC show Take Thirty used for station breaks:

That’s good advice, as we hope to present another Binks sequence a little down the road. In the meantime, enjoy a healthy and prosperous 2012.

Robert Binks: More Works by an Unassuming Master ( part 3 )

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The above says it all, or pretty much. Welcome to the Christmas installment of our series on Robert Binks, the Canadian illustrator, painter, sculptor and greeting card designer who has spent more than half a century creating beautiful and playful works of art. His greeting cards, all made privately for friends and family, come in for special but not exclusive attention this go-around.

As always, Mr. Binks’ private works are © Bob Binks, and you can find all our posts to date here and Mr. Binks’ illustrations for the poet Ogden Nash here.

Our opening picture shows the offbeat way Mr. Binks likes to play with old images and contrasting styles in his cards. He says:  “I created this personal Xmas card in 2009. I tried to combine the old with the new — I love that old photograph and I had used it in one of my CBC animations circa 1980 about the history of Toronto.” The CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., where he worked for most of his career.

The card is a favorite of mine. The whiteness and the giant mod Christmas bulb set off the solemnity of that black-and-white child from long ago.  The combination is vivid and funny at the same time.

Now a pair of sculptures:

 

The artist calls these the “Goodie Gals.”  Mr. Binks:
“Back in the ’50s, while working as a display designer in Eaton’s Department Store, I created a graphic idea of a woman wearing a large brimmed hat filled with goodies. In 2010 I finally brought this idea to fruition creating these two ceramic heads with removable plates.” Take the plates off and the two women becomes vases for flowers.

Next a very Canadian recipe page:

 

Mr. Binks drew the illustrations for the Globe and Mail, Canada’s leading newspaper, back in the early 1960s.  Like the “Good Girls,” they show his knack for generating feeling from a few simple lines. The two drawings also reflect his tendency to pile simple geometric shapes into a block, and to fill spaces with dense texture or textures (often ones that show a strong contrast, as with the tree’s bark and the little girl’s blanket).

Another greeting card, this one from 2008:

 

Santa’s red hat is actually a flap; you lift it up and there’s his party hat for New Year’s Eve. The balancing of the modest script greetings atop Santa Claus’ hat is very Binksian, if I may coin a term.

A trio of  wood statuettes:

 

Mr. Binks:  “The hot dog man was made for my grandson. In the square base of the Santa is a music box movement that plays ‘Toy Land.’
The piano with the abstract design plays ‘Yesterday.'” I love the hot dog man’s mustache and matching hat-brim shadow, and the piano shows the same sort of splashy but clean-lined color arrangement that shows up in some of Mr. Binks’ paintings.

Two holiday-season cartoons with a distinct ’60s flavor:

 

Mr. Binks:  “This Christmas page was done for Chatelaine magazine circa 1965.” The party cartoon’s elongated shapes crowded together are again very Binksian. But what I like best is how the charm characteristic of Mr. Binks’ work coexists with the Peter Max trimmings.

And now a run of highly inventive Christmas cards. The first is from the mid-1990s:

 

Mr. Binks:  “The card is received in a flat envelope. When opened, the house and trees pop up and Santa’s hat appears in the chimney. I wrote the poem to support the card.”

A card from 1986, this one with a uniquely adjustable Santa schnozz:

 

Nudge the chain and Santa gets a new profile. Caption:  “… a nose is a nose is a”

Next, a card from the mid-1980s. Mr. Binks:  “Card flaps open up in stages to reveal a Superman Santa.”

 

Finally, a combination Christmas and New Year’s card:

It’s from 1976. Mr. Binks: “I just had to do a card with Guy Lombardo ushering in the New Year. This is a multilayered card housing an elastic band to animate the action. When the Christmas tree is pushed down, the TV screen changes from Santa to Guy Lombardo. The cat wakes up to the sound of the New Year festivities.”

I think it’s fantastic: the concept, the drawing and the use of Lombardo’s lividly tinted photo. That poor cat!

And on that note, a Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah. Next week we’ll have the last entry in this round of posts. The focus will be dogs and cows — don’t miss it.

Robert Binks: More Works by an Unassuming Master ( part 2 )

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Welcome to part two of the second round of posts devoted to Robert Binks and his work. All our posts to date can be found here, and Mr. Binks’ illustrations for the poet Ogden Nash are gathered here. All the works in this post are © CBC/Bob Binks.

Let’s start with a look at Mr. Binks and hat design. He models the work himself, along with a clown nose for added high spirits:
  

“This hat celebrates a new CBC building to be erected,” Mr. Binks writes by email. The occasion was lunch in 1984 for CBC graphic designers.

Now two illustrations Mr. Binks drew for broadcast around 1960, during the era of black-and-white television. They were part of a story called “The Frolicking Mastodon.”

“The drawings were done in India ink on beige window blind with added white paint,” Mr. Binks writes.

The next three works were done about 1980 as part of a story broadcast on the CBC children’s show Mr. Dressup. The story’s set-up is simple: Queen Victoria hires a cat to rid her palace of mice.

“In contrast to this world of high tech that we now live in, we created simple animated solutions by moving cut-out shapes,” Mr. Binks says. “The stagehand at the back of the graphic would move the magnetized cat cutout along a felt pen line that determines the action. The camera follows the action of the cat as it crosses the bridge along the path to visit Queen Victoria.”

“The stagehand moves the magnetized mouse up out of the hole.”

“Part of the castle door is on another level to allow the mouse to appear and travel down the path following a curved line.”

Next, three panels belonging to a feature created during the mid-1970s for the CBC television program Such Is Life. Their collective title is “Strange Beliefs of Children.”

Mr. Binks: “The animation was preshot by myself on an animation stand. This was a simple animation technique where I used paper cut-outs and I double framed each shot.”

The first two center on the longstanding trepidation felt by little boys over contact with their grandmothers’ insistent, wrinkled mouths.

 

In the first shot, “the little boy was moved up to Grandma’s mouth by moving her long arms,” Mr. Binks writes. Then “a match dissolve changes the little boy’s normal lips to puckered lips. The eyes go from normal to crosseyed.” And that is what happens to the poor blighters. The CBC was on the case all those years ago.The next picture also addresses a widespread problem:

The boy is about to encounter something horrible. From the script: “There’s this thing which lives in the toilet and likes it and when you go in the night and flush the toilet it wakes the thing up. So you’d better hurry getting out of there — but this kid was too slow.”

Mr. Binks used a series of cutouts to show the boy flushing the toilet, then being seized and dragged into the toilet by a wormlike creature with a suction-cup head.

So this is what the CBC wants to show young people! Mr. Binks notes that his nephew, when small, was given a look at the sequence and suffered nightmares as a result. “As an adult he still has vivid memories and requested a copy,” Mr. Binks adds, which tells us something about the bizarre power of nostalgia.

Finally, a foldout Valentine’s card Mr. Binks made around 1980. Its recipient, of course, was his wife, Katharine. It’s a lovely piece of work, even in the miniaturized form we must settle for here:

Next week: A dog and cows!

Robert Binks: More Works by an Unassuming Master ( part 1 )

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Welcome to a second round of posts devoted to the artist Robert Binks. (The first series can be found here, and scans of his illustrations of poems by Ogden Nash are here.) During his half century as a professional cartoonist and illustrator, Robert Binks produced works of remarkable imagination, skill and charm. Now retired, he produces equally remarkable paintings and sculptures.  We’re very happy to be presenting more samples of his work.

For this series of posts the artist himself chose the pictures and their order. Works done by Mr. Binks while on staff to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. are © CBC/Bob Binks. His private works are © Bob Binks.

 

******

 

 

Robert Binks in his mid-30s, as presented in a Japanese graphic art magazine called Idea. The article appeared in 1961 and was about the graphic artists of the CBC, where Mr. Binks had been working for four years.

Below is a Christmas card, designed by Mr. Binks, that went out to active and retired CBC graphic designers in 2001. Mr. Binks himself had retired 10 years before, but he produced quite an extravaganza.

 

 

The photos are all of CBC designers. The black-and-white photos are from the issue of Idea mentioned above. You’ll see that Mr. Binks’ 1961 picture pops up just to the left of the CBC emblem. Of his CBC days, Mr. Binks recalls: “As designers we produced promotional slides, illustrated stories, title credits and animations. We were encouraged to be inventive and think outside the box.”

Now what can only be called a characteristic theme. Mr. Binks finds something funny about cows, especially cows that show up where they don’t belong.

 

 

The work above is from the project that got Mr. Binks started on the theme, an animation sequence for a program called All About Toronto. “In 1964 or so, back in the days of black-and-white television, I illustrated a story of a cow threatened by the bustle of the big city,” he wrote to me by email. “For this scene black line graphic cells were panned in opposite directions to create a busy traffic effect. To make the cow stand out visually, white cel paint was added.” (For more of Mr. Binks’ cow efforts, look at the posts here and here.)

I think the drawing is beautifully composed. The right-angled shapes and occasional rounded shapes and the patches of space and the busy parts — they’re all crowded together, but modulated and placed so that somehow they fit. The traffic’s busyness jumps at you, but there’s no jangle and your eye isn’t overwhelmed.

Below is a CBC Times cover depicting the CBC drama, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, circa 1961:

 

 

The late ’50s and early ’60s saw a lot of faux-naif treatments of high European art, or at least that’s my impression from album covers and theater programs of those days. This Mary Stuart is an especially nice example.

The picture is mocking but also wistful, a combination that I associate with such works. The figures here look like rag dolls locked into a high-vaulted drama that they don’t understand and that nobody else understands either. Mary Stuart emotes, hands clasped and head tilted. The Elizabethan gentleman sags and his head lists, as opposed to tilting. Elizabeth dangles. They’re all grouped around Loch Leven Castle, which is bone-white, and behind them is the black.

The drawing displays two traits that pop up in Mr. Binks’ work. There’s the patch of intricate patterning (Queen Elizabeth’s gown) and the block formed by repeated primary shapes (in this case, Loch Leven). Typically, the block seems to be pulling upward, as is the case here because of the way the shapes within the castle are arranged.

I think the arrangement of the castle’s shapes creates a grace note. The center pile of narrow rectangles abuts a pile of taller, bigger rectangles just to the right. The clash throws into relief the black gap between the two columns, and this gap acts as a line that runs straight up the castle to where Queen E’s foot is planted next to that of the listing gentleman.

To the left of the line, Loch Leven tilts away; to the right, the castle is a bit steadier. So the gap acts as a fault line, and the fault is elaborated on by the positioning of the two fgures. Queen E’s body tilts one way, the gentleman’s head and shoulders sag the other. Subliminally the two of them seem to be toppling away from each other. For what it’s worth, I find this effect underlines the sense of helplessness mentioned above. It’s part of the mocking undercurrent associated with presenting the high historical drama in a faux-childish way.

A promo slide graphic for a CBC drama, The Murderer, circa 1962:

 

 

The drawing is heavier than usual for Mr. Binks. “This graphic was done in an acrylic water color technique with India ink detail,” Mr. Binks wrote by email.  “I was trying for a heavy dramatic feeling.” The characteristically lopsided, playful composition of the buildings takes up much less space than it normally would in one of his pictures, and the foreground figure, looking haunted, is broader faced and more somber than is typical of a Binks figure. The touch that looks most like the artist’s usual work is the popping out of the background figure, who is presumably on the main character’s trail.

Next, from 1985, a background graphic used for The Fifth Estate, a public affairs program. On screen the host stood to one side of the image.

 

 

Shrinking Freud is an example of how Mr. Binks will sometimes play with the pride of place that normally goes to head or features. The eye falls inward from the giant collar and shoulders to find the miniature Freud head.

A subtler form of the trick is played by this station break graphic that Mr. Binks designed for Channel Six Toronto, a CBC television station, circa 1975. It shows a saloon door, a show girl and the station’s number. The 6 in its oval, planted atop a column, is like a face that turns out not to be a face; instead the only face in sight, also oval, turns out to be smaller off to one side:

 

 

The picture gives the viewer’s eye a strong anchor because the saloon door and show girl, standing side by side, form a vertical block that firms up the center of the picture. But at the same time that block is full of stylistic mismatches that somehow liven up the eye. They’re tricks similar to the head switcheroos mentioned above.

For example, the tight, horizontal rectangles in the door pull away from the big oval at its top, and the number itself is both prominent and a bit too high up for the eye to fall on it comfortably.

The number’s curves and the curves of the woman’s feathers are close together and therefore link up. But the number’s curves are horizontal and the feathers’ are vertical, so the two sets of curves pull against each other. And the feathers themselves push away from each, one set pointing left and the other right.

The symmetry of the feathers’ two arcs bounces against a lopsided echo further down, where a hulking set of curves (the woman’s dress) pushes off to the right.

As noted, these discordancies stimulate the eye instead of baffling it. But why that is I cannot say.

Circa 1982, a promotion graphic for a CBC drama, The Death Goddess. Mr. Binks writes “I used a photographic clear cel with black detail.”

 

 

Here’s a non-CBC work. In the mid-1960s Mr. Binks freelanced this illustration for Chatelaine magazine. He describes the subject matter as “a young woman’s first solo trip to Europe.”

 

 

As with Shrinking Freud and the Channel 6 promo, there’s a disrupted face at the center of the drawing. Which is a heavy way of talking about a charming picture, but bear with me. Where the girl’s eyes should be, she disappears and one of the most famous faces in the world looks back, but miniaturized and doubled.

Finally, three of Mr. Binks’ post-retirement paintings, all displayed in his home. The right-hand painting and the accompanying cow sculpture were combined by Mr. Binks into a work called “Cowgratulations,” which can be seen in the post here.

 

 

Next week: a black-and-white mastodon and color animation sequences about a fairy tale cat and the frightening beliefs of childhood. Be there!

Robert Binks and His Art ( part 4 )

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Our look at Robert Binks and his work comes to a close, at least for now. My thanks to Noah for hosting us. I gather that a number of people have liked (or loved) what they saw here of Mr. Binks’s work. That makes me very happy, and it was splendid of Noah to provide the opportunity.

Later this year I plan to post images from the 20 or so other works that Mr. Binks has sent me. They include some wonderful items, so there’s more to look forward to.

The first three posts in the present series can be found here, and you can click here to see scans of the illustrations Mr. Binks did for the Ogden Nash collection The Old Dog Barks Backwards.

Above we see Mr. Binks in 1991, the year he retired as a staff illustrator at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. The previous posts focused on his CBC work and his work as a freelancer. Today we’ll focus on his paintings and sculptures and the homemade greeting cards that he sends out to friends.

Mr. Binks wrote me:

I see very little difference between my private work and my professional work. I feel fortunate to have had the freedom to express myself in so many ways … I never want to work by a recipe and do things in the same style all the time — that would drive me bonkers. So, in my personal life as an artist, I will try anything.

Very true, so I’ll add just that all the works in this post are © Bob Binks.

 

First, the dickybird, a card Mr. Binks did during the mid-’90s. He writes: “the dickie bird quote takes me back to when I was a kid — having my photo taken.”

 

 

He says that using photos is nothing out of the ordinary for him. “If it helps the design I will use a photo to enhance the overall look.”

Now a charmer. The boy-and-turkey illustration was originally used for station breaks by the CBC, but Mr. Binks used it as a Christmas card in 2008.

 

 

I find that picture so comforting because it’s solid without being heavy. There’s the firm, dense line work Mr. Binks likes to do, and the composition is blocked together thru big, simple shapes placed in rows and columns. But the drawing is lit up by a gentle and understated color scheme that still grabs the eye: the lineup of orange, green and yellow against the brown, and everything placed against white. And the patterns created by the big, simple shapes intersect so that the right-angled grid that makes the picture so secure is lightened by the circles and big oval tucked inside it.

Add in the scene proper, a boy walking home in midwinter, and you have an effect that’s peaceful and secure instead of oppressive. It’s also a bit forlorn, given that the poor fellow is out there by himself.

Next, a card made strictly for private consumption, in 2000:

 

 

 

Where you see the white square, there should be a window hanging in the middle of the jungle. The card’s message, Mr. Binks says, is that “it is okay to do a little bit of daydreaming on your birthday.”

On making the card: “I used markers and luma water colors.  By adding white to the cerise color I get a wonderful   hot pink as in the jungle flower.”

And, from the late 1980s, a card like no other:

 

That’s Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev sharing space with Santa Claus.
 

 

The card was actually a cardboard wheel, with heads, shoulders and written mottos changing place whenever the wheel was turned.

Below we have “Cowgratulations,” a card Mr. Binks created in 2009 by photographing a sculpture and painting, also his creations, that he keeps on display in his dining room.

 

Cows pop up a good few times in Mr. Binks’s work. He writes me that the first was in “a black-and-white animation that I did for CBC around 1963 for a program called All About Toronto. The animation was about a cow that is threatened by the build up of the big city.” Two weeks ago we saw a CBC animation sequence Mr. Binks did in 1987 about a cow on the subway. Now we have “Cowgratulations.”

“They are a wonderful graphic symbol, taking you from the country to the city,” Mr. Binks says. He suggests that the cows may be his way of looking at rural life imperiled by industrialization.

More than that, he just gets a kick out of them. “I like them as a graphic object,” he writes. “I used eight cows to celebrate my 80th birthday party, each cow representing 10 years — why use flamingos when you can use cows? The party was on a farm in the country, my wife’s place of birth and childhood.”

Another addition to the cow lineup, from 2010.
 

 
“This 30 by 40 inch painting started out as an abstract of colored squares and rectangles,” Mr. Binks says. “It wasn’t going anywhere so I started to think of a cityscape — an ultra-modern city. I then started to think of the details — is the city real? — do we like our toys — cars, trains, etc.? And of course I had to put a cow in somewhere to break up the hard edge of the city.” He worked with acrylic paints and used stencil brushes to create a graded effect.

We end up with a sculpture that, like the painting and statue in “Cowgratulations,” takes pride of place in Mr. Binks’s home. “I have this wood construction — 12 inches high and 9 inches wide and 5 inches deep — hanging in the living room,” he writes.

 

 

Very funny! The composition is deft, what with the strong double vertical set off against itself — that is, the “I” versus the man’s body — and punctuated by the space between body and head. The statue has the same simple but involved charm as Mr. Binks’s illustration work but thrown into three dimensions. The effect makes for a fantastic sight.

And on that note I’ll sign off. My thanks to Mr. Binks for sharing his work. It’s been a great pleasure for me, and I look forward to doing another round.

Robert Binks and His Art ( part 3 )

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We continue our look at the work of Robert Binks with this sequence illustrating “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” The pictures appeared on a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. television program “around 1964,” Mr. Binks tells me. As you might guess from the complexity of the storefronts in the next picture, the pictures didn’t make up an animation sequence. Instead the camera moved along the drawings.

 

 

“Dan McGrew” is one of the best-known poems in the world. It was written by Robert W. Service (1874-1958), who was born an Englishman but settled in Canada at age 21. He began writing poems about frontier life after the bank he worked for stationed him at a branch in the Yukon. Service wrote “Dan McGrew” when he was about 30, a few years before his poetry made him internationally known.

I think the illustrations we see here are splendid, a wonderful combination of lively visual rhythms, skillfully off-center compositions, and affectionately grotesque treatment of  an ancient melodrama. Mr. Binks told me by email that he drew them with felt pen markers:

I had a technique of applying the felt ink on one side and then applying the ink on the other side and pulling the color  through for an interesting effect.

This is one method — and sometimes I would just work on the one side.

… The characters in the Dan McGrew story were bond paper cutouts, spray glued and applied  onto  22 inch by 28 inch colored backgrounds.

I’ll note that all the illustrations in this post are © CBC/Bob Binks, and that the sequence illustrates highlights of the poem; the full text is here. If you want to see more of Mr. Binks’s work, look here for scans of his illustrations for the Ogden Nash collection The Old Dog Barks Backwards and here for the previous two posts in the present series.

And now … the action begins in “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

 

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;

 

Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.

 

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.

 

He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.

 

His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,

 

Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil’s lie;

 

And “Boys,” says he, “you don’t know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I’ll bet my poke they’re true,
That one of you is a hound of hell … and that one is Dan McGrew.”

 

Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that’s known as Lou.