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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.

 

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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.

Robert Binks and His Art ( part 2 )

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Robert Binks has worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and artist for more than sixty years, during which time he has created a stream of inventive and delightful works. We began our sampling of his career last week, and scans of  his illustrations for the Ogden Nash collection The Old Dog Barks Backwards can be found here.

This week we open with some of Mr. Binks’s work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., where he was on staff from 1957 to 1991. (These works are all © CBC/Bob Binks.) Here we see Mr. Binks early in his career, posing at his drawing board for a publicity shot as a colleague leans an elbow next to him:

 

 

From 1966, two illustrations by Mr. Binks for a retelling of the parliamentary system’s history. The book accompanied a CBC radio series of the same name:

 

We see a young Winston Churchill in mid-oration. The way the MPs fall into well-defined, heavily drawn columns provides an example of the high, packed compositions Mr. Binks sometimes prefers. But the columns, most of them, are set at a slant, which brings the heaviness a bit of spring and bounce. All in all, the drawing manages to bring life to an arrangement of 25 men without giving each figure an individual posture.

The line work is very detailed. Mr. Binks does the same for Elizabeth I, in this case working up the patterns for her dress and, especially, her lace collar:

 

Now the sequence from which we took this post’s lead-off illustration. The four drawings are cells for an animated sequence the CBC inserted into Sesame Street so that there would be some material in French:

 

 

 

 

 

The look on the cow’s face when it’s in the subway … Come to think of it, I like the lady with the feathered hat too. The sequence shows Mr. Binks’s ability, when necessary, to get a certain amount of endearing personality into the bare minimum of lines for a character.

We’ll close with three of the artist’s freelance assignments. First off, there’s the card he did in 1970 as a work sample for his New York agent to show around:

 

 

I’d call it a charming exercise in Peter Max/Yellow Submarine popism. The figures are reduced all the way to design touches, slender pen strokes that have no faces and end in bellbottoms. The approach is typical for Peter Max, unusual for Mr. Binks. As we saw above, he usually gets a face in there, stylized but with at least a touch of personality.

Now a page from “The Pied Piper of Harlem,” a story that appeared in a mid-1970s school book. The brick work and the crowd of rats show Mr. Binks’s vigorously detailed line work and narrow, stacked compositions:

 

 

We close with an illustration that ran in the Toronto Daily Star in 1979. The theme is familiar to anyone who knows the Canadian winter:

 

 

I think the nine cartoons in a row illustrate Mr. Binks’s knack for deceptively simple illustrations that grab the eye. The way they mix good humor, quick communication, and visual resourcefulness is very satisfying.

Next week we’ll focus on Mr. Binks’s private artwork. Drop by!

Robert Binks and his art ( part 1 )

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Robert Binks is a Canadian illustrator and cartoonist with a fresh, wry and humane touch. His drawings and art pieces are still delightful  thirty and even sixty years after their creation.

His illustrations for the Ogden Nash collection The Old Dog Barks Backwards (1972) can be seen in four posts gathered here. As a result of these posts, Mr. Binks got in touch with me and sent along more of his works, which I will be presenting over the next few weeks. I’ll note that everything Mr. Binks produced for himself is © Bob Binks. Works that he produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. are © CBC/Bob Binks.

Mr. Binks wrote me the following:

I retired 20 years ago after a 35 year career as a graphic designer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. During those years I also free-lanced for 2 Toronto newspapers doing editorial art and had an agent in New York where I illustrated several books including  The Old Dog Barks Backwards.

A personal endeavor I have enjoyed all my life and continue to do, is making Xmas and birthday cards for my friends and relatives.

Since retirement I continue to be productive in art — fine art painting, small ironic wood constructions and clay creations.

We’ll be seeing samples of all the above during the next few weeks.

Born in 1926, Mr. Binks studied commercial art at a Toronto technical school, then fine art at the Ontario College of Art. In 1947 he became a display designer at Eaton’s, a department store giant that was a Canadian institution. Ten years later, at age 30 or 31, he joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, where he spent the rest of his professional life.

His work combines simplicity with unexpected detail and craft. These student caricatures from his days at Central Technical School provide an example:

 


 

As you see, they’re from the same set as the self-caricature that opened the post.

Now a far less characteristic work, but an interesting one. Mr. Binks produced this beach scene at age 14, during his second-year illustration course at Central Tech. He was trying to be like the painter Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) and made a good job of it:

 

 

Most of Mr. Binks’s work is, to put it mildly, not much like that of Paul Cadmus, who was a bitter moralist and who specialized in elaborate, pyrotechnically designed  canvases that are heavy with detail. The best Binks-Cadmus parallel I can come up with is that the two reverse each other. Mr. Binks produces clear, appealing works that show more detail than expected. Cadmus produced improbably dense works that communicate themselves with surprising clarity and speed.

At age 22, Mr. Binks painted columns in the women’s wear department at Eaton’s. A display from his time at the department store provides an example of his clear but subtly detailed work:

 

 

From the 1970s, we have some CBC work that shows a Binks trademark: the combination of simply outlined figures with involved but bold composition. From left foreground to right foreground, the artist turns a series of squiggles — dress pattern to hand-mike cord to snake to giant-mike cord — into a sort of meta-squiggle. It coils toward us where the reporter is standing with his hand-mike, then coils away, passing from snake to giant-mike cord:

 

 

Below is an item done freelance for the recipe page of the Globe and Mail. Mr. Binks tends to amplify the effect of the texture in a given work by creating high, narrow rectangles jammed with detail. In this case the cart’s vegetable bins do the job:

 

 

Below we see the same trait, only more so. This picture makes texture its centerpiece; usually texture is more of an accent, from what I’ve seen.

 

 

Here we have a page from a mod dictionary that Mr. Binks illustrated. The pictures remind me of his work in the Odgen Nash collection. His strengths come together very nicely here. The illustrations have the simplicity cartoons need, but with a good deal of weight to the drawing:

 

Another favorite, this one from the cover of a Toronto paper’s weekend magazine supplement. I like the nimble but unobtrusive way Mr. Binks handles the three interlocking compositions of cityscape, the first group of authors, and the second group of authors:

 

 

Again, the drawing still works as a cartoon. The composition is involved but clear, and it doesn’t produce a brushback effect, as when the reader’s jaw is supposed to drop a little and she/he to stand abashed at the sight of improbable ability. I find the drawing cuddly in a way, comforting. For example, take the tourist boat chugging along in the foreground.

To close, a Christmas card Mr. Binks designed for his own use. The paisley Santa and his colors grab me:

 

 

The card has pulled off a neat trick, which is to survive the pop art ’60s without having become dated. I love the way the raspberry, gold and tan patterns look trapped against the white.

Unfortunately I don’t know how to analyze the card’s use of color and patterns, beyond saying that Mr. Binks sometimes uses contrasting patterns to kick up a drawing’s effect, and that here he adds high-contrast colors and a white background. The result is a caricature that jumps out at you, a trippy Santa Claus whose trippiness doesn’t rely on the usual signifiers of psychedelia (beyond paisley, anyway).

Next week we’ll have some intensely involved line work and a sequence about a cow traveling by subway. Hope you can make it!

Frazetta’s Barnyard Comics

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HU alum Tom Crippen (who wrote with us in our blogspot days) sent us this piece. It’s good to have you back here, Tom!
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by Tom Crippen

Frank Frazetta (1928-2010) is probably the world’s best-known illustrator of fantasy adventure. He hit it big during the 1960s when his covers played a key part in the paperback boom that did so much for Conan the Barbarian and the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He stayed big all through the decades that followed. If you’re a dumb kid, or if any inch of you is a dumb kid, his paintings will overwhelm you. They’re like Led Zeppelin, premarital sex, or getting a driver’s license and driving fast enough to risk spinal injury. They’re as intense as psychedelic art but located at the other end of experience, the one where nothing matters but the juices flowing through your body. Look at them and your mind gets blotted out: there you are, hypnotized by muscle on muscle, shadow on shadow, detail on detail, and by the snakelike power that twists through his composition, because behind the whallop lies a superior degree of art.

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