Hospice artwork - wallhangings for exeter cathedral for their hospice service "pearl - beautiful inside"

Rosa Turner - using permanent marker and inks to create "the pearl" wall hangings for hospice to go up in exeter cathedral www.rosaturner.co.uk

chris ware

Chris Ware

Chris Ware (1967-present) is a successful American graphic novelist. His awards have included “Man’s First Genuine Successor” and Time magazine’s “Book of the Year”.  The success of his main works, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smallest Kid on Earth (2000) and Building Stories (2012) has come through his ability to communicate with his audience on an emotional level. (1)

In Quimby the Mouse, the narrative dealing with treatment of Sparky and his regret for his cruelty shows a link between Gasoline Alley and flat panels (3).    You can see his drawings are line filled and incorporate a linear perspective that is flattened or exchanged with panoptical projection.  Not only does Ware use these techniques he reduces the panels or objects to geometric shapes (Image 3). 

Jimmy Corrigan was influenced by Ware’s childhood. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts showed Ware that one could empathise with cartoon characters: (2) when Charlie Brown feels bad for himself, you feel bad for him.  Schulz portrays his emotions through the character and page layout. In Jimmy Corrigan, Ware uses an interlocked narrative of two father- son relationships, incorporating regret and abandonment in his attempt to understand his own relationship with his absent father. Ware’s use of memoir and personal history grips the reader. (1)

A further influence was Frank King, whose layout of Gasoline Alley had a “raccord” format giving a 5 second time frame to the linear sequence of the same scene. Ware used time by putting a monthly timeframe to the sequence and formatting the panels in a panoptical diagrammatical method (2) (images 1 and 2).   Ware uses time and memory in his work as two key methods of creating dynamic and emotion. Raeburn said “Gasoline Alley taught Ware that the feeling of a comic strip was best built into its structure” and “musical emotion need not be expressed through performance but through composition.” (3) Ware incorporates this cyclosis into practice via “Building Stories” by presenting Joseph Cornell’s surrealist boxes.  Ware sees literacy and visuals as two distinct aspects of his work and changes his adjectives and adverbs into a visual story. (4)

Philosophically, Ware describes himself as a “cartoonist” working with a working class art form that moves you emotionally and deeply. Gasoline Alley has a real life narrative and warmth so that readers of the newspaper do not feel as if they are inadequate.  He wants his cartoons to be regarded as an art of the people. (5)

Rudolphe Topher, father of the comic strip, influences Ware by his use of broken lines, figures in scattered hyperactivity and ironic phrases.  Richard Felton Outcault , the father of American Sunday comics, created the comic strip that merged into American society’s day to day living. (6) 

Doug Wolk, art critic and historian, dislikes Ware’s use of traumatic experiences within family units, regarding them as “pathetic fantasies and painful realities”. He contends that the composition and geometric forms challenge the face of human despair and cruelty.  (1)

 Image 3

 Image 1

 Image 2

Bibliography of Chris Ware

Cartwright James, “Illustration: Valuable life lessons in Chris Ware’s seminal Quimby comic” available at http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/chris-ware-quimby-mouse (Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Cliffnotes, Houghtern Mifflin Harcourt “Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck” available at http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/o/of-mice-and-men/of-mice-and-men-at-a-glance (Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Cushner Seth (2012) “Chris Ware building a better comic book”  available at http://www.nycgraphicnovelists.com/2012/03/chris-ware-on-building-better-comic.html ( Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Herge, the adventure of tin tin “Herge” available at http://us.tintin.com/about/herge/ (Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Kelly Stuart (2013) “Chris Ware: 'There is a magic when you read an image that moves in your mind' available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/11/chris-ware-graphic-novelist-interview (Accessed 5 october 2014)

Kreilkamp Ivan Associate Professor in the Department of English at Indiana University (2013) “The not –so-comic art of Chris Ware” the Ryder, available at http://theryder.com/2013/11/15/the-not-so-comic-art-of-chris-ware/ (Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Kunzle David “A critical study of the Swiss artist who created the comic strip” available at http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/869 (Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Larimer Kevin “The Color and the Shape of Memory: An Interview With Chris Ware available at http://www.pw.org/content/the_color_and_the_shape_of_memory_an_interview_with_chris_ware (Accesed: 5 October 2014)

Olson. D. Richard “R. F. Outcault, The Father of the American Sunday Comics, and the Truth About the Creation of the Yellow Kid” available at http://www.neponset.com/yellowkid/history.htm (Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Raeburn Daniel (2004) Chris Ware, Pg 25 (Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Schulz. M Charles Schulz Museum “Charles M Shulz Biography” available at https://schulzmuseum.org/about-the-man/schulz-biography/ (Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Images

Image 1 – Douglad Wolk, “Inside the box “building stories” by Chris Ware”, available http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/books/review/building-stories-by-chris-ware.html? (Accessed 5 October 2014)

Image 2 -walt and skeezix, “Frank o King”, available at http://www.du9.org/auteur/king-frank-o/ (Accessed 5 October 2014)

Image 3- Raeburn Daniel, Chris Ware,Pg 25 (Accessed: 5 October 2014)

Footnotes

(1) kreilkamp

(2) Kelly, 2013

(3) Raeburn

(4) Larimer

(5) Cliffnotes

(6) Olson

The analysis of Visual Language via Graphic Symbolism and Formal Qualities

In this essay I will be exploring and investigating graphic symbolism and formal qualities and how they are used and conveyed in images from traditional graphic illustrators to contemporary illustrators.

Manga is a type of visualized narrative that is created in comics in Japan.  Manga is a style of artistic expression in Japan that is immersed in a social environment including history, language, culture, economy, politics, education and gender.  Japanese language has shaped manga. For example Japanese onomatopoeia written in the background becomes part of the graphics that help us understand the image. McCloud  (1994) “symbolic representations are closer to language”.  (1)

Osamu Tezuka is known as “the father of Manga” he has inspired a generation of Manga artists and shaped the national debate about medical reform in Japan. One of his medical Manga’s is called Black Jack, where a gifted but unlicensed surgeon, Black Jack performs complicated operations on humans and animals who charges extortionate prices.  The outrageous fees are a test to make sure his patients try to appreciate that life itself is more valuable than any money.  Rejected by the medical business he gives services to criminals and outcasts. Within 230 volumes of Black Jack there are many traits of graphic symbolism that Tezuka incorporates.  His use of large eyes showed on the characters in the image, have been shown in his early work influenced from American counter parts like Betty Boop and Bambi, that are now a stylistic hallmark of Manga (2).  In one of the panels the lady is crying out saying “it’ll take us time just to find him” with big tear drops falling and a flash of light behind her.  These graphic emblems heighten the emotional impact of sadness and worry and creatively adapt to better suit the graphic form e.g. the crying lady. However these panels of images have non-conventional visual symbols that is seen in Shojo manga, that you can see through the various pattern of mark making and positive and negative spaces in the background that helps set the scene for the eerie tale of black jack (3).

David Shrigley is an illustrator from Glasgow that has many formal qualities to his work.  From handwritten scribbles, quick eratic mark making and gauche subject matter.  He implies a personal and spontaneous approach to his work.  In this image this simplistic line drawing from the “how are you feeling?  At the centre of the inside of the humans brain?” exhibition (5) (6), conveys a man looking into a green puddle of beer that makes us think about the use of the colour green and how it can convey envy, hatred and many other somber emotions that go alongside the addiction, gambling and alcoholism of life.   The type that is juxtaposition beside the image can be read easily in his own writing,  that is formatted like line writing in detention to look like something you would see in the classroom that helps the observer relate to it so well due to being brought back to their own childhood. Even though the man in the positive space is simplistic it is very controlled that implies that Shrigley erratic approach has defiance to his thoughts of subject matter, “with drawing, you are very in control of what you are doing, you know, your always constructing images yourself.  Where as with photography there’s an aspect of chance to the images you get” David Shrigley(4).  Overall his drawings are easily recognised due to them being gummy, gauche, boneless limbs, crossing-out ink blots, handwriting appearing backwards and good use of bizarre grammar word order to get his meaning across to express his own visual ventriloquism.

Edward Hopper is a best-known American realist for the inter-war period that created solitude and introspective themes in his work.  In 1899 he decided to become an artist and started off with illustration at the New York School of Illustration. In 1906 Hopper went to Paris and travelled around Europe and was influenced by the modern movement, however he became restless and he never set foot in Europe again.  For some time he painted flash backs of what he had seen abroad “It took me 10 years to get over Europe” Edward Hopper (7). Therefore from his experiences he created Nighthawks that was inspired by a diner on a corner in Greenwich Avenue in Hoppers New York neighbourhood.  The composition of objects in the piece that are dotted around e.g. the abandoned water glass and sugar jars emphasize the empty space.  The quiet atmosphere and dark use of light symbolises the figures mysterious relationships with one another.  Although Hopper has improvised with light to create atmosphere he has also tampered with scale in his subject matter “I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger” Edward Hopper (8).  

Hopper captures the reality of modern life and combines emotional states via physical settings that he constructs with distinguished use of angles, shadows, patterns of light and most of all perspective.  His scenes that are shot through and framed by wdows and doorways give an unnerving impression. The architecture outlines the composition and therefore the use of light gives an overall balance and illuminates the framework. Also with the help of fluorescent light coming into the early 1940s, the diner releases an eerie glow that gives an obvious understanding of hopper being able to express endless possibilities of light improvising on uncomplicated shapes and forms.

From the formal qualities and subject matter of this image we can observe that Ernest Hemingway story “the killers” a detective novel is a key influence to his work (8).  You can clearly see the attributes of the French impressionists in his work through his open composition, emphasis on the depiction of light, and peculiar visual angles.  Most importantly the post impressionist and surrealist are a key influence. Hopper has opened up his personal view of the visual world and has spontaneously communicated use of colour and form to describe emotion and movement that many of the Post Impressionists have incorporated. On the other hand you can see that Hopper uses the unconscious as a source of inspiration like many of the surrealist utilised. (8)

Aubrey Beardsley was an English illustrator and author who drew highly sexualised drawings throughout the Victorian period.  His symbolic illustrations ridiculed the narrow-mindedness of the Victorian age and encouraged full openness to discover sexuality.  His balanced areas of solid black and areas of open white with intricate detail delicately illustrated over leading into graceful sweeping curves, gives a lot of his images a romantic quality.  This was a subject that the Victorians found hard to approach especially with Beardsely’s interpretation of sexuality throughwhat they saw as grotesque and unnatural style with bodies that were not idealized. (9)what they saw as grotesque and unnatural style with bodies that were not idealized. (9)

Emily Haworth Booth is a contemporary illustrator who has recently done a short graphic novel for The Obsever called Colonic. She hasn’t had much artist training apart from studying an art foundation at Chelsea College where as a student she made illustrated books.  From being a receptionist to a stand up comedian Booth has always had an interest in illustration and graphics, especially through the eyes of Chris Ware. (11)

Colonic graphically symbolises one of the therapies you have done by inserting natural herb with water via the rectum for the colon to receive.  This unpleasant process has defiantly been shown in a humorous way by being edited and exaggerated in the ways of ChrisWare, a graphic illustrator. For example ware brings together two classically contrasting methods of up-to-date storytelling, spare and objective and on the other hand excessive and subjective (12a) Booth does this by taking a subjective view of colonic irrigation but also uses an objective view by using a particularcolour scheme, brown, blue and white and “crude like” speech from the Chinese woman presented at the top of the panel so the reader is drawn to this. 

Booth was inspired by this piece by originally keeping a diary of her encounters as part of her recovery process from chronic fatigue syndrome. You can clearly see from her controlled, simple drawings with abrupt language that goes hand in hand very well, that gives a kind of “home” like humour to the piece when you view this graphic novel.  Through Booth using a clean (antiseptic) illustration style by her enhance of simple linear drawings and light blue in her colour scheme that remind me of the NHS and brown that symbolises the colour of faeces she keeps it all very real! In contrast Ware does this as well, bringing in reality into his graphic novel through graphic symbolism by arranging and composing scenes into enfolded patterns “ through fantasises into other realities, through public events that stream at us in frames and screens-all going on simultaneously, all woven together” says Chris Ware. (12b)

Gabriel Moreno is a contemporary illustrator who illustrates these wonderful women in an organic way.  In June 2007 he was selected amongst 20 new talents of illustration, by the London based magazine computer arts that put him as a unique illustrator.  (16)

From originally taking a degree in Fine Art at the university of Sevilla in 1998 he has now reached the main motif that he draws for is the exquisite features of woman.  Using pen and ink he expresses shadow of pattern over the face to convey a fairy-tale like

atmosphere.  The high colour contrast and warm and cool colour schemes stimulates texture.  It draws the eye to the activeness and organic mark making upon layers of images that take you into an erotic world of place and memory.  (15)

Moreno illustrations have made him internationally known. “His distinct style that combines a deep etched engraved style with surreal get a sensitive flamboyance” (13) through his formal qualities and subject matter of nature and woman in his work, he reminds us of how we are all linked together on earth.  “a reminder, if you will that this world is not ours along to do what we please.  Co-existence and respect for each other is the key take away.  For that alone this iconic and innovate artist should be noted.” (14)

Polyp is a radical political cartoonist that lives in Manchester and has been drawing cartoons since 1980 for Leeds student Newspaper where he first took it up. He now associates with clients such as New Internationalist Magazine where he got his first break with the issue “Starve Trek”, the Ethical Consumer Magazine, WDM, Christian Aid, Liberty and many more.  Recently he has explored and illustrated a graphic novel called The Co-op Revolution.  This novel looks at the business model that can be used as a foundation for future well being.  It looks at the beginning of the co-op movement and the beneficial impacts the co-op has done and will do in 2044. (17)

Influenced by Steve Bell and Matt Brooks’s use of graphic symbolism. Polyp clean crisp style of drawing that you can clearly see in this cartoon image of football he has done “Owned! Mutual soccer action” graphically works due to the line work that is used after the football has been kicked encouraging movement and therefore an unrealisticperspective.  Polp also graphically uses text within the crowd and speech bubbles about the subject matter and incorporates the client that he is illustrating “co-operation yesterday today tomorrow always” he ties in everything through line and type and make us realise about injustices we’re surrounded by.  His work makes people ponder on his cartoons and emboldens and entertains especially this graphic novel that opens up his high interest in world history that he wants people to be aware of. “We point out in the graphic novel that every cell in our bodies, and those of almost all life on the planet are endosymbiotic co-operatives- separate organisms with their own DNA, working together as a single unit.”Polyp says. (18)   

Steve Bell is a political cartoonist that has produced for Punch, Private Eye, Radio Times, The Spectator and most importantly The Guardian.  Bell argues that “in the cartoon lies the grain of truth” (19) by his metaphorical graphic language he focuses on George Bush and Tony Blair in many of his works including Margaret Thatcher. 

He depicts Tony Blair as a dog “Americas Poodle” due to Bush dragging Britain into the Iraq War. He depicts the same mad eye as Margaret Thatcher and a very pointed head which along with his ears, can be used to make any object e.g. the speed camera and giant eye. Through utilising wordplay and corse humour and euphemistic variants he also depicts George Bush as a stupid Chimpanzeeinspired by the film Bedtime for Bonzo which Ronald Reager ( US president at the same time as Margaret Thatcher 1980s)  appeared in with a chimp.  Bell greeted Bush election with a cartoon “Bigtime for Bonzo”. 

As a result Bell graphically symbolises his work through keeping political egos deflated and represent the characters victims symbolically through visual metaphor.  (20)

Overall discussing and exploring graphic symbolism and visual qualities of these artists, I have learnt they both can be showed in many different motifs through media, perspective, pattern, mark making and many more. Therefore with these various motifs of graphic symbolism and visual qualities the artist’s message of their work can be changed easily.