At numerical intervals that please me because they round to a clean number in a hexadecimal system, I like to highlight the work of artists who I admire/like/find interesting. Last time we took a long walk through The Mission district in San Francisco in a three part series, starting here. This time it, it is Kara Walker's turn.
Stark silhouettes and clean negative space has always appealed to my aesthetic sense. It may have something to do with a misspent childhood reading comic books, I don't know. What I like about silhouettes is the minimalist nature of it. The details are all gone, so it invites the viewer to fill in the gaps. It takes a lot of restraint for an artist to strip out all of the details and only put out the bare minimum to get her point across. I sense a dynamic tension in Kara's work, the imagery appears superficially playful, but the actual scenes depict horrific antebellum cruelty.
3 comments:
I thought your comic book history didn't extend much past the _Watchmen_, for some reason. Dude, I could dump a ton and a half of comic books on you -- (not literally, I mean I have saved and scanned a lot of thought-provoking comics into CBZ format. Look up the CBZ reader, it's very convenient.) Cerebrus used to get a lot done/told with stark silhouettes, although I only have one of his comics...
I basically stopped paying any attention to comics at about age 14 or 15, but that is the medium from whence I initially learned to draw and it took me many years to overcome comic-booky shortcuts in drawing human figures. I still think the art form is amazing, though I don't care so much for the vector-based, computer graphics of today's comics as I've seen them in passing. I got away from the form because I found the writing, story-lines and characters to be a little ridiculous as I got older and they stopped holding my interest. I read the Watchmen when the movie came out because I remember hearing about it when I was younger.
I still have an appreciation for some of the old-timers, Jack Kirby, Ditko, some others I can't remember. I read a lot of 80s Marvel comics my brother gave to me back then. My last impression is of Image comics when they broke from Marvel. I think I can still appreciate what Sam Kieth was going for. Todd McFarlane used to amaze me when I was a kid, now I think it looks basically like shit, all his line work looks like someone who is neurotically compensating, and he was probably the first writer who started making me realize that comic writing was basically shit.
I agree with you about Todd McFarlane... some other comics, however, (before and after Watchmen) have been worthy explorations of philosophical or social issues... even if I don't agree with the comic writers' biases and conclusions, it's often interesting to see these slug-'em-out superheroes confronted with dilemmas their fists can't solve. (Which is why I usually prefer DC to Marvel; at its best, which is admittedly not frequent, DC returns to its roots as Detective Comics, and puts its nigh-omnipotent heroes into conundrums that their powers can't solve, whereas Marvel more often gets reduced to street-fighting.)
One of my favorite examples is an "Elseworlds" (parallel-universe) story called "Red Son", where infant Superman's rocket ship lands on a farm not in Kansas but in Communist Russia, and he grows into a Party apparatchik and uses his own powers to make the Communist experiment work... for a while.
Also satirical takes on super-heroes, such as the Tick, or maybe Normalman, can often be thought-provoking as well as playing for laughs... often by exposing lazy thinking and stereotypes in entertainment. For example, I think the Tick story, "Too Many Ninjas" back around 1996, was the first time anyone had specifically identified and lampooned the trope where an untrained white guy (in that case a girl named Oedipus) walks into a ninja dojo and immediately surpasses Asians who had grown up practicing martial arts for generations... today when we see (or hear) that trope, most of us recognize it as a silly Hollywood-ized version of American Exceptionalism, but that's partly because comic writers like Ben Edlund recognized it, got bored with it, and moved on from there.
But I feel bad hijacking your thread about a serious artist with a discussion of comic books. As you were. Please resume.
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