I love Bob Dylan’s recent album, Christmas in the Heart. Listened to it many times on Christmas day. This is his video for Little Drummer Boy. The people do seem awfully pink but maybe it’s just my eyes playing tricks on me.
Tag Archives: Art
Paris Filmmaker in 1929 Shows Us What a Camera is For
This is an odd post and I’m not entirely sure I can pull it off. The film above is called Montparnasse. It was made in 1929 by Eugene Deslaw. I watched the film and want to write about it cold, without looking up Mr. Deslaw on Google. I’ll check up on him after I’ve posted this and see if I’m even in the ballpark.
Watch the film all the way through. If you think it’s just a collection of boring tourist shots in Paris with nothing happening, then stop reading and leave now because this post is for the four out of one hundred who catch the drift of the camera work. Deslaw was shooting in the Paris of Pablo Picasso and Matisse. He appears to have had a close connection to art and the cafe life of the city. His film is full of odd angles and closeups. He runs up onto a balcony in order to shoot straight down at some tabletops. He catches a woman applying makeup at about the 13-minute mark and makes a shot that is worth paying for. He films traffic and buildings, windows, curbs, chairs, newspapers, smokers, drinkers, snake-handlers, paintings, and water. He’s fascinated by his city and by his camera. He’s making art. He set out one morning with his camera and went around making art. Everyone was happy to be alive there in Paris in 1929 and he was playing his part in it. Films made at that time tend to have this cheerful experimental quality. Deslaw is nearly drawing with his camera. It’s an immediate act of finding visual meaning. He was walking and was struck by something and filmed it in an excited state. He was consciously being an artist.
The film he made is beautiful. It’s very hard to make a film with its kind of beauty today. Think about it a little. What would you do? Go to a Best Buy and look around for a brand new digital camera. You know, one of those shiny silver things with the HD viewfinder and all the buttons. One of those? Then what? You’d march out into the neighborhood with this gleaming tourist gizmo and look like a ninny bending over to film trash as it floated down into a storm drain? You’d walk up to a guy behind a news stand and ask to film him? Really?
Yes. That’s what you’d do. You’d get a little camera and do just that. And here’s your assignment: you must do this with the total conviction that you are about to make the greatest film ever made about your subject matter. Set out for a particular street corner and make a magnificent short film or a long one about that corner and everything on it. Spend an entire day doing only that. Skip lunch. Just stay there and make your film without ever entertaining even the slightest doubt that you are working on something of incredible importance and value. It’s going to be very hard to do. Some people will walk by and giggle. Some will become belligerent and tell you to stop. Film those people. Run away if they chase you. Then come back and continue your work. Remember that you are an artist on a mission to make something and absolutely nothing will stop you. Then come back home and figure out how to edit it and then put it online. Tell me about it even and I’ll watch it.
In 1929 it would have been recognized by the maker of this film that a camera is a camera and it will make your film if you want it to. Ever wonder why you don’t ever see Steven Spielberg out and about with his little camera making a movie for himself? It’s strange isn’t it? Could you imagine Pablo Picasso or David Hockney never carrying a sketchbook to make some quick pictures while having coffee or dinner? I couldn’t imagine such a thing? So when was the last time you ever heard of a Spielberg or Scorsese out with a camera making little films for their web site?
You could almost think of all the decades of massive budget film production and the studio structures built to support the film industry and film schools as an organized effort to confuse the issue and make people forget what a film actually is. We think of screenwriters and producers and agents and superstars and all the talk shows. But it’s very hard for the artist to walk out with the camera and go make a film the way a painter would work alone on a canvas. The Montparnasse film should help to illuminate the proper use of the camera for anyone who’s interested.
Picasso Has a Comment for Doomed Publishers, Editors, Bookshops, and Newspapers
We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.
Pablo Picasso
Marvel Makes a Create Your Own Comic Tool
Marvel Comics has a Create Your Own Comic tool that lets you put together either a simple 3-panel strip or an entire 22-page comic book. You don’t actually draw anything, but you choose layouts, backgrounds, characters and objects. You can re-size everything and layer objects on top of each other. It’s great for trying one’s hand at designing a layout that tells a story effectively. So write your comic book and start designing!
iPod Art: Lavender
More finger sketching from the iPod. The major problem I see with drawing on an iPod or an iPhone is that it doesn’t work well in the sunshine. You can’t see the screen well enough to draw. Paper works better on a beach.
iPod Art: Ocean From Memory
Drawn on my iPod with the Brushes app. This one’s an ocean from memory.
iPod Art: Bottle Flowers
During my vacation I took a few opportunities to sketch with the Brushes app on my iPod. Here’s a bottle with flowers on a windowsill.
iPod Art: Yard Umbrella
I’ve been having fun with my iPod Touch today. I got inspired to draw with the excellent Brushes app but my fingers are big fat and clumsy, so it required lots of zooming to make the view big enough so my painting wasn’t just a bunch of gigantic blobs. I drew the umbrella against a backdrop of foliage in my yard. The weather has been just as excellent as it should look in the picture.
I’ve learned that David Hockney, one of the greatest artists in the world, is drawing on his iPhone with the same application. His drawings are much more successful than mine, but it’s fun for anyone to draw with a finger!
The Cool School: LA Art Scene Film
This video is from a PBS Independent Lens documentary about the Ferus Gallery that shaped much of the Los Angeles art scene in the early 1960s. It’s short but it conveys some of the sense of LA’s wild, nervy, uncontrolled art attitude that is still in force today. I love the zoom in on Andy Warhol who’s standing in front of one of his works and he just says, ‘Oh.’ LA still has that sense of offering the individual artist the clear opportunity to walk into a gallery, shake hands, say ‘How’s it going?’ and end up with an art showing a few weeks later. It’s a city of entrepreneurs. New York is a city of deeply knowledgeable and experienced people who understand that there is a system in place that’s been there forever. That’s why people walk fast in New York. They’re all trying to stay on schedule so the system keeps running. In LA, everyone is throwing crowbars into the system and breaking it so that they can make their own. The gallery scene in downtown LA is really interesting these days. You can walk for blocks, stopping in at the galleries for a wide variety of offerings. There are a couple of galleries that have copped an arrogant New York attitude and they are the ones I stay away from. In general, you get a real feeling of the art being right there and totally accessible to you. Everything is for sale. The artists are interested in your money. It’s very simple and healthy. When I buy a piece of art in LA I feel like I’ve pulled a fast one on the art world somehow. I feel complicit in something with underground tones.
75 Ways to Draw More: Advice for People Who Don’t Draw
Michael Nobbs has posted a little booklet on Flickr that has a list of 75 ways to draw more. Interesting concept. But of course it should go without saying that if you need to read a list of 75 ways to find more time to draw, you probably should be doing something else anyway.
I think the main information to take away from an illustrated list like this is from the illustrations that show you how to print the list out. What they show you is that you can just look at an object and start drawing lines on a piece of paper. Something will emerge. It might be messy. It might be neat. That will be your drawing. I call this little piece of advice ‘1 way to draw less.’
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: Making Comics: Manga, Graphic Novels, and Beyond
This is a book by Jessica Abel and Matt Madden that leads the reader through a full tutorial in writing and drawing comics. It includes many examples and information about what materials to use for your comics. There are 15 lessons in all which cover everything from writing your story, to laying out your panels, to lettering for dialog.