On Illustrators and Cartoonists: Self-Identification
Split-screen: Maxfield Parrish, detail, Alarums and Excursions, 1899, collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Ivan Brunetti, Dressing Down, cover illustration for The New Yorker, November 1, 2010. See comparative discussion below.
Like everybody else in higher education, I have retreated to my home studio/office to conduct classes for the balance of the spring 2020 semester. As I wrote last week, in my revised syllabus for the graduate drawing seminar I am teaching this semester:
“The extraordinary events of March 2020, dominated by the novel coronavirus and associated public health crisis, have created new and challenging conditions for the completion of our work together. Challenging, but not impossible. In truth, the isolation of these days mimics the solitude and sometime alienation of the work we do as culture makers, often toiling without knowing whether our efforts will find an audience, or have any discernible effect. Contrary to popular assumption, this is work for sturdy folk. We are such people.”
So, let’s buck up to the degree possible, and proceed in our work until circumstances preclude it. To that end, our graduate students have begun drafting an apologia project, also characterized as the “HOW/WHAT/WHY BOOK.” Also from the syllabus:
“[This is the] culminating project for the semester, combining writing and images. An apologia is neither an apology (saying I’m sorry), or an apologetic (a defense of doctrine). An apologia is a reasoned explanation of a position--in this case, your evolving practice and professional orientation…From here on out, our work will be devoted to this project. [For ‘book’ read:] a zine-like pamphlet in a specified format, distributed for review as a pdf, and printed later, after all this is over.”
I plan to use this project to inspire several posts on different aspects of such an undertaking. The first of these, today, has to do with questions of self-identification. In my book Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice (2018) I devoted attention to these questions in a binary way: the divide of self-identification between illustrators and cartoonists. This is a complex subject, and I refer the reader to the book for more. At heart, I have been concerned with illustration and cartooning as cultural practices, and the way that individual practitioners self-identify.
Below, from section 6.6, Illustration as a Cultural Practice:
“Ideologically speaking, values of fidelity and veracity guide illustrators’ efforts. As cultural workers, they labor to shed light. The illustrator’s craft has been based on descriptive drawing, dramatic composition, the employment of a symbolic aptitude, and the provision of a plausible sense of reality. (Over time, cartoon drawing styles made their way into the field of illustration. Today, illustration covers an extremely broad range of style and media. But veracity remains a prime value. Nowadays, fidelity doesn’t entail a particular visual style. A simplified or flattened-out drawing approach might work particularly well to explicate a given text. In other words, the contemporary illustrator isn’t necessarily faithful to appearances, but rather to content.)
And from 6.7, Cartooning as a Cultural Practice:
Cartoonists embrace the values of jest, in both senses of the term: amusement and mockery. They are accountable to facts only insofar as information supports and sharpens the comedy. To revise the formulation of Scott McCloud, cartoonists rely on simplification and amplification: They generalize some things and exaggerate others. As a result, they work in more flattened out, stripped-down, and calligraphic styles, to keep us focused on the story. As a corollary, many rely on an abstract sensibility. For example, when Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown sits on the stoop of his house, the stoop in question is not a particular stoop, built of wooden planks or cast in concrete; it is the stoop, as abstract in spirit as any set design for Waiting for Godot. Its lack of particularity gives it an existential power. Cartooning often relies on such strategies.”
In Stick Figures, I juxtaposed two images, gathered at the top of this post as a pair: a Maxfield Parrish illustration for The Golden Age, by Kenneth Grahame (1900); and an Ivan Brunetti New Yorker cover, Dressing Down, from the November 2010, issue.
Concerning the first image: Parrish’s make-believe is grounded in observable reality, costume, and photographic reference. Alarums serves up a “St. George and the Dragon,” sans made-up dragon, by pressing a snake into service. The value of veracity taken to an extreme.
And the second: Notable for the schematized representations of people and the hieratic spatial display. Brunetti represents people as interchangeable visual integers, differentiated from one another by critical attributes like hair styles, costumes, and props.
Parrish and Brunetti are at opposite ends of the spectrum, from lens-based opticality to the elementally symbolic.
Since publishing Stick Figures, in dialogue with professionals and students, I have continued to reflect on these questions of self-identification.
Above, a matrix of possibility: a bingo card! An early version of this was presented in our last class as a discussion topic. The students had many helpful suggestions, especially in the realm of game design versus game playing. I have incorporated their edits in this version.
I will post again soon to explicate this matrix. But for now, here is a take on drawing-based (or drawing-related) practices in an “expanded field.”
Coles Phillips, advertisement, Holeproof Hosiery, circa 1915. An illustration, made by an illustrator.
Chester Gould, two panels from a Dick Tracy daily strip, November 10, 1965. A cartoon, drawn by a cartoonist.
Harry Beckhoff, Elks Magazine cover illustration, April 1950. Normatively speaking, this is an illustration, made by a person who identified as an illustrator. But the characterizations, as often in Beckhoff, look cartooned, and the narrative is freestanding, in its way—although all magazine covers “illustrate” their mastheads. More the case for the Saturday Evening Post than Elks magazine.
Harry Beckhoff, detail, Elks Magazine cover illustration. If the character suggest cartoon drawing, they are also accurately proportioned and specifically costumed. All told, the illustration sensibility wins out, but not by much.
Charles Schultz, Peanuts. Snoopy’s doghouse is a generalized, abstract structure, not a particular one.
A detail of the Brunetti. Wonder Woman and Edgar Allen Poe show up at the costume party. Bobbleheads and insect appendages, supplemented by precise expression (Poe looks strung out) and well chose props (quoth the raven, “Nevermore,” and WW’s tiara + whip).