Flex Mentallo

Edward Hopper (1882 –1967) Hopper was a painter of silence. In his world, time stops. People live frozen lives. Here is a gallery of his work.

I'd just like to say thanks to the following board members for posting in this thread. Your comments have been deeply appreciated - frequently heart warming, occasionally thought provoking, and always positive! I apologise for not having found the time to acknowledge each of you individually. I hope you all have a great New Year! Sardo Numspar, nearmint, jimjum12, Sqeggs, MrBedrock, Kevin.J, comixnoir, adamstrange, DavidMerryweather, goldust40, Foxtrot70, RedFury, godquest, comicjack, Yellow Kid, Comicopolis, jbcomicbox, pcalhoun, Comixcroz, Twistty1, Buzzetta, comicwiz, Senormac, Sal, thehumantorch, 40YrsCollctngCmcs, BOOT, Theagenes, buttock

Here is a work in progress based on the pen and ink collage I posted earlier. This is actually a picture of a rock overlaid on my drawing. Now I have to engage with both surface and image, in order to excavate what lies beneath. So the issue with using Photoshop is a parallel concern to that of transforming drawing convincingly into paint. How to transcend the medium? How to create density of feeling in one so facile, when you can simply request a filter to render an image in any way imaginable? One day perhaps I'll know.

I've been thinking a lot about cave painting recently, about how the artist/shaman [probably a woman by the way, as shamans are to this day in Siberia] worked harmoniously with the surface of the rock face to evoke the form of the ur-animal she wanted to depict - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux

Or if not him then Turner

Whereas Velasquez was perhaps the ultimate "painter's painter." Infanta Margarita

Guernica

How does one turn a linear, black and white image into a full colour painting? This has never been easy for me, and is often the curse of those who are more comfortable with drawing than painting. Picasso for example, was essentially a draughtsman - Minotauromachia

The question becomes, how does the artist manage to get out of his or her own way? Because at the end of the story, it isn’t about being "great", which is a public trial; it's about knowing, which is a private revelation and a personal epiphany. “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”

Illustration tells a story. Art may also do so, but in the telling may sometimes transcend the story. [A masterpiece is a work that by definition transcends the artist's intentions, and the problem with art schools - in which I have both studied and taught - is that they encourage students to consciously try to paint a masterpiece, which by definition cant be done.] “I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.”

“To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.”

“When I was a child her sureness enraged me (regardless of the argument involved). It was a sureness that revealed - at least to my eyes - how, behind the bravado, she was vulnerable and hesitant, whereas I wanted her to be invincible. Consequently, I would contradict whatever it was she was being so certain about, in the hope we might discover something else, which we could question together with a shared confidence. Yet what happened, in fact, was that my counterattacks, made her more frail than she usually was, and the two of us would be drawn, helpless, into a malestrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out for an angel to come and save us. On no such occasion did an angel come.”

“All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves toward the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out”

“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”

In terms of technical accomplishment, the above examples would be hard to equal, let alone surpass. By way of contrast, here are some of Balthus' illustrations for Wuthering Heights. Technically, they don’t compare to Frazetta et al. But they tap into the emotional substrata that make the novel so darkly compelling, and did more to fuel my fascination with pen and ink even than comic books I read as a child. And that's because they don’t just tell the story. They embody what is underneath. They resonate with our own abiding sense of humanity. And to help bring this out I have interspersed them with some words from the writer John Berger [which, to clarify, have nothing to do with Emily Brontë!]