Flex Mentallo

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!]

I love comics obviously, or I wouldn’t even be here. Might not even have chosen to become an artist [however mediocre]. But comic illustration is a language that has evolved to tell a story. They are often done with great artistry and astonishing skill.

Sadly, I've never made it to the Prado. I'd especially like to see Velasquez Las Meninas. Which sets off an entirely different train of thought. Maybe I'll come back to it later. Edward Hopper has always been my favourite American painter and I guess I'll get to him as well. Regarding Photoshop - let me tie that into what I was saying about pen and ink [and what happens when you try to convert a black and white drawing into a full colour image in Photoshop.

Thanks Dan! Happy New Year to you and our fellows!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Goya

However, the greatest artist ever to work in black and white [even more than Rembrandt], is Goya in his extraordinary series of etchings. He has been called the first truly modern artist, prefiguring expressionism and surrealism. His technique was masterful.What really counts here - what blows away any comparison with the worthy illustrators above, is the depth and weight of humanism embodied here. Goya's world is horrific and beautiful. Goya reflects upon the human condition and his eye is unflinching.

That being said, the artist who really excelled and came into his own in black and white was Reed Crandall, who arguably did his very best work on his illustrations for Burroughs Mars books http://www.erbzine.com/mag23/2302.html

Mark Schultz surpasses them all. His work in black and white is perhaps the most masterful http://theartofbarsoom.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/mark-schultz.html

Working solely in black and white is an entirely different way of thinking about how to render light and dark, and the surface texture of forms. Buscema and Alcala proved to be a near perfect team

For me the acid test of a comic book artist is whether their work can stand the test of black and white. Without recourse to colour, does the artwork stand up. Infantino and Anderson pass the test fairly well.

Super Detective Library often had a sci-fi theme and were brilliantly illustrated http://ukcomics.wikia.com/wiki/Super_Detective_Library

And in particular there were the digest sized War Picture Library, Air Ace and Commando, written by men who had served in the war The interiors of these were in black and white. I became intrigued quite early by the way in which spot blacks were used to evoke mood, and strangely, colour. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Picture_Library

There was Buffalo Bill by the great Denis McLoughlin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_McLoughlin