Category Archives: art criticism

October 30, 2021 · 3:00 pm

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Still being under the weather and filled with sinus head-pain, I decided to go back to a subject I love so much that the post will simply write itself. You know I love Norman Rockwell and his art, and I fervently believe that kind of mass media oil-painting does not put him in a lesser category than Rembrandt or Michelangelo or Raphael or any other painter with a ninja turtle namesake. He is a genius, and though he is not a realist in so many ways, his work is more truthful than practically any other kind of painting. If you are taken by surprise and didn’t know I had this passionate obsession, maybe you should go back and look at this post; Norman Rockwell

Now that I got that out of my system, here is another Saturday Evening Post artist that is often confused with Rockwell. His name is Amos Sewell.

Sewell was an amateur tennis player who was talented enough to win tournaments. He was an employee of Wells Fargo who was headed towards anything but an art career until he decided to make a leap of faith in 1930. He started as an illustrator for Street and Smith pulp fiction, and soon caught the notice of the big-time magazine markets for his art. He published art for Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentlemen Magazine, and Women’s Day.

Like Rockwell, he was able to find the funny in everyday scenes, like the dance party to the right. That young man at center stage is trying so hard not to step on the feet of the red-headed girl, that you want to laugh, but can’t because it’s obvious how embarrassed he would be, and the charm of the picture leads you to shun the thought of interrupting. The scene is so real the boy would hear you laughing as you looked at the Post cover.

More expert on this kind of art than I am is the Facebook site that I first got turned on to Sewell by. Children in Art History

They can also be found on WordPress. Children in Art History (WordPress)

There is no doubt that Amos Sewell belongs in the same pantheon of artists as Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, or Paul Detlafsen. They are all artists who achieve in their work exactly what I have always striven for. I want to be able to hold the mirror up to our world the way they did. I want to capture both the fantasy and the reality in the subject of everyday family life. I also want to share this work with you because I cannot stand the idea that such artistic ambrosia could one day be forgotten in archives where no one ever looks at it and feels the message in their heart.

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Tagged as Amos Sewell, art criticism, artwork, homely art, humor, Norman Rockwell style, philosophy, Saturday Evening Post

October 28, 2021 · 6:11 pm

Are Fairytales Controversial?

The This is Poppinsparkle, the girl fairy. Paid a fair wage for posing nude for this portrait.

In some versions of Cinderella, her wicked stepsisters, at their wicked mother’s insistence, cut off parts of their feet in order to fit into the glass slipper. And then, the stupid Prince Charmhead doesn’t notice until talking doves and pidgeons point out on the way to Charmhead Castle, “There’s blood in the shoe!”

And of course the Prince is so dense that he goes through this particular ordeal twice with the two wicked stepsisters.

He doesn’t get it right until Cindy puts the slipper on without any blood spurting that gets noticed by talking birds.

Dang! Prince Charmhead is a real dumbhead. What kind of a local ruler would a man be if he picks the love of his life simply because she fits a shoe he likes?

But it is obvious that fairytales, especially the old ones that have been retold by a lot of fairly stupid people and changed with each new teller, deserve most of the criticism they receive.

My current work in progress is a fairytale (in that it is thoroughly infested by many kinds of fairies, mostly the little three-inch-or-smaller kind.) It is called The Necromancer’s Apprentice.

The book is a comedy, meant primarily to entertain and be funny, though. like Shakespeare’s comedies, it is intended to demonstrate themes of romance and love, and how they percolate emotionally in spite of obstacles (and the manipulations of evil fairies.)

But it will undoubtedly get criticized for its exploitation of fairies. Especially young girl fairies who agreed to pose nude for illustrations in the book.

This will not, however, be fully justified. I, as the artist, paid each nude fairy model a fair wage. Sure, it was mostly in pennies. But they are all between two and three inches in height. A penny is heavy and unwieldy for tiny arms to carry. And a penny buys a lot in Gerry-go-Gompert’s General Store for Sylphs, Elves, and Butterfly Children (no Gobbuluns allowed!)

Dollinglammer, also paid her weight in pennies for posing for this picture.

And it you consider the context of a fairytale trying to portray fairies as they really are, you have to remember that Butterfly Children normally don’t wear clothing because it interferes with the flight of delicate butterfly wings. And all forms of actual fairy-kind are immune to heat and cold, and don’t need clothing for those reasons.

On top of that, most fairies believe in naturism and nudism as a healthy lifestyle and don’t object when I write a novel that promotes that idea a little bit.

I was a little worried that this illustration from the book might be viewed as evidence of Sylph abuse. Derfentwinkle is a nude Sylph girl who chooses to be nude all the time. In the contect of the plot, this shows her temporarily imprisoned in the Harpy cage. She is, after all, the Apprentice from the book’s title and the servant of the evil necromancer. The good guys capture her and keep her in this cage until they are sure they can trust her, Derfie herself told me that she didn’t object to this picture since the Sorcerer Eli Trajedy and his apprentices Bob and Mickey treat her better than her master ever did.

So, once I am finished with this book, I am almost certain that it will be just as controversial as Little Red Riding Hood who climbs into Grandma’s bed with a big bad wolf, or Snow White who lives alone in the woods with seven little single men. But controversy can be a good thing for a story. Readers love a lurid tale. Even when the subjects are less than three inches tall.

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August 20, 2021 · 3:48 pm

Jungle Book

Last night my family and I went to the new Disney movie Jungle Book directed by John Favreau. It was the movie version I have been waiting for all my life.

MOWGLI_AND_SHANTI_by_FERNL

The amazing thing about this movie is the way it took the book and layered its themes and central idea on top of the classic 60’s Disney cartoon. The music is still there and intact, though mostly moved to the end credits. The kid is still cute and mostly vulnerable, at least until the conclusion. And they have still given the Disneyesque comedic touch to the character of Baloo the bear, voiced by comedian Bill Murray in the this incarnation. But this is a live action movie and the kid-friendly Bowdlerization of the original story is a thing no longer.

A classic book illustration by E.J. Detmold

Fortunately for the young actor, Neel Sethi, they don’t require him to play the entire movie naked as would be required by a strictly by-the-book approach. They allow him the Disney-dignity of the cartoon red loin cover. But the sense of a human child facing the violence of the jungle naked, armed only with his creature-appropriate natural defenses, has been put back into the story. This version literally has teeth and claws. We see the boy’s body wounded and scarred during the course of his life in the jungle. And at a time of crucial confrontation, Mowgli takes the defense stolen from man village, a torch of the feared red flower, and throws it away into the water, facing the terrible tiger with only his wits and the abilities of his fangless, clawless human body. Thus, an essential theme I loved about the book when I was twelve is restored. Man has a place in the natural world even without the protections of civilization.

The story-telling is rich and nuanced, with multiple minor characters added. Gray Brother has been restored to Mowgli’s family. The fierce power of Mowgli’s wolf mother has been written back into the screenplay. And the character of Akela is given far more importance in the story than the cartoon could even contemplate. Although his role in aiding Mowgli to kill the tiger Shere Khan has been taken away from him, Akels’s death becomes the central motivation bringing Mowgli and Shere Khan together for the final inevitable confrontation. And this movie does not shy away from the reality of death as the cartoon did, resurrecting Baloo at the end and Kaa’s attempts to eat Mowgli being turned into a joke (though I would like to note if you have never read the book, Kaa is not supposed to be a villain. He was Mowgli’s wise and powerful friend in the book). Even the tiger survives in the cartoon version. This is no longer a cute cartoon story with a Disney sugared-up ending.

I will always treasure the 1960’s cartoon version. I saw it at the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa when I was ten. I saw it with my mother and father and sisters and little brother. It was my favorite Disney movie of all time at that point in my life. I read and loved the book two years after that, a paperback copy that I bought with my own money from Scholastic book club back in 1968, in Mrs. Reitz’s sixth grade classroom. That copy is dog-eared, but still in my library. But this movie is the best thing that could possibly happen to bring all of that love of the story together and package it in a stunning visual experience.

the-jungle-book-2016-poster-header-165110

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Tagged as classic Disney cartoons, humor, John Favreau, Jungle Book, movie review, Mowgli, Rudyard Kipling

July 25, 2021 · 3:56 pm

Homely Art – Part One – Thomas Kinkade

These images can be found at http://thomaskinkade.com/

I honestly have a thing for artists that critics hate and common folk like my parents and grandparents loved. Norman Rockwell is a bit like that. He enjoyed commercial success as a magazine illustrator. That is about as far from avant garde art as you can get. But what can I say? I don’t call myself an artist. I am a cartoonist and all around goofball. I don’t do serious art. So the questions surrounding Thomas Kinkade bounce off my tough old non-critical hide like bullets off the orphan of Krypton. I love his pictures for their gaudy splashes of color, his way with depicting puddles and water of all sorts (splashes of splashes), and his rustic homes and landscapes of another era. This is a man who does lovely calendar art and jigsaw puzzle art. He is roundly criticized for factory production of “original” oil paintings which are actually a base he created and made a print of painted over by an “assistant” artist or apprentice. But I don’t care . I like it. And you used to be able to see his originals without going to museums, in art stores at the shopping mall. He is unfortunately dead now. For most great artists, that makes their work more valuable and more precious. Kinkade’s art hangs in so many homes around the country already that his fame has probably already reached its peak. Look at these works that he did for Hallmark and Disney and various other mass-market retail outlets. I dare you not to like it.

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Tagged as art, art criticism, Art my Grandpa loved, homely art, Oil Painting, Thomas Kinkade

July 18, 2021 · 6:44 pm

About Bruce Timm

“Today I thought I would tell you about Bruce Timm.”

“Bruce Timm? Who the heck is he?”

“You know. That artist with that style… you know, the Batman guy.”

“You mean he played Batman?”

“No. He designed Batman; The Animated Series.”

“Oh, that guy… the guy who draws girls really good.”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

new-justice-league-series-bruce-timm

“He gave all the DC heroes their modern, animated look… their style and flair. He made them angular, immediately identifiable, and powerful.”

“Yeah, I think he not only did the Batman cartoon, all film noir and retro-cool, but the Superman series that followed it, the Justice League, and all the cartoon series and movies that went along with those.”

“But that’s not all he did, either, is it?”

“No, there’s more. He wanted to be a comic book artist, but before he got into animation, Marvel and DC turned him down.”

25e4094273e0d5a978ef3c3055e68176

“I heard he worked at Filmation for a while.”

“Yes, he got a chance to draw and design characters for Blackstar, Flash Gordon, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra; Princess of Power, and the Lone Ranger.”

“Dang! He was busy. But only superhero stuff?”

“In 1989 he went to work for Warner Brothers. He worked on Tiny Toon Adventures.”

“That Spielberg/Bugs Bunny thing? The one with Buster and Babs Bunny?”

“Yeah, that one, believe it or not.”

“Tell me more about the girls. I want to hear about him drawing girls. Wonder Woman in Justice League was hot.”

“Showing you is probably better than telling you. Be prepared to cover your eyes, though. He liked to draw the female figure nude and semi-naked.”

Betty and Veronica from the Archie comics.

brucee-timm-teaser-2012-b-800

bt-nan-book-pictures-01

“I like how he draws pretty girls.”

“You would.”

ms__marvel_commission_by_em_scribbles-d5db6sy

“He’s the artist you wish you could be, isn’t he?”

“Pretty much. He’s about four years younger than me. If I had gone the comic-book artist route instead of becoming a public school teacher, our careers might’ve been parallel.”

“Except he has talent.”

“Yeah, there’s that.”

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July 10, 2021 · 6:31 pm

Thinking About Thinking with a Thought-free Thinker

Yes, today is another in a long, tepid series of Art-Day posts, but it is also about metacognitive thinking. Specifically thinking about thinking using pictures to think with. (Maybe that title should say, “Free-Thought Thinker” rather than, “Thought-Free.”)

To start with, what does a person actually see when they close their eyes? My brain does not color everything on the inside of my eyelids black. Even in the dark of night with no nightlight so that nothing shines through my eyelids, my brain interprets the dark as shapes, patterns, and colors. Hence the inspiration for this picture.

But my brain is never satisfied with raw shapes, colors, and patterns. It has to interpret ideas into them. The mass of yellow and black resolves into a butterfly, or a sunflower, or an etude by J.S. Bach. The pink mass becomes a blond girl playing the music in my head…. a girl from piano-lesson days in the early 70’s. But naked. The way I always thought about her while sitting and waiting for my piano lesson and listening to hers. How else does a boy think about a pretty girl when he is fourteen?

And as the items in the picture take shape, they do also begin to tell a story. Who is this Dr. Seabreez? Is he a shaman of the Republic of Lakotah People? Is he a white man? Seabreez is not a Native American name. The naked boy by the tent flap has a crutch, and there is a mouse silhouetted nearby. Does that make him a medical doctor? A veterinarian? A professor of Native-American Studies? The mind begins to piece together a script.

But here we see that Dr. Seabreez has set up a new practice in Japan. Again the boy near the door has a crutch and there is a silhouetted mouse near him. But now the other boy has horns on his forehead. Why horns? And pointed ears? Is he a Doctor of Magic and Wizardry? Demonology perhaps? And what is an anthropomorphized panda doing in Japan? That’s clearly a Japanese castle in the distance. The collar Kanji is definitely Japanese in character.

And now there are horns again. Three of them by my count. And another naked character. But a Grecian background. The mind is here making connections between the pictures, noticing patterns. Appreciating colors. And turning every detail over in the mind’s eye, evaluating and analyzing.

Art, especially on Saturdays, totally engages the mind. That is one of the reasons we keep art around to look at again and again. It is the purpose of art to make us see something. And not just once, superfluously. We must see it in depth, looking beyond the surface.

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July 3, 2021 · 4:48 pm

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Now that I got that out of my system, here is another Saturday Evening Post artist that is often confused with Rockwell. His name is Amos Sewell.

More expert on this kind of art than I am is the Facebook site that I first got turned on to Sewell by. Children in Art History

They can also be found on WordPress. Children in Art History (WordPress)

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Tagged as Amos Sewell, art criticism, artwork, homely art, humor, Norman Rockwell style, philosophy, Saturday Evening Post

June 30, 2021 · 5:03 pm

Homely Art – Part Two – Paul Detlefsen

Back in about 1968 my Grandma Beyer was seriously scandalized by an artist named Paul Detlefsen. Detlefsen did a lot of covers for the “Ideals Magazine” that Grandma always had on her coffee tables. He scandalized her by putting a painting on the cover that showed a young boy taking his pants off, the rear view only, so he could go skinny dipping with a group of naked boys. Truthfully the picture shown above is by Detelfsen, but it is not the one that offended her. I have discovered that this painter of old-timey things like blacksmith shops and one-room school houses has painted at least four different versions of “the Old Swimmin’ Hole”. And Grandma was easily scandalized when we were kids. She was a very conservative woman who loved Ronald Reagan and his politics most severely and thought that Richard Nixon was a leftist radical. She didn’t like for people to be naked, except for bath time, and maybe not even then. She is one of the main reasons, along with this painter whom she adored, that I came to learn later in life that “naked is funny”. http://www.freeplaypost.com/PaulDetlefsen_VintageArtPrint_A.htm

Grandma Beyer also seriously loved puzzles, and besides “Ideals” covers, Paul Detlefsen did a beaucoup of jigsaw puzzles. (Beaucoup means a lot in Texican, I tend to think in Iowegian and talk in Texican and completely forget about the need to translate for those people who don’t know those two foreign tongues) One of the puzzles we spent hours working on was “Horse and Buggy Days” that I pictured here. They were the kind of puzzle paintings where every boy was Tom Sawyer and every girl was Becky Thatcher. And there were a lot of them. Here is another;

http://www.bigredtoybox.com/cgi-bin/toynfo.pl?detlefsenindex

Grandma had this in puzzle form also. We put the puzzle together, glued it to tag board, and framed it. It has hung on the wall in a Grandparent’s house, first Grandma Beyer’s and then Grandma Aldrich’s, since the early 1970’s. My own parents now live in Grandma Aldrich’s house, and that puzzle-painting may be hanging in an upstairs bedroom to this very day. Detlefsen is not known as a great artist. He was a humble painter who painted backdrops for films for over 20 years. In the 1950’s he switched gears and started doing lithographs that were turned into calendars, jigsaw puzzles, laminated table mats, playing cards, and reproductions you could buy in the Ben Franklin Dime Store in Belmond, Iowa and hang on your back porch at home. I believe I saw his paintings in all these forms in one place or another. According to Wikipedia (I know, research, right?) “In 1969, UPI estimated that his artwork had been seen by 80 per cent of all Americans.” That is pretty dang good for a humble painter, better numbers than Pablo Picasso ever saw. Let me share a few more of his works, and see if you recognize any of these;

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Tagged as art criticism, artist, artwork, homely art, Oil Painting, painters I love and admire, Paul Detlafsen

May 3, 2021 · 3:13 pm

Krazy Kat

I told you before about a cartoonist from ancient ‘Toon Times named Fontaine Fox. He was a master, and I acknowledge him as one of my greatest inspirations. But he was not the original master mentor for my teenage ‘Toon Training. That honor goes to the inestimable George Herriman. He was the Krazy Kartoonist who died more than a decade before I was born, yet, through his Kreation, Krazy Kat, did more to warp my artistic bent into Krazy Kartooniana Mania than anybody else. I discovered him first. I found him through Komic books and the Kard Katalog at the local library. I own a copy of the book I pictured first in this post. It is the first Kartoon book I ever bought. I couldn’t post a picture of my actual book here because I have read it so often in the past forty years that the Kover has Kome off. It is now more of folder of loose pages than a book.

Krazy Kat is a newspaper Komic strip that ran all around the world from 1913 to 1944. Comics Journal would rate Krazy Kat as the greatest work of Komic art of the 20th Century. Art critics hailed it as serious art, and it fits snugly into the surrealist movement of Salvador Dali and others. It has been cited as a major influence on the work of other artists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware.

The centerpiece of the strip is a love triangle. Krazy Kat the Kharacter is a feline who may be female or may be male but is definitely deeply in love with Ignatz Mouse. The Krazed rodent hopped up on seriously stinky fromage (cheese to us non-French speakers), is Konstantly throwing bricks at Krazy’s head… obviously out of serious disdain, however, Krazy sees it as a confession of love. Offisa Pup, the police watchdog, wants to jail the malevolent mouse for battery and protect the precious Kat, whom he obviously loves with an unrequited love. Explanations are superfluous in the weird world of Krazy Kat. How can I explain the charm, the humor, the good-natured violence of a strip such as this? There are echoes of it in Tom and Jerry animated cartoons, but nothing like it really exists anywhere else. Krazy has her own unique language, a language that you naturally learn to interpret as you read the strip. Ignatz exhibits psychotic frustrations that he takes out on the world around him in our name, that we might experience hubris at his expense. And what’s with that mysterious sack of “Tiger Tea” that Krazy carries about and keeps a Klosely guarded “sekrit”?

I honestly hope you will give Krazy Kat a thorough “look-see”. Because if you like Kartoons at all… and it doesn’t have to be the Krazy Kooky love of a seriously overdosed addict like me… you will fall desperately in love with this one. It is a world of its own, a superbly superfluous abstract anachronism. It is a surrealist’s dream of fun with puns and tons of buns… or something like that. Simply put… read it and don’t like it… I dare you!

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Tagged as art criticism, artists I adore, books, cartoons, classic cartoons, comic book, humor

March 7, 2021 · 9:08 pm

“Oh, no! Not Dr. Seuss!”

“And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “The Cat’s Quizzer,” “If I Ran the Zoo,” “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!” and “Scrambled Eggs Super!”

Apparently, according to conservative-minded friends and cousins on Facebook, evil liberal Democrats are out to cancel and get rid of Dr. Seuss. They are taking seriously the warnings of the good-hearted, common-sense broadcasters at OAN and Fox News and rushing out to buy copies of Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who, Green Eggs and Ham, and Oh, the Places You’ll Go before the communist-leaning book-burning enemies of the people get ahold of them.

I say to this dire warning, “Okay! Great! Buy every wonderful Dr. Seuss book you can get your hands on! That’s the right thing to do!”

But I would be remiss in my duty not to also say, “Don’t spend a thousand dollars on e-Bay to get a copy of And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street.“

Let me say this, as a teacher who taught reading skills in all of my thirty-one years as a public school teacher, I always made use of Dr. Seuss books whenever and wherever possible, even reading Fox in Sox aloud to gifted students (and reading those tongue-tying tongue-twizzlers as fast as it is possible to read aloud without wrapping my tongue around my eye teeth and crashing into my molars because I couldn’t see what I was saying.) (Which the kids always found profoundly entertaining.) And I celebrated Dr. Seuss’s birthday every March since that became a thing in 1988.

But I also think that we have to recognize that Theodore Seuss Geisel, Dr. Seuss, is a man from a different time. Some of the tropes and techniques he learned and employed in the 1940s as a political cartoonist and ad illustrator are no longer appropriate in the time of George Floyd and Asians being attacked over the “Wuhan Kung Flu.”

Remember, his cartoon skills were developed back when America was fighting propaganda wars with the Axis powers.

So, in some of his works, he may have been guilty of some outdated thinking and is unintentionally racist in some of the things he cartooned and thought were funny.

And of the books that will no longer be published, I admit that I read and enjoyed If I Ran the Zoo while I was learning to read in the first grade. And I think I read McElligot’s Pool in school in 1965, but I don’t really remember what was down there at the bottom under the protagonist’s fishhook. I looked up a hard-to-find copy of And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street in 2009, and saw that it was not really right for my ESL class at that time. The other three controversial books I haven’t even heard of before this whole thing first outraged Fox News reporters. These six books were not available for purchase from either Barnes and Noble or the Dr. Seuss website before the controversy.

So, I love Dr. Seuss. But I am not worried. Democrats and liberals like me are not trying to do away with Dr. Seuss. In fact, Random House publishers are not even the ones who decided. Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the business that preserves and protects the author’s legacy, announced it would cease sales of these books. So, this is purely editorial in nature and certainly within the rights of Dr. Seuss’s family, friends, and promoters to do.

But by all means, buy up more Dr. Seuss books! Give them to kids you care about! I can’t think of anything I would rather have conservatives, Republicans, and Fox News viewers doing than reading about Horton, the Grinch, Sam-I-Am. and Daisy-head Maisy.

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Tagged as Dr. Seuss

Category Archives: art criticism

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Are Fairytales Controversial?

Jungle Book

Homely Art – Part One – Thomas Kinkade

About Bruce Timm

Thinking About Thinking with a Thought-free Thinker

Homely Art – Amos Sewell

Homely Art – Part Two – Paul Detlefsen

Krazy Kat

“Oh, no! Not Dr. Seuss!”

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