illustration:
The Garden of Earthly Delights
For Inktober 2020 I decided to draw a creature from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights each day. I ended up drawing far more than 31 of the creatures since I drew almost all of the third panel (Hell) in its full. There are so many great little details in the original painting, and it was so fascinating to spend day after day looking at it. I highly recommend looking at the high-res photos available online.
Observe + Quantify
These drawings and the Riso prints that came out of them feel more true to my actual personality than anything else I’ve made. I really love working with Riso. Pan Terzis really hit the nail on the head when describing Risograph at Multiple Formats. He said it feels like something between arming a nuclear warhead and doing secretarial work in a 1980s office. The machine physicality of it is something I find very appealing. This is the first time I integrated my illustration with digital design and Riso all at once, and I found it very satisfying to bring together so many disparate parts of my newfound knowledge-base. I was also really inspired by my classmate Jaylen’s prints. I was happy to see someone else incorporating illustration skills into Riso work. His prints were so focused, clean, and well executed. I would really love to try something like that next with my own illustrations.
One of my main motivations with this project was to make my work more personal. The nature of the prompt is very open-ended and allows room for monumental undertakings. My first thought was more data-centric. I thought about trying to document and visually represent polyrhythms using shape and color. Then I considered doing something with basketball statistics. Ultimately, I realized that those were projects that anyone could do at any time. Nothing about them was rooted in the material circumstances of my life. I have been reading a lot of David Sedaris recently and I appreciate his ability to reflect upon seemingly insignificant day-to-day things. I wanted to see how documenting my own life would capture my voice, especially compared to my previous work. I spent three days documenting various details of my life. I took fastidious notes and tried to draw as much as I could in the moment. What I couldn’t draw immediately, I either photographed to draw later or I simply committed it to memory.
Not all of the drawings here were done live. Some (like the drawing of Shuning giving the peace sign) were drawn from photos after class. Ultimately, though, every drawing was made between 2/23 and 2/25 of 2022. The drawings were always intended to be Riso prints as per the assignment prompt, but I wasn’t sure how I would be printing them for some time. The original plan was to print my drawings over photographs of the rooms in which the events took place. My tests of that idea weren’t satisfactory. The photos felt busy and distracted from the drawings. Then, during the last day of Multiple Formats Book Symposium, I was sitting in one of the sessions when the idea came to me: I could print the drawings on top of Riso prints from the studio. There had been Riso workshops that entire weekend, so not only was the Riso printer still accessible, but the studio was full of spare prints from the past few days. I immediately ducked out of the symposium and headed to the studio to start printing. I found a few scraps and then supplemented the remainder by taking materials from the workshops, turning them into masters, and reprinting them in various combinations. I had what I needed for printing, so I just had to format my drawings and reprint once everything was dry.
Grisaille
Donatello: Judith & Holofernes, 1457-1464. Commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici for the garden of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence. In 1495, it was moved out of the Medici palace to the Piazza Della Signora to commemorate Florence casting off the yoke of the despotic Medicis to establish a republic. Not long thereafter, the Medicis returned to power.
Cellini: Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545-1554. This statue was commissioned by the Medicis upon their return to power. It was meant to directly mirror and oppose Donatello’s work from nearly a century earlier (see previous post). It was displayed in the Piazza Della Signora along with the Donatello. The work was also deliberately positioned across from Michelangelo’s David, with Medusa’s eyes facing him as if to imply that Cellini’s creation had turned the lifelike David to stone. Cellini cast the entire work in one piece, a monumental task which was groundbreaking at the time. Donatello’s Judith, for instance, took 11 castings.
Olmec Wrestler: circa 1200-400 B.C. The Olmec “Wrestler” was discovered in Mexico in 1933. Despite its name, it is unlikely that the statue was actually meant to represent a wrestler. The facial hair he wears is typically associated with members of the Olmec socio-political hierarchy. That being said, some would argue that such particular analysis is meaningless since the statue itself may not be genuine.Many experts question it’s legitimacy thanks to the work’s dubious provenance and utterly unique style. Although the sophisticated realism of the rendering is admittedly unusual for ancient Meso-American art, I tend to question scholarship that argues against authenticity on the grounds that a work is simply too good. I find this reasoning to be circular. I.e. the statue cannot be genuine because we haven’t seem one like it, but when we see one like it we say it is not genuine. I can’t help but imagine a brilliant Olmec sculptor being both flattered and deeply frustrated when experts call his work a fraud. I also have to wonder whether a uniquely nuanced statue from ancient Greece or Rome would be met with similar skepticism or whether scholars would more readily assume that those white civilizations simply had some geniuses who were ahead of their times.
Boxer at Rest, circa 330-50 B.C. Much like the Olmec Wrestler, this statue was unearthed many centuries after its creation. Discovered in Rome in 1885, Boxer at Rest is admired for its unusual realism and attention to detail. Idealized human forms are a hallmark of Hellenistic art. The works of Phidias and his contemporaries depict a Mediterranean world populated by super-human physical specimens. This trend was meant to illustrate Greek superiority. The friezes of the Acropolis feature virile, spry Athenians triumphing over sub-human opponents. It comes as some surprise to see a statue like the one pictured above. The subject is battered and bruised. Its maker took painstaking care to illustrate cuts, abrasions, oozing blood, and a deformed “cauliflower” ear. The boxer is hunched over, exhausted, and perhaps even defeated. He still has his various appendages wrapped in his caestus and kynodesme. The very existence of this statue is unusual, not because of its unique style, but because so many bronze statues of this period were later melted down for other purposes. Yet its provenance is not considered dubious. Its maker is anonymous, its style is atypical, but its authenticity is not questioned. I don’t mean to imply that we should be skeptical of its origins, in fact just the opposite. But it seems to me the Olmec Wrestler may not be afforded the same luxury.
Assorted Drawings
