Christmas is Coming! December 11, 2007

Who doesn’t love the old Rankin and Bass Christmas cartoons? Okay, maybe Charlie Manson or someone like that hates them, but most people of my generation have a warm and fuzzy spot for these silly little holiday specials. In fact, Rankin and Bass had such a profound effect on me as a kid that the first stories I started writing in college were Christmas stories! Albeit mine were weird for the sake of being weird (“The Christmas Spam”, story of a magic batch of spam that could be formed into real toys being the ultimate example of my weirdness). But one of my best stories to date was inspired by the Rankin and Bass brand of story-telling. One that I am confident enough to have sent out to agents and publishers. Sure, I’ve gotten negligible responses so far, but that’s all a part process right? Anyway, it’s time to bundle up my two year in his jammies with feets and wrap him in a warm blankie so that we can watch “Jack Frost” and “Rudolph’s Christmas in July”–no wonder I wrote such weird Christmas stories huh?

—David F.

The Peanuts Gang! November 19, 2007

It’s definitely holiday time again, and nothing reminds me more of my childhood holiday experiences than the Peanuts gang. They were a big part of my growing up years, and a big influence on my work as a writer and artist.

In the new biography about Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, we are reintroduced to the genius of his world. Schultz was a naturally melancholy individual with the singular drive to be a comic strip artist. “Peanuts” will forever reign as the pinnacle of its medium, and every comic strip artist after owes his/her allegiance and inspiration to Charles Schultz–and many willingly show their respect to him.

What is it that makes this strip such a remarkable work of art? Initially, it is the contrasting simplicity and complexity of the drawings. In a way no one else can, Schultz was able to rendered deep emotions with a few simple strokes: the confusion in Charlie Browns bracketed eyeballs, the dismay in Linus’ squiggle line mouth, the rejection in Charlie Brown’s downcast head, the melancholy in Charlie Brown’s black cloud, the frenzy and paranoia in Charlie Brown’s multi-bracketed eyes, the rage in Lucy’s slant-eyed stare, the security in Linus’ thumb in mouth below two dashes (to indicated closed eyes), the insecurity in Linus’ down-turned mouth and bulging eyes, the joie de livre in Snoopy super-time dance for joy, the agony of defeat in Charlie Brown’s closed eyes and straight mouth.

Beyond the drawings themselves is the pervasive exploration of the meaning of life and all that that entails. Schultz was an intensely philosophic and introspective individual who had the gift of making us laugh despite the horrible struggles he often portrayed on his comics page: Charlie Brown endless missing that football, Charlie Brown never having the nerve to talk to the Little Redheaded Girl, Peppermint Patty and her endless stream of D minuses, Linus and his never getting to meet the Great Pumpkin, etc etc. Despite these and more insurmountable obstacles, the Peanuts characters keep going on, and this is what makes them remarkably human. We all experience struggles and setbacks, yet we continue to work on moving forward. Schultz was at times an optimist like Linus or Peppermint Patty, but was basically a pessimist like Charlie Brown. Each character, although fully realized, is an extension of who Charles Schultz was. Schultz himself often said that if you wanted to know who he was, it was all in his comic strip.

Truly words can not do these pictures justice, and if you are not one of the 100s of millions of people who have read and loved these comics, I urge you to give them a peek.

—David F.

The moment you first realized you were going to be an artist November 1, 2007

I’ve been asking artists lately—probably for a future essay—to tell me their memories of when they first realized they were going to become artists. The stories thus far have been quite interesting. (If anyone wants to add their own memories, feel free to submit them as a comment on this post.)

As for me, I wrote about an early artist inkling once, several years ago, for an magazine essay on “art and sound”:

I discovered I was going to be an artist when I was all hands and feet, eyes and ears, and learning how to navigate my way through space at age 17. I remember the exact moment: My grandmother was visiting my mother from down the San Bernardino Fwy, and during a pause in the mutual antagonism between the two, my mom mentioned I had recently finished my first painting. “Oh?” said grandma. “Can I see it?” It was a small, high school art class abstract geometric representation of a favorite song (I forget now which one), and of course pretty horrid. But my grandmother’s response to the work was surprising. Instead of saying “that’s nice” and moving on, she looked at the image closely for a long time, then said: “That looks just like Kenneth’s work.”

It turns out that my grandmother was married for a few months in pre-War North Carolina to Kenneth Noland—the superstar minimalist painter of the 1960s. She wasn’t married to him long (she grew tired of his abuse and alcoholic fits), and I am not related to Noland—but even so, this pronouncement carried a lot of weight. So you’ll forgive me when I say that after that day I commenced my “Noland” period—a period which coincided with my “sound, mostly in the form of loud music” period. I can’t count the number of hours I spent during this era in my blacklighted and postered room, sprawled on my stomach, filling my sketchpad with Noland-esque shapes, the sounds of Zeppelin, the Who, the Beatles–whatever—filling the space around me.

This tableau was appropriate–but not so much for the full maudlin middle-American wistfulness of it; rather, because sound and Noland go hand in hand. In fact, sound and art go hand in hand. As James Mcneill Whistler put it, “As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight.” Sir Isaac Newton, who examined the physics of color for his work Opticks, believed that color was an analogous phenomenon to sound in general, and to music in particular. “The Vibrations of the Air,” he wrote of light rays traveling through space, “according to their several bignesses, excite sensations of several sounds.”

And so it has been thought through the centuries into the current era. In a recent article on the jazz saxophonist turned painter Ivo Perelman, critic Eleanor Heartney made numerous comparisons between sound artists (composers and musicians) and the visual arts. “The mysterious affinity of music and art isn’t limited to the realm of metaphor,” she wrote. “Artists on both sides of the divide have frequently crossed the line which separates one side to the other.” She cited musicians like Mussorgsky and Debussy, who attempted to recreate paintings in their music, and contemporary artists like Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Romare Bearden and Stuart Davis who embraced music as a source of inspiration for paintings and sculptures. “Some artists have gone even further,” she continues, “creating sculptures which can be played like instruments, and designing color organs and other devices which mechanically translate sound into color.”…

While my hero Kenneth Noland has not often spoken of his work (except to answer technical questions), one exception to this rule was significant. In regards to his shaped canvases, he said he often creates play between the shape of his canvas and the symmetry of his visual layout, “which opens the depicted forms to the use of color—to sound or harmonize in an expressive way.” Noland was enough of a thinker on sound that he even produced at least one jazz record: “Svengali” in 1973, by Gil Evans. I bought it and listened to it and tried to grok the mystic connection of artistic ideas of sight and sound….

So why are sight and sound so strongly connected in our minds? Seeing and hearing, of course, are the senses that help us navigate through space–and so have a connection to each other. That is, we position ourselves in space simultaneously by seeing the space around us, and by hearing it. (Conversely, the sense of smell, taste, and touch are localized and intimat—constrained usually to a relationship with an object at hand.) To a degree, abstract painting is all about the ways these artists attempt to navigate through the space of a picture-plane. It makes sense that artists would think about and combine our two navigatory senses….

In the end, artists may simply be especially attuned to receive sensory input, and that’s why such thoughts about the abstract nature of sensory perception appears in art throughout this century. My dual interest in sound and seeing as a young man translated in time into a love of art. In a sense, I simply grew into my own body through art and learned to give my senses what they required. As Jackson Pollock once famously said: “The modern artist is expressing an inner world, expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”

This is Halloween! This is Halloween! October 31, 2007

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays, and it has had a profound impact on my artistic life. Dressing in costumes as a child would be a precursor to dressing in costume on stage and standing in front of hundreds of people to sing, dance and perform.

As a child, I looked forward to Halloween every year with great anticipation. In the early years, it was all about the candy. Costumes were only a secondary concern. Of course I cared about what I dressed up as, Woody Woodpecker one year, Spider-man the next, Boba Fett two years in a row, but it really was about the candy.

At the age of twelve, when Halloween was unceremoniously torn away from my brother Sean and I, we made our own defiant stand. Our mother would not buy us costumes, so we would make our own instead! Sean dressed up in a tank top, swim trunks and sun glasses to be a surfer dude. He even lugged around one of our boogey boards, such was his dedication. And I dressed up in winter coat, boots and snow hat, calling myself one of the MacKenzie brothers from the Great White North. On we went to have a joyful time of candy collecting. It would be the last year we would trick or treat together, and one of the few pleasant memories from that time.

It was that year that I learned the true meaning of Halloween. No, it’s definitely not all about candy. It’s about self-expression, and being something or someone that excites you. It’s about having an excuse to be silly or scary or sexy, or whatever you want to be–the things you are not necessarily allowed to be in your everyday life.

Since that time, I have made some pretty amazing costumes. Among them, a giant pumpkin-headed scarecrow and Death himself complete with hand-stitched tattered robe and realistic home-made scythe. If anything, being a theatre major teaches you to be a very resourceful artist.

—David F.

The Coolness of Cars = The Coolness of Art October 25, 2007

So, to continue–just a bit longer–this discussion of how cars, car culture, and my childhood love of Hotwheels and all things automobilic influenced my burgeoning interest in art, I want to talk about fifth grade.

In fifth grade, I became friends with a guy named Thomas (pictured here, from my fading fifth grade class photo):

Thomas was the first friend who became a partner-in-crime, with whom I had similar enough sensibilities that we began to encourage each other’s interests and talents. By this I mean, as all the other boys were comparing notes on which was their favorite NFL team and which girl they hated the most, he and I drew pictures, wrote stories, and made up games that only we two appreciated.

I don’t mean to put too much of a fine point on this, but Thomas was probably my first artistic collaborator. One thing we often did share with each other were our drawings of cars and car-related stuff. For instance, Thomas invented the “race-track drawing,” which quickly became a staple of our classtime doodling and note-passing. This was a drawing of a fantasy race track for cars, rendered from a bird’s-eye view looking down at the race in progress.

We spent a lot of time drawing these over multiple sheets of paper that we would tape together, and we ever were competing with each other to come up with ever-more creative trappings on our courses–jumps, loop-de-loops, chasms, shark ponds, rough terrain, etc–and ever-more outlandish race cars.

I have no idea what happened to Thomas–where he ended up going to school or where he lives now–as my family moved an hour east in the middle of that school year. I never saw Thomas or any of those kids again, and, lacking my artistic collaborator, I gave up making race track drawings altogether…

And while I’m not saying that the race-track drawings were any kind of great art, I should add that fifth grade was the year that I first began to be widely identified–by parents, grandparents, teachers, fellow students–as someone with “artistic talent.” The school art teacher–who came in to teach lessons only once a week usually–actually asked my parents if she could give me private lessons, a luxury we could not really afford at the time.

As proof of this growing art-identity, consider this–my class photo from that year. You’ll note the artistic trappings on my shirt; those are paint brushes:

Man, I liked that shirt. I wouldn’t mind having one like it today.

On Watership Down Part II October 20, 2007

The seventh an eighth grade were about as close to a living horror show as any time in my life.  I was one of a handful of Caucasian kids in a predominately Hispanic and African-American school.  I trod every day in absolute fear, hiding from everyone as best as I could.  Kids routinely called me names and pushed me around.  I sat on tacks, endured endless ridicule and the occasional spit wad.  Bullies gravitated to my like bees to honey, and though I was never beat up, the threat of an asskicking was a constant topic of conversation.

It was at this time that I began to truly immerse myself in the world of books, and made the transition from young to adult fiction.  As a means of escape, I voraciously plowed through book after book.  And the largest and meatiest of these novels was “Watership Down”. 

It took me many months to read, as it was way above my reading level.  Often I found myself rereading passages over and over again.  I was determine to go on Hazel and Fiver’s epic journey.  It was the first book that I could honestly feel in my heart and gut.  The gripping suspense of Bigwig caught in the wire.  The frustration of Hazel’s attempts to lead a band of ornery rabbits.   The triumph of Blackberry’s great escape plan coming to full fruition.  The sorrow of many deaths on a long and painful road.  When I finished this book, I was hooked on reading forever.  If a book could be this powerful, this moving, this purely magical, what else was in store in the world of literature??

—David F.

(What indeed!  Next time, find out what I have discovered in rereading “Watership Down” a dozen times during the last 25 years of my life.  —David F.)

Reveries, revelations… October 18, 2007

Although I knew, when I started this blog, that I wanted to talk about what it was in our backgrounds–mine and my brother’s–that led us both to become artistic, I hadn’t really plotted much further than this basic idea. I did not know what I actually would end up writing about, and whether what I wrote really would get to the heart of the Art Brothers premise. I had no idea why, for instance, my first post had to be about Speed Racer (other than the fact that it was such a big part of a certain section of my early years); I just knew it had to be.

Now that I’ve given it more thought, I realize that the influence of cars, California car culture, and all things car-related really did have a profound impact on my artistic outlook. For instance, David reminded me that I had a penchant, back in the day, to paint my old Hotwheels when they had become old, their paint chipped, their luster worn off. I would take a little bottle of enamel paint (I remember I had several colors–midnight blue, red, silver, gold, black), and I’d gussy them right back up.

After thinking about this, I realized that his habit came out of my interest in model cars–you know, of the sort where you buy a kit and glue the pieces together with model glue to make the whole. I did these kits very often as a kid–and though I’m certain I never did them very well, that didn’t matter so much. What I mostly loved was tweaking the designs to make them my own–painting them special colors, toying with the decals, etc. I remember in particular one model kit very clearly–a 1960ish Corvette–that I spraypainted (in the garage, of course) a sparkly candy-apple red (where these paints came from, and how I got my hands on them, I don’t know; my parents were often very hands-off, much to the benefit of my artistic development).

Here’s a good representation of what the Corvette ended up looking like (at least as I remember it in my head):

One could argue that my later artistic interest in paint, painting, gluing and collaging, and in certain cultural forms and certain shapes emerged from these early childhood car projects. Probably that’s oversimplifying things, but I will post (someday, when I find them) images of some of my earliest serious art work that reinforces the connection.

On Watership Down Part I October 15, 2007

I have to hand it to our dad who always seemed to be up on new technology. We had a PC Jr. long before anyone I knew had a computer. And in the days before cable and VCRs, we had ONTV. It was a squat box that sat on top of the television. At about 5:00PM every evening we would switch a fat knob to the “on” position and watch movies late into the evening.

Unfortunately, this allowed me to see movie like Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the70s version), and Jaws–all of which plagued me with nightmares at the tender age of 7 or 8. But I also got to see some very formative stuff, including an animated movie version of Richard Adam’s “Watership Down”. 

It was a dour and bleak imagining of the book that appealed to me greatly.  It is the tale of a band of wandering rabbits, who have been violent uprooted from their home.  They battle the forces of nature, of man, and worst of all, of nature gone awry.  It is compelling in its creation of a rabbit world–complete with a language, a religion, rituals and beliefs, tradition and superstition, and the storytelling of the adventures of a folk-tale hero.

My brother Michael bought the book shortly after we saw the movie.  It languished on his shelf, unread for several years until he passed it on to me.  I was twelve years old, a very formative time in any one’s life.  It was an especially vunerable time for me as I had been uprooted from everything I knew and valued–school, friends, etc.  Reading “Watership Down” at this time would make a life time impression on me as an artist and a person.

—David F.

(Next time, I will talk about how the novel “Watership Down” effected me, and what I have discovered in its pages over the last couple of decades.  —David F.)

When Hotwheels Came Back Into My Life October 14, 2007

So, after working three or four years in mind-numbing cubicle land (a few years ago), something must have short-circuited somewhere in my few remaining active synapses. This is because, one day, before I even knew what was happening, I suddenly realized I was buying small toy cars to decorate my cubicle, and I had no idea why. Here’s a representative sample (of about half of the cars I ended up buying):

If I had to speculate why I suddenly became so enamored of a childhood toy, I’d suggest it was probably out of nostalgia for a lost childhood. When I was ten or so, mom and dad realized that they could no longer afford to be a one-income family. So mom had to get a job, any job (the first job was at a taco stand, if memory serves), and still there was little money left over to pay for any kind of childcare. I was often asked to be more responsible than I was prepared to be–including occasionally babysitting my brothers, and later even cooking for them.

As a result was I ended up chucking away–early on–any trapping of childhood, often giving to my brothers the toys that I’d loved as a kid (including my cars, my baseball cars, my Big Jim and GI Joe dolls. (Yes, I played with dolls; what of it?) I ended up having much less fun as a kid than I probably could have, so I suppose it makes total sense that I would later as an adult try to recapture the fun.

Wild Imaginings! Part II October 7, 2007

“The night Max wore his Wolf suit…”  And so begins the epic story of a boy who defies his mother and uses his imagination to deal with his rage and anxiety, ultimately becoming King of the Wild Things–a miscreant band of giant monsters.

Max, the protagonist of “Where the Wild Things Are” appeals to us in the same way rebelious figures like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield do.  He is young boy who acts naughty, as young boys are sometimes apt to do.  Granted, like any naughty child, he is given consequences, but Max embraces his time out as a chance to deal with his anger and fears.  He uses his fanciful imagination to travel to the land of Wild Things.  He shows no fear to these hideous beasts, and “tames them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once”.  One can hardly imagine a more empowering image for a child who is afraid of nightmares than to see another child boldly standing before a group of dumbfounded monsters, his hands held high and his face straight with courage.  My childhood was riddled with terrifying nightmares.  Max’s adventure made me feel like I could eventually conquer my own fears.  

In “Wild Things”, Max gets to party with the monsters for his unflaggable bravery as they christen him King of All Things.  He is author of their fun and games, as he leads them in dancing under the moon, swinging from trees, and celebrating him in a parade–what an imagination!  But as wonderful as his imaginings are, Max soon feels lonely and wants “to be where someone love(s) him best of all.”  So he gives up his new life as King, and returns home.  And what does he find?

Forgiveness.  Despite his naughty (hammering nails in the wall, chasing the dog with a fork), his mother has lovingly given him his supper.

Few children’s stories are as dense with meaning, addressing multiple childhood concerns with viable solutions understandable to even their target audience:  naughtiness, temper tantrums, nightmares, anger, fear, imagination, forgiveness and love. 

 A book like “Where the Wild Things Are” taught me as a child that books are complex and incredible things worthy of more than a passing glance.  There is much to be discovered in the pages of any book, even a short children’s story with very few words.

—David F.