Sealion, v.2

linoprint, concertina book, personal work

Cave Painting

linoprint, personal work

Exercise: Objective drawing

A shoe--

Exercise: Exploring drawing & painting

left; white acrlic ink applied with palette knife-right; various	left; stippled acrylic paint applied through stencil with bristle-brush-right; pencil crayons, and graphite powder around stencil
left; alcohol based markers & biro-right; watercolour & gouache applied into water with stencil resist, bleach	left; watercolour daubed with rag & paper tissues-right; crowquill nib pen, and decoupage

Illustration - 1950s

After a series of traditional roughs, most of which focussed quite tightly on a seated protagonist, I decided to make more direct use of my collected reference. Roughly trying to pick out elements from each of the categories (Architecture, Art, Design, Film & TV, People & costume, Surface pattern, Transport) I felt a serendipitous connection to a particular photo of James Dean, seated appropriately in a tubular aluminium folding chair (an innovation of the late '40s & early '50s). From there I made several distinct digital prototype compositions simply by dragging, adding, removing and resizing elements. Audrey Hepburn even had to endure having her leg chopped off and rotated. In the end I settled on a limited range of vivid subjects that I hoped would immediately engage the attention of the proposed--teenage--audience.


The kitschy look of a completely pasted-up image didn't appeal to me and I felt the elements lacked unity, so I printed my final composition out and redrew it free-hand looking at a tracing, searching for a feeling of earnest hand finish. The printed wallpaper image and the Pollock painting, funnily enough, both proved prohibitively tricky to reproduce traditionally, so I determined to re-introduce them as digital elements.


So this illustration ended up being very experimental for me in some ways. It was really interesting to digitally mix and collage found and altered images. I was let down by my poor painting skills, though at the same time the lyricism and softness of the treatment conveys an appropriately 'vintage', illustrative feeling that I enjoy and seems to fit here.

Visual Review – 1950s

I was deeply hesitant at the thought of beginning the seemingly herculean task of describing the look of an entire decade, in however cursory a fashion. I limited myself to an analysis concentrating on what seems to have been the dominant visual culture of the era, which was by and large informed by the USA. My aim is to provide a brisk overview not just of the phenomena of these 1950s aesthetics, but hopefully of some of the developments that made them possible and a little about what they signified.

In the 1950s the world economy, and with it the world centre of visual innovation & culture was in the throes of a monumental shift. Europe was in wreckage, financially and spiritually. In Britain it was almost half way into the decade before rationing ended completely. The USA had emerged from the Second World War as an almost unassailable world power, a benevolent and terrifying titan. Many of the leading lights of 1930s continental modernism were émigrés, setting up new homes and new schools in the United States; László Moholy-Nagy, for instance, founded the Chicago Institute of Design, which incorporated into the Illinois Institute of Technology & became the first school in the United States to offer a design Ph.D. Paris was no longer the arbiter of couture; many French designers had likewise emigrated to New York in the pre-war years, and fashions designed for US screen idols by now had a vastly larger audience. The buying power of North American consumers continued to shape the world in the period between the end of the Korean war and the beginning of US intervention in Vietnam, a time of immense optimism and immense paranoia, fear of communist subversion from within and nuclear destruction from without.

Harley Earl's 1948 Cadillacs, GM's 1951 Le Sabre concept vehicle and similar cars would set the trend for the popular and iconic personal vehicles of the decade, inspired by aviation, particularly the distinctive twin-engined Lockheed P-38 and the new generation of supersonic military jet aircraft. Wrap-around windscreens, extensive chrome detailing on wide, prominent aestheticised grilles designed to evoke turbines and slipstream, low, wide bodies with head- and tail-lights positioned in prominent fins or nacelles were all common features of these extravagant, powerful vehicles that increased in visual drama through the decade. Several concept cars of the era went much further in looking to the sky for a distinct identity, including adopting fighter aircraft-style bubble canopies and the Firebird series, which utilised gas turbine engines complete with huge circular air intakes.
The growing automotive culture and the postwar boom in road building meant that advertising had to be aimed at faster moving and far more mobile consumers, eye-catching in the dark, in poor weather and over long distances. Signs grew and were lifted up onto tall poles. Glowing neon lighting, know and used since the 1920s, came into its own as a tool of advertising and stylish consumer décor. This decade was the last in which hand-painted signage was economically viable on a large scale, as offset lithographic printing technology came of age. Lettered scripts became more flowing, eccentric and calligraphic, occupying the fringe areas of extreme ligature and kerning that typography couldn't accommodate. Meanwhile the continuing influence of modernist International Typographic Style, characterised by severe, spare layouts dominated by carefully regimented text in sans-serif typefaces would lead to the 1957 creation of Neue Haas Grotesk, later re-named Helvetica, one of the defining fonts of modern graphic design.
Advances in plastics and dyeing technologies meant that the colour palette of daily life could expand dramatically. Vivid, fast-drying acrylic paints first came onto the marketplace and acrylic lacquers applied to post-war vehicles brought an ever wider range of lustrous hues out onto the highways. "Candy apple red", seafoam and mint green, along with more staid cyan blues and glossy chocolate brown were common car colours of the era. By the end of the decade, amateur photographers were regularly taking colour photographs of special occasions and holidays. Likewise, while in 1947 only 12 percent of feature films were shot with colour film, a share that rose to over half of productions by 1954, partly in an effort to maintain the appeal of the cinema as domestic black & white televisions became more ubiquitous (colour sets would only become affordable for most in the late 1960s-the first commercially sold colour television cost the equivalent of about $10,600 dollars in today's money.)

As the rapid advance of science transformed people's lives, against the bright new dawning of the space age and the early heights of nuclear optimism the sublimated fears of the American public seemed to bubble up in the 'creature features' and monster movies of the decade. External monsters were often the result of the follies of nuclear science, most famously the Japanese import Godzilla (1954), while more insidious threats came from within, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) which in retrospect is often read as a cathartic expression of McCarthyite panic. This trend reached a particular iconic zenith with Forbidden Planet (1956), a sumptuously designed film now famous for introducing the hulking robotic servant Robby, in which the ultimate enemy is the 'id monster', an animated special effect creature that is literally the Freudian expression of one character's secret desires. Historical epics like The Robe (1953) and The Ten Commandments (1956) impress with their grandeur and careful attention to costume & setting, expressing a more confident moral tone.
The home too was feeling the impact of bold colours. Relatively neutral earth tones of the early '40s began to be offset with orange and chartreuse, wallpapers featuring abstract geometric patterns began to displace arts and crafts inspired floral prints as the decade continued. Chequered & tartan patterns in various degrees of brashness were popular on textiles of all kinds, from picnic blankets to sports coats.

Central heating and heated cars were still not reliable, so dressing warmly for much of the year was still a necessity. Gloves were both a useful and 'proper' accessory. For women, the coat and dress mostly followed the same lean, narrow-waisted silhouette, often aided in achieving a glamorous, Hollywood hourglass figure with girdles, less stiff and more comfortable than previous corsetry, and conical-cup bras in new, 'easycare' nylon fabrics. The shape was completed with A-line skirts given volume and shape by layered petticoatss, often cinched with a high-waist belt which could be let out easily in case of maternity, a common event in the post-war baby boom era. For mature men, the grey flannel two-piece business suit was the icon of the decade, so much so that The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was a suitable and instantly recognisable title for a 1955 novel about American middle class discontent. Hats began to be worn less frequently. There was a slowly-growing acceptance of trousers as casual wear for women, in part thanks to screen stars like Katharine Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn (unrelated).
In general a new, relatively uni-sex leisure mode of dress became part of the fashion vocabulary for the young, with more informal, 'sporty' polo shirts, cardigans and for men even blue jeans and undershirts (what we'd today think of as t-shirts), previously almost exclusive to blue collar workers, began to find acceptance as suitable for an afternoon outing, although day wear still closely followed the dress of their parents. This was the first generation of “teenagers”, exemplified on screen by stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean. In music-oriented youth subcultures often originating in the working class there were far greater efforts to demonstrate distinct group identity & independent spending power, for instance among greasers in the US, with their leather jackets and pomade-slicked hair, and teddy boys in the UK, who by contrast self-consciously adopted knee-length Edwardian-style jackets, brocade waistcoats and similar fashions.
While in commercial illustration Norman Rockwell typified an bright, clean idealised vision of America for magazine covers, abstract expressionism continued to dominate the fine arts milieu. American painters like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock & the De Koonings were continuing to react to the long European tradition of illustionistic representative art, exploring the canvas not as a surface on which to create a false representation of real space, but as a record of action, emotive and significant in the emotional energy and physical effort recorded in each mark, 'action painting' as it became known. Others artists, including Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg, became more concerned with re-appropriating and contextualising the images that existed around them, obscuring the personal signature of the artist and challenging the viewer to ascribe new meaning to old symbols. This relationship with the canvas as the explicit, flat vehicle for the message gave rise in turn to colour field painting and more impersonal hard-edge painting, among other movements.
Modernist architects working in the international style & brutalist modes used plain, 'honest' prefabricated concrete blocks and powerful, simple rectilinear shapes to accommodate the rapidly rising demand for housing & public infrastructure. New ideas of urban renewal, centred on the car rather than the pedestrian reformulated the city, creating swathes of open space and flat, looming uniform skylines. With leisure spending increasing, cafés, cinemas, and bowling alleys bloomed, leading to a flowering of whimsical, futuristic entertainment architecture. Emerging from Deco of the '20s, but discarding many of its neoclassical elements, the 'Googie' style named after the L.A café designed by John Lautner featured smooth, asymmetric forms and sweeping aerodynamic forms evoking motion, exploring the new frontiers of potential in steel-frame and poured concrete construction.
For later designers and artists the smooth, dynamic aesthetics of the 1950s, both its contemporary manifestations and the future that it popularly envisioned, would come to be called retrofuturistic. Everything from Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds to The Jetsons was inspired by those visions of a technocratic utopia of transportation. There have been frequent re-visitations of '50s aesthetics throughout the proceeding decades: Elvis' comeback in the late '60s, the show Happy Days, the rockabilly revival of the late '70s & early '80s focussing on the style of the disaffected teens of the era. Even modern neo-burlesque performers like Dita von Teese explicitly evoke '50s glamour model Bettie Page.

The post-war 'baby boom' is variously described as characterising the demographics of an era lasting from about 1943 to 1960, or perhaps 1946-64 depending on the source. The '50s saw a hugely increased birth-rate, with a US record set for yearly births in 1957 that wouldn't be topped for 50 years. For many millions of Americans & Europeans the 1950s are still the era of their ideal youth, a time they look back to as defining the palette and texture of their dreams & aspirations, aspirations that defined the challenges of living in the west in the latter part of the 20th century. A future of bright colours, space colonisation, flying cars that went as fast as their aeronautic styling suggested. As a teenager towards the year 2000, I heard many people of my own generation wonder aloud on a theme encapsulated by the phrase 'where's my jetpack?' Where is the glistening, clean, high-rise future we were promised? Strangely this wasn't even a future promised to us, but to our parents' generation by the pulps and the spacefaring confidence of the post-war decade: an optimistic 1950s dream recapitulated with various shades of cynicism and confidence throughout the past 50 years.

Exercises: Words into Pictures & Making a Moodboard

Words into Pictures

I didn't find in the is exercise quite the satisfying step forward from brainstorming that I had hoped; I found that a lot of my process simply involved mentally generating a brainstorm just as I had for the previous exercise and then drawing rather than writing things out. I'm not sure that I found the challenge of the adjective 'exotic' much different from that of the noun 'destructive', in that both readily suggested operative objects & actors to me. It was the use of mixed media and my attempts to efficiently convey various moods & concrete effects that really kept my interest.

Destruction

Exotic

When I took on the prompt Exotic I was troubled as an illustrator attempting to embrace both a decent standard of personal behaviour, and working in a public & multicultural marketplace; immediately aware of, and made uncomfortable by the obvious notion of the foreign as exotic, a tendency that leads to reductive orientalism & similar kinds of othering. However it seemed dishonest to attempt to escape from or ignore that image, so instead I attempted to contextualise the tendency from a more global, if perhaps rather naive perspective that everyone's culture is equally exotic from the outside, the businesswoman no more or less an oddity than the Sikh Nihang or the Masai tribesman.

Making a Moodboard

Moodboard: Destruction

The next stage was bringing one of the visual brainstorms forward by investigating and combining found media related to the visual themes I had established. I found making the moodboard a much more deeply satisfying exercise. Partly it was the motivation to play with the [very] rudiments of photoshop image editing, and partly the jigsaw challenge of putting together the commonalities of disparate elements that make up something of the texture of Destruction: the central billowing shape of a neutrophil (a type of white blood cell) devouring anthrax merges with atomic explosions, tsunami waves, fire and smoke. Or the correspondences between the Capone gang's arsenal and medieval medical manuals and the ruins of Nagasaki. The swarm of locusts that seem to merge into the rubble of the Cabrini–Green demolition. Most of these images come from my pre-existing digital reference library, an archive approaching 75 GB I've kept for several years of any image that has caught my eye, sorted loosely into subject categories.