Nancy and drawing

Ernie Bushmiller: Nancy Dec: 1956

I was just 6 years old when this Nancy cartoon was published, but Nancy had already been going for 12 years as a stand alone cartoon strip. I was always fascinated by any sort of drawing as a boy and Nancy cartoons were in there with the best of them. However as I got older I began to see them as something almost akin to a type of visual philosophy. 

Then I got older still and found out that other artists had also seen Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy as a philosophical conundrum. Bill Griffith had this to say about Nancy, “Peanuts tells you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.” Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden have written a book on Ernie Bushmiller’s work, 'How to read Nancy'. They point to the comic strip's three-panel minimalism and compare its underlying aesthetic philosophy to the “less is more” architect Mies van der Rohe. They state that every element in a “Nancy” panel adheres not to a comic strip but rather to “the blueprint of a comic strip.”  Everything in a Nancy panel is in crucial service to the gag, free of the fussiness of embellishment. The Zen-like nature of some of the Nancy panels has been commented on by Art Spiegelman, Scott McCloud and Bill Griffith, who has recently been producing a book on Bushmiller’s work.  The 'Three Rocks' issue is of particular fascination. Scott McCloud quotes Art Spiegelman in his rules for the card game “5-Card Nancy”; “Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be ‘some rocks.’ Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate ‘some rocks’ BUT IT WOULD BE ONE ROCK MORE THAN WAS NECESSARY TO CONVEY THE IDEA OF ‘SOME ROCKS."

Three rocks in action

Scott McCloud has this to say; 

"Why Nancy? 

Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip Nancy is a landmark achievement: A comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the "gag-strip"; a sense of humour so obscure, so mute, so without malice as to allow faithful readers to march through whole decades of art and story without ever once cracking a smile. Nancy is Plato's playground. Ernie Bushmiller didn't draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew THE tree, THE house, THE car."

As well as the three rocks, if you look at the cloud and the two trees in the panel above you can see why people philosophise about Bushmiller's comic strip, that cloud and those trees are sort of numb, an ontological* image of a cloud, or of a stand of trees but no more. 

It is said that invention often arrives out of boredom and perhaps that's part of the Nancy mystique, because there are no visual extras, we are left with a space for the mind to fill. 

Philip Guston: Book

I sometimes wonder whether Philip Guston was a Nancy fan. His 'Book' is pretty much to the point, although Bushmiller would have avoided the pink and the book would have had somewhat sharper edges. 

Nancy's book

This is however Nancy's book not Bushmiller's, but I think the point is made. Art doesn't imitate life, it extracts from it and simplifies it and that simplification allows us to think about the very life that has been simplified, because real life is far too complicated to think about. 

*Ontological from ontics: A branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. Ontic: Greek: "Of that which is".

See also:

Underground comics enter into art

Hardeep Pandhal: The Beano and Viz

Richard McGuire's 'Here"

Drawing and philosophy Part one

More theories about drawing

On page 151 of the book, The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing as a way of Thinking, Shawn Gilmore uses Thierry Groensteen's concept of 'braiding' to show how Ware uses visual simultaneity to effect meaning. I have long been a believer in the power of comic books to deliver complex ideas and theory seems to have now come to terms with this too and has accepted that what was once seen as a low brow or low class art form, can now be regarded as just as important an art form as any other.
So how can you use these theories to open out ideas related to art history as a whole?

I wasn't totally convinced by Scott McCloud's triangle of abstraction but it helps to resolve several issues surrounding levels of reality and can help us to rethink Plato's old 'Theory of Forms' that suggested that the reality we experience is only a shadow of true reality which is in fact a Realm of Forms, which are abstract, time transcending, perfect concepts or ideals. As we move through McCloud's triangle, we get a sense of moving between different levels of realism and this is in itself very interesting.

I'm not sure about the three points of the triangle, having one as reality, another language and a third as the picture plane is awkward because these are very different concepts. Even so it sort of works and I can see clearly what he is getting at. The dotted line that separates the emoji from the word is an interesting one, but if he had been Chinese perhaps a more subtle line could have been drawn. 

The concept in the top left speech balloon stating that, "Things can be themselves" is a philosophically interesting one and one that needs unpicking a little. The fact that artists such as Paul Klee began to explore the various abstract elements used to make drawn images, such as point, line and plane, doesn't automatically make these things in 'themselves' or things in their own right. They can instead be read as categorisations of language, a product of our ability to atomise or break down things into smaller parts. We are looking at a type of process here rather than a set of things. 

This reminds me of how Scott McCloud wrote about the 'gutter' between two images in a comic book sequence. Yes, you can point to the gutter but what you cant point to is how the brain is processing its encounter. Someone has to be able to take two unconnected images and mentally construct them into an idea that in some way 'fills the gap' by projecting an invented narrative into it. 

According to Moszkowicz, who uses Ricoeur's ideas to develop a 'gutter' concept, it’s the observer who “simultaneously takes the story outside itself and yet holds it within himself”. This is about keeping a distance at the same time as inviting closeness, suggesting that sense-making and imagination can take place everywhere: within, between, alongside, on top of, next to, across and in the edges between things, as in Deridda's concept of the parergon. The central idea here being that it is the passage between an inner and outer reality that is more important than any fixed thing. The various stages that we set out between reality and fiction, or the art object and the world are important as they can reflect or mirror what goes on between ourselves and the world. Sometimes we hold within one image several approaches at the same time, which is similar to how when we perceive the world we simultaneously mix inner and outer approaches, imagination and perception fusing. In El Greco's wonderful painting of The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, he has constructed the top half of the image as a flight of religious fantasy, whilst the bottom half represents the reality of what was then contemporary Spain. The division between the two halves is occupied by the assumption into heaven of the count's deceased soul in the form of an "ethereal" baby.

El Greco: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

If we now place an image of the El Greco painting on top of Scott McCloud's diagram we can begin to see another idea emerging, one that can relate Plato's ideas of perfect forms to everyday reality and which uses Derrida's idea of the parergon as a form of sliding divide between reality and fiction. In this case the frame as an edge between the artwork and the world, now enters inside the work itself, in El Greco's case it could be argued that the division between heaven and earth occupied by the space above the collected heads of the Spanish grandees being the edge of the frame. The ideal forms that inhabit the picture plane being in this case the ideal forms inhabiting a Catholic vision of heaven.

The two images of my own above are both related in that they are from the same sequence of drawings, but I have put them together missing out several other images from the sequence. What interests me is how I can still develop a narrative simply because of their close relationship to the gutter between them. It might be a bit of a struggle, but I can feel my brain seeking out some sort of story, some sort of imagined series of events that could make the one image become linked to the other. One implication of this is that I could regard a series of images in an exhibition in exactly the same way. The gap or gutter between images can be adjusted and made narrower or wider, which could imply a closer or further relationship between each image. The 'meaning' or 'communication' coming from the images is now though also entangled in how we read an image within a frame and how we read 'between frames'. 

Derrida came up with the term ‘parergon’ when he was writing ‘The Truth in Painting’, using it to explain why when looking at a framed work of art, the frame is part of the wall but when looking at the wall it is part of the work. The frame existing as an idea between the two, as a separate entity. He stated, "neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.”
The function of the parergon being to create a context for the process of framing.
The parergon being both a literal framing and a metaphysical concept.

Such stretches of the theoretical frame, may indeed break the rules of logic, but at times we need to break rules in order to arrive at a new framework of thinking. For many years the comic book world was excluded from consideration by fine art historians, but the reality is that we can use any discipline to give us insights into any other discipline. For instance death doulas exist as a profession to help individuals cross the divide between life and death. Images can exist in order to meditate on exactly the same thing, but perhaps it gets more interesting if we ask a death doula to help us reflect upon an image? Would we in doing so be using shamanic thought processes and if so does this take us back into engaging with pre-historical types of consciousness? 

We only stop perceiving the world when we die. Layers of reality are deeply interconnected and perhaps nowhere near as clearly organised as in McCloud's triangle. If we look at visual perception through the combined lenses of art and neuroscience, it should be possible to explain why the brain/body finds more meaning in incoming data than given by incoming signals alone. This on the one hand I would suggest is the mystery of the gutter and on the other the internalisation/externalisation of image processing. Imagination it would seem is inseparable from perception. 

The idea of externalising thoughts about the body is central to my work at the moment. Working with the ancient concept of votives, I'm exploring how people can be persuaded to take an internal concept, such as a pain in the foot, and transfer it into an external object. Images have a sort of direct feedback mechanism, in that observers 'echo' what they see. In the same way that we begin to reflect the body posture of someone we are talking to, we mimic both internally and externally the shape of an idea as an image. 

A object designed to be both seen and touched, made to reflect both the shape of a hand becoming a fist (to grab), as well as the idea of two humans clinging, (to cleave to) or a form beginning to split apart. (to cleave away from)

In English, the word cleave historically comes from two different Old English words that merged into one spelling. One meant "to split or cut" (like a butcher's cleaver) and the other (clifian) meant "to stick, adhere, or cling to". Therefore the same word can now suggest to cling togther or to split apart. Trying to make an object that does the same thing suggests that there is always a tension between people, we want to cling to each other, but sometimes we get too close and we need to retain our personal space. 

The object above was made in response to someone telling me that they were lonely. As an artist I wanted to both externalise the feeling tone that was at the centre of the inter human communication and to feed back into the making process both image and perceptual instigation. The feedback from the recipient of the small object I made was very encouraging and suggested that a 'real' communication had been effected. At the core of the idea was a visual narrative, a sort of graphic animation in the mind, which brings me back full circle to comic book ideas of how to abstract from reality. 

The image development process behind the making of the loneliness votive

If we return to Thierry Groensteen's concept of 'braiding' a concept that explores how uses of visual simultaneity can effect meaning, we can push it a little further and look at how imagination is inseparable from perception. The image of something and its perception become entangled, and the relationship could be thought of as that between braiding and knotting. When we braid we wrap threads around each other, as we do so we develop patterns based on how we have interconnected the threads. However without a knot tied around their ends the braids will quickly unravel. The image is that knot and the braids but it is also about splitting giving us various possible perceptions. An image in effect holds things together, just long enough for the various effects of perceptions to be understood as to their potential for action, be this fight or flight or something much more subtle, such as how we appreciate a tree coming into bud or the flight pattern of a swallow. 

References

Ball, D. and Khlman, M. (2010) The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a way of thinking University Press of Mississippi

McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding comics. New York: HarperPerennial.

Moszkowicz, J. (n.d.). Time, Narrative and the Gutter in Graphic Novels: how philosophical thinking can make something out of nothing. In: Cultural Expression and Formal Expression in the Graphic Novel. Inter-Disciplinary Press, UK, pp. 197-205. ISBN 978-1-84888-199-0  Accessed from http://ssudl.solent.ac.uk/2596/ 10. 09. 2019

The interplay between neuroscience and art

See also:

Richard McGuire's 'Here'

The Beano and Viz

A much more detailed post on Derrida's concept of the parergon related to ideas about edges. 

To use theory or not to use theory

Drawing and philosophy

Visual semiology using the Sherman realism axis. The PDF linked has an example of how this works and can be used in conjunction with Scott McCloud's triangle of abstraction.

Hardeep Pandhal: The Beano and Viz

Artists influenced by British graphic traditions continue to emerge and as they do more and more complex interrelationships are revealed. In a multicultural society like the United Kingdom it is sometimes hard to realise how powerful children's culture is, especially for the children of different ethnic minorities, who will have had to reconcile the culture of their family with that of the place they find themselves growing up in.
I believe that there is a comic centred graphic culture that stretches from the Beano through to Viz that has had a particularly powerful influence on the visual imagination of British children. Leo Baxendale created an iconic visual language for The Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx, Little Plum, the Three Bears and other DC Thompson owned comics. Generations of British children would have the Beano or the Dandy brought for them every week and the surreal playful inventiveness of the imagery has engrained itself into many an artist's psyche; including I must say my own.

Leo Baxendale

As children we were brought up on these images of anarchy and inventive disruption. I still remember the visual complexity of Baxendale's ideas, the double page spread above being typical of his inventive style. I can still remember how my mind inhabited these scenes and how I loved looking at them over and over again. In particular the protagonists were often children versus authority figures such as the teacher, and the children were nearly always succeeding in their anarchistic ambitions by sheer inventive destruction. In the drawing below, I love the way the pocket naturally grows to accommodate the cascade of pop being poured into it. Arms can come from anywhere, nostrils can accommodate rockets and mashed potato can become a weapon of choice in this surreal world designed for growing children. 

Detail of a Leo Baxendale drawing

The Beano style was the dominant look for children's comics for years, so much so that when the satirical magazine Viz started up in 1979, it used the visual language associated with the Beano and the Dandy as a parody; Viz's diet of misogynistic toilet humour, surreal black comedy, and violent sexual storylines would instantly be appreciated by teenagers and young men who as boys had grown up with The Bash Street Kids, Denis the Menace and Desperate Dan. 

From Viz

For youngsters of the post 1979 Viz generation the Beano's comic style was now deeply associated with hard core satire and sexual violence that was the staple diet of Viz and it is no surprise therefore that as a new generation of artists emerged steeped in that tradition that they would reflect it in the work they did.

Viz

Viz was a comic that specialised in taking on and subverting stereotypes of British society. For youngsters coming from very conservative cultural traditions the anarchistic core of both the Beano and Viz must have been particularly powerful models. In the hands of Hardeep Pandhal this comic book tradition confronts and is merged with visual cultures from the Indian sub-continent. Hardeep takes on the language of Viz and pushes it further, embracing other narrative traditions and in the anarchistic spirit of his influences takes on elements of Sikh, Mughal and Rajput miniature painting and incorporates them into his own irreverent stories. 

Sikh miniature

 

Hardeep Pandhal

Hardeep was at one time working in Leeds and then moved to Glasgow; as soon as I saw his work I recognised the Beano/Viz linage of his visual languages and because these languages have a wide currency I would suspect his work will be accessible to people outside of the contemporary art world as well as his images re-invigorating the more traditional languages of fine art drawing.
Personally I'm not sure about the way the images work on a larger scale, I can see the need to appropriate the language of the gallery and more contemporary installation practices, but I feel that the smaller images on paper work much better for me. I can see the connection with the comics easier, their grubby creased surfaces, coloured in bits and passed around feel, seem so much closer to Hardeep's deformation of his Leeds Met BA certificate. Not that I'm advocating that you all to deface your hard earned certificates as soon as you get them, but there is a necessary irreverence when working in this territory.

Hardeep Pandhal

The sensibility of someone like Hardeep Pandhal is totally different to Shahzia Sikander. Sikander grew up in Pakistan, developed a contemporary miniature style whilst still living there, but then moved to New York. 

Click on this Shahzia Sikander image to enlarge 

Shahzia Sikander: Projection

When Sikander moved to New York she became immersed in the contemporary art world. Gradually her work developed a hybrid style of contemporary art practices mixed with the tropes she had brought with her from Islamic miniature painting. I personally feel that the 'art' style of the West has in this case overwhelmed her personal sensibility, but it could also be argued that in embracing contemporary art practices she has been able to demonstrate the continuing relevance of world wide cultural traditions within modern society. 

At its best art that works in the gaps between two cultures can shine an illuminating light on the sociological complexity of cultural hybridity in such a way that people from both cultures are asked to think again about themselves; Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' being one of the most insightful and imaginative books of the 20th Century, a book that shines a light on post-colonial history and in doing so establishes a type of writing that is both polemical and fantastic. Homi K. Bhabba's 'The Location of Culture' is the classic text if you want to read more around these issues in order to develop a more theoretical understanding. 

See also:

Drawing can be funny (Sometimes)

Children's drawings in an adult world

The portrait as stereotype 

Chad McCail

Chad McCail

Chad McCail has this to say about his work, "I make drawings, paintings and prints working in a figurative, illustrative manner. It is my intention that there should be no question as to what is represented but that the viewer’s attention should be focused on why it is and what is happening and that if this is successful, important questions should be raised. The pictures usually carry a short text that provides a lens through which the image can be seen. My interest is in examining those forces that enable us to take pleasure in one another, to empathise and co-exist peacefully and those which alienate and cultivate antagonism and mistrust.
Recently I have been looking at the history of compulsory education and this had led to an interest in how we treat children at puberty. In other cultures it is an event often contained by a public ritual which binds the adolescent to the community. That no such thing exists for most of us testifies to our emotional incompetence. Our general denial and failure to acknowledge or preserve the significance of this event, has particular consequences".
From the Edinburgh printmakers website

Chad McCail's paintings and prints adapt the type of visual language you might find located on the back of your seat in a plane as you are waiting to take off. He wants to make a point and to make it as simply and clearly as possible, therefore he uses graphic languages designed to do just that, when you have to think about your safety on a plane the language used must be both clear and universally applicable.

The language of air safety

His recent work 'Compulsory Education' looks at the three-tier education system that has resulted in comprehensive, grammar and public schools. He puts forward speculative arguments about the origins of 'compulsory education' in the conflicts between the European 'great powers' in the nineteenth century and is fascinated by the fact that..."pupils whose parents have paid for their schooling are four times as likely as state school peers to get a place at one of the top ten universities."

Chad McCail: images from various projects

McCail's work is about highlighting the mechanisms that are used for social control  'Most children learn enough to obey orders, some learn more so they can transmit commands' one of his images reads. 'A few learn to dictate'.

As you can see from the range of images above, McCail varies his style to fit the idea. Sometimes he is dealing with issues that need a more open ambiguous response and at others he uses text to solidly ground or anchor his images to a particular issue. 'Wealth is shared', is for instance a title many would aspire to, but the reality is that Capitalism as a system is not about sharing. The images therefore can seen as naive but on second reading you realise that their simplicity is intentional. If it seems very appropriate to talk to children about sharing, why is it so hard to broach the same subject with adults? In our heart of hearts we are socialists but in our minds we are often capitalists. McCail asks us to rethink and go back to the essential truths that we thought were right when we were young.  Often drawn on a computer, McCail's work is digitally printed or made into silkscreens. He also works as a mural artist, his accessible style being very useful if there is a need for an idea to be communicated to a wide variety of people. 

Chad McCail: The Becontree Mural

See also:

Drawing and politics

Yuksel Arslan's political drawings

The Secret of Drawing

Andrew Graham Dixon produced a series of TV programmes about drawing back in 2005. They are a very good introduction into how to think about drawing and he opens out the role of drawing far beyond its 'Fine Art' applications.
If you are thinking of contextualising what you are doing for Context of Practice they are not a bad place to start. In particular because he ranges over such a wide field of approaches it can be a helpful way of thinking about how your own work relates to the broader issues of what drawing is capable of.
The Secret of Drawing part one Beginning with a surgeon who draws, AGD looks at Leonardo, George Stubbs, Turner and Constable as well as natural history and scientific illustration. George Shaw and Richard Long are used as contemporary examples.
The Secret of Drawing part two Narrative drawing. Beginning with Hogarth and Gilray, including Goya and Picasso, american comic book, Japanese Manga and animation. 
The Secret of Drawing part three How drawing captures emotion, concept and personality. Drawing as an instinctive activity, perhaps even as a definition of who we are. Durer, George Gross, Sol Lewitt, outsider art, life drawing, Sarah Simblet, Raphael,  David Shigley and the balance between reason, intellectual ideas and emotional engagement.  Ends with Michael Landy's drawings of weeds. 
The Secret of Drawing part four Drawing and design, in particular architectural ideas. Includes Leonardo, Brunelleschi and a really interesting beginning section on Mark Fisher's design for rock concerts, that opens out ideas of how to communicate to thousands through drawing.

I realise that we have now reached the end of term, but the summer is a wonderful time for research as well as recharging creative batteries. You Tube can be a very good resource for research and in particular I always find interviews with artists fascinating. Try this film on William Kentridge or this one, David Hockney's Secret Knowledge or Vik Muniz: Art with wire, sugar, chocolate and string.


Look at the BBC series 'Making Their Mark: Six Artists on Drawing'


Maggi Hambling


Drawing as a primary medium: a focus on the drawings of Eva Hesse


Richard Serra on his drawing.


Rachael Whiteread: drawing





Try and keep drawing during the summer, especially if you want to build a practice that relies on your ability to control the materials you are working with and the skills to draw convincing images. It does take hours and hours of practice I'm afraid to be able to develop these skills. 

COP3 is meant to be a balance between practice and theory, reading around the subject, watching programmes such as the ones linked to this post and visiting exhibitions are good ways to prepare yourself, but don't forget what you are writing about is how to support your practice.  So keep drawing, even if only in short bursts, because it is only by making drawings that you will discover what it is that you are doing. Sylvain Chomet the animator that AGD interviews at the end of The Secret of Drawing part two has a wonderful way of describing how when drawing the image arrives out of the process, you can only discover what it is you are drawing by drawing.  The more you therefore draw the more you will invent new things. 

Mick Peter: Between sculpture and the cartoon

The upcoming KAWS exhibition at the YSP reminded me of the work of Mick Peter. Peter has developed a practice that juxtaposes the solid reality and gravitas of sculpture with the 'throwaway' language of the daily cartoon. His cartoon figures can look as if taken from the work of cartoon artists such as Robert Thompson or Larry but they are in fact illustrations designed by the artist himself.

From the Pyramid Selling exhibition at Tramway: Glasgow

Peter's work has examined the interrelationship between the flat, iconic language of drawing and the material language of sculpture in various previous exhibitions. 

Drawing for Trademark Horizon

Trademark Horizon

The work in the exhibition 'Trademark Horizon' takes the shapes of typical logos and folds them into 3D forms, the drawing for the exhibition, shows how straightforward his working process is, however by pushing the work's scale and creating an installation, he is able to transcend what could be a trite idea and elevate these concerns into a dialogue about the nature of the relationship between flat images and sculptural concerns. 

This is an old dialogue. During the Renaissance debates as to the merits of painting versus those of sculpture were common. Leonardo sets out the main issues. He argues that the demands placed on a painter are much greater than of a sculptor. While the painter had at least 10 visual problems to solve, “light, shade, colour, body, shape, position, distance, nearness, motion and rest”, the sculptor only has to work with “body, shape, position, motion, and rest.” Leonardo also argues that sculpture demands less talent than painting, going on to state that painting importantly involved less physical effort than sculpture, thus illustrating how painting was more cerebral. He rubbishes sculpture, saying that it “causes much perspiration which mingles with the grit and turns to mud”. The sculptor’s face is “pasted and smeared all over with marble powder…his dwelling is dirty and filled with dust and chips of stone.” The painter on the other hand “sits before his work at the greatest of ease, well dressed and applying delicate colours with his light brush”. His home is “clean and adorned with delightful pictures” and he enjoys “the accompaniment of music or the company of the authors of various fine works”. This of course is a key issue, because artists were at the time trying to make sure that their profession was seen as something higher than a mere craft. By pointing out the 'workmanlike' aspects of sculpture, he was trying to associate it with humble 'craftwork'. Leonardo accepts that sculpture’s greatest asset is its three-dimensional quality, however he goes on to state that the painter can equally achieve the effect of relieve (3 dimensional relief) through modelling in light and shade. It is unlikely that Michelangelo agreed with Leonardo on these issues. For centuries the arts had been divided into two categories. “Liberal” and “Mechanical” arts. The Liberal arts were considered to be fitting pursuits for free and noble citizens, being above the labour of handicrafts. Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music represented the scientific Liberal arts because they were based on mathematics. Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric represented the rational side because they dealt with language. Both painting and sculpture had been classed amongst the mechanical arts because they required manual labour. Leonardo argued “With justifiable complaints painting laments that it has been dismissed from the number of the liberal arts, since she is the legitimate daughter of nature and acts through the noblest sense. Thus it is wrong, O writers, to have omitted her from the number of the liberal arts, since she embraces not only the works of nature but also infinite things which nature never created”. 

These arguments as to what is 'proper' or high art, continue, and Mick Peter's work reminded me of how my own interests in art were 'rubbished' by my art tutors when I entered art college in the late 1960s.  My own particular art hero was the cartoonist Giles. I thought his work wonderful and directly relevant to me as a young lad from a working class background. As well as Giles, the Marvel comics illustrator Jack Kirby seemed to me to be someone who could give real visual excitement to a graphic image. However I was soon guided away from these things and told to look at 'proper art'.  Looking back on those times I can now see these debates as continuing ones, ones that will perhaps always be there because those that set the taste for society as a whole tend to be those rich and powerful enough to have their values listened to and taken seriously. We now have a debate as to what are 'English' or 'British' values, another debate as to who tells who what things are good and what are bad. Over time values change, my own work would have been derided as 'illustrative' 40 years ago, it is now accepted as 'narrative' art. 

If you look at Peter's earlier work immediately above, you can see him thinking through the dilemma. His sculptural work is obviously directly influenced by 2D imagery, it operates as relief sculpture and/or sculptural line drawing, however the sources have been effectively covered up or hidden. His more recent work brings his interests out into the open, he is prepared to show full-blown cartoon type images and have confidence that they won't be derided as simply blown up cartoons, but that they will be accepted as interesting reflections on sculptural language and popular culture. 

Mike Peter

See also:

Texture: between drawing and sculpture

KAWS