p e n c h a n t

one: to repel flies while working in the garden, tie lemon balm in your hair or rub it into your skin. I do this frequently, because I don’t like commercial sprays, and the buzzing and biting of flies is annoying

two: when creating a work of art, capture the essence of the idea or the subject, then stop—in this case, the greenery in the hair. to continue on to complete the face would have been fine, but it also would have changed the focus. once the art becomes more developed, it’s easy to forget the original inspiration. if I had gone on to create a full painting, I would have put the lower portion of the face in shadow

this is a visual journal sketch, drawn quickly because the garden was calling
ballpoint pen & acrylic on paper

Even the Random House Dictionary of the English Language seems to be vague about it:

en·er·gy 7. Physics. the capacity to do work; the property of a system which diminishes when the system does work on any other system, by an amount equal to the work so done; potential energy.

How do you illustrate something so undefinable as energy?

You can use the concrete and the cliche. An electrical outlet, for example. Or solar panels, or a hydro-plant, or an oil field, wind turbines, or …

But energy is so vast and open that these solutions seem limiting and trite. How do you capture complexity in visual terms? Think of other complexities, such as government, love, religion. These types of depictions are challenging to the illustrator, and to be unique and captivating one must pursue a range of solutions. How have they been conveyed symbolically in art and literature? The Great Sphinx, for example, has served as an emblem of mystery. The heart (now an overused cliche) has symbolized love, health, sacrifice. In the Book of Revelation a ten-headed beast symbolizes a multi-national government alliance.

Here is one solution, which is a piece I did for an illustration workshop: energy personified, running the treadmill earth, as both a renewable and an expendable resource. I also wanted to convey its timelessness—the past, present, and future of energy.

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acrylic on rag board

You know that book in which the only place where the word anomaly appears is the index, on page 362? It reads: anomaly, 362.

My blog entry for this week, “Hare today…”, is on my agent’s blog, Crowe’s Nest. If you came here from there, please look around. If not, you can get there from here.

For every created piece—whether it’s for visual arts, musical, written, or multimedia—
form is an essential consideration. Form does indeed, or should, follow function. Function determines the shape of things. Just look around: a phone’s length is determined by the distance from ear to mouth; the passenger jet has its birdlike design because that is what’s been proven best for horizontal flight; and looking down from those technological birds, we see that most cities are riverside or lakeside, established when the need for access to drinking water and water transport were primary. Carry this approach into the creation of art and the solution to the need becomes natural, a naturalness that is readily accepted by all who see it or experience it. It also becomes unique, and that uniqueness has an attractive quality that validates it.

Milton Glaser’s I ♥ NY, for example. Here is an internationally recognized icon that I would bet has been accepted by the high percentage of those who have seen it without a thought that one genius of a graphic designer conceived and produced it. Witness its horrendous adaptation over the decades, no thanks to the multitudes of copyright violators who have obviously not given it a first, much less second, thought. (The most recent version of this kind of rip-off is the LensCrafters ads, in which the eye—“I”—of a happily bespectacled person is followed by “♥ LC”. You can see the ads in Time magazine.) This multiple adaptation only proves how unquestionably unique and natural Glaser’s solution was. He achieved this purity by paring down a project—that of promoting a city in need of a better image—to playful, austere essentials. Like New York itself, it hits you. It’s immediate. No reams of hype.

Another example: Moby Dick, the book. A BIG book, exhaustive. With big words, like the 20-letter long, uninterpenetratingly. A big book for a big subject. A leviathan of a book. That was not accidental on Melville’s part.

You can apply this principle to anything created, as I said in the beginning: whether music or drama, film, sculpture, architecture, painting, graphic design.

Without belaboring the point, here’s one more example, one of my own. When asked by a local self-employed house painter to design a new business card for him, I cleared my head of all I knew about the ubiquitous “business card”, and got down to the essence of the matter. It came to this: aesthetic choice. Each customer selects a color, a selection that suits the individual’s tastes and the needs of the habitation. Hence, the essential paint swatch. Hence, a business card posing as a paint swatch.

As you create what it is you’re after, allow the subject to dictate a natural solution.

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The card is scored to be folded in half to the common busness card size of 2×3.5,
an option that the client requested.

There is one scent that has always stirred my senses: the enchanting pungency of artist’s oils and linseed. As a student I’d enter the halls of the Art Center School of Design and feel both comfort and excitement. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that comes with the smell, that creation is at work: the head and the heart and the hand laboring together to produce a vision not yet fully realized but full of possibility. You peer in the door and see the quiet, repetitive dip of the sable or bristle hair brush into the paint, the certain stroke across the stretched linen, the wiping of the brush into the rag. Stepping back, tilting the head, squinting the eyes, stepping forward, dipping the brush—the artist is taking the slow dance of creativity under the revolving sky of the artist’s dream.

Ink has a poignant, serious smell, and ink is absolute. Watercolors have the fragrance of subtle charm, and charming and subtle is their effect. Sketch, charcoal, print papers—these emit the ancient memory of trees, and their fibers absorb the marks laid on them, like expressions of passion etched into bark.

The American artist, Walter Meigs, said, “Experience, even for the painter, is not exclusively visual.”

Of the many allurements of art, one is its bouquet.

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Once a year about this time a pink cloud grows and grows and hovers above our front yard.
It affects the light that comes in the windows, the feel of the air. It’s telling the creatures, of course, who love the scent and the sweet, “Come propagate me.” They do, lustily. Then the winds come and we have pink rain. After that, by summer, we have cherries. Then come the birds and squirrels.

And so it goes, year after year.

photo © 2009 by Troy Howell

There seem to be many myths about art and creativity. One of them is that the process of creativity is done under the sway of some nebulous creative mood, which comes seldom and vanishes at its own mysterious will. You must wait for it the way you wait for the sun to come out.

“So,” I’m asked occasionally, “you work when you’re in the mood, when those creative juices flow?”

Mood, shmood. If you want to use the word mood, mood runs in our veins, along with all those creative juices. That’s what our gray matter consists of. That’s who we are.

“If I waited for The Mood,” I usually say, stressing the The, “I’d be flat broke.” (Not that I’m rich, mind you, not even close—that’s another myth.)

If there’s any mood to be had, we create it.

We go to work, not unlike a man with a shovel across his shoulder, with a purpose to perform. We may not know what the exact result will be—usually we don’t—but we are engaged the entire way through, from the first glimmer of concept to the final polished result. If we’re an illustrator we have story to start from, and we respond according to its needs. If we’re a writer we have something to say, and we endeavor to say it in the most succinct, unique way we can.

In the process, we are pulling something out of nothing.

That’s work, believe me. It may not be brow-beading (though sometimes it is), but it’s certainly brow-beating, soul-sweating, mind-wearying.

Also in the process, we are pulling something out of a vast reservoir—the accumulation of all those somethings, whether they’re from years of formal education, practice, life’s experiences, or intensive research. That, too, takes hard work. Lots of it.

Am I in the mood? Give me pen and paper. Just possibly, if I try hard enough, I can put you—not in The Mood, but in a mood. A mood that enhances the subject. That may have an affect on how you see, or think, or feel or laugh or cry, in that moment. Or even longer.

We’re mood makers, not mood twiddle-our-thumbs anticipators.

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Written moodily.

and a crimson of cardinals burdens the birdfeeder, five crows—one with a hiccup
that follows its every caw—come harassing, the cat who wanted out wants in again,
both wood stoves, upstairs and down, are coughing and choking, and the ink in my
pen’s gone cold.

artwork is charcoal—the real stuff, right from the hearth—on charcoal paper

In book illustration, as in writing, you don’t include everything you’ve produced. Much of the process of creation involves exploring ideas, such as points of view, details, style. Though it may be a great idea or well done, like a beautiful metaphor, if it doesn’t quite fit, out it goes. You don’t wear a coat that doesn’t complement the trousers (OK, there are exceptions).

These are a few visual ideas I created for the book, Mermaid Tales from Around the World (Mary Pope Osborne / Scholastic Press). The first is a cover concept. The other two helped me immerse myself (pardon the pun) in the subject. Nothing’s wrong with them, but they were more of a “day in the life” approach rather than illustrating any of the stories. Perhaps I should have found a way to include them somewhere in the front or back matter.

To view a finished color piece from the book see the Trunk Sale.