Francis Marshall and Roy's adventure. . .

On the fifth anniversary of my father's death, a time that I can only describe as gut-wrenching, I thought I would recount one of my favourite art-related stories. When Roy was in his early twenties he had more or less decided that he wanted to eventually become an artist of some sort. He began to draw incessantly with the idea of eventually getting into art college. And in those days, thanks to mid-century socialist principles, if he got into college he would also receive a national scholarship to pay for his time studying. So he worked an worked to become a good drawist. He drew continually from life in sketchbooks and grew to be very good over a few years. Some of the drawings he did before becoming a student showed exceptional talent and were better than many professionals I have known.

Here is one of Roy's early drawings of St. Bart's church in London done around the time he became a student.

At some point before he became a student, Roy, thought that maybe he could get a job as an illustrator for a commercial studio. In those days there were, in a city like London, many people who could earn a living just doing illustrations for various kinds of commercial jobs from magazine and book illustration to advertising and promotion. As I was growing up, Roy gradually became quite humble about his skills as an artist; he knew his talents as well as his limitations. But in his youth he was, as many of us are (and perhaps need to be), somewhat over confident concerning his abilities. Many of Roy's drawings up to that point had been cityscapes of London with some sketches of the people around him. But drawing the human figure is the aspect of drawing that takes the longest to master so he was still not entirely accomplished in this regard. So when Roy put together a portfolio to look for a commercial job, he thought he would take a few figure drawings by other artists and use them to pad the folio and give himself an advantage. He wasn't going to actually pass off anyone else's work in print so he figured no harm no foul, so to speak. An artist that Roy admired a great deal was a fashion and book illustrator named Francis Marshall, and in the 1950s Marshall was at the height of his power. Now, you would think that being an amateur with little experience, Roy wouldn't pick drawings by one of the best illustrators around to pass off as his own. But, as Roy told it later on, he lost his head and he filled his folio with Francis Marshall drawings. Marshall had a magic ability with line and composition that was unrivalled, and his ability to use an ink-brush to create masterful drawings that look like that have been just whipped off in a moment is truly remarkable. He illustrated the human figure in situ and out, with an ability that Roy would later admit he would never be able to achieve (and very few others have as well). Some of Marshall's full-colour book covers could be a bit stiff, but his brush drawings were amazing for their spontaneity and ability to portray figures with just the right amount of minimal detail.

Look at this drawing of a woman sitting on a bed.

Or this drawing of people on a London street. 

And here is another collection of drawing from Marshall's book on New York. 

Roy got offered a job at the first studio to which he applied but in retrospect, he couldn't fathom how the art director didn't recognize illustrations by one of the top illustrators in the county. Roy sometimes thought that maybe the art director did recognize them but figured that at least he knew to steal from the best so maybe would do a decent job. Well, needless to say, a week went by and the art director called Roy into his office to sack him. If you know how socially awkward Roy could be you can only imagine how comically this scene must have played out. The art director was very nice and didn't really call Roy out on what he had done. He just suggested that things weren't really working out and he would pay Roy for the week he had worked. 

Well, a couple of years later Roy finally started at art college and eventually went on to have a successful career of his own. Though he loved to draw and became very good at it, Roy's career was more that of a designer and art director, and he would have admitted that his pure skill as spontaneous illustrator of the human figure never matched that of Francis Marshall.   

Reading some Contemporary Fiction. . . .

For reasons that I am unable to articulate, I stopped painting a couple of months ago. I wish I could explain why, but I don't even understand it myself. Suffice to say that after 35 years for continually working as an artist, I ran out of steam, faith, and inspiration. It has been a significantly depressing and stressful process. In order to deal with it I started writing about life and art. And, of course, reading is always an essential concomitant of writing. Most of my fiction reading for the past twenty years or so has been 19th century and early 20th century work, but I recently started reading contemporary fiction again. After years of reading mostly older fiction, it is quite interesting to read newer books for a while.

The first book I picked up was one that I had read twice before - Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Since it was published in the 1970s, this book has become a kind of modern classic, I think in large because it expressed the immense crisis in the Western psyche that was occurring in the lead up to the 70s. Though it doesn't specifically address these issues in any kind of systematic ways, Motorcycle Maintenance was written against the backdrop of the breakdown of traditional rationality, the linguistic turn in philosophy, the abandonment of so-called meta-theories, and rise of contemporary philosophical pragmatism. I read this book in the 1980s, in the 90s, and now again. Thought parts of it seem dated, an inevitability with any philosophical/fictionary work, it holds up well overall and it is an enjoyable read. Persig really illustrates the way that approaches to rationality were breaking down in someone's everyday consciousness. And of course, because he deals in detail with the question of "quality," a question always central to me as an artists, I find it fascinating.

The next novel I read was David Foster Wallace's last (and posthumously published) book The Pale King. I must admit that, though it is on my list, I have never read Infinite Jest, and I cannot comment on Wallace's work in general. But The Pale King is, I am fairly certain, one of the most boring books I have ever read. Though Wallace's prose style is fluid and interesting in itself to a degree, I just don't know how anyone (particularly an editor) ever thought this could be an interesting book. It is ostensibly a 600 page book about people who work for the IRS, and is precisely as boring as that sounds. It is profoundly difficult to imagine how Wallace could ever have gotten this book published if he hadn't been dead or famous or both. What made the book seem both more tragic and ridiculous is the way the publisher put a little 'guide for reading groups' in the back of the book. In this section you will find sophomoric questions meant to stimulate discussion for reading groups such as "Discuss the different ways in which the characters in The Pale King search for, and perhaps find, happiness." Since corporate publishers have no sense of humour and are notoriously irony-impaired, I am fairly sure these high school-like questions are not meant as a joke. And if they are meant seriously they are absurd, insulting, and belittle not only this book but I suspect Wallace's entire literary project.

Then I read a book I have been meaning to read for years; Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. This is one of those books that people often put on lists of so-called 'post-modern' novels, like Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It is a book in which the narrator is always present and continually addresses the reader, a technique that some people find gimmicky and aggravating. It is essentially a story of a guy who tries to purchase Italo Calvino's latest novel but due to a printing mistake he gets the wrong book, and an incomplete one as well. He goes back and receives the wrong book again, and then the whole novel becomes a story of the reader encountering a series of fragments of different novels that he can never complete. Through the book, the reader is drawn closer to a mysterious and enigmatic woman whom, depending on how you read it, he marries. Calvino is always an entertaining writer and the fragments that he writes are all, in themselves, very compelling. Because Calvino seems like a natural story-teller, you find yourself, like the reader in the novel, wishing you could finish most of the fragments. It is well worth the read for both entertainment value as well as being an interesting literary experiment.

For my next book I went back to North America and read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Foer. The only thing I knew about Foer before I picked up this book was what I had seen in the movie version of his first book Everything is Illuminated. Apparently this book has also been made into a film, and upon reading it I can see why - it is pure Hollywood. This book deeply offends my sensibilities, not because it is poorly written, but because it is gratuitously sentimental. The book revolves around a young boy essentially trying to come to terms with the death of this father in the Twin Towers. This subject matter, in itself, is dangerously evocative and could be made sentimental even by the best, most circumspect author. But in Foer's hands every page drips with saccharin-like sentiment; and it is not just sentiment, but it boarders on melodrama. What I find particularly offensive about it, is that with all this sentimentality the whole book becomes a kind of trickery, like advertising that uses babies or puppies. To me Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a little bit like literary cheating because Foer has taken 9/11, which is a subject that is already very explosive and emotion laden, and then he has infused it with a story of a young boy who has lost his father and is close to a mental breakdown; and he has done all of this without offering any kind of distance or counterpoint whatsoever. It has the makings of the kind of Hollywood film that I most despise, one that intends to pull at the heartstrings (both patriotic and familial) with the aim of selling tickets and little more.

After reading that book I went back to Italy and read Umberto Eco's Novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. This is a story of a mad who has had a stroke and attempts to rebuild a vision of his life by looking through all the books, magazines, and comics in his childhood home. Eco is a very good prose writer (at least his translator makes him so) and I always enjoy his work. Part if the theme here is the issue of the narrator's childhood in fascist Italy where even the comic books and children's' songs were promoting fascist ideology.  If you have an interest in comics and other popular culture from the 30s to the 50s, this book is excellent. But most readers will simply miss most of Eco's references and fail to connect with the narrator. I found this book among my father's things and, though I don't know if he ever had a chance to read it, I am sure the subject matter would have been of great interest to him. I liked it but found some of the long descriptions of various comic books and other popular culture artifacts got a bit tedious after a while.

I am not sure if any of these books will be helpful in my own writing which is very much geared toward sorting about where my conceptual and artistic life will go from here but so far it has been interesting.