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Posts tagged "copying"
Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work
I don’t believe that Woody put the examples together as a teaching aid for his assistants, but rather as a reminder to himself. He was always trying to kick himself to put less labor into the work! He had a framed motto on the wall, “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” He hung the sheets with the panels on the wall of his studio to constantly remind himself to stop what he called “noodling.”
See also: Ivan Brunetti’s parody
(Thx to Andy Wales)
It seems Chinese copycat architects are pirating the design of Zaha Hadid’s latest project, the Wangjing SOHO, as the building comes to fruition. This isn’t the first time pirates have copied architectural plans on a massive scale — it’s just that now it’s happening in real time.
One of the major ways to tell whether something is a remix or a ripoff is whether the thief has transformed the stolen material into something new. One of the ways this transformation can happen is by simply appropriating material from one context and tweaking it just enough to make it work in another.
But when you consider how Hadid feels about context, things get a little interesting:
I don’t really believe in relating to the environment, per se. [It can be hard] to start afresh with something new if you’re always constantly relating to context. And I think what’s happened in the last, let’s say, twenty or thirty years is the whole idea of context has changed a lot.
Some would say this is exactly the trouble with architecture today: architects design buildings regardless of their context, in the hopes of making “something new,” something less like design and more like art. In some ways, it seems fitting that Hadid is having her design ripped off—if one designs without “relating to context,” then it makes sense that the design could be lifted and plopped right down in another context without any transformation.
Redrawing Comics
This is fun: Kevin Huizenga is re-drawing an old Dell Comics issue in the style of his Glenn Ganges comics. You can follow along here. His new book is Gloriana.
There’s also a Tumblr called Redrawn that features comic pages redrawn by various artist that cites Kevin and Tom Hart as the inspiration, and Covered, which featured artists reinterpreting comic covers.
Copycat Movie Posters
Nobody copies like Hollywood and advertising. Put them together? Things get even worse.
But before you get too upset, remember what these posters are for: they’re a kind of visual shorthand for genre. The fact that they all look alike is, to the marketing department, a feature, not a bug.
The first thing I learned as a librarian: you can judge a book by its cover, or at least its genre.
Barry Blitt covers Norman Rockwell
Next week’s cover, “Skin Deep,” by Barry Blitt, pays homage to the Norman Rockwell painting “The Tattoo Artist.” We asked Blitt how he came up with this idea. “My grandfather was a Sunday painter, he used to copy a lot of Norman Rockwell paintings, so I was aware of all the classic images at a very young age,” he told us. “Mitt Romney looks like he stepped out of one of those pictures.”
Bob Ross’s rivalry with his mentor, Bill Alexander: “He betrayed me!”
Show Your Work! Episode 2: Falling Out from Austin Kleon on Vimeo.
So here’s something you don’t hear about a lot — Bob Ross, the famous afro-ed host of The Joy Of Painting, was taught his famous “wet on wet” fast painting technique by a German expatriate painter named Bill Alexander, who, believe it or not, had his own PBS painting show called The Magic of Oil Painting, that ran from 1974-1982. (The show, like The Joy Of Painting, was basically an advertisement for his painting supply business, Alexander Art.) Here’s a clip of Alexander painting:
Look familiar? When Bob Ross was a young military man stationed in Alaska, he was constantly searching for an art teacher who could actually teach him to paint:
“The schools I went to, the professors were mostly into abstract — talking all about color theory and composition,” he said. “They’d tell you what makes a tree, but they wouldn’t tell you how to paint a tree.”
When he finally took a class from Bill Alexander, everything clicked:
“I took one class and I went crazy,” he said. “I knew this was what I wanted to do.” Mr. Ross eventually set up his own traveling art school in Florida.
“The Joy of Painting” started airing on PBS in 1983. Alexander even passed the torch to his former student:
At the beginning of The Joy of Painting’s second season in 1984, Ross dedicated the show to Alexander, who filmed a promo for his former student: “I hand off my mighty brush to a mighty man, and that is Bob Ross. In 1987 someone from Alexander Art told Ross that they could not keep up with the demand generated by the The Joy of Painting and suggested that Ross start his own line of art supplies.
And then, after Ross became “a $15 million industry of how-to books, videos and, most of all, Bob Ross art supplies” something between the two changed. In this 1991 NYTimes profile, Ross declines to mention his painting teacher, because “Now he is our major competitor.”
Alexander said he felt betrayed:
[Alexander] spoke of his former protege in the tones Thomas Couture might have used to describe the young pupil who outstripped him, Edouard Manet. “He betrayed me,” he said in his strong German accent. “I invented ‘wet on wet.’ I trained him and he is copying me — what bothers me is not just that he betrayed me, but that he thinks he can do it better.”
(For the record, Alexander didn’t “invent” wet-on-wet, or alla prima — Jan van Eyck, van Gogh, and Monet beg to differ.)
What fascinates me isn’t the aesthetic qualities of the two or whether Ross was a copycat or not — the art seems pretty mix and match to me, and their business models are almost identical. What’s interesting to me is why Ross was the more successful, or more heralded of the two.
The answer lies in showmanship.
Contrast the two: both present an easy, “happy” kind of painting — art as a type of therapy — but their personalities and delivery are very different: Alexander is passionate, fiery, referring to “un mighty brush!” and Ross is folksy, laid back, with a hippie ‘fro (which he originally had permed to save on haircuts but then had to keep because it was his trademark). Alexander is, in other words, European, and Ross is American.
This juxtaposition is hilariously parodied by Patton Oswalt in his bit on the two in “Easter Eggs,” off Feelin’ Kinda Patton
But maybe more importantly, Ross and the PBS station managers knew very well that “The Joy Of Painting” wasn’t really much about the painting at all.
Ross’s expanding circle of viewers are, for the most part, not even painting, nor do they have any plans to start. They watch because “The Joy of Painting” is the most relaxing show on television. It is unfailingly simple, a three-camera production with a black background and, at Ross’s insistence, no edits. Ross wears the same thing every time — blue jeans and a John Henry shirt — and in 26 minutes not only completes a painting but also, in his lullaby voice, murmurs familiar Bob-isms like “happy little trees” and “what the heck, let’s give him a little friend over here” and “there are no mistakes, only happy accidents.” As the Ross fan Matt Lauer once admitted to Rosie O’Donnell, it’s hard not to slip into “a little Bob Ross coma,” so entrancing is the show.
“It’s funny to talk to these people,” said Joan Kowalski, the media director of Bob Ross Inc. and Walt’s daughter. “Because they think they’re the only ones who watch to take a nap. Bob knew about this. People would come up to him and say, `I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’ve been putting me to sleep for 10 years.’ He’d love it.”
“There are people who just like to hear him talk,” one station manager said. “We even get letters from blind people who say they tune in because he gives them hope.”
In other words: It ain’t what you paint, it’s how you paint it.
