The Art of Michael J. Malzone

Archive for September, 2008

An early inspiration and influence on Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, Skippy is considered one of the great comic strips of its’ era. Percy Crosby, the strip’s creator brought a fresh new approach to the comic pages and Skippy attained great success and popularity throughout it’s run from 1925 through 1945. Percy’s creation also found success in publishing and product licensing, including an academy award winning adaptation starring a young Jackie COoper as Skippy.
Sadly, Percy’s last years were bogged down with a trademark infringement suit with Skippy Peanut Butter, with him tragically dying in an asylum in NEw York in 1949.
I found the Skippy.com site a wonderful tribute to Percy Shelby by his daughter Joan Crosby Tibbetts. There are quite a few articles about the family’s legal battle with US food giant Bestfoods at the skippy.com site.
Here are some interesting SKippy sites:
http://lambiek.net/artists/c/crosby_p.htm
http://www.skippy.com/
http://www.toonopedia.com/skippy.htm
http://www.skippy.com/stealingskippy.html

Is Charlie Browns’ wall inspired by Skippys’?

Nov. 20, 1954 ,Charlie Brown and Lucy appear at the wall for the first time

“…after World War II, when I came home, Krazy Kat became my hero. I had never seen Krazy Kat up until then because neither one of the papers in the Twin cities published it, so I didn’t know Krazy Kat. But then it became my ambition to draw a strip that would have as much life and meaning and subtlety to it as Krazy Kat had.”
Charles Schulz , interviewed by Rick Marschall and Gary Groth in Nemo 31, January 1992

Next to Peanuts, Krazy Kat has always been my favorite comic strip. I remember enjoying the animated Krazy Kat cartoon on TV as a kid with my Mom and brother. The late sixties seemed to be the golden age of TV cartoons. From the old classics like Felix the cat, Popeye, Snuffy Smith, through Bugs Bunny, Foghorn leghorn, the Beatles, the list is endless. Here are some great Links about Krazy Kat including Gilbert Seldes’ essay in his classic,”The seven lively arts”, and also American poet E.E. Cummings introduction for a collection of the comic strips.
Click here for a nice page dedicated to Krazy Kat
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/crocker/

Click here for the Gilbert Seldes essay,
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/SELDES/ch15.html

Click here for “A Foreword to Krazy” from E. E. Cummings, this essay was originally published as the prelude to the 1946 Henry Holt collection of Krazy Kat strips.
http://www.krazy.com/cummings.htm

And finally, Click here for a great little early Krazy Kat animation on Youtube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcmfe0F6vVA&feature=related

One of America’s first major comic-strip artists and pioneer of animation, Winsor McCay’s work still stands as one of the finest cartoons in history. His classic strip “Little Nemo In Slumberland” first appeared in the New York Herald on October 15, 1905. The most famous cartoon of it’s day the strip featured Little Nemo, a young child and his wild dream world, filled with animals, stunning palaces, and villians, with him ultimately always being awaken in the last panel in which he would comment on his adventure. McCay employed superb draftsman along with a wonderful sense of storytelling in every Sunday strip. In his foreward to John Canemaker’s biography on McCay, children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak wrote: “My book In the Night Kitchen is, in part, an homage to Winsor McCay.”

In 1914 McCay made animation history with “Gertie the dinosaur”. A short animated film, Gertie’s personality was the inspiration and predecessor for other successful animators like Walt Disney and MAx Fleischer.
What is truly amazing is that McCay had to draw each frame, thousands of them, on 6 x 8 sheets of rice paper, before the concept of the plastic cel animation in which the key characters were paint on celluloid material and overlayed on the painted background. His first animated short is wonderful, my favorite part is when Gertie recalls in a dream, earlier days when she was the life of the party!
There’s a great blog dedicated to Winsor Mcay at: http://springlakemccay.blogspot.com/
and also an excellent wikipedia entry on Little Nemo at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Nemo
To see Mcay’s first animation of gertie the dinosaur, click here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36gqBoUSJ4M

Newspaper comic strips appeared in America in the late 19th century, and many historians agree that The Yellow Kid, by Richard F. Outcault was the first newspaper comic strip.
By the early 1900’s there were over 150 strips in syndication by noted cartoonists such as Winsor McCay, George McManus, George Herriman and many others.

Some interesting links about the Yellow Kid;
http://www.virtuemag.org/articles/the-yellow-kid
http://www.neponset.com/yellowkid/history.htm
Tommorow we’ll explore the magical world of Winsor Mcay!

On October 2nd, the world will celebrate the 58th anniversary of the all time classic cartoon strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz. Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the gang are by far, my favorite creation by any artist. I’m including the greats, Rembrandt, Valesquez, Inness, you name it, no one artist has brought me more happiness and laughter than the genius art of Charles Schulz.
From childhood memories of reading the strip in the newspaper everyday to the holiday classic, “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, I can truly say that Charles Schulz was the reason I wanted to be an artist. Over the next week we’ll take a look at Schulz’s predecessors and inspirations and some interesting links to cartoon sites on the web.
Click here to visit the official Snoopy website

For to Be a Farmer’s Boy was painted at Prout’s Neck, Maine, and is one of several watercolors in which Homer returned to his earlier theme of rural American childhood. Although the sky has faded and appears empty, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and FTIR analyses have yielded evidence that the artist originally painted the sky with dilute washes of chrome yellow and pink madder (both fugitive pigments), with a minute amount of vermilion, to create a glowing orange sunset. Thus, the watercolor originally showed a young boy pausing in his work of harvesting pumpkins to gaze off toward the setting sun, recalling the work of French Barbizon School artists, who influenced Homer in his early career. Their pictures of peasants pausing for a moment of contemplation at the end of their workday resonated with Homer, who showed a lifelong preference for depicting workers.

Click this link to see some tools and techniques of Winslow Homer courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/homer/tools

three Gulls, 11 x 14 oil on linen

Over the past year I painted two seagull paintings, each of them thankfully sold. Which told me two things, one, people like seagulls, and two, I should paint more seagulls!
Usually when I paint at the beach I spend a lot of time just sitting and observing the always changing waves and shoreline. As an artist, it is well worth it to spend just as much time to study and observe the subject in front of you, as it is to paint it. Preferably, an outdoor or plein air painting is finished on the spot, or finishing touches might be done in the studio. But many times these outdoor sketches can just be a gathering of information for use later in the studio. Carrying a notebook is valuable for writing down observations that we can use in our paintings later in the studio. Two weeks ago down at Long Beach Island I watched hundreds of gulls flock around a woman who was feeding them. They were so orderly lined up down the beach 30-40 yards and there was actually a master seagull who kept them in order so no one got out of line. It was great to observe and although I didn’t have a camera, I made a lot of mental notes for my next seagull painting. When we left the beach we had the privelege to talk to Leslie, who was known as the Bird Lady at LBI, and feeds them everyday in the Summer. I’ll be heading down again in a few weeks and look forward to bringing my sketchpad and a lot of bread!

Watching 16 x 20, oil on linen

At the Carke Institute, Williamstown, Ma. through Oct. 19th
Through an innovative manner of handling paint, a group of American artists around 1900 created deceptively simple canvases that convey images of shimmering transience, visions suggested rather than delineated. Focusing on this singular aesthetic characteristic—softness—Like Breath on Glass explores this painterly phenomenon through works by fifteen important artists, including Whistler, George Inness, John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, John Henry Twachtman, and Eduard Steichen.

Thomas Wilmer Dewing,
Summer, 1890 Oil on canvas, mounted on board
Smithsonian American Art Museum
TO find out more about this exhibit, click here

Historians have long known that Vincent van Gogh often painted over his older canvases. It is estimated that almost one third of his early paintings were covered by other compositions. But now thanks to a new, advanced form of non-destructive X-ray analysis, reveals hidden paintings. The analysis of the painting ‘Patch of Grass’reveals a portrait of a woman. Read the whole article at: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/ancham/2008/80/i16/html/ac800965g.html

Vincent Van Gogh’s “Patch of Grass”
The womans’ face is revealed
in the x-ray

Nothing seems to stop the viewer in their tracks faster than a painting of a rainbow.
The challenge in painting a rainbow is to maintain a sense of luminosity, a credible transition of one color to the next, and to keep it consistent throughout the arc.
In this painting in progress, I laid in the sky and then wiped out the area where I wanted the rainbow in one continuous swipe of the cloth. I then laid in a light layer of titanium white and softened the edges into the sky with my finger. The prism of colors were laid in with cad lemon yellow in the middle, cad orange, then cad red light going to the inside of the rainbow. Then from the yellow heading outward, I made a transition using cad lemon yellow and manganese to progress through the blues, with cobalt violet rounding out the edge. These colors are very subtle and barely discernable in this photo. It requires a lot of expiermentation but well worth the time as ithe prism of light and atmospheric effects should be a vital part of your picture making process.
Here’s an interesting website about rainbows; http://eo.ucar.edu/rainbows/

A book I highly recommend you add to your art library is, “The nature of Light & Color by M. Minnaer. This book is a must have for artists who should know the nature of light and atmospheric optics.