Gather round, children and listen to Grandma reminiscin’ ‘bout the days when studying comics meant changing out of your pajamas and showing up at the bursar’s office, check in hand.
Actually, Grandma’s full of it. Graphic novels are enjoying unprecedented popularity and educators are turning to comics to reach reluctant readers, but as of this writing, there still aren’t that many programs for those interested in making a career of this art form.
At the very least, you’ll learn a thing or two about layout, the relationship of art to text, and using compression to denote the passage of time.
It’s the sort of nitty gritty training that would benefit both veterans and newbies alike.
Ready to sign up? The free course, which starts in February, will require approximately 10 hours per week. The syllabus is below.
Session 1: Defining Comics
Identify key relationships in sample texts & demonstrate the use of various camera angles on a comics page
Session 2: Comics Relationships
Create Text-Image and Image-Image Panels
Session 3: Time And Space
One Second, One Hour, One Day Comics Challenge
Session 4: Layout And Grid Design
Apply multiple panel grids to provided script
Session 5: Thumbnails
Create thumbnail sketches of a multipage scene
Jonathan Barnbrook, the British graphic designer who created the cover art for several of David Bowie’s more recent albums, had his creative studio issue an announcement on Facebook today, one which will surely please many:
Barnbrook loved working with David Bowie, he was simply one of the most inspirational, kind people we have met. So in the spirit of openness and in remembrance of David we are releasing the artwork elements of his last album ★ (Blackstar) to download here free under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. That means you can make t‑shirts for yourself, use them for tattoos, put them up in your house to remember David by and adapt them too, but we would ask that you do not in any way create or sell commercial products with them or based on them.
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“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?,” asked T.S. Eliot in lines from his play “The Rock.”His prescient description of the dawning information age has inspired data scientists and their dissenters for decades. Thirty-six years after Eliot’s prophetic lament over “Endless invention, endless experiment,” futurist Alvin Toffler described the effects of information overload in his book Future Shock, and though many of his predictions haven’t aged well, his “prognosis,” writes Fast Company, “was more accurate than not.” Among his many “Tofflerisms” is one I believe Eliot would appreciate: “The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”
Indeed, the exponential accumulation of data and information, and the incredible amount of ready access would make both men’s heads spin. Internet archives grow vaster and vaster, their contents an embarrassing richness of the world’s treasures, and a perhaps even greater store of its obscurities. Each week, it seems, we bring you news of one or two more open access databases filled with images, texts, films, recorded music. It can indeed be dizzying. And of all the archives I’ve surveyed, used in my own research, and presented to Open Culture readers, none has seemed to me vaster than Europeana Collections, a portal of “48,796,394 artworks, artefacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe,” sourced from well over 100 institutions such as The European Library, Europhoto, the National Library of Finland, University College Dublin, Museo Galileo, and many, many more, including contributions from the public at large. Where does one begin?
The possibilities may literally be endless, as the collection continues to expand at a rate far beyond the ability of any one person, or team of people, or entire research institute of people to match. It is easy to feel adrift in such a database as this, which stretches on like a Borgesian library, offering room after endless room of visual splendor, documentation, and interpretation. It is also easy to make discoveries, to meet people, stumble upon art, hear music, see photographs, learn histories you would never have encountered if you knew what you were looking for and knew exactly how to find it. Eliot warned us—and rightly so—of the dangers of information overload. But he neglected, in his puritanical way, to describe the pleasures, the minor epiphanies, the happy chance occurrences afforded us by the ever-expanding sea of information in which we swim. One can learn to navigate it, one can drift aimlessly, and one can, simultaneously, feel immensely overwhelmed.
In high school, I had a history teacher who was, in his spare time, a millionaire owner of several marinas. He taught, he told us, because he loved it. Was he a good teacher? Not by the lights of most pedagogical standards, but he did intend, amidst all his lassitude and total lack of organization, to leave us all with something more important than history: the secret of his success. What was it, you ask? Naps. Each day he touted the power of power naps with a proselytizer’s relentless enthusiasm: 15 minutes a few times a day, the key to wealth and happiness.
We all thought he was benignly nuts, but maybe he was on to something after all. It seems that many very wise, productive people—such as Albert Einstein, Aristotle, and Salvador Dali—have used power naps as sources of refreshment and inspiration. Except that while my history teacher recommended no less than ten minutes, at least one of these famous gents preferred less than one. Dali used a method of timing his naps that ensured his sleep would not last long. He outlined it thus, according to Lifehacker:
1. Sleep sitting upright (Dali recommends a Spanish-style bony armchair)
2. Hold a key in your hand, between your fingers (for the bohemian, use a skeleton key)
3. Relax and fall asleep (but not for too long…)
4. As you fall asleep, you’ll drop the key. Clang bang clang!
5. Wake up inspired!
Dali called it, fittingly, “Slumber with a key,” and to “accomplish this micro nap,” writes The Art of Manliness, he “placed an upside-down plate on the floor directly below the key.” As soon as he fell asleep, “the key would slip through his fingers, clang the plate, and awaken him from his nascent slumber.” He claimed to have learned this trick from Capuchin monks and recommended it to anyone who worked with ideas, claiming that the micro nap “revivified” the “physical and psychic being.”
Dali included “Slumber with a key” in his book for aspiring painters, 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, along with such nostrums as “the secret of the reason why a great draughtsman should draw while completely naked” and “the secret of the periods of carnal abstinence and indulgence to be observed by the painter.” We might be inclined to dismiss his nap technique as a surrealist practical joke. Yet The Art of Manliness goes on to explain the creative potential in the kind of nap I used to take in history class—dozing off, then jerking awake just before my head hit the desk:
The experience of this transitional state between wakefulness and sleep is called hypnagogia. You’re floating at the very threshold of consciousness; your mind is sliding into slumber, but still has threads of awareness dangling in the world…. While you’re in this state, you may see visions and hallucinations (often of shapes, patterns, and symbolic imagery), hear noises (including your own name or imagined speech), and feel almost physical sensations…. The experience can essentially be described as “dreaming while awake.”
The benefits for a surrealist painter—or any creative person in need of a jolt out of the ordinary—seem obvious. Many visionaries such as William Blake, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge have made use of waking dream states as wellsprings of inspiration. Both Beethoven and Wagner composed while half asleep.
Scientists have found waking dream states useful as well. We’ve already mentioned Einstein. Brilliant mathematician, engineer, philosopher, and theoretical physicist Henri Poincare also found inspiration in micro naps. He pointed out that the important thing is to make ready use of any insights you glean during your few seconds of sleep by writing them down immediately (have pen and paper ready). Then, the conscious mind must take over: “It is necessary,” wrote Poincare, “to put in shape the results of this inspiration, to deduce from them the immediate consequences, to arrange them,” and so forth. He also suggests that “verification” of one’s hypnagogic insights is needed above all, but this step, while critical for the mathematician, seems superfluous for the artist.
So the micro nap comes to us with a very respectable pedigree, but does it really work or is it a psychological placebo? The author of the Almost Bohemian blog writes that he has practiced the technique for several weeks and found it “relatively successful” in restoring energy, though he has yet to harness it for inspiration. If you asked empirical sleep researchers, they might tend to agree with my history teacher: “Sleep laboratory studies show,” writes Lynne Lamberg in her book Bodyrhythms, “that a nap must last at least ten minutes to affect mood and performance.” This says nothing at all, however, about how long it takes to open a doorway to the unconscious and steal a bit of a dream to put to use in one’s waking work.
Aside from the very specific use of the micro nap, the longer power nap—anywhere from 10–40 minutes—can work wonders in improving “mood, alertness and performance,” writes the National Sleep Foundation. Short naps seem to work best as they leave one feeling refreshed but not groggy, and do not interfere with your regular sleep cycle. The Sleep Foundation cites a NASA study “on sleepy military pilots and astronauts” which found that “a 40-minute nap improved performance by 34% and alertness by 100%.” Lifehacker points to studies showing that “power naps, short 10 to 15 minute naps, improve mental efficiency and productivity,” which is why companies like Google and Apple allow their employees to doze off for a bit when drowsy.
One stress management site observes that the 10–15 minute power nap does not even require a pillow or blanket; “you don’t even need to go to sleep! You just need a comfortable place to lie on your back, put your feet up, and breathe comfortably.” Such a practice will not likely turn you into a world famous artist, poet, or scientist (or millionaire marina-owning, altruistic high school teacher). It will likely rejuvenate your mind and body so that you can make much better use of the time you spend not sleeping.
I’ve long wondered what it would feel like to have synesthesia, the neurological phenomenon — this straight from Wikipedia — “in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” A synesthete, in other words, might “see” certain colors when they read certain words, or “hear” certain sounds when they see certain colors. Non-synesthetes such as myself have trouble accurately imagining such an experience, but we can get one step closer with the work of Greek artist-musician-physicist Yiannis Kranidiotis, who, in his “Ichographs” series, turns the colors of famous paintings into sound.
“Examining the relationship between color and sound frequencies,” writes Hyperallergic’s Claire Voon, “Kranidiotis has recently composed a soundscape for Raphael’s ‘Madonna del Prato’ (1505), or ‘Madonna of the Meadow.’ His resulting video work, ‘Ichographs MdelP,’ visualizes the breaking up of the painting into 10,000 cubic particles that correspond to various sounds, honing in on specific parts of the canvas to explore the different tones of different colors.” You can view that video at the top of the post, and see even more at Kranidiotis’ Vimeo channel.
Voon quotes Kranidiotis as explaining the basic idea behind the project: “Each color of a painting can be an audio frequency. Each particle, like a pixel in our computer screen, carries a color and at the same time an audio frequency (sinusoidal wave).” He chose a Renaissance painting “to generate a high contrast between the classical aesthetics and the digital transformations that occur,” as well as to make use of its “blue and red colors that help to create a complex and interesting audio result.”
The artist has more to say at The Creators Project, explaining that “there are areas of sound and color (light) that humans can perceive with their eyes and ears (hearing and visible range) and areas where we need special equipment (like infrasound—ultrasound and infrared—ultraviolet ranges). As a physicist, I was always fascinated by these common properties and I was investigating ways to highlight and juxtapose them.”
You can enjoy more Ichographic experiences in the other two videos embedded here, the first an overview of the process as applied to a variety of paintings from a variety of eras, and then a piece focused on transforming into sound the colors of Claude Monet’s 1894 “Rouen Cathedral, West Facade.” While Kranidiotis’ process doesn’t draw from these works of visual art anything you’d call music, per se, the sonic textures do make for an intriguingly incongruous ambient accompaniment to these well-known canvases. If the Louvre offered his “compositions” loaded onto those little audio-tour devices, maybe I’d actually use one.
Or some lavish dish you never had a chance to taste?
What might your choice reveal about your race, regional origins, or economic circumstances?
Artist Julie Green developed a fascination with death row inmates’ final meals while teaching in Oklahoma, where the per capita execution rate exceeds Texas’ and condemned prisoners’ special menu requests are a matter of public record:
Fried fish fillets with red cocktail sauce from Long John Silver’s
Large pepperoni pizza with sausage and extra mushrooms and a large grape soda.
The latter order, from April 29, 2014, was denied on the grounds that it would have exceeded the $15-per-customer max. The prisoner who’d made the request skipped his last meal in protest.
One man got permission for his mother to prepare his last meal in the prison kitchen. Another was surprised with a birthday cake after prison staff learned he had never had one before.
Each meal Green paints is accompanied by a menu, the date, and the state in which it was served, but the prisoners and their crimes go unnamed. She has committed to producing fifty plates a year until capital punishment is abolished.
Whatever else Banksy’s 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop suggests about the strange relationship between the worlds of gallery and street art, its title alone hints at a serious problem with the art establishment: museums are expensive! Unless you are in Washington, DC, where most of the museums are free, you must not only pony up an entrance fee (or “suggested donation”), but you must also, well, exit through the gift shop, where you’ll inevitably be tempted to purchase some tchotchkes, swag, knick-knacks, or—more likely for art lovers—some beautiful, overpriced book with glossy, full-page reproductions of the works you rushed past with impatient family or stood on tiptoes to glimpse over the heads of tourist crowds.
It’s true, you may sometime have the good fortune of getting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty, the Guggenheim, or the LACMA on an off day, with all the time in the world to mill around and take it in. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll still find yourself hovering around the shelves and book tables, trying to convince yourself not to shell out upwards of $100 or more for some gorgeous coffee table volume. (And that’s assuming you even get to New York or L.A. to visit these museums at all.) Museum gift shop art books—whether they highlight the collections, other museums, historic schools and movements, or the techniques and development of individual artists—are tantalizing objects, as are the catalogs that accompany exhibitions.
Online libraries created by major museums have mitigated many of these issues of cost and distance. While they won’t substitute for the feel and smell of new books, nor proudly adorn your coffee table, hundreds of the volumes you might covet at the gift shop have been digitized and can be read and downloaded for free. For example, if you head over to the Guggenheim’s website, you can browse online catalogs from historic exhibits, like that for the Paul Klee 1879–1940 exhibit from 1967 (top). Then rummage through 108 free art books delving into all kinds of modern art.
And if you happen to be in Los Angeles with time on your hands, I know you won’t deny yourself a trip to the fantastic L.A. County Museum of Modern Art. But whether or not you’re able to see its dizzyingly diverse collection for yourself, or visit its gift shops, there’s little stopping you from browsing its online Reading Room, where you’ll find several online titles free to read and download, like this excellent presentation of Edvard Munch’s lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts. Whether you’re a student, a scholar, or simply a devoted lover of art, your life will be greatly enhanced by the hundreds of books in these free online collections.
We owe the way we see California today in part to the painter Richard Diebenkorn, “whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces” of the state “where he spent virtually his entire life.” Those words come from his 1993 New York Times obituary, which suggested that Diebenkorn’s resistance to brief aesthetic movements and art-world fads (a resistance aided by the distance between California and New York) would ensure that the influence of his vision long survive him. Now, thanks to Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, we can look more closely than ever at what went into that vision in a new online exhibition of Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks.
“Throughout his long career,” writes the Stanford Report’s Anna Koster, “Diebenkorn, AB ’49, kept a sketchbook – a ‘portable studio,’ as he called it – to capture his ideas. These books, now in the Cantor’s collection, span 50 years and represent the range of styles and subjects he explored, including deeply personal portraits of his wife, studies of the figure, landscape studies and compositions that point to Diebenkorn’s signature blend of figuration and abstraction.” The sketchbooks, donated by the artist’s widow and the Diebenkorn Foundation, currently sit on display at the Cantor’s exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed, which runs through August 22, 2016.
But if you can’t make it to northern California before then, you can have a look at all of them online and behold in detail their 1,045 drawings spanning fifty years of Diebenkorn’s life. They give not only an insight into how he rendered the material for so many of our California dreams, but how he handled his famously contrarian oscillations between styles, from Abstract Expressionism to figuration and back to the abstract again, with some of his richest work in-between. “I was never throwing things away when I switched from one way of painting to another,” he once said. “You can see a continuum from representation to abstraction, although I must say it never felt like a smooth transition while I was in the middle of it.”
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