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THE VISUAL NARRATIVE

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

AMERICAN ARTISTS ON ART

ARTISTS ON ART

 

QUOTES ABOUT ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN

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Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting , 35; "A narrative picture should include some figure announcing and explaining to us what is taking place there; either beckoning to us with its hand to come and see; or warning us with angry visage and menacing eyes to keep away; or pointing to some danger or some marvel; or inviting us to weep or laugh together with them." from Goldwater, Artists on Art , Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947.
 
William Hogarth, Memoir c1729,having given up conversation pieces he turned his thoughts "to a still more novel mode, viz., painting and engraving modern moral subjects, a field not broken up in any country or any age. The reasons which induced me to adopt this mode of designing were, that I thought both writers and painters had, in the historical style, totally overlooked that intermediate species of subject which may be placed between the sublime and the grotesque. " from Goldwater, Artists on Art , Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947
 
Odilon Redon, Journals 1898 On Titles "A title is only justified when it is vague, and even aims confusedly at the equivocal....." Goldwater, Artists on Art , Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947.
 
Redon, ibid 440; "A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline. The objects and figures represented in it must likewise tell you of something far away from them and also of what their shapes materially hide from us. A certain dog painted by Courbet is like the story of a poetic and romantic hunt." from Goldwater, Artists on Art ,Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947.
 
Antonioni, "I see my films as narratives, romans par images ...." from Leyda, Film Makers Speak.
 
TIME AND THE NARRATIVE; Horizon ,April 1982, The Real Annie, Richard Marschall, " [Harold] Gray's technique in dealing with the comic artist's imperative of chopping up his story into daily chunks was audacious and unique; in Little Orphan Annie every day's episode represented another day's action.In other continuity scripts, each installment typically picked up barely minutes after the day before; conversations, fights, confrontations, and suspenseful build-ups that would take a few minutes in real life, stretched out over weeks and months. Gray with scarcely an exception for years and years, made a day in the reader's paper correspond with a day in Annie's life - technically an excruciatingly difficult task for a narrative artist."
 
Lyle W.Shannon, "The Opinion of Little Orphan Annie and her Friends, " Public Opinion Quarterly Summer 1954, of 110 weeks of the strip(1948-1950) "39 weeks were spent in conflict with foreign agents whose identities were thinly disguised and presumably Russian with names such as Ivan Ichalotski, Andrei and Alex. For another period of 15 weeks Annie had numerous encounters with a gang of young hoodlums working the protection racket. Thus 50% of Annie's time was devoted to conflict with specific persons and to definite causes, namely preservation of capitalism, in the struggle against communism and to aid small, honest, decent businessmen having difficulty with young hoodlums engaged in the protection racket."
 
Arnold Bennett, Journal 1932 edition quoted Hjerter, Doubly Gifted , "The attitude of the general public towards a picture - by which they apparently regard it as a story first and a work of art afterwards - is not as indefensible as it seems, or at least not so inexcusable. In the attitude of the perfectly cultured artist himself, there is something of the same feeling - it must be so Graphic art cannot be totally separated from literary art and vice versa. They encroach on each other."
 
William Faulkner,quoted in Hjerter, Doubly Gifted ," The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means, and hold it so fixed that 100 years later when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life." 1962 interview.
 
Masereel's L'Idee was turned into a 30min animation by Berthold Bartosch (with music by Honegger) in 1932. (see World Ency of Comics.) The cartoonist as popular comedian, drawing as performance for an audience. see World Encyclopaedia of Comics under Frank Beard the animator who supposedly invented Chalk Talk, drawing as performance.
 
World Encyclopedia of Comics. Under Moritz von Schwind, records a 40 foot long pen and ink drawing by Moritz von Schwind, the so-called Lachner Rol l, celebrating the life and musical career of an old friend.

Gordon Craig writing in Woodcuts and Some Words , Dent, London 1924, p.25, "It was then [c1900] that I came to practise more thoroughly the craft of wood-engraving, or wood-cutting, whichever be the correct term. I found that it was a blessing to be able to turn to this rather difficult craft; teach myself through its slow ways how to design scenes and how to delineate characters better than I could do in 1896, and how to keep from heartbreak, and this it did teach me. It is a work which I found allowed one to listen, if not to speak , while practising it. So I would listen to the novels of Dumas as I worked; and I was wood-cutting some three days out of seven, and listening to Dumas, and planning how to wake up the old theatre."
 
"And we, spectators always, everywhere/ Looking at, never out of, everything !/ It fills us. We arrange it. It decays. / We rearrange it, and decay ourselves." Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, the eighth elegy, 1922, quoted in L.Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape , Reaktion, London 1990, p.179.
 
The German film maker R.W.Fassbinder when asked why he uses white fadeouts in Effie Brest [1973], "It's one element of alienation, like books which have white pages with black print. According to Kracauer, when the screen goes black the audience begins to fantasise, to dream, and I wanted the opposite effect through the white. I wanted to wake them. It should not function like most films, through the subconscious, but through the conscious. It's the first film that I know of where the audience is supposed to have its own fantasy, like reading a novel - the first normal fiction film." Film Comment Nov-Dec 1975 quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak.


Peter Fonda talking about flash cutting in Easy Rider , it was Dennis Hopper's idea. " Dennis and I agree that dissolves and fades are all triggers that let you off the hook as an audience. If you are fading out a scene, the audience knows that the scene is ending, and can relax; dissolve has the same effect. Dennis wanted some way of dividing the scenes that weren't either a fade or a cut, and thought up these `flash cuts'. I was opposed to them because I still prefer direct cuts. I think that both of those times we cut 6 frames one scene, 6 frames the next, then 6 frames back, 6 frames the next scene and so forth, could have been accomplished on a direct cut each time." quoted in Leyda, Film MakersSpeak .


Georges Franju the French director, "Documentary is to the cinema what the poster is to painting. A poster has a clear, precise question to resolve, which is why there are rarely good posters. The narrower the question, the better your chances of going beyond it .." in Documentary Explorations 1971, quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .


Buster Keaton `After we stopped making wild two reelers and got into feature length pictures, our scenario boys had to be story-conscious. We couldn't tell any far fetched stories. He couldn't do farce comedy for instance. It would have been poison to us. An audience wanted to believe every story we told them. Well, that eliminated farce comedy and burlesque. The only time we could do something out of the ordinary had to be in a dream sequence, or in a vision. So story construction became very important to us. " interviewed in Film Quarterly Fall 1958, quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
Keaton "Somebody would come up with an idea. `Here's a good start' we'd say. We'd skip the middle. We never paid attention to the middle. We immediately went to the finish. We worked on the finish and if we get a finish that we're all satisfied with, then we go back and work on the middle. For some reason, the middle always took care of itself." " interviewed in Film Quarterly Fall 1958, quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
Ernst Lubitsch, German director, "In my silent period in Germany as well as in America I tried to use less and less subtitles. It was my aim to tell the story through pictorial nuances and the facial expressions on my actors. There were often very long scenes in which people were talking without being interrupted by subtitles. The lip movement was used as a kind of pantomime. Not that I wanted the audience to become lip readers, but I tried to time the speech in such a way that the audience could listen to their eyes. " That Lubitsch Touch [1968] quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak.
 
Leo McCarey on early Laurel and Hardy films. " At that time comics had, for the most part, a tendency to `do too much'. With Laurel and Hardy we introduced a nearly opposite comic conception. I tried - we tried - to direct them in such a way that they showed nothing, expressed nothing, which had the consequence of making the public, which was waiting for the opposite, laugh. We restrained ourselves so much in showing the actors' feelings that the public couldn't hold back its laughter, and laughed because we remained serious. " Cahiers du Cinema Feb 1965 quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
Satyajit Ray asked around 1949 to do illustrations to the novel Pather Panchali


"Graphics is the gift of the fairies..." S.Makovski, quoted in A.L.De Saint-Rat, Vasilii Masiutin's Der goldene Hahn, Soviet Union, 1974.


Federico Zuccari, from The Idea , 1607 115" Rules serve no purpose, but only do harm because apart from the fact that bodies are foreshortened and always rounded, these rules are useless and unsuited to our tasks. The artist's mind should be not only clear but free. His fancy should not be trammeled and restrained by a mechanical slavery to such rules. In this truly most noble profession judgment and practice should serve as rules and formulas.' Poussin, " that the Greeks worked according to systems," It constrains us not to pass the limits, it compels us to employ a certain evenness and moderation in all things, and therefore is nothing but a certain manner or order that has been determined upon, and which reinforces the process by which the essence of the thing is preserved. " From Goldwater, Artists on Art ,Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947
 
Looking at things afresh; G.L.Bernini, a reported conversation 1665 135 ; Bernini recommended that to judge your own work, " look at his work through spectacles which will change its colour and magnify or diminish it, so as to disguise it somehow to his eye, and make it look as if it were the work of another, removing by this means the delusions caused by amour proper." from Goldwater, Artists on Art ,Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947
Charles Le Brun, "Upon expression", 1701 (1667) "Expression, in my opinion, is a Lively and Resemblance of the things which we have to represent... it is by that the Figures seem to have motion, and that everything therein counterfeited appears to be Real." from Goldwater, Artists on Art, Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947
 
Chardin, To the Jury of the Academy, 1765, 170, "The story I have told you here is the story of Belcourt, of Lekain, of Brizard, become bad comedians out of despair at being mediocre painters..." from Goldwater, Artists on Art , Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947
 
P.P.Proudhon, letter to J.B.Fauconnier 1787 177, " there is too much concern with how a picture is made, and not enough of what puts life and soul into the subject represented.." from Goldwater, Artists on Art , Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947
 
MOVEMENT, Umberto Boccioni, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, 1910, 435/6, : Everything moves, everything runs, everything turns swiftly. The figure in front of us is never still, but ceaselessly appears to and disappears. Owing to the persistence of images on the retina, objects in motion are multiplied and distorted, following one another like waves through space. Thus a galloping horse has not four legs: it has twenty, and their movements are triangular. " from Goldwater, Artists on Art , Kegan Paul, Pantheon NY 1947
 
RESEARCH Robert Frost, "Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more valuable in the free wild ways of wit and art. "
 
The advancement of research over tutorial techniques alarmed the Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, "Research ! Research ! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved and will never achieve any results of the slightest value." from Modern Poets on Modern Poetry .
 
John Box, " There must be nothing arbitrary about the background. That must be the place where this person is at this time - and the audience must be convinced of its inevitability. The designer must not be self-indulgent, his background must never distract from the character in the foreground..." source unknown.
 
 
DRAWING; Saturday Evening Post 6 July 1957; of Dr.Seuss, (Ted Geisel) Mrs. Geisel, "Elbows and knees have always bothered him. Horton is the very best elephant he can draw, but if he stopped to figure out how the knees went , he couldn't draw him." He invented the catch phrase, "Quick Henry the Flit" which became national currency.
 
CHARACTERISATION; Charles Schultz of his creations, Saturday Evening Pos tApril 25th 1964; " Who are all these little people ? They have become so real to so many people it's frightening. Am I controlling them of are they controlling me ? Here I am playing king of the hill with them , and there's no place to go but down. I wish I could do better..."
 
WORKING METHOD; Thomas J.Fleming, "TV's Most Unexpected Hit (Flintstones and Yogi Bear) ; Hanna and Barbera as freelancers after MGM ; Saturday Evening Post Dec 2nd 1961, " the partners created a process which they called "Planned Animation." Realism was junked for drawings that were broadly comic and basically simple. They worked out short cuts. When a character spoke, only his mouth moved. When he walked, only his legs walked. In each case hundreds of drawings were saved. Most important the partners chose stories which emphasised character and dialogue. The result was a seven minute cartoon which needed only 2000 drawings, but still resembled full animation so closely that only a professional could tell the difference. ... Although they appear on current TV in black and white, all Hanna-Barbera cartoons are produced in full colour. The partners figure that when color TV becomes widespread, they will have a warehouse full of film ready to resell." Much criticism from Disney of their TV work.

 

 

Look August 19th 1947, Jay Ding Darling, the cartoonist Ding has been drawing cartoons on the conservationist cause for 40 odd years, " I used to think drawing was fun until I discovered that, contrary to the general opinion, no one ever changed his mind because of a cartoon."
 
RESEARCH, Dale Kramer, " Those Hoskinson women", Saturday Evening Post April 17th 1951 Helen Hokinson, the New Yorker cartoonist, "She worked at a common kitchen table. A Victorian sewing table which held art materials was used simply because it was the right size. Her work was noted for accuracy of detail. She got it by keeping a huge file, to which she turned when the situation demanded. " She died in an air crash in 1949.
 
CARICATURE; Champfleury,
"Caricature has had a minor role in history, and few writers have bothered to study it. But today the scholar can no longer only look at official documents. He must study everything which can shed light on men's lives. For this reason Caricature is no longer being neglected and is regaining its importance. It is, with journalism the voice of the people. It manifests the most personal sentiments of mankind." Histoire de la Caricature Moderne ,1849.
 
COMICS ; Ernest Brenneke, "The Real Mission of the Funny Paper, Century Magazine , March 1924, " The funny paper... has become not only a faithful reflection of the tastes and ethical principles of the country at large; it is also manifestly an extremely powerful organ of social satire. The daily block of cinema squares is the medium through which the vices of man are held up for all to see " quoted in Blackbeard/Williams.
 
PROFESSIONAL : J.F.Horrabin, the creator of Dot and Carrie, did the maps and diagrams for Hogben's maths and economics books and became MP for Peterborough, comics is " a rubber stamp business". Percy Bradshaw, They Make us Laugh 1941
 
CARTOONS ; David Langdon claims to have invented The Open Mouth, "he will remind you of the astonishing truth that comic artists who illustrate conversationalist jokes - people saying amusing things - have almost invariably drawn their people with mouths closed." Bradshaw They Make us Laugh 1941
 
PROFESSION : from the World En.Comics , Anton was in fact two people, Harold and Beryl Antonia Thompson, brother and sister, who drew in exactly the same way, see They Make us Laugh 1941
 
SYMBOLISM/ALLEGORY; " Among the numerous types of allegorical images there exists one kind of image... in which an artist does not attempt a specific sequence of thoughts, but rather puts together a few symbols of some quite comprehensive ideas which, in their relation to one another , indicate something only very general . Beyond this every viewer is left to think through these relations according to his own individual direction and feeling. In such ambiguous allegories, it is very possible that the artist himself interprets the work differently than many beholders, but this does not at all detract from the value of the image..." C.A.Semler, "Uber einige Landschaften des Malers Friedrich in Dresden" in Journal des Luxus und der Moden 1809, pp.233-40 quoted in J.L.Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, Reaktion, London 1990, p.63.
 
COMPOSITION; Luis Bunuel, film director
, "Technique is no problem for me. I have a horror of posed shots, and I detest unusual angles. Sometimes I work out with my cameraman what we think is a superbly clever perspective; everything is arranged down to the very last detail, and then when the time comes for shooting, we burst out laughing, throw the whole plan out, and simply shoot, with no special camera effects." Arts, July 1955, quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
COLOUR; William Clothier,cameraman in On Film 1970, " Bill Wellman had an idea; he came to me and explained what he had in mind. He wanted to make a colour picture with very little colour - in black and white in a sense. And that's exactly what we did....The result was that for the first time, I think, you really saw the color in people's faces. You were immediately conscious of the color of a person's eyes, because there was no surrounding color..." quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .


MEDIUM; the film and theatre director George Kukor, comparing the reception of The Philadelphia Story in the Theatre and on Screen, "In the theatre all the comedy was in Phil Barry's verbal wit, but in the movie a lot of it was visual, reactions, pieces of business and so on. That's why I believe in letting comedy `happen' on a screen." in Cukor and Co. 1971 quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
COLOUR; Hitchcock, "To the question of color, again it's the same as the orchestration with cutting. If you notice in Rear Window , Miss Lonely Hearts always dressed in emerald green. To make sure that that came off, there was no other green in the picture because we had to follow her very closely when she went across the street into a cafe. So I reserved that colour for her. In Dial M for Murder [1954] I had the woman dressed in red to begin with and as the tragedy overtook her she went to brick, then gray then to black." Take One Nov-Dec 1968 quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
COLOUR; the photographer James Wong Howe
, "This question of backlighting in colour is another thing that demands modification of usual techniques. In black and white we use back light and rim light to outl;ine our characters so that they will stand out from their backgrounds. This is seldom necessary in color, for we have inherent color differences to serve the same purpose. " American Cinematographer Oct 1937 quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
COLOUR; Ossie Morris working on Moulin Rouge described by the director John Huston, "used filters which before had only been used out of doors and we used smoke in the scenes in the Moulin Rouge. The effect, to flatten out instead of breaking up the color to make it a local colour, was rather similar to the posters of Lautrec." interview NFT Sept 1972, quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
COLOUR; Joshua Logan filming South Pacific, " the dialogue should increase in emotion, and in height until there's a feeling that the moment has come when there's nothing else to do but sing.... And the color goes with this. I always thought that, just as we dimmed our lights down on the stage for a song, we could also do a similar thing on the screen. Because we did have strange purples and orange tones in the shadows of the stage, when the spotlight is on the face of the singer while the background changes its color. Nobody has ever objected to that in the theatre, but they did object to it on film in the case of South Pacific because they just had it fixed in their heads that film was a realistic medium." Films and Filming Dec 1969 quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
PERSPECTIVE; Charles Rosher camera man, working with Murnau, trying to induce depth artificially in a set, " I worked with a wide focus lens of 35mm to 55mm for the scenes ion the big cafe. All the sets had floors that sloped slightly upwards as they receded, and the ceilings had artificial perspectives ; the bulbs hanging from them were bigger in the foreground than in the background. We even had dwarfs, men and women, on the terrace. All of this produced an amazing sense of depth." in Murnau 1973 quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
POV Rosalind Russell about Ronald Colman,
"he would never kiss you on the mouth. He always got over on the corner of your mouth because of the better camera angle. He knew the camera better than any actor I have known. He also played a bit to your ear, never looking you directly in the eyes, so that his face would be more turned towards the camera." Hollywood Speaks [1974] quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak .
 
COMPOSITION: Question asked of Robert Weaver. Where did the idea of splitting a picture into halves come from ?Probably the impulse to compress. Clearly I wanted to get as much into a picture as possible. I think one of the triggers was seeing Andy Warhol's movie, Chelsea Girls. The same scene was shown from two different cameras..." Heller, Innovators of American Illustration ,VNR VNY 1986
 
HISTORY OF ILLUSTRATION; Robert Weaver, "Mine was no longer the era of Norman Rockwell where everything was easy, obvious and on the surface. How would Norman Rockwell illustrate the problem of lefthandedness ". Heller, Innovators of American Illustration, VNR VNY 1986
 
ILLUSTRATION HISTORY; Norman Rockwell and the realist illustrators were, in a sense, the enemy because their work was too sentimental. Those story-telling renderings were pedestrian compared to the work of George Grosz and Saul Steinberg. Interest was shifting to our inner psyche rather than our exterior surroundings." Semour Chwast in Heller, Innovators of American Illustration, VNR NY 1986
 
COMICS; of Superman, Sheldon Masyer the publisher, " I went nuts over the thing... It struck me as having the elements that were popular in the movies, all the elements that were popular in the [pulp]novels and all the elements I loved." quoted in Ron Goulart, Over 50 years of American Comic Books ,Publications International Ltd., Illinois 1991.
 
ILLUSTRATION; "A great text, that is already a sort of miracle: to give an illustration to it, is to will another: it is to ask that the text and the image should establish that mysterious bond between themselves that we call harmony..." Andre Malraux quoted in W.J.Strachen, The Artist and the Book in France.
 
DESIGN; "Briefly, the designer experiences, perceives, analyses, organises, symbolises, synthesises." Paul Rand, Thoughts on Design ,1947.


DESIGN; " Contemporary as it may seem, the concept of simultaneity is not new. The ancient Chinese, conscious of the need for a means of expressing in one picture simultaneous action or multiple events, devised a form of isometric perspective. By this procedure, they were able to show one object behind another, by free disposition of elements in a composition, completely disregarding the illusions of mechanical vision....." Paul Rand, Thoughts on Design ,1947.
 
ILLUSTRATION/SEQUENCE' Otto Neurath, "Long before I started to read I started to look at books that contained pictures and maps in my father's library. I looked especially at the atlas intended to accompany Alexander von Humboldt's famous Cosmos. Here were deserts, mountains, clouds, seas, strange plants and unfamiliar animals, marvels of many sorts. This world, presented in delightful drawing and colouring, satisfied my longing for a cosmic view. The arrangement of our library helped my liking for books with pictures. As often happens, the large books, many of which contained pictures and maps, were kept in the tall bottom shelves. I would take them out and lie down on the floor to look at them. I liked that position. Most children do. I soon realised the difference between pictures `made for children', and pictures with a more general appeal. I found that books describing inventions and crafts for children did so by using large pictures and `big' figures, but pictures intended for adults were smaller and not so colourful. The colourful pictures when the colours were clear attracted me much more than when they were vague and indeterminate. I have always remembered this." quoted from the Neurath manuscript, in Future Books ,Vol III (undated)
 
MAGAZINE DESIGN; Allen Hurlburt, " For years, man has accepted a neatly packaged idea of measurable space, fixed time and a round world that revolves around a reliable sun. Today, science is challenging these three-dimensional views. As we move inward towards the atom and outward toward space, we discover that what seemed unreal to our untrained perception is actually real and what we took for reality is sometimes an illusion.
Faced with these new concepts, no art director can afford to take his perception and design approach for granted, and no editor can afford the comfortable luxury of editorial formulas and a fixed format." in Publication Design, VNR 1971.
 
SCREENWRITING; when Catherine Turney arrived as a screen writer with Warner Bros. there was only one other woman writer, Lenore Coffee. The roster of writers was primarily;y hard-nosed guys, a lot of newspaper men, sports writers. They were inclined to be condescending with me at the beginning. They used to say, `What are you working on ?' and then, `Oh Yeh, a woman's picture'. And they dismissed it. But they didn't after some of those pictures went out and made a lot of money. And they recognised that a woman could handle a story about a woman's troubles better than most men could. Any way, you can rest assured that if the studio didn't think the woman did a better job, she wouldn't have been there for long." in Lee Serverm Screenwriter; Words Become Pictures , 1987.
 
ILLUSTRATION; Of Children's books at Christmas, c.1880 "In England a real children's literature exists, which has its classics and innovators, a movement and a market, editors and talent - in nothing in fact is it inferior to our literature for sober adults. Here, no sooner does the little child learn to spell than straightaway he has his own special books; they are adorable works, of a dozen or so pages, interspersed with illustrations, printed in enormous letters and edited with rare taste..... It is mainly at Christmas that this literature flourishes. The book shop windows are a paradise then. There is nothing more picturesque, more original, more decorative, than English book bindings; and the illustrations, the pale tones, the watercolours, are almost always real works of art, charm and humour." Eca de Queiroz, Letters from England , written after being appointed Portuguese consul in Newcastle.

 


METHOD; Richard Taylor advising young cartoonists, "A very sensible habit is that of keeping a log, or record of work done, [especially during the student period. We all tend to put off until tomorrow what we should have done yesterday, and by keeping a record of each day's work, a clear picture of the progress made (or otherwise) can be seen at a glance. This has a very definite psychological effect, sharpening up one's effort." from from Introduction to Cartooning , Watson Guptill NY 1947.
 
ILLUSTRATION, Paul Nash, preparing illustrations for Shakepeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Benn London 1924, " "My ambition is to make models for all the scenes & drawings from the models.One thing I am trying to bring off is the wood from two different points of view A) the Fairies - plants and flowers the size of trees etc etc B) the humans normal vision of a wood, and these constantly changing almost imperceptible as A and B hold the stage." letter to Gordon Bottomley, quoted in Paul Nash Book Designs , exhib.catal. Minories Colchester 1982.
 
DESIGN; John Nash, "The artist must show proper deference to the book and its author by giving it first place in his consideration and allowing himself to be absorbed by the subject rather than imposing his will upon it. He should not worry too much about what particular `manner' he will employ but allow a natural and spontaneous issue to his personal reactions and their expression. I myself read a book in a very practical manner, marking passages that appeal to me or present a vivid picture and indulging in periods of research necessitated by the desire for naturalistic details or the exploration of costume. I then read and re-read until almost a traumatic state is induced from which more imaginative ideas proceed.
The illustrator is concerned with the highest form of book decoration apart from the typography not merely to make picture books but to convey with his illustrations an enhanced sense of the book and its impact on the artist. For this he must be a good artist and a good craftsman receptive to the ideas offered by his subject , and able to carry them out in several media. The versatility of the pen line, the precision of the engraved block and a lively sense of the colour possibilities of lithography - all these should be at his command and with as sense of taste and balance of design that should enable the illustrations to satisfy the eye and support themselves within the page margin." in ARK No.1, quoted in John Nash Book Designs , ex cat Minories Colchester, 1985
 
ILLUSTRATION: John Nash, "The best books to illustrate are those written by the illustrator - a matter between him and his artistic conscience. The next best those by defunct authors - the artist and the published only are involved. The most difficult, those written by living authors - this means either a tripartite conflict or a dangerous two to one against the illustrator." in ARK No.1, quoted in John Nash Book Designs , ex cat Minories Colchester, 1985
 
ILLUSTRATION; John Nash's illustrations to Walter de la Mare's Seven Short Stories, "Please remember apropos of the edges of the drawings - that the colour will fill in any parts that may appear to be wandering away - but really they should stand without lines round - I think they will look much better but we must take care of the placing on the page." John Nash Book Designs , ex cat Minories Colchester, 1985, catal entry.
 
ILLUSTRATION; John Nash, " I sat slogging away at White's Selbourne nearly blind with cross hatching and have now finished 24 pen drawings for which I hope and expect to receive some cash." letter to Clarence Elliott 1950, quoted in John Nash Book Designs, ex cat Minories Colchester, 1985.
 
COMICS; Marcus Morris and the conception of the Eagle. " The phenomenal rise and rule of the comic in America, plus a study of the paper and publications that children were reading in this country, seemed to point to an obvious moral - hence came the idea of Eagle. Many American comics were most skillfully and vividly drawn, but often their content was deplorable, nastily over-violent and obscene, often with undue emphasis on the supernatural and magical as a way of solving problems. But it was clear to me that the strip cartoon was capable of development in a way not yet seen in England except in one or two of the daily and Sunday newspapers - and that it was a new and important medium of communications with its own laws and limitations. Here. surely, was a form which could be used to convey to the child the right kind of standards, values and attitudes, combined with the necessary amount of excitement and adventure." in The Best of Eagle ,Joseph, 1977.
 
CHILDREN'S BOOKS/ EARLY READING
; Osbert Lancaster recalling a childhood gift of an album full of scraps, ""The shakoed, hand coloured infantrymen, who so gallantly assaulted that vaguely oriental stronghold, were the soldiers of Louis Philippe subduing the fierce Goums of Abd-el-Kader; this mysterious steel-engraved lake shadowed by twilit mountains was Lamartine; and the rather over-plumed knights, their armour gleaming with applied tinsel, were undoubtedly the setting for the Eglington Tournament. The charm and excitement of these charmingly coloured vignettes must have made a powerful appeal to the imagination of any child but in my case it was reinforced by the contrast they provided to the illustrations in my other books. My mother suffered from that perpetual delusion common to all parents that the books which had meant the most to her in her own childhood.... would awaken a similar delighted response in her offspring. My nursery library was therefore well stocked with the illustrated fairytales of the late seventies and early eighties. It cannot be denied that the skill of the great nineteenth century school of English wood-engraving was then at its height and that many of these volumes were, in their way, masterpieces. Nevertheless, not only did I dislike them all with the solitary exception of Tenniel's Alice, but certain of them awoke in me feelings of fear and revulsion.... This the world of Mrs.Ullathorne's scrapbook with its brilliant green lawns and flat improbable trees people by kindly gendarmes in enormous tricornes and little girls in pork-pie hats and striped stockings practising archery in chateau parks, took on in addition to its own proper attraction the welcome character of a safe retreat from that other, boring yet terrifying, world of all too completely realised fantasy." " in All Done from Memory 1953.
 
ILLUSTRATION; review of Thackeray's illustrations to Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, January 1846, "The `pencillings ` of this little volume are as lively as the letter-press : they really illustrate - placing before the reader's eye just those points that must be illustrated visibly. The frontispiece for instance lowers the romance of the East to the level of Brighton or Hyde Park. The wood-cut sketches are remarkable for always bringing out the points of character forcibly and humorously." quoted in John Buchanan-Brown, The Illustrations of W.M.Thackera y, 1979.
 
DRAWING: Saul Steinberg, "Drawing is a way of reasoning on paper." from Harold Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg .
 
GENERAL "Grammar contributes to painting its concordances; dialectics its logical conclusions; rhetoric its persuasion; poesie its inventive power; oratory its figures of speech; arithmetic its numbers; music its harmonies; symmetry its measures; architecture its level planes; sculpture its roundness; perspective and optics their magnification and diminution; and finally astromony and astrology their talents for the knowledge of the heavenly images. Who can doubt that [painting] , the transcendant sum total of all arts, is the chief art which comprises all the others ?" Antonio Palomino, "Pictorial Museum and Optical Scale," 1795-7, in E.Holt A Documentary History of Art Vol 2.
 
METHOD "Profit yourself by the Counsels of the Knowing: And do not arrogantly disdain to learn the Opinion of every Man concerning your Work. All men are blind to their own productions; and no Man is capable of judging in his own Cause. But if you have no knowing Friend to assist you with his Advice; yet length of Time will never fail; `tis but letting some Weeks pass over your Head, or at least some Days without looking on your Work; and that Intermission will faithfully discover to you the Faults, and Beauties." from Du Fresnoy, "The Art of Painting" 1716, in Holt Vol 2.
 
METHOD; Of Table-Books
. "Be ready to put into your Table-Book (which you must always carry about with you) whatsoever you judge worthy of it; whether it be upon the Earth, or in the Air, or upon the Waters, while the Species of them is still fresh in your Imagination." from Du Fresnoy, "The Art of Painting" 1716, in Holt Vol 2.
 
MEANING; Hugh of St.Victor, quoted in Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression, " the meaning of things is also much more multiple than that of words. Because few words have more than two or three meanings, but everything may mean as many other things, as it has visible or invisible qualities in common with other things."
 

 



PROFESSION; advice to young cartoonists who perform in public, "A cartoon act should last for from ten to fifteen minutes. Each drawing including patter, should not take longer than a minute and a half. Therefore, six numbers, allowing for applause and laughs, should give you a ten minute act. As you gain experience you will become even faster and so put more drawings into your programme.
Your opening number should be a quick humorous sketch. Walk straight up to your easel and put a stroke onto the paper. Turn to your audience in order to make any comment you wish to make, turn back to the board to continue with your sketch, and so on until you finish the sketch with a flourish.... There is no doubt at all that a musical background, although not essential, helps enormously. As a pianist is always in attendance at any concert this should not be a very difficult problem. We will assume that your easel etc. is on stage, the pianist sitting at the piano. When you are ready to walk on, the pianist should 'play you on' with a few bars of a bright number. As soon as you begin to work he should play a soft waltz or similar. At all cost the pianist should realise he is not playing a solo and play so loudly that you have to shout your patter at the top of your voice. Ask him to play very softly the whole time you are working... The matter of dress is entirely up to you. At very formal affairs you will be expected to wear evening dress. For the cartoonist this presents a formidable problem, CHALK DUST. It gets everywhere. ...."from Louis Valentine, How to be a Lightning Cartoonist, Foulsham c1950.
 
FESTIVALS, " Nothing could be more insipid and ugly than the 'entertainments', consisting of giant pies enclosing complete orchestras, full-rigged vessels, castles, monkeys and whales, giants and dwarfs, and all the boring absurdities of allegory. We find it difficult to regard these entertainments as something more than exhibitions of incredible bad taste." from J.Huiizinga, The Waning of the Middle Age s, 1965 (1924)
 
PRIMARY AND SECONDARY DETAIL; ".. in the expression of details the artist is absolutely free. Whereas he is tied down by rigid convention in the composition of his principal theme he may give a free rein to his imagination in all other respects. He may paint the materials, the vegetation, the horizon, the faces, just as his genius prompts him; the wealth of detail will no more overload his picture than flowers weigh down a dress which they adorn.
In the poetry of the fifteenth century the relation of the essential to the accidental is reversed. The poet is generally free as regards his principal subject; something novel is expected from him. As to accessories however, he is tied down by tradition; there is a conventional way of expressing every detail, from which, though he may be unconscious of it, he can hardly deviate; the flowers, the delights of nature, sorrows and joys, all these are sung in a fashion which varies but little. from J.Huiizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages , 1965 (1924)
 
THE CHAIN OF BEING AND THE CONCEPT OF ORDER
; "In this order hot things are in harmony with cold, dry with moist, heavy with light, high with low. In this order, angel is set over angel, rank upon rank in the kingdom of the heaven; man is set over man, beast over beast, bird over bird, and fish over fish, on the earth in the air and in the sea; so that there is no worm that crawls upon the ground, no bird that flies on high, no fish that swims in the depths, which the chain of this order does not bind in the most harmonious concord. Hell alone, inhabited by none but sinners, asserts its claim to escape the embraces of this order..." Sir John Fortescue, On the Law of Nature, quoted by E.M.W.Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, 1968 [1943]
 
EDITORIAL DESIGN: The designer Frank Zachary writing of Alexei Brodovich, "I think the major canon of his philosophy was the spread. He never looked at an open magazine as two separate pages. The spread was the page. He always treated the spread as a unit, and he thought of the spread as an architectural element - as a wall, and the wall was to be pierced, fenestrated with windows, a door and bricks... he had such an elegant sense of proportion and scale, it was absolutely impeccable." quoted in William Owen, Magazine Design.
 
EDITORIAL DESIGN; Otto Storch, later to redesign McCall's, "To my mind, there are two moments in the preparation of material for a magazine that are of supreme importance to the art director, and indeed determine the ultimate success or failure of his work. The preliminary editorial conference that outlines the material to be presented and the thinking behind it... The second decisive moment is concerned with my instructions to the photographer, illustrator and layout men... planning is vital. They want, just as I want, to have a clear visualisation of what they are going to accomplish before they start." quoted in William Owen, Magazine Design.
 
EDITORIAL DESIGN; Ken Garland of art direction, "Consistency and continuity of style are more decisive in magazines than in any other form of graphic design, and there should be frequent reference to precedents as well as forward planning. There is some correspondence between the design of a periodical and that of a film, since turning over a sequence of pages is similar to scanning a sequence of film frames in the cinema." quoted in William Owen, Magazine Design .
 
EDITORIAL DESIGN; Dr.Agha
on the role of the art director, "He is the first cousin of the movie director, and like the movie director, he plans, coordinates and rehearses, but does not perform; at least not in public." quoted in William Owen, Magazine Design .
 
EDITORIAL DESIGN; William Owen, in Magazine Design, "The new magazine design is grounded in four conditions the liberation of designers from certain material constraints by new pre-press technologies; the influence of television on readers expectations and habits of perception; the establishment of new, generalist editorial products which do not conform to traditional publishing notions; and the enhancement and consolidation of the designers' position in the editorial process, as both initiator and communicator of ideas, and as a constructor of thematic structure, which has resulted from all three of the above. A decade of high economic growth has been an additional encouragement to experimentation and innovation."
 
EDITORIAL DESIGN; David Bailey, choosing the cover of Vogue magazine in the 1960's, "On the same day, six photographers shot a cover. Six photographs would be put up on the wall and one was chosen. The light was always on the model's right, and her eyes were looking towards it, to draw the viewer to the type. A psychoanalyst called Don looked at the covers, and if he didn't like one it just didn't go on."


ILLUSTRATION; commissioning for the Oxford Illustrated Trollope, "My idea is that these books should be illustrated by painters rather than professional illustrators, and by painters who are concerned with figures moving in an interior, with the fall of light and the substance of flesh and drapery; and I conceive that with an author such as Trollope, we want that straight, without adventitious decorative charm or the egotism of an imposed romanticism. The reader can supply his own notions of the characters, but only a painter accustomed to observing men moving in the mise en scene of Trollope's substantial and intimiste world." Letter to Rodrigo Moynihan, quoted in George Mackie, Lynton Lamb Illustrator .
 
ILLUSTRATION; "An illustration is a picture with a purpose: it has generally to communicate information of some kind. To achieve that purpose, it must be generally be made available in quantity. We can draw a broad distinction between two kinds of illustration:
a. Those that are conceived from the start as illustrations, and where the original is therefore in some reproducuble form.
b. Those which start life as one-off items, and so have to go through some kind of 'conversion' process before they can be reproduced."
from Hilary and Mary Evans, Sources of Illustration 1500-1900.
 
ILLUSTRATION; Degas' notes, "Do all kinds of objects in use, placed, associated in such a way that they take on the life of the man or woman, corsets that have just been taken off, for example, and which still retain as it were, the shape of the body etc etc" from Reed and Shapiro, Edgar Degas, The Artist as Printmaker ,ex cat. Boston 1984/5.
 
EDUCATION; G.K.Chesterton went to an art school after St.Paul's, "An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature. Moreover, those who work are, I will not say the least intelligent, but, by the very nature of the case, for the moment the most narrow; those whose keen intelligence is for the time narrowed down to a strictly technical problem." from Autobiography first published 1936.
 


METHOD; J.M.Richards of Edward Bawden, "He is different from other painters because he was trained as a designer. This does not only mean that organisation and a strong sense of rhythm are present in his work; it means that his whole emotional approach is different - - in fact it means that there is no attempt to interpret emotion immediately in paint, in a way that a painter brought up in the ivory tower of self expression aims at doing. His work is not impulsive. Instead all his pictures, however moving and significant in the end, are the product of study. Their vitality is intensified, but not by strong emotional urgency, but by being passed, as it were through the tempering process of an exacting technique. Some of his greatest successes spring directly from his handling of what are primarily technical problems..." Penguin Modern Painters.
 
ILLUSTRATION / CHILDREN'S BOOKS; Graham Sutherland was not influenced by Beardsley about whom his aunt Beatrice had an obsession, "What did influence me was the fact that my grandfather at Macmillans oversaw the republication of classics like Thackeray, Jane Austen, and George Eliot in a rather splendid edition which was illustrated by people like Hugh Thompson, E.M.Brock, and even Arthur Rackham, though he was slightly later.... I used to copy them, or try to. Then Macmillan published a series called Highways and Byways, by E.V.Lucas. They had some jolly good illustrators, and I think that was another influence. " John Piper too was fired by this series. Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland.
 
ILLUSTRATION; Vincent van Gogh recalling his days in London, ten years ago, "I used to go every week to the show windows of the printing offices of the Graphic and the London News to see the new issues. The impressions I got on the spot were so strong that, not withstanding all that has happened to me since, the drawings are clear in my mind......." letter Feb 1883, quoted in ex cat English Influences on Van Gogh ,Nottingham/Arts Council 1974/5.
 
ILLUSTRATION ; Pablo Neruda Memoirs, of his childhood, "I grew older. Books began to interest me. Buffalo Bill's adventures and Salgari's voyages carried me far away into the world of dreams..."
 
ILLUSTRATION; Kitaj, "I have always to copy those late Giotto faces from books ! Van Gogh loved them. He said they were always full of kindness. Goodness, kindness, facial expression, loneliness... these days young artists are too often told to shy away from such 'literary' things. They are beset by the devils of illustration which Van Gogh loved (and collected and copied and emulated). Sickert loved to antagonise Roger Fry by insisting that 'all good art is illustration and only illustration'. Today, even our best artists fret over this little demon." R.B.Kitaj, The Artist's Eye , National Gallery London 1980
 
ILLUSTRATION PROFESSION; June 1860, George Du Maurier describes the life of the freelance illustrator, " Clambering up the staircases and knocking at the doors of the editors who are always busy and always in a bad temper. Sometimes treated rudely, sometimes put off with much politeness and slight hopes of future employment etc etc. At last by cabals and intrigues of which you can have no idea, a slight opening seems to offer itself in a weekly periodical, price two-pence, called the Welcome Guest, on the express condition expressed by the editor that I am not to make it a stepping stone to Once a Week, his rival. " from The Young George Du Maurier, 1951.
 
ILLUSTRATION METHOD; Du Maurier of the Eighteen Sixties illustrator Frederick Sandys, "He showed me two crayon portraits he is doing, the finest things of the sort I ever saw, and as for the studies they are wonderful. If he has a patch of grass to do in a [wood]cut, he makes a large and highly finished study from nature for it first..." 1862, from The Young George Du Maurier , 1951.
 
ILLUSTRATION PROFESSION; George Du Maurier, "I have recently struck for higher wages with Punch ; I used to charge 4 or 3 guineas, and asked in an imperial way for 6 and 4, say that I could not work for them a lower wage (what a lie!) What should I have done had they refused ?" from The Young George Du Maurier ,1951. June 1865.
 
BOOKS: Graham Greene staying with his uncle, at Harston in Cambridge. Aged c 8, "It was at Harston I found quite suddenly I could read - the book was Dixon Brett, Detective. I didn't want anyone to know of my discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Balantyne's Coral Island for the train journey home - always an interminable journey with the long wait between trains at Bletchley. I still wouldn't admit my new talent, and I stared at the only illustration all the way to the junction. No wonder it so impressed itself on my memory that I can see with my mind's eye today the group of children posed on the rocks. I think I feared that reading represented the entrance to the Preparatory School.... I detested that absurd book Reading Without Tears . How could I be interested in a cat that sat on a mat ? I couldn't identify with a cat. Dixon Brett was another matter, and he had a boy assistant, who might easily, I thought, be myself....[of terrors] Another recurring terror was of the house catching fire at night and I associate it with the sticky colour plates in the Boy's Own Paper recording the exploits of heroic firemen. " Lists of favourite books of the period, Beatrix Potter and the influence on the writing of Brighton Rock . "The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on our shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct than any religious teaching. I feel certain I would not have made a false start, when I was twenty-one, in the British American Tobacco Company, which had promised me a post in China, if I had never read Captain Gilson's Lost Column , and without a knowledge of Rider Haggard would I have been drawn later to Liberia ?" G.Greene, A Sort of Life .
 
ILLUSTRATION, Children's Books, Nabokov's double nostalgia, "Once in 1908 or 1909, Uncle Ruka became engrossed in some French children's books that he had come upon in our house; with an ecstatic moan he found a passage he had loved in his childhood beginning, 'Sophie n'etait pas jolie...' and many years later, my moan echoed his, when I rediscovered, in a chance nursery, those same "Bibiliotheque Rose" volumes, with their stories about boys and girls who led in France an idealised version of the vie de chateau which my family led in Russia. The stories themselves (all those Les Malheurs de Sophie, Les Petites Filles Modeles, Les vacances ) are, as I see them now, an awful combination of preciosity and vulgarity; but in writing them the sentimental and smug Mmme. de Segur, nee Rostopchine, was Frenchifying the authentic surroundings of her Russian childhood which preceded mine by exactly one century. In my own case, when I come over Sophie's troubles again - her a lack of eyebrows and love of thick cream - I not only go through the same agony and delight that my uncle did, but have to cope with an additional burden - the recollection I have of him, reliving his childhood with the help of those very books." Speak Memor y, 1967 p.76
 

ILLUSTRATION; Lewis Mumford, "How keenly I remember those pages of the Illustrated London News .....Some of that British stuff must have seeped into my blood, though part of it may have come from the equally enigmatic pages of Chatterbox , a book-sized annual that was a yearly Christmas gift in my early childhood." Autobiography p.88.
 
ILLUSTRATION, the illustrator Eugene Witla newly arrived in New York goes to the offices of Truth and sells them a drawing. He gave his address for the cheque, "His heart was beating a gay tattoo in his chest. He did not think anything of the price, in fact it did not occur to him. All that was in his mind was the picture as a double page spread. So he really had sold one after all and to Truth ! Now he could honestly say that he had made some progress. Now he could write to Angela and tell her. He could send her copies when it came out. He could really have something to point to after this and best of all, now he knew he could do street scenes." from Theodore Dreiser, The Genius ,p.106, originally published 1915.
 
ILLUSTRATION - CHILDHOOD; the young William Carlos Williams, as a child was offered by this father a dollar apiece if he would read The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man . "But I remember also the three volumes of the famous illustrated translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I'll never forget how I studied Gustave Dore's pictures of those beautiful but damned ladies and with what profound disappointment I failed to discover from them anatomical secrets which so fascinated me at the time. The text escaped me." WCW Autobiography ,p.15
 
ILLUSTRATION - MEMORY; DAVID LOW ON MAKING STUDIES
, "[Harry] Furniss cultivated a trick of making rough notes blind in his pocket - a difficult job at first, but one at which improvement comes with practice. In my experience a better dodge in emergencies is to 'draw' notes with the forefinger upon the palm of the hand. After all, half the value of putting down lines on paper is that by action, the lines are also put down in memory... 'Spy' believed that his best work in pure caricature was a done from memory, but from memory ordered and educated by copious note-taking beforehand. " DL, Ye Madde Designer ,1936. p.77
 
ILLUSTRATION, John Farleigh explores the difference between drawing and an illustration in a lecture given in 1945, " There is a bookishness about an illustration that does not exist in the more intimate and individual quality of a drawing. In seeking an analogy I thought of the difference between conversation and prose. ....Observation in drawing - that is a drawing that is merely a recording - is rather similar to conversation, and the formalised imagery necessary to an illustration is rather like prose. You get conversation against prose, observation as against imagery." It Never Dies 1945. p.80
 
ILLUSTRATION; "I would go so far as to say that if an illustrator or a potential illustrator does not see an image as soon as the phrase is given him, he should not illustrate a book: if he does not feel the excitement of a typographic page, he should not illustrate a book; if he has no dreams or aspirations, he should not illustrate a book; if there are no books he feels he would wish to illustrate, then he should not illustrate. These are some of the essential qualities of the illustrator; they must be already there." from John Farleigh, It Never Dies 1945. p.80
 
ILLUSTRATION: Norman Rockwell
, "We read the Rover Boys, Horatio Alger - From Canal Boy to President, Phil the Fiddler - and G.A.Henty, who was considered a peg above the rest because it always said, 'Based on Historical fact'... (p.23) .... My father used to copy drawings from magazines in his spare time. I sketched dogs, houses and vegetables, and, from my imagination, pirates, whales, Indians. I drew pictures, as I said, of the characters of Dickens. I found I liked to draw....(p.37,38)" Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator.
 
ILLUSTRATION; of the great influence of Howard Pyle, and a sense of mission his pupils lacked. "When Pyle had to paint a Spanish galleon he hunted through old books until he had learned what a galleon actually looked like. N.C.Wyeth, one of Pyle's successors, painted his idea of a galleon, more romantic perhaps but lacking the authority and the research of a galleon by Pyle. " Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator . 52/3
 
ILLUSTRATION: "It was a profession with a great tradition, a profession I could be proud of." Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator . p.53
 
ILLUSTRATION; Norman Rockwell, "When I left school, art directors were cultured gentlemen who enjoyed an honoured and useful position in the hierarchy of editorial staffs. Then they fell upon hard days. The editor became all powerful. Art directors weren't much better than office boys. But in the twenties the advertising agencies raised their heads... and art directors, like Lazarus, rose from the grave."Norman Rockwell ,My Adventures as an Illustrato r. p.139
 
ILLUSTRATION, Leonard Rosoman,
"I think I regard myself as a painter who is interested in illustration - I would almost go the length of saying that it is almost necessary for an illustrator to be a painter." in Klemin, The Illustrated Book .
 
EDITORIAL DESIGN; Rosoman
"Sometime during the Thirties and I undertook the project as a chore. But then I began to discover the delights of type: fitness, elegance, tradition, humour, the color of pages, the vast panorama of choices, each with its own peculiar flavor which added so much to the words said. I enjoyed a year or so complete infatuation with type... If my enthusiasm cooled, that was because I began to realise that the uses and understanding of type are a life's work, and that I would never be much more than a dabbler. " in Klemin, The Illustrated Book p.132.
 
EDITORIAL DESIGN: Warren Chappell to Diane Klemin, "I'm sure you realize that I can't do sketches which I feel are more than indications of style and subject. The jacket should always come last, and it seems a shame, always to disregard so obvious an imperative... The ornament which will be made up for jacket and binding spines is by no means clearly formed in my mind - I think that the right sort of floret can also be used as a spot in connection with special opening pages for each of the selections. " Of The Fairy Ring 1967, quoted in Klemin, The Illustrated Book.
 
ILLUSTRATION; H.L.Mencken as a boy, his first reading was a story in Chatterbox , 1887,"which now seems to be pretty well forgotten, was an English annual that had a large sale, in those days, in the American colonies..." He read The Moose Hunters. "The rest of the 1887 issue was made up of intensely English stuff; indeed it was so English that, reading it and looking at the woodcuts, I sucked in an immense mass of useless information about English history and the English scene.... " A second experiment with a bad translation of the Brothers Grimm. Then discovered Jules Verne and Huck Finn. from Happy Days by HLM, 1947.
 
ILLUSTRATION; Childhood, Dickens' early love of picture books," all about scimitars and slippers and turbans and dwarfs and giants and genii and fairies, and Blue-beards and bean-stalks and riches and caverns and forests and Valentines and Orsons; and all new and all true." Peter Ackroyd, Dickens ,p.29 see also footnote. He particularly like Jack the Giant Killer and Little Red Riding Hood ("my first love").
 
ILLUSTRATION, COMPOSITION;
The photographer Marc Ribout meets Cartier Bresson in 1953, "He convinces me to use an old and peculiar viewfinder which reverses the image. 'Great asset', he tells me, 'the Renaissance masters did the same with a mirror to verify the composition.'..."from ex.cat, the choice ,Photographer's Gallery London 1988
 
ILLUSTRATION; the America figurative painter Isobel Bishop was commissioned to illustrate Pride and Prejudice . "My involvement in this undertaking has to do also with my feeling... that in Jane Austen's handling of the writer's problem, certain... factors relate...to my own efforts as an artist over fifty years... She doesn't describe, in detail, environments; while she gives you the immediate social context of her characters, she is silent about the wider context (you don't know the general economic situation, or that England was at war); she doesn't allow you to care what people had on, or even about the details of their physiognomies ! She governs the questions you are allowed to ask - she forbids any impulse to ask others .... What she presents to you as important convinces you utterly in its completeness... and assumed monumentality... she limits her aesthetic problem and... gains great power through it. What a lesson for visual art ! In fact the whole 'modern' period of painting (since 1910) has been preoccupied with some aspect of the problem." afterword to Pride and Prejudice , Dutton NY 1976, drawings done in the forties, from Helen Yglesias, Isobel Bishop, Rizzoli NY 1988
 
ILLUSTRATION: Balthus' drawings after Wuthering Heights , drawn in 1933, coll, Mrs. Duchamp, another set Vicontesse de Noailles, "Heathcliff in particular captivated him; not the mature and openly fiendish Heathcliff... but Heathcliff the lost boy, the foundling, the human animal toughened by continuous unkindness, the classic outsider. The drawings do not cover half the book, but merely the first third or half of it in which the impossible wooing of Catherine Earnshaw by Heathcliffe is carried on in childhood and adolescence." intro by David Sylvester to exhib.catalogue Balthus Tate Gallery 1968. p.11/12
 
ILLUSTRATION; drawing in India by Christopher Corr, "Drawing is not intrusive like a camera can be. It allows you to make intimate pictures of ordinary life. Many people treated me warmly, seeing me draw their country. Sometimes one of the crowd would act as a 'controller' and keep my view clear... A lot of people asked to be drawn or 'photographed' as they called it. They would stand right in front of whatever I was drawing and give me instructions: 'Make sure you put in my watch !' 'Are you painting my moustaches ?' ..." from Corr and Leddy, Welcome to India , MacDonald Orbis, 1988
 
ILLUSTRATION; the American painter Marvin Cone, "The purpose of art is not to reproduce life, but to present an editorial, a comment on life..." from J. Czestochowski, Marvin Cone An American Tradition Dutton NY 1985
 
ILLUSTRATION; CHILDHOOD Edward Bawden interviewed AOI, was ill in bed, and attracted by the illustrations in a French book. "I started copying from the Girls Own Paper .I didn't much care for the Boys Own Paper which I actually took, but I liked the drawings in the Girls Own Paper which I got from the lending library...."


EDITORIAL DESIGN; Noel Carrington
on the beginning of the Puffin Picture Books, "My children [in the late thirties] were then at an age when they seemed to need books of information which I could not find in the shops. I discovered as many parents must do, that my own fund of knowledge on mnay subjects was poorer than I imagined. The series I had in view was one which would arouse, as well as satisfy, the child's awakening interest in its surroundings; natural phenomena in the first place, then human activities such as the theatre, machines, and travel. I felt that colour was essential, and that artists could, for various reasons be more successful in books of this nature than the camera. " Penrose Annual 51, 1957.
 
EDITORIAL; reference to Irene Martyn's Learning to Spell, Harper London c1947, "Miss Martyn has remembered what almost all parents forget; that children almost instinctively personify letters, numerals, and a thousand other things that they work with.. The picture of Helpful 'H' as a railway porter... is impossible to forget." in Beatrice Warde, "Improving the Compulsory Book", Penrose Annual, 1950.
 
ILLUSTRATION; Lynd Ward, "...the book artist must have a basic conception of what the finished book is to be: its character, flavor, impact on the reader. The pictures themselves must be worked out as part of this conception. With this first step, the artist can go on to decide what kind of pictorial unit should mark the opening of chapters, what larger drawings should emphasise moments of crisis or record action against an informative background, how the physical and psychological characteristics of the people in the book should be interpreted. " Ward, "The Book Artist", in Work for Artists, What ? Where ? How ? , American Artists' Group NY 1957.
 
ILLUSTRATION CHARACTERS; creating a cartoon character to fend off nationalisation by a Labour government. "Faced with the problem of arousing public interest, every conceivable device was resorted to in order that Tate and Lyle's message might be driven into, what one of the operators termed, the public's thick heads. A stroke of artistic genius produced a cartoon character, the ubiquitous 'Mr.Cube'. Drawn to look like a cube of sugar, capable of an infinite variety of facial expressions, and simple enough to be readily printed, 'Mr.Cube' has dominated all the anti-Government propaganda. It was recognised from the start that 'if he caught the public's imagination [he] could sat the most outrageous things and get away with it and... could act as a buffer between the public and Tate and Lyle....'" H.H.Wilson "Techniques of Pressure - Anti Nationalisation Propaganda in Britain", Public Opinion Quarterly Summer 1951.

 

 

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