Artists are ridiculous, discuss. And sometimes a pencil is just a pencil.
Junk shops seem to be a source of inspiration recently, firstly for the Seventies Romance Portraits I made last year which celebrate the melodramatic cover art of pulp romance novels, and began my current obsession with tiny brushes and gouache paint, and now my new love, Finding Out magazine. I found a stack of these magazines at my local antique market (pleasingly called ‘The Emporium’) and simply couldn’t resist them. Trying to work out what this irresistible pull to objects consists of is all part of the fun.
Finding Out I, Still Life with Cowboy Boot (A Portrait of Angus McBride) was the first I completed. McBride was a prolific and talented illustrator of children’s books, text books and magazines, and just as with the romance novel illustrations, I found the skilled lightness of touch of these artists compelling for reasons beyond the image. These are largely lost professions, with the possible exception of SF/Fantasy, book artists of this kind, once ubiquitous, are no longer common.
Finding Out itself is an anachronism, a pre-internet weekly encyclopedia filled with seemingly random articles intended to educate young adults, strapline ‘The Modern Magazine For Young People Everywhere’.
McBride’s compositions for Finding Out are complex still-lifes which gather together the subjects of the contents of each magazine in order to inspire the young reader. A cowboy boot on a martian landscape, with a piece of bamboo, a picture of a canoe, tubes of paint, gold doubloons and a blue pencil. Or a chinese lantern, moths, a bat, a picture of Tower Bridge, an x-ray of a skull, a book written in arabic and a red pencil. Or the latest of my paintings, Native American Indians racing across a plain on horseback, huge cumulus clouds, a cricket bat, a model boat, William Caxton’s makers mark, ants and a blue pencil. There’s always a pencil.
Brought to mind for me is a quote by Isidore Ducasse under the pseudonym Comte de Lautreamont, “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.” From Les Chants de Maldorer, a text which was influential on Symbolists, and Surrealists alike, including Andre Breton, and was also referenced by Man Ray in his piece, The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse. I always think of Giorgio de Chirico when I remember that quote, with his strange, cold juxtapositions. They always seem so blank faced to me, coded and inaccessible, yet troubling.
The juxtapositions on the magazine covers are more arbritrary but share a language of visual connotation with de Chirico. When looking at McBride’s illustrations I find myself using the same attempt at decoding symbolism as I do the De Chirico, except for McBride, there is no hidden agenda, no manifesto and (apparently) no ambitions to high art. Only an attempt to engage a young reader in learning about subjects as diverse as mathematics, social history, inventions, drawing, zoology, myth & legend and so on.
I don’t think the pencil has any symbolism other than that of being a drawing implement.
These magazines are defunct and obsolete in the digital age, out of date in their information, and outmoded in their manner, just as the book artist no longer has a role. As obsolete as the misogynist and somewhat ridiculous manifestos of Breton and his friends.
Obsolete and ridiculous, like the artist painstakingly gridding and drawing out a life size still life copy of a painting from an old magazine no one cares about any more.
