Ok, for anyone tired of my slacking on this blog, here is a new comic! :)
Life is certainly different now that I am working in an office again. It's a reminder of how difficult it was to get artwork done, before I left the corporate world. Ah well, I shall be back to the art full time, in July. I have an art request from a friend to work on, so between that and the comics, I'll have enough to keep me busy.
Currently I am reading a book about the history of the Bauhaus. That was the famous art school in Germany, which was only around for 14 years, before the Nazis closed its doors. That didn't prevent it from having a great influence on Modern art and architecture, however. Its founder, Walter Gropius, had a number of harrowing experiences while fighting during World War I. It's a good book, and it's one of the things that I'll write more about when I am back to writing consistently on this blog!
Voilà! A comic newly created!
The "photo" on the wall, in the first panel, is a quick painting of the Pleiades open star cluster. The stars in the Pleiades are relatively young, being born around the time that the dinosaurs became extinct. Well, extinct except for the two specimens shown in this comic (Thorny in yellow and Bronty in green). :)
So I'll do a little mini-post today anyway. :) Just an update: I should have a new comic finished by tomorrow! I've got it all drawn out, so I just need to digitally ink it, and color it. Woo hoo!
I made it through my first day back at work! Just some office duties, to help pay the bills. I suppose that I was satisfied with my performance today. Walking up to the building this morning, I noticed that my pants were unzipped. Then, after lunch, I guzzled a bunch of water, to make sure that I'd need to pee while at the doctor's office (required for the drug test). That backfired on me, because I ended up sitting in the doctor's waiting room for far too long, about to pee in my pants. They kept calling other people to come on back, people who had arrived after I did. I had a stomachache by the time they called me. That's the way it goes.
Long day! Off to bed shortly... in preparation for drawing and coloring tomorrow...!
Hi Gang-
I'm going to have to take a break from this blog for a while...! Oh no!!!
My old company called me up today, and offered me a temporary job for a few weeks, which I've accepted (though it'll be official only after all the paper work is done. I've been working on that all evening). But I do start work tomorrow, and so I will be preoccupied with that job for maybe seven weeks or so. In my spare time I will concentrate on drawing more comic strips.... and I will write on this blog, as time permits!
Thanks in advance for your patience! And thanks for reading, it makes this worthwhile..! I'll do this temp job, and then I'll be back to the artwork full time again!
Best regards,
Michael
Today I finished reading Fiorella Terenzi's book, "Heavenly Knowledge". I much enjoyed it, and will write more about it later. But tonight I'll note a conversation that she had with Timothy Leary, near the end of the book, in which they compared the estimated number of galaxies thought to exist in the universe (100 billion), to the number of neurons in the human brain, also at 100 billion. Analogies between astronomy and human existence seems to be one of Fiorella's favorite topics, which was meaningful to me in reading her book, because I also love to make connections between my interests. Art, martial arts, astronomy, cosmology, etc. bring extra meaning when connections and similarities are made between them. Indeed, it's the goal of physics to eventually connect all laws together into one idea which explains everything (the Grand Unified Theory). Anyway, it was kind of coincidental and "interconnected" to read of Terenzi's brain discussion with her friend, as just two days ago I had been reading separately a book regarding the brain, specifically about there being 100 billion neurons and possibly over 1,000 trillion synapses in the human mind (the most complex object known). I much enjoy it when concepts overlap and merge, as it helps to make sense of a complex universe, and lets me believe that maybe I am moving closer to truth.
I drew another comic today! But I'm afraid that you'll have to go to my main website to see it. The Blogger website is not permitting me to upload any images right now, for reasons unknown!
The new comic can be reached here: www.michaelricketson.com
The three previous comics are also now appearing on the main website. For convenient accessibility from one place! :)
Hopefully tomorrow, Blogger will be working a little better..!
Here we go again with another new comic strip! :-) Freshly drawn and colored today.
(You can click it to enlarge)...!
By tomorrow, I will likely have this, and the other two recent comics, posted to my main website:
www.michaelricketson.com
As always, thanks for taking a look!
Yves Tanguy was a Surrealist painter, born in Paris, France on January 5, 1900. He was persuaded to become an artist after viewing paintings by Giorgio de Chirico (in particular, "The Child's Brain", which he had viewed from the street in the window of a gallery). His associations with the French poet Jacques Prévert and writer Marcel Duhamel were his inspiration to join the Surrealist group headed by André Breton.
This is one of Tanguy's best known paintings, "Indefinite Divisibility", from the year 1942:
The clear, bright air lends a disturbing quality in illuminating this bizarre arrangement of colorful forms. The horizon disappears into an infinite mist. Such landscapes resembling beaches may have been partly inspired from Tanguy's time spent in the Merchant Navy. Tanguy eagerly practiced "automatism", a favored Surrealist technique of painting and creating without conscious interference of any kind. For me, "Indefinite Divisibility" was one of the first paintings to open up the larger world of Surrealism, outside of my initial sole interest in Salvador Dali.
Tanguy, like many Modern artists, left Europe during World War II, settling in the United States.
I know Reno, Nevada for two things. One is the sleepless night that I spent there, after arriving early one morning for a business trip. The other is that it's the place where Yves Tanguy married the artist Kay Sage. Not that I was there for that occasion, or even in existence, in 1940. (See post dated 4-6-2011 for more about Sage, also one of my favorite Surrealists). Eventually Tanguy and Sage moved to Woodbury, Connecticut, where they continued to paint and embrace the American life, declining to return to France even after World War II ended.
Tanguy died of a stroke on Jan. 15, 1955, at only 55 years of age. Sage spent the subsequent years promoting and cataloguing her husband's works (in spite of failing eyesight) before taking her own life in 1963.
You can see Tanguy's really cool hairstyle and more, at www.yvestanguy.org/en/
(This website includes an interesting biography on Tanguy, broken up into different years. There's also a photo of a very young Kay Sage, a picture which Tanguy apparently carried with him constantly).
At the risk of dwindling my readership, here is another comic, which I just completed!
And, just for Mom, who appreciates the classic look, here's the same comic in a no-color version..! :)
The guy with black hair is a new version of the character Willy (who was last seen here, in the older comic posted on 5-17-2011).
Oh, stop! This is NOT torture.
Here is a new comic strip for you to enjoy, that I finished drawing today.
Clicking on it will enlarge it..! :)
I'll wait before offering any apologies, as there may be another comic coming up soon. :)
Today I've been working on drawing my first comic strip for some time. I'm drawing it on the computer, in Corel Painter 11, and have yet to decide if I prefer that to drawing directly on paper! The pen and tablet technology these days, while vastly improved over what was available a decade ago, are still not as precise as a real pencil and dip pen.
Also I need to decide if coloring the strip is a good idea. I'm so used to reading the old fashioned comic strips in black and white, that I wonder if the color is just a secondary consideration. It's the characters and the idea that count, and if the color in strips is not going to be done in a beautifully detailed manner, then maybe it's best left out. On the other hand, even flat colors can add a type of 3d depth, so I do lean in favor of it overall. Plus it's more current with the contemporary style of comic strips.
I have a cast of characters which I invented a long time ago, which always appear in my writing and comic strips. I feel there's a story to be told with these characters, but I always debate if that should be in the form of a novel, or through comic strips. There was a day when I couldn't imagine writing 4-panel comic strips, because I always considered my ideas to be lacking in brevity. I drew cartoons as a youngster, but they were typically long, drawn out affairs, covering dozens of pages. I think it was something of an accomplishment when I decided that I was able to write the short comic strips!
Enough for today. I'll do more doodling and pondering tomorrow...
I was writing to an artist associate of mine today, when I brought up the subject of Rene Magritte's depiction of balusters in his paintings (a baluster being a decorative column, seen in architecture or furniture). This made me think of a couple of Surrealist paintings of Magritte's which I have long admired, but lately hadn't seen, and for which I couldn't remember the names! But a little bit of searching on the internet helped me to recall. The two paintings are pretty similar, and both are from the year 1926.
One of the paintings is Magritte's "The Birth of the Idol":
The other painting is Magritte's "The Difficult Crossing":
Both paintings reveal a nightmarish domestic setting, seemingly on the verge of upset by a raging storm. The balusters, with their ornate designs, take on a gesture of futility in the midst of such upheaval (it reminds me of the lament of utter pointlessness, "The ship is sinking, and I'm polishing the handrail")! These paintings are easily enjoyed by anyone, who, like me, loves thunderstorms, and that teetering feeling that one experiences in dreams while flying through the air or flailing in an angry sea.
I wonder if "The Difficult Crossing" might have been the inspiration for Paul Nash's painting, "Harbour and Room", from 1932-1936:
