Painting 2 Post 5

This week I went back and spent a good amount of time re-painting over with my Unbleached Titanium some small sections of the Cashews painting, which I am considering titling "And Yet You Still Seek Their Approval." Perhaps these very straight-forward names will be a counterbalance to the still-lighthearted nature of the "strips."

As it turns out, one can paint over india ink with acrylic. It just requires several layers, and often still ends up with a slight grey tinge akin to light pencil marks. Areas of note are the C and E of "Cashews" and Barry's left foot in panel 3, where a stray line was removed.

Then came the "Dawson Dawg" painting. Designed to be much more straightforward in its critique of American culture, this is the largest of the set at 1 x 2 feet. I was determined this time to include backgrounds (as you can see, drawn directly from the source material) and to "shade" (note the tree) which was significantly harder with a brush than nib or pen.

One of the stranger notes about Floyd Gottfredson's (1930's) Mickey Mouse was that when black shapes overlapped (Mickey's arms and body for example) there was no thin white line to delineate the forms. They simply meshed. This has been historically explained as the reason Mickey and his friends all wear white gloves.

Because the lines of my brush use their width variation to do much of the representation, filling in the shapes with black makes the negative "white" space the new "line." Thinking in these terms is slightly confusing until you get the hang of it. Consider the shape of Dawson's eyes in the first picture. Very round. Now in this one, after shading, the slightly angular shape of the negative space, originally negligible, becomes much more visible. Quite the nuisance.

And of course with the beauty of the Pentel Brush, it's easy to forget that you don't have an infinite source of line until your cartridge dies mid-stroke. This one cartridge has lasted through several pre-semester drawings and 2.5 paintings. That's pretty good value.

To explain the premise, I've pulled a quote from David Gerstein in his section titled "Katnippery" in Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse Collection.

"The greatest Disney comics have always appealed to adults as well as children. "Mickey Mouse Vs. Katt Nipp" is a simple cat and mouse game: cat holds territory; mouse uses tricks to put cat out of the way. Yet on another level, the story is slyly sophisticated. The grown-up significance of fights for "territory" could be found in any Depression-wracked big city; and let's not even start on the importance that Mickey and Nipp attach to their tails, which reflect prewar notions of masculinity via a crude kind of fashion consciousness."

This is the passage from which this painting, and indeed my entire premise for this series sprouted. Mickey, Superman, Maggie and Jiggs, and a slew of other 1930's creations not only find themselves in comic-violence situations, but PUT themselves there because of pride and lust for adventure. Yes, comics were designed to take people's minds off their Depression-era woes, but why of all things, would we go straight to that? America is a funny place.