Across the Border

The border guard asked who we were, what we were doing, and what we brought back. We told him we were painters up to see an exhibition called "Garden of Enchantment," and all we bought were a couple of art books. He looked kind of disgusted with us, and waved us through.

At the PriceChopper in Plattsburgh we got some turkey sandwiches. I saw a guy two aisles over in the checkout line who looked just like one of Henry Hudson's crew in Rip Van Winkle. I started sketching him, and when he noticed, I just told him: "I'm sketching your picture."

Later I caught up with him at the Lotto machine and showed him the sketch. His shoulders were covered with sawdust. He told me he is a logger, and we got talking about the early chainsaws that the old-timers used to work. They used motorcycle engines and took two men to operate.

He said the oldest trees he had seen in the forest were yellow birch. Once in a while he runs across a chestnut or an elm, but he said he leaves them for wildlife. He invited us by his place, but we had to get home.

Back to the U.S.A. Border

A long line of cars led up to the border crossing as we returned from Canada. It seemed they were stopping and searching everyone.

Four guys in flak jackets searched a car in front of us, using mirrors on poles to look under the bumpers. They made the guy get out of the car, escorted him away, and then one of the officers drove off in his car.

I asked Doug for his passport. This time I wanted to make sure I presented the passports up front, rather than waiting for the officer to ask me for them.

I turned to Dennis. Last time the guard asked us four times if we had firearms, and when he asked Dennis directly, he just shook his head. This time he said he was going to speak up.

Tomorrow I'll tell you what happened.

Parakeet Artist

I'm proud of Mr. Kooks, my budgie. But I didn't expect him to upstage me.

Gallery Flambeau Video

Because not all paintings were meant to live forever.
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More about the Gallery Flambeau on GJ.

Wireless Era?

The Deep Sea Diver

Earlier this month, the gargantuan marionettes returned to Nantes in western France, this time with a deep sea diver (Le Scaphandrier) in search of his gigantic niece.


In the second half of this video you can see how the operators lunge off the moving platform to lift the legs for each step.

The spectacle was produced by the street theater company Royal de Luxe of Nantes, who brought us the Sultan’s Elephant.
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Image from Flickr user misterstf
Previous GurneyJourney post on the Sultan's Elephant, link.
Report on BoingBoing, link.
More Flickr images of the Giant Diver, link.
Wikipedia on Royal de Luxe, link.
Nantes municipal website with pictures and info, link.

Pen Disaster

Just heard a scream from the laundry room upstairs. Looks like I left my fountain pen in a load of whites. It busted up and bled in the spin cycle. Now we'll be walking around covered in strange brown spots.

Clotheslines

Clotheslines are beautiful things.


Charles Curran painted these sheets drying on the line, using the cloth as a back projection screen for the cast shadows of the nearby foliage.

Clothes dried on the line smell fresher. Hanging laundry floods the soul with joyful light. And it uses free energy.


So why don’t we see more clotheslines in America? The energy and appliance companies ran a relentless series of ads in the 1950s and 1960s brainwashing people into thinking clotheslines are ugly or old fashioned. Many communities have laws against clotheslines. You could get fined for hanging out your laundry.

G.P. (Golden Palm)

The letters “G.P.” are hidden in many of my science fiction paperback covers from the 1980s.

The letters stand for the Golden Palm, an apartment building that I shared with many other Art Center students.

Many of them have gone on to become well known in comics, illustration, and painting. They include Paul Chadwick (Concrete), Bryn Barnard (Writer, Illustrator, Muralist), Thomas Kinkade (Painter of Light), Ron Harris (Crash Ryan), Alan Munro (Visual FX), Mark Verheiden (Writer), and David Mattingly (Animorphs Illustrator).


We all called ourselves “GP-ers,” and we got together for sketch groups, field trips to movies and museums, and art-themed potlucks.

I’ll send a free Dinotopia map to the first person who correctly names all of the covers from which the details above are excerpted.

Dead Tech: Waxers

If you’re younger than 35 years old, you might want to click off.
This is going to be one of those boring topics where geezers gather together and talk affectionately about “the good old days.”


The waxer was a basic tool that every graphic designer used in the analog era. Waxers applied a thin layer of molten beeswax to the back of a piece of paper.

At the bottom of the waxer was a roller that distributed the wax on the paper in a honeycomb pattern.

The piece of paper might be a headline or a column of type used in a newspaper or magazine layout.

This layout process was called paste-up. The waxer was a big improvement over paste or rubber cement, because it was non-toxic, it could be easily repositioned, and the adhesive didn’t turn brown.

The photo above shows a Lectro-Stick handheld waxer. There were larger sheet-fed waxers, but this little one did any small- to medium-size waxing job.

By removing the red plug at the top, you could push in a sticky square of yellowish beeswax. A heating element inside melted down the wax. It took about a half an hour to warm up.

You could leave the waxer plugged in all day and it didn’t hurt it. It gave off a friendly smell, reminiscent of candles.

This is one tool that still has some practical uses. If you can still find one (along with a supply of wax squares), grab it! It’s still the best repositionable way to hold down small pieces of paper, like thumbnail sketches, on a larger board.
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(Note: This is the first of an occasional feature called “Dead Tech.” In the future we’ll unravel the mysteries of such things as Rubylith, Letraset, Merganthaler, Zipatone, and Craft Tint. And if you’re under 35 and you read this far: I congratulate you. You are a person of rare spirit and curiosity.)

Empty Coffee Cups

The caption to this photo of American illustrator John Gannam says: “Empty coffee cups bear witness to the artist’s insistence upon a clean cup for each fresh drink—of which there may be a half a dozen at one sitting.”

I drink coffee, and I agree with Gannam on this one. I definitely grab a new cup each time. How about you? Check out the poll at left.
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Photo from "Forty Illustrators and How The Work."
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Poll results added later from 334 voters:
37 New cup each time.
222 Reuse the same cup.
5 Use disposable cups.
67 Don't do coffee.
3 Other.

Chrysler Personalities

With all the talk lately about the bankruptcy of the Chrysler Corporation, Jeanette and I decided to take our sketchbooks yesterday to the Rhinebeck Car Show to look at Dodge, Plymouth, and Chrysler.

We sat next to each other on folding chairs. Jeanette got out her ballpoint pen and watercolors and sketched the 1961 Dodge Lancer and the 1958 Plymouth Fury, slightly exaggerating to bring out their personalities.

I liked her idea, so I tried to graft the cars onto the bodies of people walking by. I jotted down fragments from conversations that I overheard.

In 1958 America seemed to be caught between memories of war, fears of nuclear devastation, and dreams of space, and that zeitgeist is written on the cars’ faces.

Maybe Chrysler will bounce back to life like a ‘toon car. Let’s hope so. Maybe the key to the success of the company is putting a little more personality into the car designs.

More on this blog about automotive zeitgeist and car names.

Meatball, the Squirrel

Every afternoon, my friends put a pile of sunflower seeds on their kitchen windowsill. Three different squirrels come to gorge. The one they call Meatball was just two feet away from me as he dined, and allowed me to sketch his portrait.


Meatball has beautiful little fingers, and he grabs the seeds one by one in his fists.

At my house I don’t leave out food for the squirrels, at least not intentionally. But they get into my bird feeder anyway.

They’re not the stupid rodents I first thought them to be. They can beat almost any bird feeder baffle that I can devise for them.


Have a look at the Kung Fu Squirrel on YouTube.

I wish I could understand the squirrel mind better. I feel a basic sympathy for a dog’s or a bird’s mental state and thought process.

But I have no idea what the squirrel is thinking. They seem to be driven by a mysterious combination of determination and paranoia...and now and then a fierce Killer Instinct.

Recognizing Faces

Whenever I walk through an airport far from home, I’m struck by all the strange faces. Endless new variations of features and head shapes present themselves. I know with certainty that I never have seen any of them before.

Where does that certainty come from? How do I separate familiar faces from strange ones?

Like everyone else I probably have a few thousand faces filed away in my memory banks. There are the people I see regularly in my daily rounds. And then there are the famous people from the movies or in the magazines. I rarely see those famous people in real life, but I still recognize them at a glance from a blurry photo or from a caricature.

I can recognize all these thousands of faces at any angle, in any lighting, and with any facial expression. I unconsciously adjust my mental image of each face as each person grows older, grows a mustache, or gets a new haircut.

If I don’t see a teenager for a few years, I often don’t recognize them at all. They become, for a moment, strangers. That experience is jarring for me, and it must be a strange experience for the teenagers, too.

As we glance at the faces of people walking on a busy sidewalk in our hometown, we automatically check each face to see whether the person is an acquaintance or a stranger. Our behavior changes accordingly. We greet those we know and pass over the rest.

Aside from categorizing people according to gender, the division of people into the two sets of acquaintances and strangers must be one of the deepest unconscious tasks of visual perception.

Jules Breton once observed of his beloved Paris:

“It is a singular fact that when I am in Paris I fancy I recognize the faces of those I meet in the streets. I do not experience this feeling in any other city. This is because Paris reunites the various types one has seen elsewhere, and which strike one like old acquaintances, made one does not remember where.”

Image courtesy: link.

Unicorns

Unicorns have been spotted in Toronto.

Antibubbles

A regular soap bubble is a thin film of liquid surrounding a sphere of air and floating in an air medium.

Now think of the exact inverse: a thin film of air surrounding a sphere of liquid and floating in a liquid medium. That is called an antibubble. You can make them in a beaker of soap bubble solution.

An antibubble, with its modest bouyancy, floats slowly upward to the surface just as a soap bubble floats delicately downward.

This YouTube video has other permutations: zero gravity bubbles, bubbles-within-droplets, and a "bubble war" filmed in slow motion and explained by a NASA scientist.



Wikipedia on Antibubbles, link.

Behind the Scenes at Gurney Journey

Several of you have asked what goes into the making of this blog. How is it possible to do all those groundbreaking, authoritative posts on a daily basis?

Of course it would be impossible without the help of my production staff, so I thought I’d introduce them to you.

Here’s Clifton, our Art Historian and Image Sleuth. He is an expert on obsolete traditions and hot new trends, which in the art field are one in the same.


Jonathan is our Writer. I keep telling him to keep it brief, cut out adjectives, and eschew obfuscation.

Donna, on the right, is Manager of Comments and Analytics. She tracks reader response and compiles the weekly Boredom Index to remind me which posts fell flat.

Margie, on the left is in charge of Blog Revenue. Or I should say "was in charge." Because of the economic downturn, I had to let her go last week, so she's sniffing around for a new job.

That’s about it. I don’t do much on this blog, just let it run itself.

Giant Spider in Liverpool

The people who brought us the street theater marvel of the Sultan's Elephant recently unveiled a new miracle: a giant spider that visited Liverpool. The response was not fear, but love. (Thanks, Jason!)

More about artistic director François Delarozière and his theatrical machines here.

Winter 2009

Today we're being hit with another winter storm. The north wind is rattling the windchimes and spinning the anemometers in wild orbits. New snow is whitewashing the ground, covering the gray remnants of the last few snowfalls.


It has been a long winter. But I'm not complaining; in fact I thrive on the austerity of winter as a foundation for my creative life. Winter scrapes the palette clean before springtime unscrews the caps from the tubes of colors and squeezes out the reds and yellows and greens.

Smile or Grimace?

In the 1980s the Newport cigarette company ran a series of magazine ads showing women and men interacting. The tag line was “Alive with pleasure! After all, if smoking isn’t a pleasure, why bother?”

One ad showed a man and a woman embracing while squeezing giant, long balloons between them.

The ad campaign continued with a woman squirting her boyfriend with a drinking fountain, spraying him with a boda bag, and a holding an icycle up to his mouth.

The Freudian overtones are pretty obvious now that two decades have given us a little more objectivity.

But what is even more interesting are the facial expressions. Are those really smiles of pleasure, or something else?


Primate social behavior expert Jane Goodall has said, “The chimpanzee's smile so often seen on TV is actually a grin of fear.” Monkeys and apes pull their lips back from their teeth in social situations to show extreme discomfort.

Sometimes the primate smile has an aggressive side. Diane Fossey, who studied gorillas, said, "The primate grimace known as the threat face tells an aggressor to back off."


Humans have two kinds of smiles. One is the genuine smile of pleasure. The other is the nervous grin. It’s the uncomfortable smile that we see at cocktail parties or in conference rooms when people are unsure of their social position.

Anthropologists call it the “deferential grimace.” It’s often accompanied by a squinting of the eyes.

Above is a painting by contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun. Time Magazine describes the expression in Mr. Minjun’s work in this way: “a laugh that isn't entirely funny; an exuberance shadowed by deep unease.”

The Newport ad campaign affects us on two simultaneous and conflicting emotional tracks. The conscious track tells us that these are happy people having fun together. The unconscious track, which the conscious mind easily dismisses, awakens uncomfortable feelings of role reversal, alienation, or jealousy.

The conscious tag line is “Newport: alive with pleasure!” But the unconscious line should read: “Newport: fraught with social anxiety!”

But why does it sell cigarettes?
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More
A study suggesting that Americans and Brits use slightly different muscles when expressing the deferential grimace, link.