Multitasking

Howard Pyle provides probably the ultimate example of multitasking while painting.


One of his students, Thornton Oakley, recalls:

On the stairway landing I found my teacher at his easel, working on a canvas for his series “Travels of the Soul,” his young children cavorting about his knees, a model posed nearby in costume to give him some detail of texture, Mrs. Pyle sitting beside him reading aloud proofs from King Arthur for his correction, he making comments for his notation.”

That kind of brainpower is a remarkable achievement, way beyond me, that’s for sure. But I find that while my mind is engaged in painting, there are chunks of grey matter sitting around idle. Engaging those areas with non-visual tasks makes me paint more intuitively, which helps.

You all offered some great comments on an earlier post about listening to music or books on tape. When it comes to enjoying the company of young children or pets, I’m in agreement with Pyle. When my kids were young, there was always a lot of commotion going on in the studio, and it strangely helped my concentration.

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.

Revell’s Rembrandt

Jack Leynnwood was the Rembrandt of Revell plastic model boxes.
Leynnwood was a teacher at Art Center, where I went to school, but I don’t think the school administration valued him enough at the time. In my day, the only place he taught gouache painting was at off-campus seminars, where I had the privilege of watching him paint a demo of a red car.

In 1965, the Revell company turned to Leynnwood to paint the box cover for their model of the Army Air Force B-24D.

When Revell switched to using photos instead of paintings on their boxes, I lost interest in plastic models. I didn’t want truth in advertising. I wasn’t just buying a box of plastic parts. I was buying the whole fantasy. And no one understood how to deliver that fantasy that better than Jack Leynnwood.

Read more about this painting and the aircraft shown at The Box Art Den, link.

Tonal Focus

Here are two ink wash drawings of a picturesque street scene. They’re very similar. There’s an upper and a lower arch. The light is coming from the upper left in both scenes, and the figures are all in the same places.

As you look at both pictures, do you find your attention is attracted to a different part of each picture? What is different about them?

Arthur Guptill, in his book Color in Sketching and Rendering, provides this example to show how tonal arrangement can help create a focal area.

His purpose with the picture at left is to draw the eye to the upper arch by means of strong lighting and punchy contrast. The second picture has the tonal focus on the lower arch.

I found that my eye moved the way he intended, but I may have been influenced by his discussion in the book. How did it work for you?

Art Carts and Art Education Survey

The Lehigh Valley Arts Council in eastern Pennsylvania just published a survey about how the arts are faring in schools. It’s a regional survey, but it probably speaks to problems that face art teachers everywhere, especially in these tough economic times.

A few of the findings:
1. Fewer and fewer art teachers have their own dedicated classrooms, and many are heroically teaching from art carts. Schools with limited space often replace art classrooms with computer rooms.

2. Collaborations between art teachers and other curriculum areas, such as geography or science, are much more common in elementary and middle school levels, and harder to find at the high school level.

3. It’s also harder for high school art teachers to organize field trips or to get support from parents and funding groups.

The arts council is facing these somewhat discouraging trends by reminding parents, business people, and school administrators how important the arts are to the growth of young people. They’re working with an allocation from the Pennsylvania state budget that was cut back more than eight percent from the previous level.

You can read more about the survey, conducted by Paul Dino Jones at Lehigh Valley Live. and Morning Call Newspaper Article.

Press notice about my keynote at the Arts-In-Education gathering.

The Cello and The Pencil

I enjoy sketching musicians, partly because I'm in such awe of what they do. This cello student from the Bard Conservatory Orchestra put tremendous skill and feeling into his playing of Dvorak and Schumann.

I'm fascinated by the way musicians collaborate with dead composers to bring centuries-old creations back to life at each performance. Doing so requires a level of skill and depth that we artists can only regard with wonder.

There's really no parallel in art for this act of sympathy with past masters. When we go to art school, we don't make a group practice of copying the Sistine ceiling or the Night Watch. Imagine if Michelangelo or Rembrandt depended on our technical skills as the vehicle for realizing their creative ideas.

As artists we don't have a shared repertoire that we must all master. We simply glance back at the vast sweep of art history, taking sips of inspiration here and there, and then try to find our own way alone.

Fantasy Art in High School

Kathleen Harte, visual arts instructor at Millburn High School in New Jersey, has encouraged her students to use maquettes and posed models to add realism to their imaginative work.


According to Ms. Harte:

“One of the students, Joy Jeong, had to create an image of a young girl riding a giant caterpillar for a series of 12 paintings she is creating based on a story she originated in which giant insects have invaded our world.

Joy had seen your book, Dinotopia, and had heard me tell about the presentation you gave at the Society of Illustrators last year. I had explained how you make models when needed to use as reference and to explore lighting situations. So Joy came in after school and made a rough mock up of her caterpillar. She put a small figure on it that I brought in from my own studio and used a strong light to create her shadows. Combining those photos with one she took of a fellow student, she created the final piece that I have included here.”

Thank you to Ms. Harte, Joy, and Anna, for permission to use your images. I’m impressed with the wonderful results you got from your extra effort. It’s fun to imagine what will happen next in your story world when that caterpillar turns into a butterfly.

For other arts instructors in the Mid-Atlantic region, don’t miss the Dinotopia arts-in-education event tomorrow in eastern Pennsylvania. Here’s the official announcement, and I hope to meet many of you there.

James Gurney, author/illustrator of ''Dinotopia,'' will talk about his fantasy artwork and sign copies of his books about a world where humans and dinosaurs live together in harmony. It's Saturday at Zion's Reformed United Church, 622 Hamilton St., Allentown. Gurney's talk is part of the Lehigh Valley Arts Council's arts-in-education forum. He will talk at 1 p.m., followed by the book signing at 2 p.m. Tickets are $10; $5, students. Info: 610-437-5915, http://www.lvartscouncil.org .