James Marshall Week Day 2: Gorey Details

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Alright, I asked you yesterday which Edward inspired James Marshall. You had the choice of Edward Gorey, Edward Ardizzone, and Blake Edwards. The answer?

photo by Julie Danielson from Bill Gray’s scrapbook

The gentleman on the right is none other than Edward Gorey. And, yes, Marshall considered him a master (alongside Maurice Sendak) of picture book illustration. You can see Gorey’s influence in Marshall’s earliest work. Here’s a page from PLINK, PLINK, PLINK (Baylor, Marshall, 1971).

You can see Marshall’s working hard to capture the atmosphere in Gorey’s work and in some places he’s successful (that tree, especially) but his crosshatching isn’t there. Lines in crosshatching are often oriented to follow the form of the object they’re decorating. Marshall accomplishes this in some places (the sloping bannister and the ball top) but in a rudimentary way. Crosshatching can also be used to denote the illustration’s light source but the shading is indistinct and, in some cases contradictory, (the ball at the top of the post is shaded on the left, the post itself is shaded on the right). Mostly, he’s using crosshatching to fill space.

Marshall would later find his strengths in shape, form, and composition to give his characters volume.

GEORGE AND MARTHA ROUND AND ROUND (1988)

But he’d never give up using at least a slight bit of crosshatching. Or in the following example, a lot. Here’s three attempts at filling in Old Mother Hubbard’s skirt, none of which were used as the final art (please excuse the dim quality of the first two pictures, I took these in a low-light archival setting, the last photo is darker and triggered my camera’s flash… if the original should suddenly dissolve, you know who to blame).

from the Thomas J. Dodd Library JAMES MARSHALL PAPERS, University of Connecticut

from the Thomas J. Dodd Library JAMES MARSHALL PAPERS, University of Connecticut

from the Thomas J. Dodd Library JAMES MARSHALL PAPERS, University of Connecticut

The final? It’s wonderful. That drapery is a hard effect to achieve in any technique. James Marshall absolutely nails it here. It’s incredibly intentional (as is my jeans folds being kept in the image).

OLD MOTHER HUBBARD AND HER WONDERFUL DOG (1991)

Oh, incidentally, today (the tenth) is James Marshall’s birthday. Maybe I’ll dip my pen in ink in honor of the occassion. As for the rest of the week… I’m playing it by ear, I’m not sure what else I’ll talk about. If you have any Marshall questions you’d like answered, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them. See you tomorrow!

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Oh, To Be a Gnome Living Underground, Grinding Colors Out of Crystals

2 Comments / #ArtProcess, #PBwithJ / /

In one of those moments of synchronicity, Fuse Eight and Kate covered THE RAINBOW GOBLINS in their most recent podcast. What’s the coincidence? Well, I was wrestling with colors today (I’m preparing some large sheets of paper to use in collage illustrations, a technique you’d be most familiar with in Eric Carle’s work) and, like the goblins in the story, found myself elbow deep in acrylics and ethical dilemmas.

blarg

Acrylics are a plastic-based paint and their use releases microplastics into the environment. I don’t use acrylics often, but when I do, I try to keep my water waste to a minimum. I don’t use paint palettes, I use scraps of cardboard or old paper plates that I let dry and then throw away. I use pretty cheap brushes and don’t make an effort to rinse them perfectly clean but nevertheless, when I do run them under the tap, I see rivers of paint pigment, each a constellation of nano-scale plastic particles, swirling down the drain. It’s not a good feeling.

Some of the papers I painted today. The hammer is totally necessary to my process.

The papers, I like those. When the color and pattern come together in a pleasing arrangement, anyway. I could maybe scan them, and then use and reuse them in digital compositions. I don’t know, that doesn’t really excite me. If you’ve seen any one of my donut process videos, you’ll notice I draw on the fly with an x-acto knife. I’m not sure how I’d translate that onto an ipad.

I guess the best I can do is mitigate the amount of harmful byproducts working in this style creates. I’ve started using disposable brushes (which come as a bundle wrapped in plastic) so I can stop washing them all together. They’ll eventually wind up in a landfill which, granted, is only marginally better but it keeps me from worrying about microplastics in our water. The ones I put there, anyway.

You might be wondering what in the Rien Poortvliet I was talking about up in the post title about gnomes living underground. It’s this:

Now those guys knew how to make some eco-friendly paints. I’ve always wondered if Ul de Rico could have been inspired by this cartoon. I seriously doubt it. But then again, I think it was Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci who said the “Baby Mine” sequence in Disney’s DUMBO was one of the greatest scenes in all of cinema, rivalling in beauty the works of Michelangelo (citation needed).

UPDATE: TikTok to the rescue. Turns out there’s another microplastic mitigation technique.

@angietherose

Water evaporation makes cleaning in the studio less burdensome 🎨 #artistsoftiktok #howto #acrylicpainting #cleantok #themoreyouknow #シ #fyp

♬ Make Your Own Kind Of Music – Mama Cass

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