Luck of the Draw

Cody Garcia's BFA show, "Willy B. Lucky," had a good dose of cartoonish verve. The brightest splashes of color were four cut-paper scenes following the adventures of the show's titular character, Willy, making his way through a casino. The one wall without the cut-paper pictures was painted with nearly life-size silhouettes of casino denizens, bored dealers and unctuous servers and gambling shmoes. Cody set up the gallery for maximum casino ambiance, stationing a bartender in one corner, setting up a couple round tables with red tablecloths, and piping in rat pack music (the music murmured like a haunted historical echo of the Cal-Neva, which had just shut its doors a couple weeks before). Outside the gallery was a small ceramic sculpture of an old man with a pair of cards balanced in one hand, frozen in the moment before he's about to slap them on the table.






Cody's interested in being a character designer, and the show was a good distillation of lessons he's learned at school, through online courses, and with his own disciplined practiced and research. As far as influences go, I know he admired Lou Romano's design work for "Up"(which we were fortunate to see in person during a small student visit to Pixar we were able to arrange last year, thanks to the graces of Erica Milsom), the exaggerated plasticity of the characters owes something to the rubber-band anatomy of Tex Avery, and I thought I could detect some of the geometry of Mary Blair's designs for Disney in the flat boldness of his compositions. The cut paper technique really seemed to suit him, forcing him to concentrate on dynamic, essential shapes. There was a wonderful playfulness in how Cody pried certain pieces of the paper up from the two-dimensional surfaces of the images, so that a cigar or a die-throwing hand might jut out of the picture plane, casting its own shadow over the proceedings. I enjoyed the way he curved arms into elbowless tubes, loop-de-loops of form that swooped you through the activity of each vignette.




(Cody mentioned he identified with Willy somewhat, though I've never known Cody to sport a mustache. Below, a model recreates his posture as a caricature, complete with levitating tie action. It was amusing, when the reception was in full swing, to see the painted silhouettes blending with the live audience in the dim light.)




The humor in the images was pretty gentle (and this is probably my own bias against Casino culture rearing its head). I can go for kitsch and camp in certain doses and distillations, but Casinos usually defeat me. The tackiness is too close an objective correlative to naked human misery in that milieu -- something to do with the alchemical properties of hard liquor, cigarette smoke, and flop sweat. Cody shows some traces of the gruesome here and there (most directly in the silhouette of a woman slouched in front of her small pile of chips, hooked up to an oxygen machine by a thin tube that squiggles up into her nostril), but the images are more of a rib-nudging than real satire. Cody has a sense of humor that's sharper and more perverse in person than what usually shows up on his drawing board.








On the other hand, too much poison in the images might have cramped his style as a host. Anyone who has seen his spot-on caricatures of his friends (popping up on his sketchbook, his blog, and the occasional classroom whiteboard) could intuit the social dimension of his work. He needed to put on an art show, but he also wanted to put on a party. Dressed in black with a ruby red bowtie, he clearly enjoyed being master of ceremonies for a night. Like Willy -- in one picture enthusiastically ordering a round -- for the time being, the drinks were on him.



(the last pic was taken by Kath McGaughey)

R.I.P Nest...

(Student blogger first post woohoo!)

Some of you may have wandered by the creek recently to see that the nest is gone! Russell was first to report that the nest had disappeared early last week and the word from some ceramics students is that they saw IVGID trucks behind the art building monday afternoon. Obviously IVGID does not approve of organized wood piles because there are many other random piles of wood in the area that were not removed. The nest lived there for about a year before its disappearance. The nests intended purpose was to provide a space for people to meditate, achieve clarity and take a break from mental disruptions or possibly feel what needed to be felt or forgotten about. I am definitely disappointed that the nest was removed mostly because I do not understand a good reason to do so, but am happy I recently used it again for another New Genres project in which I collaborated with Kristin and her dancer Terryn to do a performance piece.

Cody Garcia mours the loss of and contemplates the disappearance of the Nest...


Before and after...

Cody Cartoon

Congrats are in order for student Cody Garcia, who has an illustration in the current issue of Clay Times. Below is the illo itself, and then in the context of the page. You can read a little more about it on Cody's blog (from which I nicked the pics).

"Wickedly intelligent and shamelessly unfair"

There's a terrific but fairly heartbreaking article up at Vanity Fair's site about the great caricaturist David Levine. Levine is one of the very few living caricaturists whose work could bear comparison to the historical giants of caricature, like Daumier, Gillray, Cruikshank and Nast. The only other living artist I can think of who might fit in with that company would be Oliphant. To be a political caricaturist of that stature, you need a rare blend of psychological acuity and distillable rage. You can see the two at work in the drawing of William F. Buckley, above -- one of my favorite of Levine's hatchet jobs.

(It seems wrong to talk about modern caricature and not mention Hirschfeld, but the elegance of his style carried him into another category -- he didn't seem to have the neccessary quotient of vituperation to become a political cartoonist)

Levine drew caricatures for the New York Review of Books for over 40 years. I'd noticed, a couple years ago, that his recent caricatures were deteriorating -- he was abandoning his sharp pen line for smudgy pencil, and his figures were becoming foggy, indistinct. I remember one drawing of Obama done in that mode:



It's actually an attractive drawing, but the blurriness of Levine's recent output made me worried about his health. I thought about asking around on a cartoonist message board or two to see if anyone knew how he was holding up, but it seemed indelicate to ask at the time. As the Vanity Fair article discloses, his eyesight has begun to fail him -- a circumstance that seems insupportably cruel, especially while Henry Kissinger is still around, and still deserving of newly-minted acts of graphical character assassination.

I've had caricature on my mind lately, because Cody Garcia has been bringing some caricatures to class -- he posted a really successful one of Obama to his blog.

Here are a few more Levine links:

A searchable gallery of his work for the NYROB.

A webpage for a show of drawings of American Presidents and paintings currently running at the Forum Gallery in New York.

And here's an interview with Levine that the Forum Gallery produced. Some of the narration is intolerable (I personally think the NYROB is the best magazine for political and literary news being published today -- as an oasis of thoughtful, incisive commentary that actually helps to make sense of the world, it's been indispensable to my overall mental well-being -- but the attempt, in the narration, to equate the singles in the NYROB back pages to a squadron of little Petrarchs made my stomach turn over). But tune that stuff out, and it's nice, after all these years of having watched Levine's line, to be able to hear his voice.