S. Weasel has new digs and
Now that I wrote "weasel on the run" in the post title, I somehow have the song "Fox on the Run" (by Sweet, from the mid-70s) stuck in my head. I can't even keep my carnivore tribes straight. Of course, the only weasel song I know is "Pop Goes the Weasel," which is a worse earworm and hardly a congratulatory number. Seems as though there's a dearth of mustelid music. There's also Zappa's "Weasels Ripped My Flesh," but it's not overly singable. At any rate, congrats on the new location, SW, and I love those excellent drawings!
4 comments:
Ha! Thank you kindly. I'm afraid to start posting drawings of cats, for fear your head will 'splode. (I missed the photo of a lifetime this afternoon when the kitten shot out the back door and instantly discovered by empirical observation the frictionless nature of wet ice).
I spent a happy evening not long ago clicking through your bookmarks. Winsor McCay is one of my all-time favorites. And Maxfield Parrish, who did some extremely strange things with technique.
That's the trouble with kittens, they're just too fast. One nearly always misses the best action shots.
Parrish - Strange things with technique? Where might I read of this? I always liked his colors. One of the girls depicted in "Daybreak" is distantly related to me (a fact I discovered only recently).
And, noggin 'asploding be damned ...
BRING ON THE KITTEHS!
Parrish used to approach his paintings as if he were color film. He would project photographs onto the wall (did he paint on canvas? I think he painted on panels) and, using thin layers of translucent pigment, paint a blue layer, let it dry, varnish it, then paint a red layer and a green layer in the same way (I'm not sure he did just RGB, but he was using the same principle as multiple-plate color photography). That's how he got those beautiful jewel-like colors (that's how the Northern Renaissance guys did it too, minus the photos) and photorealistic effects. He was really the first photorealistic painter.
He would use a number of unrelated photographs to get his final composition. Sometimes, his landscapes were tabletop models that he built himself -- little buildings made out of cardboard, sheets of glass for the lake, large stones for the mountains. When I first read about fractals (the idea that tiny pieces of a thing look like miniature versions of the big thing) I thought, "pff! Maxfield Parrish knew that in 1900." In a sense, he was the first Photoshopper. An analog Photoshopper :)
There's no doubt he was a capable draftsman on his own, but you couldn't get his kind of treebark/leaves/mountain textures any other way. It's interesting to see his stuff unfinished, though I don't suppose I can post photos in a comment.
Fascinating! I would love to see the unfinished stuff. If you get a moment, maybe you could email a pic or so to iamfelix @ yahoo (dot) com.
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