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Inspiration From Artists Week 65 Featuring Artists : Dean Cornwall and Frans Masereel .
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Message
Posted
Welcome to this weeks Inspiration from Artists the week the featuring artist are :
Dean Cornwall and Frans Masereel , I will start with Dean Cornwall and on Wednesday I will present the artwork of Frans Masereel.
Dean Cornwall 1892 - 1960 was an American illustrator and muralist.
His oil paintings frequently featured in popular magazines, advertisements and books as literary illustrations, advertisements and posters promoting the war effort. Throughout the first part of twentieth century he was a dominant presence in American Illustration. At the peak of his popularity he was nicknamed the “ Dean of Illustrators .
Information from Wikipedia.
I hope you enjoy his very varied artwork, and hopefully find one you would like to post . .
Edited
by Robert Jones, NAPA
Posted
One of a type: hugely skilled - to think this level of accuracy and observation could be translated into paint is quite remarkable, and some think you can only do it today via digital fiddling, or fumbling..... No, it can be done via practise, dedication, expertise, determination, and knowing what you're damn' well doing!
I like some examples of it more than others, in terms of pictures I'd want to own, but "liking" has nothing to do with it: and I shall continue to stress this until I go a lovely shade of oyster-pink.... Some of these illustrations reflect the racial and political attitudes of mid-century America, they illustrate a national mood, to some degree a state of national arrogance, they betray ideological certainties .... all the rest of that. Despise the USA, LIFE magazine, and you'll despise these illustrations: but not being a political fanatic, I see the art as well as the underlying assumptions; and the art is unquestionably brilliant.
Posted
In another life, another body and another England, artists like Dean Cornwall left me in wonderment about art. I dreamt of having one tenth their skill and imagination. A golden memory is an exhibition in London of original work by artists from the golden age of illustration, among them Dean Cornwell. Utterly captivating. This was a time when art still ruled in books and magazine, the time before photography took over. The time when ROTHKO and his fellow modern artists were being touted as the way forward for art. But for this snotty-nosed schoolboy the truly great artists were illustrators. My artistic tastes have widened now, but the great illustrators still hold the premier position in my idea of what art should be. Dean Cornwell studied under the greats of his era, among them Frank Brangwyn, the genius Welch artist, muralist, illustrator and designer. It's Brangwyn's influence I see most in Dean Cornwell's art.
I love the way he stages his paintings, they teem with energy and character. I particularly like the vignetted compositions. A great choice Dixie.
Posted
I thought he would be your cup of tea Lew . I was just looking at Frank Brangwyn’s artwork you had mentioned him I can se the similarities and the influence you speak about, I don’t think we have featured Frank Brangwyn I will check and if not add him to the list . As to the illustrations in books it because of looking at them and trying to copy them as a child that I started sketching.
The other important thing about illustration is that they tell a story themselves when done well and as a child with dyslexia they allowed me to read books often via the pictures and the few words I could make out. I have several old books that I have bought over the last few years simply because I love the illustrations and do spend time just browsing them.
Posted
Martin, you're comparing oranges with house-bricks there. Our ability to give you a Rothko is likely limited, even if we all chipped in to a Get Martin a Rothko fund - and anyway, I'd want one too. Cornwall was an illustrator: the vignettes would in most cases have been accompanied by text, the paintings fitting it, it fitting the paintings. Rothko didn't do that... They might jar abstracted from their context, they might even jar within it; but I suspect it would then trouble you less.
Posted
Re apples/oranges -- I don't *think* I find it particularly hard to compare a pair of painters in terms of my own preferences, regardless of the context. But in any case don't worry Robert. I'm going to get a good dose of Rothko at the upcoming retrospective
Posted
An interesting point raised by Martin...he finds Cornwall's art repetitive. I think most art is repetitive which may be one reason why we like/dislike some artists. If I wanted to show an example of repetitious art I'd google images of Rothko's art. I mentioned him in this thread because he was all the rage with the art establishment at the time I was in London. Had a young Martin been there when I was being wowed by the exhibition of illustrators art, he'd have been next door being wowed by Rothko. I'm talking mid 1950's. The truly great thing about art is that there's something for everybody.
At that time I recall reading about Rothko's art, a critic was going into paroxysms of delight because Mark Rothko had started producing paintings with vertical bands of colour instead of horizontal. I do find Rothko an interesting character, liking much of what he said and some of his earlier art. He'd be a good subject for this thread.
Imagine for a moment a world in which ALL art was like Dean Cornwall's. Horrible. Now imagine where it's ALL Rothko's. Horrible. Worse still...imagine a world where ALL art was like Franz Kline's (substitute your artist of choice here...it can't be me, because I'm not an artist.)
Posted
Context is vital in this case, preferences aren't particularly relevant, or anyway useful (probably a better word) - I wouldn't choose to have this work on my walls; but - he could paint. Taken together, those criteria make comparisons at least difficult, and perhaps impossible. A bit like comparing The Searchers to Shostakovich on the grounds that it's all music. I would have seen a lot of these illustrations in the magazines I used to read as a child/adolescent - all good swashbuckling stuff, and, of its kind, very well done. It was one of the things that probably kicked off my desire to draw - but not perhaps to draw these particular subjects. Norman Rockwell was another such illustrator - the skills great, the subject matter not necessarily so; which is as diplomatic as I get.
Changing the subject slightly, but still talking of drawing, and magazines: my memory isn't what it was, but I do remember small magazines, around A5 size per page, illustrated in pen and ink, with captions. One of which was about a professional burglar and murderer given the name Creepy Crawly, and featuring in - I think - a Dick Turpin series.... I can still see the drawings in my mind's eye, but can't find the magazine anywhere, having looked obsessively for the last ten years or so. They're like these in the sense that they're pure illustration to drive a story forward - but much less, as it were, "down home" than the majority of the Cornwall illustrations.
Find this magazine, someone, and my gratitude will decend upon you like the dew from Heaven. (Lew would love those drawings - if only we could find them.)
But thanks for the link to the upcoming retrospective, returning to the point, which I shall seek out. I don't think by the way that Lew was disparaging Rothko so much as lamenting the assumption that figurative drawing and painting were superseded by the abstract, at least in art colleges and criticism, at a given period. A point of view whose expression I remember and which the passage of time has done nothing to endear to me.
(This is the point in most such conversations at which a panicked host would giggle in terror, and say "Wouldn't it be awful if we all thought the same?", while seeking to smother the subject by forcing a chocolate éclair on those engaged in it.)
Below...a mural.
