A Shining Example

This week, I'm going to continue on with the theme of inspiration and artwork concentrating on film and how it can inspire. In the middle of my childhood discovery of art as a release/hobby, I started to become interested in film. That being said, as supportive and helpful as my parents always were and are of my artistic endeavors, they made a rather strange decision in allowing me to see 'The Shining' when I was about 7 - a couple of years after it was released. Aside from the initial "Holyshitfuckfire and brimstone, I won't be able to pee by myself until I'm 29!" reaction, (which I later discovered that as a feeling, being scared was kinda fun) it had a deep effect on me, and by no means was it negative.

Here was this striking moving picture - poetic, dark and beautiful, all at the same time. The epicenter of the dread is not in so much the terror you feel for yourself, but the feeling you have for Wendy and Danny on this hopeless, claustrophobic stage. You aren't just watching a man unravel, you are watching his family watching him unravel - that's where you become emotionally invested. That affects you. That inspires you.

Kubrick was so good at that. So what if he made a film adaptation that the story's own author famously hates (in King's defense though, who would like to have their mediocre novel transformed into something cinematically perfect by someone else). It was an important film to me and many others. I feel that same inspiration in 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.

When I watch something by a genius like Kubrick or Lynch where the protagonists and antagonists dance around in the tangible and intangible weaving dream logic into the real world, back out, then back in again, and they force you to question reality and accept certain things that aren't. This is how creativity truly breeds creativity.

A good film unlocks things in your brain similar to good music - with music its an intense and precise mathematical process taking place in the fields of the abstract, that triggers pattern recognition and familiarity of concepts to elicit a response from the listener, inspiring a 'mood'.

My lesson here today is to act on that mood. Whenever you hear someone say 'there are no words' there may not be, but I guaran-damn-tee there is a picture. There is a picture for everything - true art is a feeling, an expression. Everyone is an artist - there is no right, no wrong, no one artist is better than another, and success in art can not be measured monetarily, it just is. Maybe you express yourself in giant fields of color with amorphous shapes drifting casually across, or perhaps an angry scribble and scratch under a dark sky, possibly a meticulously framed unsettling portrait or intricate vase of flora.

As for me, I'm into details.

Inspirato and the Devil

So, because this is the very first shiny new blog, I decided to discuss a topic that comes up often as far as art is concerned - inspiration.

Ever since I was a small child I've had a fascination with monsters. Whether they were dragons, dinosaurs, aliens, werewolves or vampires, I loved every
single one of them.

I grew up a quiet kid with not many others my own age anywhere around - which when combined with an intense and vibrant imagination, a love of comic books
and old monster movies is pretty much a natural bubble to grow an artist in. I remember my mom bringing coloring books home to me from the drugstore and I
immediately flipped the inside cover open and started drawing my own picture. Even at an early age, I had more independence and faith in my own
creativity. It wasn't a strange occurance to flip one of my coloring books open to find a vividly colored depiction of a dragon in a cave filled with gold being
attacked by trolls, defending his treasure, and starkly illustrated untouched pages of nothing until the inside back cover where you would more than likely find
an army of werewolves converging on vampires.

As I got older, my parents (always supportive of my art) would allow me to sit in my room with a stack of old issues of 'Famous Monsters of Filmland',
'Creepy', 'Tales From the Crypt', and of course,'Mad.' I was so taken by the work of Bernie Wrightson, Jack Davis, Don Martin, Basil Gogos, Frank Frazetta, and so on,
that it gave me hope at a young age that there were talented people out there doing exactly what I already had an intense love of doing.
This was some of my earliest inspiration. Though I didn't fully understand it at the time, creativity breeds creativity.

Poring over issues of these fantastic gems, I would identify the work of my favorite artists, and try and emulate certain bits and pieces of their various
styles - the whole time I was blissfully and innocently developing my own style and look. The intense, dramatic work of Wrightson, the beautiful use of
color of Gogos, the realistic textures of Frazetta, and a hint of the goofiness of Mad Magazine.

In the coming weeks and months I will discuss various other aspects of inspiration including how film has helped in life and work, but this is how it all started.

My biggest influences will always be the pen, paint, and paper heroes of my childhood, and the hope and dream of my adulthood is to be a hero to a future artist
that has an imagination like mine.

So to all parents - make sure your child always has crayons and paper.