Japanese style

The Japan trilogy comes to an end, with something art-relevant even.

I was a little surprised to start seeing anime and then manga become the powerhouse media they are. When I was young, the anime options open to you were largely either Voltron, Starblazers or Robotech (I chose Starblazers). At that time, these series were pretty hot (especially Voltron and Robotech, I was such the rebel for not watching). But they were something new, by and large. Transformers were Japanese-produced and didn’t feature any overly anime-styled humans. There was the Cliff Hanger video game, which was mainly Miyazaki’s Castle of Cagliostro remixed, and whose ninja sections floored me as a kid. I suspect other bits here and there were farmed out to Japanese studios (like Inspector Gadget). But manga was by and large unknown then.

I hadn’t seen human animation quite like this scene before.

When the anime film industry began getting seriously imported, it was still hard to get a hold of stuff. I recall seeing Akira for the first time in like, 1990, on a bootleg video, in Japanese and thinking where the hell had that come from?! At that moment I began to realize that something big had been happening in Japan while we weren’t paying that much attention, while we were settling for the Little Mermaid.

The visuals still bend my mind.

The 90s then seemed to usher in a golden age of anime in the USA. Stuff known previously on unofficial copies, with sometimes unofficial dubs, was being officially released. The dvd era brought it to the mainstream. Pokemon certainly helped with the young ones.

Throughout this history, whose telling I am only outlining from my own observance and could be chronicled endlessly by serious fans of the genre, something happened: anime became the visual language of the youth, and in this decade has become fully mainstream among the younger generations. If there was a visual language among artists in my generation, when we were young, it revolved around Marvel and DC comics, and probably Star Wars.

These days, from my own young nephews to young (or not-so-young) adults with portfolios in hand, there is an increasing sense that a group of people have grown up so enthralled by anime that it has basically defined what they draw. For some, they’ve never drawn anything else. It’s really weird, especially since I’ve always considered it a uniquely Japanese expression. I appreciate some anime quite a lot, though there is certainly what I would class the “Hanna Barbera” school of really bad anime, too. But those distinctions don’t seem to be made among those who copy anime endlessly. The main thing seems to be the cartoon or manga—if they like it they learn to draw it whether the art is technically good or not. I suppose I can understand this to a point.

I fear for that generation. Who is teaching them to actually draw? Learning the visual language of anime is a pretty specific thing, a pretty narrowly defined visual slang, and usually eschews things like shading/rendering and realistic anatomy. Even comic books have decent, if over-wrought, anatomy.

Oh dear.

Beyond that, if someone had been brought up pretty exclusively on comic books, and thought that they’d try to make their way as a comic book artist, there is certainly a living to be made drawing super heroes even if their art never becomes other than that. But for anime, it’s not like there’s a huge market for American anime artists. Most anime is done by Japanese, and when they aren’t doing it, they are farming it out to South Korea or China or who-knows-where because they can pay someone rin on the yen. So where does that leave our young American anime artist?

Certainly, taking that style and moving on with it, learning some of the stylish design sensibilities and some of the clever figurative poses that they use, and then creating something new can be worthwhile, and there are a number of artists who’ve done just that who are doing well by appealing to anime fans without being all shiny-bug-eyed.

But if you think you’re going to be a clean-up artist on Dragonball Z or something, it’s probably best to think again. You may as well be a German kid who wants to succeed as a Bollywood leading-man or something.

Nicht für Sie

Japanese

I have a bad habit of piling my plate. This bad habit was probably learned as a child when we’d occasionally go to Reno with my parents and would make pilgrimage to the Circus Circus breakfast buffet. I am a man who loves his breakfast. Well, I was a boy who loved his breakfast at that time, but you get my drift. Large piles of link sausage, waffles and/or pancakes, all-you-could-eat scrambled eggs. For some reason knowing you could get a clean plate and go back for more never stopped me from carefully having to balance my plate all the way to our table. And the freshly-squeezed orange juice…. If you’ve ever shared a pizza with me you have seen this sort of food-greed set in even now--that evil glimmer that takes hold, unmovable, within my very eyes.

Civilization began with the invention of the pancake

So, some time after my first trip to Japan I endeavored to begin learning some Japanese. The notion struck me as a surprise. I think I speak English tolerably well. My Spanish is good enough to get me in trouble, but not good enough to feel comfortable being interviewed in. Japanese? I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s because of the visual appeal of the written language, as mentioned. Perhaps it’s because due to my Spanish-speaking, I already have basic pronunciation down (the similarities are incredibly striking) and wouldn’t sound like a complete moron as I would learning Mandarin. I certainly like how spoken Japanese sounds, its staccato hum is a contrast to the more passionate Mediterranean tongues or other guttural languages. Whatever it is, it appeals to me.

Beijing: graffiti using a water-brush—not only a brilliant idea, but that people draw Chinese characters for fun says something about the script

Now at the time I was illustrating, engaged in home life, and was playing music too. I knew going in that it was going to be a very slow and prolonged endeavor. It would be years until I was anywhere of note. And I was right. Though I’ve continued with it on and off ever since, my studies of Japanese have always been the caboose on a long, long train of obligations and interests. But it’s remained hitched to the train one way or another.

Being able to return a few years later for another trip, I was curious to see if the feeling would wear off, the wide-eyed newness replaced with a more sober reality. Nope. If anything, being able to ask the most basic traveler’s questions and reading the very occasional sign (katakana, primarily) made the place all the more intriguing.

Japan

I’ve had the benefit of visiting many wonderful places, but there is something about Japan that just stuck in me. After visiting Japan in 2000 I was simply in love. It is still the only place whereupon returning home, I actually felt homesick. I don’t rate as a manga fan (have never read one) and am a pedestrian anime consumer, at best. So while the many otaku identify with my feelings about Japan (and I’ve got nothing against otaku, except that I wish they’d be as into western fantasy stuff because, you know, that’s how I make my money), I can’t say Japan represented my super-deformed mecca before going.

You cannot deny.

Sure, I grew up on Ultraman, watched Starblazers (not being entirely cognizant of its origins at the time or that it first aired the year I was born, by chance), and enjoyed good ol’ Godzilla. My NES occupied many, many hours of my youth. Yet I think my ideas of Japan going in were as much influenced by what knowledge I had of World War 2, James Clavell’s Shogun, and Japanese ukiyo-e art and dynastic craft. Certainly I’d imbibed far more medieval fantasy, so that Rothenburg Germany should’ve captured first place in my heart (top 5 though, definitely).

But nope, it was Japan, and it was more upon leaving than entering. Going in I was a little nervous, it being the first really foreign culture I’d visited (even Brazil before had a level of Latin American that I was comfortable with). But between landing and departing I was swept away by the people, the culture, the traditions, the history, the ginormous cities and the architecture. William Gibson once commented that Japan could be viewed as the beta-test for the future. There is some truth to that, certainly. And yet the remnants of old Japan demonstrate a gorgeous respect for craft that keeps the entire place from being too purely technological. These sorts of opposites hold together without tension and create a place that constantly surprises.

As an artist, I find Asian scripts (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) to be very beautiful. Being constantly surrounded by these characters, of which I understood none, probably helped my experience, while making travel just that much more confusing—a lot of societal truths that might have been discovered had I been able to read were obscured and replaced with a veil of mystery. What a tempting veil to want to pierce.

Limited Editions

Today I will do my first artwork of the year, well, at least my first physical artwork of the year. This is an important distinction for two very important reasons: I actually sign my physical artwork with my “g” logo, and because I will date it.

In the art world one will hear about things like limited-edition prints and such. Sometimes these limited editions are so large that their limited nature starts to lose importance. However, every year artists who produce materials-based works establish a sort of truly limited-edition: original art.

Output varies year by year, but I can only produce so many paintings and drawings in a given year, and all of those works will bear the current year on them. A year of limited life passes and the works of a given year can be bundled up and a bow put on them: there will be no more artworks made that bear “06” under the logo. Ever. I could expand and talk about an artist’s lifetime body-of-work, but for the moment the yearly oeuvre only is in discussion.

Never again

Now, I suppose I could be cheeky and back-date something, but what’s the point of it? No, from today on “07” is the norm for another 12 months. How much will I accomplish, how many works will bear that year? I have no idea, nor do I know what most of them will look like. They are mysteries to me, and I look forward to discovering the results myself!

I’ve made a distinction between digital and physical art here. While I suppose I could very easily “sign and date” my digital works (and for final digital illustrations, I do), I am not in the business of (nor do I know any means of) selling originals of any digital works. I can make a “one-off” print and call it an original in that it is one-of-a-kind, and some artists actually do this and sell them for the cost of an actual painting (buyer beware), but of course it isn’t the same. What’s special about the real thing, and it’s what I love about originals that I own as well, is the sense of holding in your hands the very thing the artist labored over for part of his life. As a painter viewing an original painting or drawing, I can sometimes even mime the motions that I know were made in leaving certain kinds of marks (and sometimes I catch myself doing it at a museum). This is not so easy to do with a digital print, it’s a little hard to gaze in wonder at a blending method used on a particular layer to make an image look translucent.

It’s not even a knock against digital: in the end, painted and digital works are reduced to printed dots of ink all the same. From an illustration standpoint, it’s about the ends. But for those like myself who enjoy holding and experiencing original art, the difference are enormous when holding the real deal in my hands.

Happy 2007

Welcome to 2007. Assuming all sane-minded people behave precisely as I do, I neglected this space for a couple of weeks. During those weeks my own blog perusal was low to nil, hampered by dial-up (or worse) and end-of-year stuff. You’ll forgive me if I incorrectly assumed your online behavior was similar.

Further discouraging my desire to post was the always sneaky flu, which has laid me low over a week now, and has taken out members of my family with Ebola-like aggression. My wife and I toasted the arrival of the New Year with bubbly…that is, bubbly glasses of Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold & Flu.

A year ago, I mentioned that my starting to jog again was not a resolution. This was largely because resolutions have a 97% yearly failure rate. By avoiding the resolution moniker, I managed to maintain my running regimen the entire year (until the aforementioned dengue fever). I ran on 2-lane country roads in England in freezing weather with 25-mph headwinds and sleet flying horizontal at my very eyes. I ran on a dirt path in Spain, skirting around a herd of goats being led around by their herder after a day at pasture. I ran on a boat somewhere on the water heading towards Ensenada, Mexico. I ran in Clovis, CA of all the places on earth. But I ran and have turned it into a habit I’ll easily continue as soon as the black lung passes. So, for those of you considering your resolution don’t call it a resolution. Just do it.

A year ago I also undertook a mostly year-long project of artistic improvement by reading, absorbing and putting into practice much of what can be found in Andrew Loomis’ 1947 classic, “Creative Illustration.” I saw tremendous growth in my work in 06 as a result and am looking forward to picking something new to study for this year.