ARTISTS EXTRAORDINAIRE

Posted on February 10, 2004 by Dave Pollard
chris ware
This week’s New Yorker double edition (Feb.16 & 23) has a stunning work by the critically acclaimed but little-known comic strip artist Chris Ware (copy of one of his oil paintings shown above). Taking up two full pages of the magazine and not available online, this comic tells a complete, poignant, soul-stirring story. Ware’s brilliant artwork employs facial expressions and body language so vivid the characters come to life, and conveys passion, pathos, hope, and resignation with incredibly spare text, line and colour. I hope Chris sees fit to allow it to be put online (it’s way too big and detailed for me to capture here, and would need to be recast as a multiframe serial to work on-screen). In the meantime, visit your magazine store and check it out — pages 172-73. Awesome.

On a similar subject, check out the videos of performance art using a light table and sand (the artist uses his fingers to ‘draw’ in sand on a light table, with the results projected on a screen and accompanied real-time by an orchestra) on Phil Vassar’s Just Playing blog.

And Phil also discovered this wonderful short animation called Life from Italian artist Bruno Bozzetto.

This entry was posted in Our Culture / Ourselves. Bookmark the permalink.

7 Responses to ARTISTS EXTRAORDINAIRE

  1. hugh macleod says:
    February 10, 2004 at 19:51

    Funny, I went to college with Chris Ware. Nice guy. Unbelievably talented, even back then.

  2. Dave Pollard says:
    February 10, 2004 at 21:30

    Wow, Hugh, you’re no slouch yourself. Which college turns out such exemplary artistic talent?

  3. hugh macleod says:
    February 12, 2004 at 08:36

    UT Austin, late 80s

  4. Dick says:
    February 13, 2004 at 02:32

    What an amazing pic. Shades of Edward Hopper. I shall take out the mortgage necessary to buy the New Yorker over here & check him out.

  5. Jennifer says:
    February 13, 2004 at 13:10

    Chris Ware is the doyenne of comic scholars, and with good reason. He’s a fantastic artist, an innovator with layout, and can really pluck some emotional strings. (Of course, being at the top of the heap of non-superhero, independently created comics doesn’t mean much in a world where few people read comics at all.) I highly recommend Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth. Fantastic and heartbreaking.

  6. Ed says:
    February 24, 2004 at 13:35

    That painting is for sale at $5.0000 her in the Netherlands at Lambiek.net I saw it a couple of months ago. I’m a big fan and would love to receive digital copy of article, as I can not get the NEw Yorker here in Amsterdam…

  7. Ed says:
    March 23, 2004 at 11:51

    Hi Dave,I received the copy you sent me. Thanks a million!!! If there is anything you want from he netherlands, just give me a call..Thanks Again

Comments are closed.