Anders Nilsen's Blog, page 21

SXSW Tech Expo 1,000,000 B.C.

This was in the NYT today. accompanying an article about beer and civilization. I'm very happy with it, and it was a pleasure to get to cast my favorite hominids in a new role, but I thought I would post one other sketch I pitched. Understandably the alternate version was simply too complicated design-wise – the text of the article and whatever else they were running would, in theory, have been set in the empty space. Admittedly, a lot to expect in print, near impossible on the web. But I liked how simple the idea was.

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At the end the score is tied

Below are a few last images from my stay in Paris. In addition to a few museums I visited the Cimetiere Pere Lachaise. It's famous because Jim Morrison was buried there, but it houses a few French people, too. There's a map to greet you when you come in with a bunch of famous people's names. I wrote down coordinates for Delecroix, Daumier and Oscar Wilde, but ended up just wandering around aimlessly instead of hunting them down. I mean, if you want to pay your respects to Delacroix, go to the Louvre, right?
 Walking around a cemetery this grand inevitably becomes a meditation on the art of death. In a way it actually is like walking around the Louvre. It's a catalog of a certain kind of artmaking and of French history. One thing that struck me were the few tombs (examples above and below) that made use, intentionally or not, of live plants. As a commentary on the power of death, it seemed strongest when the plants outgrew their confines and obscured the graves themselves. Life is not so easily corralled.

Same goes for little plastic dogs.

This burst of color attracted my eye, but the flowers are, of course, plastic. Which seemed unintentionally ironic and even more sad, symbolically speaking, than the gray stone and moss that surrounded them. They do look nice, though.
This little guy meowed at me but wouldn't stop for a better picture. Maybe he was on his way to pick up a baguette. Or looking for his buddy's lost sword.
Below: a variety of containers for discarded materials of all sorts.
The monument below stopped me in my tracks. I even stood and did a little drawing of it, until my fingers froze. The deceased, rendered up top, apparently felt important enough that he needed a woman, symbolic of the French Nation presumably, to gaze admiringly up at his name for all eternity. From my perspective in the 21st century it looked absurd, but also... weirdly effective. He looks good up there. It peaked my curiosity enough to look him up later. And actually he seems like a pretty cool guy. So, deceptively pompous 19th century French statesman: 1, obscure 21st century American cartoonist: 0.


Help! Some ruffians! They took my sword! They went thataway!

Genevieve Castree on tour

If I was in Chicago I would go to this at Quimby's tomorrow night (or any of these other places and times, like tonight in L.A.).

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I drew this for a little group show (with Marc Bell and Taylor McKimens) at Purdue University a few weeks back.

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La Musee de la Chasse

The third day in Paris, Eglantine from Le Monte en L'air showed me around the city a bit including taking me to see La Musee de la Chasse (the Museum of Hunting). It was like walking into another world.

I particularly noted this image, below, of trained eagles that have just taken down a wolf. A year or so ago someone sent me a link to this video of the same phenomenon demonstrated in Mongolia (it's harrowing). Note, in particular the artwork depicted in the intro. So apparently it's a widespread, ancient practice.


Carved bone. A lot of the imagery carved into handles and gun butts was decidedly pagan.

A Bar in Brussels, the Train, and Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise

An American Cartoonist in the Palaces of European Painting

My second day in Paris I went to the Louvre. This despite having announced to my companions the night before that I wasn't going to visit its crowded halls again. I came to Europe for the first time in 1999, when I was 25. That trip was mainly to Italy to look at Italian proto-renaissance paintings in places like Florence and Padua and Sansepulcro...

But I made a trip up to Amsterdam as well, and entirely by accident (long story) was able to visit the Prado in Madrid to see practically the entire career of Francisco Goya.

At the very end of the trip I got stranded in Paris for a few days. I had pretty much had my fill of museums by that time, finding that while the continent has a very large number of truly revelatory, beautiful, strange and wonderful pictures of all kinds, it also has an exponentially larger amount of crap. The new economic titans of Europe demanded artifacts of conspicuous-consumption (as new economic titans always do) and apparently painters obliged with piles of ultimately repetitive and uninspired pictures of all sorts. If the U.S. is any different it's only because we came of age at a different time, and employed different means to display our wealth.

Still, the Louvre has its moments. I love the rooms with the giant Delacroix's and Gericault's and David's – the giant Hollywood mega-blockbusters of their day...

But the picture that summed up the arc of Western painting for my tired eyes in 1999, was this one:
When it stopped me in my tracks again last week I felt the same amused disdain, but it was mixed now with a certain nostalgia and the goofy fondness one has for someone you used to hate in high school who turns out to actually be kind of fun to talk to. I'm sure this guy, in his day could have had me burned alive for looking at him the wrong way, and yet here he is, frozen for all eternity, with that haircut. But this painting has stuck in my mind for the last 14 years because it completes a perfect half circle. The rising merchants (and, yes, crime bosses) of the aforementioned Italian cities began the tracing of this curve by hiring a new crop of incredibly inventive and ambitious young painters to try and encapsulate the mythology and world view that gave their lives and culture meaning in their own eyes. They did it in ways no one had ever imagined before. But for these patrons to have themselves depicted other than in supplication and extreme humility (the guy in purple, below, handing a new chapel over to The Virgin Mary and her friends) was not even a question, they were really and truly trying to get into Heaven by commissioning these works:
(and also: out of Hell)

By the time we get to the fellow with the flowing locks, however, the relationship is completely inversed. Suddenly it is the gods and angels that wait, their clothes all but sliding off their bodies, at the pleasure of these masters of a newly global universe. Images like the Last Judgement above stop getting affixed to Church walls at about the same time that actual horrors almost as fantastic are being enacted in the mines and plantations of the New World. Eventually images like this make their way little by little into new imaging technologies like printed books and eventually political cartoons (see Goya, above), but the spotlight of visual culture has decidedly moved on.

Of course there are a small number of really wonderful, humbler pictures at the Louvre. Painters, of course, continued to find ways of describing the strangeness, bitterness and beauty of the world whatever the economics happened to be. Here's a portrait of a flute player, blind in one eye:


Of that strangeness and beauty I found a bunch the next day at Le Musee de la Chasse, and much of all three qualities at the Musee de la Beaux Artes yesterday in Brussels. That place was a revelation. So avoid this URL for a few days if you're sick of dusty old paintings.

Paris Sketchbook