September 19, 2004

• It always amazes me that artists can pick out light and shadow like that. Very nice!
• I've never been much impressed by sheer technical skill without soul. All of these portraits seem to be copied from a pre-existing photographs and little is added by its transposition to the ball point pen medium.
• So what!@# He's like a Franco-American of the Kérouak type. But, yeah, I prefer Crumb with a technical pen.
• It's stated on the webpage that he copies from photos. No less impressive to my eye.
• I agree with squidranch, and I don't envy this guy - I don't know which would explode first from doing this, my head or my wrist - but I still wish he'd provided scans of a picture he did at size or zoomed in 200% or so because I don't think I'm getting a good sense of how the pictures actually look. I've got to admit I am curious.
• Well I thought it was impressive, especially when I found out he did them all with Bic pens.
• But even copying from a photograph (something many oil painters now do, to save on the trouble of sittings), it not simply the same as copying. There are artistic choices that are made. An artist and oil portraitist once explained the difference to me - photographs captured a single moment. A drawing or painting, even when based on a photograph (which is usually much smaller), tries to give a sense of a person that is more timeless. I see that quality in many of these.
• There are artistic choices that are made. I guess the disagreement here is about how many artistic choices are being made... With oil portraits, the painter may start from a photo (probably a number of them), but their goal isn't necessarily to get the painting to look as much like the one photo as possible... and these pictures are pretty far along that continuum, and at the end of it you're copying newsprint dots. Which is an impressive stunt, but not really exciting to certain snobs. :) On the other hand, I'm still convinced these pictures are losing something in translation - who knows, they could be uglier in real life. Or not. Also, the most recent ones seem a little more stylized.
• I've always been impressed with a person's artistry when it comes to photo-like reproduction. I can now do this with pencil and paper, but it took a long time to figure out how on my own. People don't see what is really there, but interpret what they see. If you try to draw that interpretation it won't come out correctly. Learning to see what is really there is the hard part -- but I digress. Learning to use a ball point pen do do photo-like reproductions boggles my mind. I'm very impressed with this.
• To me they look like street portraits of a slightly higher caliber. No feat of technicality (this one possibly excepted) can compensate for a lack of vision. But I am pretty picky when it comes to art, so...
• I already have a photocopier.