W. W. Denslow, Co-Creator of Oz

If someone asks who came up with the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, most people think of L. Frank Baum, but the illustrator William Wallace Denslow helped to create the characters and the world.

Denslow was mostly self-taught, and he had experience creating colorful advertising posters and editorial cartoons. This background gave his work a different style from the book illustrators of his time.

It was a distinctly American fantasy, with characters who were flawed but lovable. 

The first edition of the book, when it appeared in 1900, was colorful and eye-catching, and it captured the public's imagination. 

Denslow and Baum shared the copyright and royalties in the first Oz book. They also worked together on a 1902 stage production where Baum wrote the script and Denslow designed the characters.

Income from these ventures made Denslow rich enough to buy an island in the Bermudas and build a mansion in the style of a castle. He dubbed himself 'King Denslow I.'

But he and Baum had a falling-out over who created Oz, and Baum chose other illustrators for the later Oz books.

Denslow independently adapted the characters of Father Goose, the Scarecrow, and Tin Woodman for comic-strip adventures. 

He tried to create his own separate world called "The Pearl and the Pumpkin" to rival Oz. He produced a book and an expensive Broadway stage version, but they weren't very successful. 

After three failed marriages, a drinking habit, and financial setbacks, he was forced to sell his Bermuda mansion, and died relatively poor, having made and lost his fortune.

The new issue of Illustration Magazine (#71) has a feature on Denslow, with 59 illustrations, mostly in color. You can order a copy here. It also has a feature article on Ken Riley. You can preview the issue at the link.

There's a facsimile copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Illustrated First Edition) with the Denslow illustrations.

William Wallace Denslow on Wikipedia 

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Glazing in the Pits

A confused Lee Crabb from "Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara" is painted with a technique called “glazing in the pits” to bring out the impasto texture in his sleeves.

Glazing in the pits means dropping pigment into the hollows, nooks, and crannies of your impastos. To do this, build up your impastos either with acrylic modeling paste before you get started with the oil paint. Or you can build up impasto texture with some white oil paint mixed with a little cobalt drier to help it set up in a few days.

When it is completely dry, you can quickly glaze a thin layer of raw or burnt umber thinned down with turpentine. Most of that brown glaze will sink naturally into the pits.

When that layer is dry, you can lift off the hint of the umber layer from the tops by using a smooth cotton rag with just a hint of turpentine or a more gentle paint solvent. This will take away the glaze from the tops but leave it in the pits. But don’t try either of those last steps unless the surface is bone dry.

Glazing in the pits was used by Rembrandt, NC Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, and a lot of other painters. For illustrators, this method allows impastos to survive the flattening effect of copy cameras.

Confetti Strokes

Quick concept sketch in oil, tossing strokes around like a handful of confetti.

 

Gasoline Alley Explores Comic Abstractions

Comic artist Frank King was fascinated by the way comics translate reality into abstract 2D graphic conventions such as word bubbles and panels.

In this Sunday Gasoline Alley page, he had fun with the idea with characters becoming silhouettes. 

Walt and Skeezix become cutout people who eventually contemplate the holes in the paper they were cut out of. 

This page uses a high viewpoint where the background continues from panel to panel as Walt walks across the beach. The panels suggest changes in time as well as space.

In this one, they draw everything with a compass (even the word bubbles).

In a previous post I shared how comic artists satired the strange abstractions of modern painting all the way from the early 1900s to Calvin and Hobbes. In case you missed it, here's another Gasoline Alley page where Walt and Skeezix explore the distorted worlds represented in abstract painting.

In art school, I had a perspective teacher who critiqued our student artwork as if the worlds we portrayed were an objective reality that we had to inhabit. "I wouldn't want to live in that building," he'd say. "The floors aren't level and the walls look like they're going to fall down." 

These Gasoline Alley pages take that premise of living inside your pictures to its logical extreme.

Collector Mel Birnkrant says: "I was slow to appreciate the greatness of Gasoline Alley...It all seemed so polite and sweet, and the level of stylization was not extreme. It was not until I finally examined some of the Gasoline Alley Sunday pages that I tuned in to the understated genius of Frank King. I was amazed to realize that many of these Sunday pages are excursions into surreal fantasy. Such flights of fancy were to be expected in Winsor McCay's Slumberland, but they are stunning when encountered in what purported to be day to day domestic reality."

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Books: Gasoline Alley: The Complete Sundays Volume 1, 1920-1922

Gasoline Alley: The Complete Sundays Volume 2 1923-1925

Previously: 

Cubist Nightmares in Comics

The Other Abstract Art Movement

Cubies (1913 comic satire on the Armory Show)

Dinotopia Exhibitions

Photo by Chip Clark.

The entrance to the Dinotopia exhibition at Smithsonian's natural history museum in 2002, one of about 35 exhibitions of the original artwork in the USA, France, England, and Switzerland over the last 20 years. 

Here are some of them:
MUSEUM SHOW LIST (from recent back to 1992)
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Stamford Museum and Nature Center, CT
Arkell Museum, Canajoharie, NY
The New Hampshire Institute of Art, Manchester, NH
The Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT
The Alden Dow Museum of Science and Art, Midland, MI
Palazzo Ducale, Lucca Comics & Games, Italy
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE
Festival International de Science-Fiction De Nantes, France
Centre for Life, Newcastle, UK
Maison d’Ailleurs, Yverdon, Switzerland
Oshkosh Public Museum, Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA
The Alden Dow Museum of Science and Art, Midland, Michigan.
Oshkosh Public Museum, Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Palais Granvelle, Besançon, France
Maison d’Ailleurs, Yverdon, Switzerland
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC
Carnegie Public Museum, Three Rivers, Michigan
Richmond Children’s Museum, Richmond, Virginia
Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Ohio
Tiffany Windows, Tiffany & Co. Jewelers, Fifth Ave, NYC
Buffalo Museum of Science, Royal Tyrell Museum, Drumheller, Alberta, New Mexico Museum of Natural History.     

Cover for 'Never the Twain'

 

'Never the Twain' was a science fiction novel by Kirk Mitchell. I did the cover for Berkley/Ace books.

It tells the story of Howard Hart, who travels back in time to wreck the literary career of Mark Twain and improve the reputation of his ancestor, Bret Harte.

I needed to come up with a way to show the two men, their two worlds, and the device that made it possible to cross over. After reading the manuscript I made a lot of sketches. 

The visual metaphor for time travel had to be an object about the size of a standing man, something that could have existed in the past or the present. 

The grandfather clock seemed like a natural device, but the breakthrough idea was the interlocking double clock face.

Old Tow Truck

 

This old tow truck is parked in front of Triebel's Garage in Red Hook, sketched in pencil and watercolor.

Art Mission to Mars

To celebrate the successful landing of the 'Perseverence' Mars rover, the California Art Club has arranged a virtual exhibition called 'Mars: An Artistic Mission.'

  

Artists include Bryan Taylor, Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, William Stout, Peter Adams and me.

James Gurney, The Ice Rover, Oil on board, 20" x 14"

In this oil painting, which is for sale, autonomous fusion crawlers inch across the frozen landscape, deploying forward feelers, grinding heads, and communication arrays to transmit their discoveries back to Earth.

More info:

NASA Mars Mission site: Mars rover 'Persistence' 

California Art Club exhibit: 'Mars: An Artistic Mission.'

H.M. Bateman's "The Man Who..." Illustrations

Henry Mayo Bateman (British 1887-1980) created a popular series of comic illustrations that show a man doing something socially inept and suffering the consequences.

Here's the reaction that happened to "The man who threw a snowball at St. Moritz."

Or to "The man who asked for a second helping at a city company dinner."

Or "The man who lit his cigar before the royal toast."

And finally "The man who stole the prize marrow." (What we in America would call a gourd.)

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Henry Mayo Bateman on Wikipedia

Alpine Scene by E.T. Compton

Edward Theodore Compton (1849–1921)

The Grossglockner, 1880, watercolor, 40 cm (15.7 in) x 60 cm (23.6 in)

"Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice."

—'Fire and Ice' by Robert Frost