THE MAN IN THE TORN SHIRT

Here is a reprint of my most recent post for the AMAZING STORIES website. This post was inspired by my good buddy Cal over at the Cave of Cool who tends to knock one of my great childhood heroes because of his choice of shirts.


 

This post is about icons.

It's about powerful images and the way that they can become stuck in the public consciousness.

But it's also about old pulp heroes. One in particular.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. Not back in the 1930's when Street and Smith released a new hero pulp magazine featuring a super-scientific crime fighter named Doc Savage. Not even in the 1960's when the adventures were reprinted in paperback format with covers painted by artist James Bama.

For me the beginning was the summer of 1976. I was eleven years old and it was the start of our family summer vacation. Summer vacation for me meant long drives in a hot car with my brothers and I in the back seat. We had made a stop somewhere and my mother sent us in to a used bookstore with a little bit of pocket money to buy comic books to try to keep us interested in something else other than fighting amongst ourselves.

I started rifling through the second-hand paperbacks. I can't remember exactly what I was looking for, but when I came across the Doc Savage paperback I was stopped cold. The cover showed a muscled man with a torn shirt and a strange haircut, fending off a trio of weasel-like creatures. The name DOC SAVAGE was blazoned across the top but above it was the name of the adventure: The Other World.

The description on the back of the book got me even more excited. “To the world at large, Doc Savage is a strange, mysterious, figure of glistening bronze skin and golden eyes...”

How could an eleven year old resist that? I read the paperback and wanted more.

Fortunately there were lots around at the time. George Pal had just made Doc Savage, the movie. There were comic books and magazines and plenty more paperbacks all featuring the iconic image of Doc Savage sporting a torn shirt.

The iconic torn shirt.

An icon is a religious work of art from Eastern Christianity. Depictions of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, saints, what have you, these images were very powerful representations of a people's faith.

The icon has become co-opted by our society for anything but religious purposes. An icon is a visual representation of an idea or a feeling. It can be a symbols that encapsulates a feeling or an idea. Icons are very powerful, though we tend not to think too consciously about them. But that's how they work.

Take Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was never... NEVER... described as wearing a deerstalker cap. The illustrator of the stories, Sidney Paget depicted Holmes wearing a traveling cloak and a deerstalker hat for one adventure. For whatever reason, the deerstalker became permanently associated with Holmes. The deerstalker was a country cap, favored by hunters. To wear it year round, in the city was an absurd thing back in the late 1880's, yet it quickly became Holmes' costume.

Put on a deerstalker cap and you are Sherlock Holmes. Even the recent BBC TV series Sherlock, which has updated Holmes to the Twenty-First century, could not entirely get away from at least giving a nod to the existence of the famous cap.

Doc Savage wearing a torn shirt ALL the time is ridiculous. Yes, he's an adventurer and very busy. If, in the course of an adventure his shirt gets torn he doesn't have time to get a new one.

Some bloggers, including Calvin from Calvin's Canadian Cave of Cool, take to complaining about it, asking why he doesn't make his shirts out of the same, seemingly durable material out of which his pants are made.

But these questions are immaterial. Doc Savage's ripped shirt is iconic. It's as iconic as Sherlock Holmes' deerstalker, or Tarzan's loin cloth.

It was not always like that. Just as with Holmes's deerstalker, the torn shirt is a product of the illustrator. Doc Savage's original pulp magazine run featured lots of action-filled covers and on some Doc appears wearing a ripped shirt. In the very first issue Doc's shirt is torn. Nowhere near as torn as it would be in later covers, but it was there from the beginning. But other covers do not feature the torn shirt. In some cover illustrations Doc is wearing a suit and tie with not a single rip in sight.

When the adventures were released in paperback the job of painting the covers went to artist James Bama. Bama was the one who settled on the image of the torn shirt (the publishers insisted on the weird, widow's peak hairstyle, but that's another story) and the torn shirt appeared on every single cover that Bama or any other artist painted, right up until today.

So now, poor Doc Savage has to wear a torn shirt all the time, just like Sherlock Holmes was saddled with his ridiculous deerstalker. Perhaps Doc will move beyond the torn shirt. There is supposed to be a new movie in the works. Perhaps that will give us a new iconic image for Doc Savage. Maybe something cleaner, sophisticated and less... torn.

Perhaps that is a vain hope. I imagine that the poster for the movie, should it ever materialize, will feature a picture of whatever broadly muscled actor they cast sporting a shirt hanging raggedly about him to better highlight his pectorals and six-pack abs. That image will still overshadow the essence of a character who is so much more than a torn shirt.

Such is the power of the icon.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
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http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

KATIE O'HAGAN: DIRTY LAUNDY

The latest issue of The Artist Magazine has an article about Katie O' Hagan, a portrait painter originally from Scotland and currently living in Beacon, New York . I have become quite taken with O'Hagan's work, particularly with the above piece. It's called DIRTY LAUNDRY and O'Hagan describes it like this:

“It’s basically about what it feels like to go through a personal crisis in a small community where many people know—or think they know—your business and the feelings of paranoia that can result.”

As someone who has grown up and spent much of his adult life in small towns I can tell you that she has captured that feeling perfectly. Though the subject of the painting is a woman (and I suspect that such a situation would be much worse for women then for men) the feeling she evokes with the image is universal.

I would like to do portrait painting -- I mean real, traditional, actual paint, brushes and canvas and not digital, portraits -- and what I would like to try to produce are images like this; dark, moody and evocative. I could only hope to be near as good as O'Hagan.

Here's another one which I really like and it says in a single image what I once tried to tell a friend -- that art (or in my friend's case, writing) would save your life. She asked if I was sure and I told her that I was and here is an image that supports that thought. Art will save your life when all else seems to have failed you.

Anyway, I am now a bit Katie O'Hagan fan and I wanted to share. You can check out her website here.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

NEW! MODERN! CONTEMPORARY! HIP!

From the AMAZING STORIES website (Still in Beta Tests):

 

I have spent a lot of time in previous posts dwelling in the past. I have been like an old man suddenly lost to the present, the memory of times past reeling behind his eyes while he absently stirs his tea. Well, I think perhaps I should bring this topic into the present and talk about some of the science fiction and fantasy artists working today.

There has been an explosion of fantastic art. In the past fantastic art's only reason for being was as illustration to fantastic literature. That changed and today fantastic art is it's own reason for being. You can find fantasy art on posters, tee-shirts, coffee mugs. You can find it on the internet almost as easily as you can find pornography or lolcats.

Digital art, made possible by programs such as Photoshop or Painter, has exploded onto the electronic canvas of the internet like a Jackson Pollock painting. No longer do we rely on the “delivery devices” of magazines, book covers, calendars or the like. The art is completed and posted online within hours, sometimes in the very minute of its completion.

The digital revolution in art is a big topic and one that I will not tackle in this post. I'll get to that later. For now I just want to touch upon a few artists still working with traditional materials today who, in my mind at least, stand above the crowd.

Read the rest of the article Here!

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
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...ARE YOU WARM, ARE YOU REAL, MONA LISA?

This is the Islesworth Mona Lisa.

For anyone with even a passing familiarity with DaVinci's masterpiece it is obvious that this is not the portrait that currently hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. For one, the woman is much younger than the iconic Mona Lisa of DaVinci. There are other differences as well. The canvas is wider and we can see more of the framing pillars behind the figure. The background is different.

The Isleworth Mona Lisa was discovered just before World War 1 by an art collector named Hugh Blaker in the home of a Somerset nobleman. Blaker bought the painting and took it to his studio in Isleworth, London, from which it takes its name.

Now, the appearance of a Mona Lisa is not that unusual. Many have painted copies of DaVinci's portrait. It is one of the most reproduced images in the world, after all. But there is a twist.

Blaker knew that Leonardo had started to paint Mona Lisa in 1503, but "left it unfinished". This is recounted by Leonardo's early biographer Giorgio Vasari. However, a fully finished painting of a "certain Florentine lady" surfaces again in 1517, shortly before Leonardo's death and in his private possession. The latter painting almost certainly is the same that now hangs in the Louvre.

So what happened to the earlier attempt? Well, Blaker figured that the Isleworth Mona Lisa was that earlier attempt. He and other supporters claimed it to be the unfinished Mona Lisa, made at least partially by Leonardo and originally handed over to its commissioner. That would mean that the Louvre Mona Lisa was a later version of the portrait made by Leonardo for his own use.

The Isleworth painting has changed hands a few times between then and now. It is currently owned by a Zurich group calling itself the Mona Lisa Foundation. They unveiled the painting recently and reiterated the claim that it is an earlier DaVinci version of the Mona Lisa portrait.

That claim, unsurprisingly, has provoked a number of reactions in the art world. Some have come forward to denounce the Isleworth painting as a forgery.
So what are we to make of this younger and prettier Mona Lisa? Is it an authentic Mona Lisa? Should it replace the portrait hanging in the Louvre? Wouldn't that be an appropriate comment on the age in which we live? The older, mature face gets replaced by one younger and prettier. That would be a sad story.

But here's a better story, and maybe a sadder one. Did Leonardo DaVinci fall in love with the young, pretty wife of Francesco del Giocondo when he was commissioned to paint her portrait? He would have been 51 in 1503 when Lisa Gherardini sat for him. She would have been 24 years old, a young wife, making a home with her wealthy cloth merchant husband, their second child newly born.Was the old painter sentimental enough to fall in love with her smile? The smile is certainly more evident in this earlier portrait. Did it haunt him through the years? Did young Lisa's face stay in his mind, aging gracefully in DaVinci's imagination until he was compelled to commit her likeness to canvas once more years later, older, sadder perhaps, with an enigmatic smile? Did he paint it from memory or did she sit for him again, one more time, years later -- just for him this time?

Did he know he was painting his masterpiece?

The later portrait, the one in the Louvre, was called by DaVinci "La Giaconda", which means "The Jocular One" A pun, perhaps? A play on the name Giocondo? Or was DaVinci obfuscating to hide the fact that he had the portrait of another man's wife in his possession? Was it love that compelled Davinci to paint La Giaconda? Was it a great and unfulfilled love that immortalized a young Florentine woman to the point that she is now arguably one of the most recognized faces in history?

We will never know, of course. This is just a story. But it is an appealing idea, isn't it? That it was love -- not money, or vanity, or the lust for fame or power -- but love that was responsible for the most famous painting in the world.



I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

A LESSON IN SUSPENSE

Portrait of Madame X, painted in 1884, is the informal title of a portrait by John Singer Sargent of a young socialite named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. Madame Gautreau was an American expatriate who married a French banker, and became notorious in Parisian high society for her beauty and rumored infidelities.

As it was originally painted the portrait caused a scandal because of one shoulder strap that was off the subject's shoulder. The portrait, which, you must remember, was merely canvas and paint, was the cause of much consternation among Paris society. There were calls for Sargent to remove the painting from the exhibition.

Imagine crowds of young Parisian men gathered around the canvas in breathless anticipation of the moment when gravity does it's thing and causes Madame X's dress to fall to the floor. Of the painting one critic wrote: "One more struggle and the lady will be free". It is sexual titillation at it's most piquant and it all happens in the mind of the viewer.

Above you see the painting as it was repainted by Sargent with the strap back in its safer position. Here a photo shows the painting as it hung at the salon of '84 with the strap off her shoulder:

With Sargent repainting the strap, he successfully took much of the sting out of the painting.
To see how the painting might have looked, take a look at an altered image done by Mike Pieczonka:

To me, the whole incident is amazing and shows just how powerful a painting can be. How provocative are these images made up of an arrangement of pigments! In and of itself the object is harmless, yet what it depicts enflames desire or outrage. Whether it is a Sargent portrait or a controversial comic in a French newspaper, images have amazing power.

And yet, as Robert Crumb observed almost 100 years later "It's only lines on paper, folks!"


I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EDWARD HOPPER!

American painter Edward Hopper, most famous for his iconic Nighthawks painting, was born this day in 1882.


The above painting, 11 am, is one of my personal favorites.


UPDATE: This post was scheduled to go live on July 22 (the actual day of Hopper's birth). Somehow it got lost and didn't show up until today.


I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

YOU SURE CAN SEE PLENTY FROM UP HERE...

I love this cartoon by Bill Ward. I saw it and had to swipe it from rhade-zapan's tumblr.


I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

AN ARTIST`S LIFE IS HARD...

Arnold Kohn - 1956

Honestly, it`s just work, work work around here!


I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

CAPTAIN MAL by DON DOS SANTOS

Don Dos Santos is a great painter and here is his take on Firefly's Captain Malcolm Reynolds.


And here is an article from his blog outlining how Dos Santos went about creating this image.


Shiny.


I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

MAYBE I NEED AN ASSISTANT...

"Experimenting" Oil by Ron Swanson

...someone to carry my brushes and canvasses? No?


I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN - Day 6

In the Swamp by MD Jackson.


An early digital painting I did back in 2006.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN -- Day 3

Stairs by MD Jackson.


A pen-and-ink illustration I did back in 2008.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN -- Day 1

Pumpkin Candy by Matt Dixon.


Matt Dixon is a UK artist who has a website, a blog and a Deviantart gallery.

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

IMAGE EXPLOSION

Last time I picked and chose images. This time it's completely random. You get what you get. Hope you enjoy them!

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio

IMAGE EXPLOSION

I've been here and there. I've drawn a lot of pictures. I've written a bit, too. I'm not good at this self-promotion thing. Look, you want to know about me? just visit these websites. Okay?
www.mdjacksonart.weebly.com
http://mdjackson.deviantart.com
http://community.imaginefx.com/fxpose/mdjacksons%5Fportfolio