Updates....

Some more recent art and sketches.

The first one is a promotional piece for Nerd Anti Zombie, the second novel by my dear friend Francesco Nucera.

The brief was to make an illustration that'll be printed on a t-shirt, featuring Bill Gates attacked by zombie Steve Jobs coming out of his grave.

My first sketches had a different layout

but upon seeng them, Francesco suggested to change the design in order to make it look like the cover of the first issue of Dylan Dog, an incredibly popular horror comic book in Italy.

This choice, perfectly understandable because it would add an additional intertextual reference and therefore reinforce the visual joke, posed a problem: having two real people in the picture required that I showed both faces, yet I needed Jobs to be the prominent zombie in the composition, if not the only one.

This meant I could not place him behind Bill Gates (it wouldn't be as menacing if relegated to the background) nor I could place him in front of him but also turned towards him.

I resolved that by making Jobs crawl out of his grave but unaware of the presence of his former Sylicon Valley competitor.

Bill Gates' pose, the tree and moon in the background are swiped in order to make the image a direct parody of the orignal. Hopefully Claudio Villa won't mind.

To complete the joke, I've colored the piece to replicate the original cover and added a logo in the same font.

And here you can see the finished product:

The following piece is a caricature of Italo Calvino

created as promotional art for an event.. I'm happy with the style, but I don't think I totally nailed the likeness...

I think I've done better with these other caricatures

Danny Elfman

Ennio Morricone

And since I really took a liking for caricatures people, I gave a shot to a couple of other movie-people

Steven Spielberg

Alexandre Desplat

These last two being only sketches at this point.

The following is my  most recent caricature, featuring composers/podcasters MArty and Will Brueggeman from the Underscore Podcast.

More Spielberg and Rockwell

In a shadowy studio, an unimpressive looking man is painting a self-portrait, looking at his reflection in a mirror to better capture his own features .
The man is quiet and seems alost indifferent to this activity.

This is the opening of Bridge of Spies, a political thriller directed by Steven Speilberg.

The man is Abel, and he is a spy (even though, the character never admits being one).

This opening image asks: who is the real Abel? Which one is only a reflection? Which one is just a depiction?

Talking about the film, my brother Maurizio pointed out to me how much this first visual is reminiscent of the famous "Triple self-portrait" by Norman Rockwell.

In the painting, Rockwell presents three versions of himself. Painted on the canvas is the suave, knowing Norman Rockwell. With the pipe securely held between the slightly smiling lips, the portrait suggests confidence. But in the mirror Rockwell looks far less secure. His pipe hangs downwards and a reflection on his spectacles (absent in the portrait with the portrait) blanks out the eyes, suggesting even more cluelessness (something that reminds me of the "featurelessness" of another self portrait of an American artist: Charles M. Schultz)

This multiplicity expressed by Rockwell is absent in its visual equivalent in Bridge of Spies, but implied in its narrative: who is Abel really?

Steven Spielberg is both a fan and a collector of Rockwell's work (and trustee emeritus at the Rockwell Museum, MA), so it is not surprising that Rockwell-inspired images crop up in his work.

For instance, this iconic moment in Schindler's List...

... stems from the very well known "The Problem We All Live With".

Spielberg himself is on the record saying that many images in E.T. were inspired by Rockwell, although I cannot find some direct evidence.

The oldest direct quote I was able to trace comes from The Empire of the Sun (1987), based on the novel by J.G. Ballard.

At first this quote stroke me as incongruent. Why a movie based on the memoirs of a British kid in Shanghai would be a good place to reference an American painting? Apart form the time period I could see no connection.

But at closer inspection the 1941 painting, called "Freedom from Fear", which is part of a series of four, reveals its thematic resonance with the movie.
The headline on the paper in the painting contains the word "BOMB", which, unbeknownst to Rockwell, will take new meaning when "THE bomb" will be dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 (that very event also plays an important role in the movie's third act).

That is what i like about Spielberg's adoption of Rockwell's imagery: he's not making literal quotations for the sake of it, but rather borrowing Rockwell's strong visual language to explore similar thematic material, be it identity, intolerance, a safe shelter in wartime.

It is a different approach than Zemeckis', whose quotation were more direct because the intention was to evoke a precise era and its feeling (in this sense, the quotations in Forrest Gump serve the same purpose as the pop-hits featured in the soundtrack).

One last quote is from Spielberg's penultimate movie to-date, The Post.

Spielberg stages a scene with a woman pressured (or advised) by men...

...just like Rockwell did in his "Jury Room" (1959)...

... which was most likely inspired either by the teleplay 12 Angry Men (1954), or by its movie adaptation of 1957.

And in this game of mirrors, quotations and deceit, 
Rockwell's "Jury Room" has apparently seeped out of the realm of fiction in to our reality: this picture has been taken during the last G7 summit.

It's a sad realization, when your world looks like a Bizzarro version of a Rockwell's painting.
(again: thanks to my brother to point out this last connection).

Zemeckis, Spielberg, Lucas and Norman Rockwell

The work of  Norman Rockwell had a very important influence on Robert Zemeckis' 1994 classic Forrset Gump.

I wanted to link an interview with a direct quote to support the claim, but I cannot find a specific an contextualized statement, so take my word for it.

But I think it's pretty evident.

The most overt visual quote is probably this one:



being clearly influenced by the 1953 painting "Outside the Principal's Office"




(it has been admitted by the filmmakers: check out Zemeckis and producer Steve Starkey's audio commentary on Forrest Gump's DVD).

But it does not stop there.

For instance, to me Forrest's very appearance is very reminiscent of Rockwell's beloved "Breaking Home Ties": notice the similar haircut and the subtle use of the U.S. flag colors in both images.





And even when not quoting directly any painting, some scenes have a very rockwellesque feel to them.






I also think that the way the character of Lieutenant Dan (last descendant to a long line of soldiers) is introduced hearkens back to the many paintings of the fighting Gillies, a fictional dynasty of all-american patriots.





Although admittedly, Zemeckis' take on patriotism is a little more satirical and makes for a funnier visual gag.









https://youtu.be/gh2DzGccvJc?t=2m44s

Rockwell has been criticized both for his sentimentality and for his stubborn dedication to realism. Even when compared to other commercial illustrators working in a realistic style, his work has been dismissed as stale, or lacking grit and vitality.

I do not share those feelings. Even putting aside the sheer draftsmanship he possessed, and uncanny ability to depict human reactions, he was incredibly skilled in the art of STAGING a picture.

He took his job as an ILLUSTRATOR quite seriously, and the way he chose the colors, the lighting, the framing, the props, the faces was meticulously crafted and arranged (and THAT takes skill) with the reader in mind.

He didn't not want you to appriciate the craft, he wanted you to immerse yourself in the scene.

Not surprisingly director Steven Speilberg is both a fan and a collector of rockwell's work and quoted it in several of his movies as well.

Like Rockwell, Spielberg is an absolute virtuoso in his field. The staging an camera work in his movies are among the best in the business, but they are NEVER meant to be noticed. Spielberg does not want you to admire his technical prowess, he wants you to buy in to the story.

Rockwell is also far less cheesy than he's often accused of being. While at a first glance there seems to be a directness to the stories they are telling, there is a surprising amount of ambiguity and  "openness" to them.

They could make for some interesting material in a thematic apperception projective test, and the different takes different people may have at many of them could be surprising.

What is unmistakable is Rockwell feeling for the humane and his lack of cynicism.

Rather tellingly, Rockwell collaboration with the Saturday Evening Post coincided with the shooting of president Kennedy in November 1963.





Check out this video where Spielberg and George Lucas explain their fascination with Rockwell:

Other pages worth checking:

https://indianapublicmedia.org/arts/breaking-home-ties-sketch-masterpiece/

https://paintinglifestories.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-two-norman-rockwells.html

And I'm finally back... again!

Sorry folks (folks?! ahahaha!!)
Sorry casual reader for letting you down... hey, maybe tha'ts why it's called Down the Guts. HA!

Anyway, my original intention to dedicate my blog to comics or at most animation really limit the range of stuff I can share, so I'm going to include random finds here as well.

I'll try to keep it about various forms of storytelling anyway (meaning I'll be talking about movies), in spite of my actual disgust with this current shapeless amalgama that goes under the name of "geek culture" or even worse "pop culture".

It's not that I cosider TV or movies as opposed to comics, but I kind of miss the times when liking comics was something a lot o f people kept closeted.

No, it's not that either.

It's just that I hate seeing a lot of people juming on the band wagon.

Going to Lucca Comics has become something of an obligation for anyone who got something to sell, regardless of its pertainance with comics. I mean, I ADORE Bizzarrobazar.com for instance, I really think it's one of the best places on the web, but how does that blog has anything to do with Lucca Comics?

My brother put that brilliantly some time ago: "When I was young, there wasn't all this p***y around Star Wars".

I'm really having a hard time adapting to this trend (don't get me started about San Diego)

I guess it has something to do with what the GRAT ALAN MOORE says here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93sV5XGLmgQ&feature=youtu.be&t=14m


That said. enjoy this videos about Steven Speilberg's DUEL.