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For this quarter's Lunchtime Lecture, we heard Kirk O'Brien discuss the social role of comics and the government's many attempts to censor them. Because the 1950s were an era when the United States was afflicted with the Red Scare and particularly focused on allowing only "appropriate" content to be circulated (read: focused on oppressing minorities and dissenting opinions), comic makers had a long list of rules foisted upon them. Among other requirements of the list were these: police and other forces of "justice" had to be depicted in a positive light; divorce was not to be portrayed as humorous; the words "horror," "terror," and "crime" could not be titles of a comic by themselves; and (strangely) no ads for fireworks were permitted. One of EC's (or Entertaining Comics') books was flagged for a single scene at the end, where a black man was piloting a spaceship (because black people couldn't be astronauts at the time, so heaven forbid a comic depict a black person as an astronaut) However, moral comics were permitted, and those were often quite dark and involved vigilante justice.
I was fascinated and disgusted by the way the prevailing beliefs and opinions of the 1950s affected the development of comics. (In my sketchbook, I have several sarcastic notes that are all some form of "*yay* for the 1950s".) It makes a lot of sense to me that the government of the time would have gone after more progressive or violent comics, because of the era (the Red Scare didn't exactly help ease conservatism). I was surprised that the code of rules went away only recently (really they were out of use by the 1990s, but they only technically went away in 2010), since I would have expected that people would have gotten rid of them sooner. One question I did have was this: if the government was so against violence in comics, why allow vigilante justice to be taken so far? In one of the examples we saw, there was a baseball game, and one player poisoned his spikes so he could slide into the star player on the other team and kill him. The players on the other team were furious, and got the poison-spiked player to come to the baseball field at night, where they dismembered him and played baseball with his body parts. I found that awful to read, and while I won't argue for it to be censored (that would undermine my annoyance about other things being censored), I don't understand how that would be allowed under such a restrictive system. Progress has continued! It's actually done by now, but I have to take a picture of the finished work.
As I may or may not have mentioned before, this is the end of my Solo series (the first piece of which got an Honorable Mention from Scholastics, which is cool and exciting). I wanted to focus on the viewer finding the scene of the crime in this piece, because the last two merely hinted at something ominous. Two things about this piece bother me more than other parts: first, the fact that the solo cup isn't a nice red like before (I couldn't find the right paint until it was too late), and second, the lack of shading from the hair (which can be seen in the final picture). I was kind of rushing to get this one done, and I neglected to shade where the hair should have cast a shadow. Hopefully in my next piece (which will be big...boy oh boy what a fun time that'll be) I can be more attentive to detail (lord knows I have no idea how I can have a loose mark and a detailed figure at the same time...maybe time to ditch figures so I don't have to worry about that?). After months of putting it off/not having enough time/doing other work instead, I have finally made the commitment to finish my Solo series. The above pictures show off the beginning of that process. I noticed when going back over Solo I and II that the implication of assault gets more serious as the series goes on (Solo I merely shows a red solo cup; Solo II shows pills as well as a cup with a pill in it), so Solo III will be the final and most serious iteration. The background will be shiny black like always, and the circle of light will show a clearly unconscious figure, looking away from the viewer and laying on a bed. More updates will come hopefully soon depending on my level of procrastination and the time I get to work on this piece (snow may cut into that; we'll see).
This project was different than anything I've ever done before. The last time I painted something this size or bigger was two years ago in Art III, and then I didn't have to paint so painstakingly. It took me so long to finish this, in fact, that I had to rely on the mini-snow break in December to get it done at home. The painting shows two of my characters, Yahaira and Tamsin (the former of which is also featured in my mixed-media piece, "Eden"), tearing each other down for the way they look/the clothes they wear. I was inspired to make this piece by the way society shapes women - women are often forced to compete for things that men don't have to compete for in the same way, so some women end up trying to push other women down instead of building them up - and I used Yahaira and Tamsin for this because a big issue between them is Yahaira's modesty versus Tamsin's lack thereof.
I called this piece "The Put-Down Competition" partly because of my content - women are often forced into putting each other down by society restricting roles for women, and they do this to compete for limited things (due to misogyny many businesses and industries may not have many women in leadership positions because they seem to have adopted the idea that having a tiny percentage of leading women is filling a quota and they don't want to overfill that quota for some reason). However, I also chose the title because I couldn't think of anything better or more clever; maybe I'll think of a better one later. (Maybe not, though; I entered this painting into Scholastics and if it wins anything I may not be able to change it...but we'll see how that goes.) It's finished! It's a little sloppier than I had hoped (the colored pencil does not work well when you get up close to it, plus the paint I added with lace did not cover the whole thing as well as I wanted it to), but from a distance it looks the way I wanted it to - like a mouth, with text in the background. I had originally planned to write an excerpt from Canterbury Tales in the background, since the project idea came from reading that, but I wanted something cleaner and I didn't have any copies of Canterbury Tales laying around, so I used pages from Romeo and Juliet instead. The title, "She Leet No Morsel from Hir Lippes Falle," or "She Let No Morsel Fall from Her Lips" in modern English, is an excerpt from Canterbury Tales and the reason I was inspired to use this subject in the first place.
Source: "Monuments for a New Era: What should replace statues celebrating the Confederacy? Six artists imagine a way forward", August 10, 2018
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AuthorMolly Goodman Archives
May 2019
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