Friday, June 13, 2008
Where's Tiny?
I know I've been missing in action most of this semester, but I have been keeping busy. Below are the individual pages of the book dummy for Where's Tiny?, the book I've been working on all semester. It's a 48 page picture book that I wrote myself, and will be working on finishing next semester.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Paper - Illustration, Authorship, and Copyright
Introduction
As the authors of individual creative works of art, picture book illustrators are faced with the challenge of defending their rights to their art, all the while working within a culture that is moving away from ideas of individual authorship, and towards an “information wants to be free” society. The current United States copyright laws are being challenged and might soon change to unfavorably reflect our society’s desire to provide equal and broader access to creative work. Does this shift indicate a change of attitude towards the value of individual authorship of art, and how does this shift affect picture book illustrators?
Authorship
What does it mean to be an author of a creative work of art? The question seems simple enough. If I create a work of art, I own it. I am the author, and therefore the fruits of my labor are my own. Martha Woodmansee, in her essay titled The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’, says that “in contemporary usage an author is an individual who is solely responsible – and therefore exclusively deserving of credit – for the production of a unique work” (426). But as she quickly points out, this is a fairly recent development, and in fact social norms in Europe in the eighteenth century dictated a much different authorial landscape.
Authorship: What it Was
In the wake of the Renaissance, writers, artists, and poets were considered craftspeople above all else. They were repositories of generations of knowledge and skill, which they spent years mastering in order that they could then “achieve the effects prescribed by the cultivated audience of the court to which they owed both their livelihood and social status” (Woodmansee 426). But sometimes there would be an instance of inspiration in which the craftsperson would seem to rise, not only to meet the expected requirements of her craft, but also achieve new heights. These inspirations were said to be provided by either a muse or by God. So in both cases, an artist wasn’t considered personally responsible for authoring their works of art. They were considered to be either vehicles of tradition or vessels of divine inspiration.
This situation provided well for the artist as long as a patronage society functioned. But the reproducibility of printed texts, which started in the late fifteenth century and slowly spread and sped up through the Renaissance, would flood an eager reading public with an exciting new form of entertainment. With this new interest in printed texts, “writing became an individualized activity, a potential source for recognition and social advancement” (Finkelstein and McCleery 70). This is also around the same time that we see the emergence of authors signing their work. “The result of attaching a name to a text was critical evaluation, recognition, and in some cases an enhanced reputation” (Finkelstein and McCleery 70). Elizabeth Eisenstein concurred that the “drive for fame itself, may have been affected by print-made immortality” (qtd. in Finkelstein and McCleery 70).
Writers and artists no longer felt shame for accepting money for their work, although this idea of individual authorship remained a hot topic for debate through the nineteenth century. In 1772, the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in his essay “Live and Let Live”, a proposal for reorganizing the book trade: "What? The writer is to be blamed for trying to make the offspring of his imagination as profitable as he can? Just because he works with his noblest faculties he isn’t supposed to enjoy the satisfaction that the roughest handyman is able to procure – that of owing his livelihood to his own industry?
…
But wisdom, they say, for sale for cash! Shameful! Freely hast thou received, freely thou must give! Thus thought the noble Luther in translating the Bible. Luther, I answer, is an exception in many things. Furthermore, it is for the most part not true that the writer received for nothing what he does not want to give away for nothing. Often an entire fortune may have been spent preparing to teach and please the world" (qtd. in Woodmansee 436-7).
Here we must consider Lessing’s words in relation to a picture book illustrator. It is true that illustrators and writers would both toil to learn their crafts, and “often an entire fortune may have been spent preparing to teach and please the world,” both in an emotional and monetary sense. But most poets and writers work alone and do not collaborate. Unless an illustrator was a master engraver, so that there was no middleman between conception and execution, a book illustration usually involved two or three “authors.” In the case of George Cruikshank, who illustrated Europe’s first great example of children’s literature, the first English translation of Grimm’s fairy tales; German Popular Tales, he was the one who conceptualized the drawings, transferred it to copper plates, and made the final adjustments during the final etching. But John Tenniel’s famous illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) were drawn by him directly onto the wood block, and then the Dalziel Brothers, his engravers, would interpret his drawings (Hearn, Clark and Clark 9).
So who would be considered the author, the illustrator or the engraver? The drawings and woodblocks hold different steps of creative evolution, but the print produced from both efforts is the intended work of art. The important thing to consider is whose intentions produced the print? John Tenniel persuaded Carroll to repress the first edition of Alice in Wonderland because he was unhappy with the printing: "That of the White Rabbit as herald in Alice in Wonderland was scrapped and reworked for the final version. A completely new rendition of Hatta in person in Through the Looking Glass replaced the first even after it had been engraved and a proof pulled, and several of Alice as queen on the chessboard also were redone to give her dress less crinoline; “plugs,” or pieces of wood, were inserted in the blocks to make the corrections. The wood engraving was the final work of art" (Hearn, Clark and Clark 10).
It’s the intention of the illustrator that drives the work of the engraver and makes her the unique author of a work of art. So from the beginning of picture book history, when books began to be reproduced for the media market, the concept of authorship was a sticky problem for illustrators, and remains so today.
Authorship: A Modern Evolution
An industrial evolution began to change societal expectations in Europe and America and consumer culture began to take a more prominent seat in every day life. As Walter Benjamin noted in his famous 1937 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, “during long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” (par. 10). The historical circumstances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was of a burgeoning commodity culture, slowly permeating and “simplifying” concepts, actions, and art, through the vehicle of reproduction.
Writers, artists, and illustrators began to be treated like celebrities. They became larger than their work, and their personalities and private lives began to become enmeshed into the aura of their “work.” As Steven Heller and Marshall Arisman note in their book Inside the Business of Illustration, “before radio, motion pictures, and television the printed page was the exclusive entertainment for the American public. Illustrators were household names. Many received fan mail and were paid as “celebrities” to advertise and endorse products” (86). Michel Foucault noted in his famous essay What is an Author, “it would be worth examining how the author became individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given, at what moment studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization the author was involved, at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes, and how this fundamental category of ‘the-man-and-his-work criticism’ began” (qtd. in Woodmansee 426).
Authorship and the Relation to Copyright
This new commodity culture offered up authors of texts and art as geniuses who were not only personally responsible for creating masterpieces, but sole owners to the rights of those masterpieces. Copyright laws began to acknowledge this author authority, by not only extending economic rewards and protections, but by making it clear that those rewards and protections were the best way to encourage the dissemination of ideas (“Graphic” 29). By instilling copyright laws that were effective, both the artist and the public would be well served.
Copyright: What it Was
While the earliest recorded English copyright law, The Statute of Anne of 1710, only protected against anyone but the author reproducing a work, today’s copyright laws are more focused on giving an author the right to authorize “use” of the work (Joyce et al 3). Not long after the American Revolution, a copyright clause was added to the Constitution and enacted in 1790. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 gave the Federal Government the right to legislate regarding copyright and patent: “Congress shall have Power…To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times, to Authors and Inventors, the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (qtd. in Joyce et al 19). Then in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered a revision of the copyright law so that it might better reflect modern conditions. In the 1909 Act that followed these revisions, copyright was effective the day of publication, instead of the moment of copyright registration. The 1909 Act did not protect unpublished works.
Copyright: What it Became and Why it Works
The 1976 Copyright Act changed this so that a work of art is protected by copyright laws the moment it is “fixed” in tangible form. Even without a copyright notice, or failure to register, once a work of art or text is created, it is protected. The 1976 Act also made it clear that an author’s copyright is actually a bundle of rights, and the author can choose to transfer or license all or part of those rights. The author has rights to her work for life plus 50 years, which was extended in 1998 to life plus 70 years by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Also in 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act broadened copyright law, but specifically Section 512 which, in general, limits internet service providers from copyright infringement liability for simply transmitting information through the internet. However, thanks to Section 512 the internet service providers must promptly remove material from their user’s websites that appear to constitute copyright infringement (“Graphic” 42).
The 1976 Copyright Act brought the United States closer to the standards of the Berne Convention, which was a multinational treaty for the protection of literary and artistic works that accepted moral rights as a matter of course. Moral rights are a kind of doctrine that recognizes “certain inherent personal rights of creators in their works, even after works have been sold or the copyright transferred” (“Graphic” 51). The 10th edition of the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines outlines the four rights that the doctrine traditionally grants to artists and writers:
1. The right to protect the integrity of their work to prevent any modification, distortion, or mutilation that would be prejudicial to their honor or reputation.
2.The right of attribution (or paternity) to insist that their authorship be acknowledged properly and to prevent use of their names on works they did not create.
3.The right of disclosure to decide if, when, and how a work is presented to the public.
4.The right of recall to withdraw, destroy, or disavow a work if it is changed or no longer represents their views (51).
The members of the Berne Convention were required to “frame their copyright laws to certain minimum standards and to guarantee reciprocity to citizens of any other member” (“Graphic” 51). By joining the Berne Convention in 1988, the United States extended protection of American works in an additional 24 nations, thereby significantly slowing the foreign piracy of American works.
Certainly picture book illustrators, and illustrators in general, are greatly affected by these copyright laws. Under current copyright laws, an illustrator may create, let’s say a children’s picture book, and transfer all of her rights to the illustrations to the publisher, and then ask for a royalty agreement that will ensure that if the book is popular enough with the public, she will be compensated for her hard work. The mastery of the illustrations is a major component to the success of a children’s book, and the author of those illustrations can, if agreed upon before it is published, reap the benefits of a media market. An illustrator may want to reclaim her rights to those illustrations, and may do so if the publisher agrees, or if she waits till 35 years after the initial transfer and through a simple process, terminates the original copyright agreement. The illustrator of the picture book may also decide to license the works for limited usage, so that the publisher can print a book, but can’t create a cartoon based on the characters within the book. Or the illustrator can agree to license those rights to the publisher so that if her book gets turned into a major motion picture, like Polar Express by Chris van Alsburg, she will be compensated for being the author of the original book, which inspired the movie.
And if an illustrator creates a work of art and then realizes that someone has, without her permission, misused it in an advertising campaign, a campaign that has made millions for whatever company is being represented, she has the legal recourse to stop the representation and get fairly compensated for the misuse. Because illustrators have always worked within a commodity culture, instead of in opposition of it, copyright laws have been important tools to maintaining economic independence. How can an illustrator survive if her rights are easily stripped? And if illustrators can no longer create, can no longer afford to make art, how does that serve the dissemination of ideas that seems to have become so central to American life.
Copyright: Where Will it Go?
This stripping of an author’s rights and protections has recently taken a disturbing turn in the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008. To preface this discussion, we should turn back to the concept of authorship. The individualization of the author seems to hold no place in this new commodity culture, where information flows freely, and the demand is outpacing the reality of laws. If an author holds pure authority and truth to her works, and society believes in that authority, she has the power to defend her rights to her works. But with Roland Barthes short essay The Death of the Author, published in 1967, came a new kind of perspective on the authority authors bring to the table regarding their own work:
"…an author did not exist once his work passed into the public domain. Remove him, and you created room for new meanings, you liberated the text. In an attempt to shift critical emphasis from author-centered enquiry to reader-based analysis, Barthes argued in dramatic fashion that how readers interpreted these texts was now all-important to critical reflection.
…
…readers created their own meanings without the aid of this concept of an author – they, in a sense, were authors in their own right. Each time readers read something they would come away with entirely different meanings and significations" (Finklestein and McCleery 81).
This idea of the death of the author was supposed to be liberating and freeing to society, as well as to artists. It was supposed to make room for diversity and new interpretations. Of course it rang hollow with groups such as women and minorities, who hadn’t yet had the chance to develop the same kind of authority that came with being a white male author. Yet critics like Barthes and Foucault continued to drive home the point that even though an author creates something, her choices are influenced by many social factors, and that free choice is not quite so free. Sure she owns what she creates, but her creation can change at any time through interpretation, appropriation, etc.
This view of authorship is much more agreeable to the digital age, an age in which everyone is an author through blogs, websites, and online forums. Everyone’s opinion counts, and everyone borrows from everyone else. The personal respect that was the norm for authors, is fading through the impersonal vacuum of the internet. How can one hold an author’s work as being the highest form of truth, when that author’s work is easily manipulated through photoshop, collaged into anyone’s self portrait, or taken completely out of context?
The Orphan Works Act promises to use this new attitude to favor this “information wants to be free” society. The title of this Act is misleading at best. The supposed purpose of this Act is to free up works that are still under the 70-year copyright protection, but the author has passed away or is missing and the work is languishing in limbo, unable to benefit either the author or the public. Say a work of art was created and then the author passed away and it’s now 50 years later and no one has kept up with the copyright of this work. Under current copyright, this work is protected and therefore cannot be used by anyone, not even libraries and museums, for another 20 years. The Orphan Works Act will free these works up for general consumption, but it will do so by freeing ALL works from copyright protection.
Artists will have to register, for a fee, all drawings, sketches, doodles, etc. with privately owned and operated online registries if they want their work protected. No longer will a work be copyrighted the moment it is created. Even works that have previously been registered with the Copyright Office will have to be registered with these online registries in order to be protected. The point of the online registries is to give people who are looking to reproduce works of art, the ability to perform registry searches, in order to determine if the work they want to use is in fact an orphaned work. If this person can prove that they have done a reasonable search for the work of art, they can assume it’s ok to use for whatever purpose. But the Act doesn’t stipulate the allowed number of registries. There could be hundreds. So even if an artist has done the work and registered with an online registry, if the person searching for your work doesn’t look at that particular registry, they are in the clear.
An illustrator could spend thousands of dollars and many more hours registering all her work in as many online registries as she can find, and someone could still reproduce her work without permission and, if caught, only have to pay what they normally would pay if they had commissioned the work. Hardly a great deterrent.
This Act will not only affect artists and illustrators, but will also impact anyone using social networking sites or photo/file sharing sites like Flickr or Snapfish. A photo could be chosen from one of those sites, after deemed an orphan work through a feeble search through one or two ineffective registries, and used in a product campaign for something that the original author of the photo might morally oppose, or not want their work to be associated with. The scope of abuse if this bill is enacted is tremendous.
This bill was originally written by eight American University law students under the direction of a law professor named Peter Jaszi. Jaszi wants to overthrow the romantic notion of authorship and reinstate the idea that all authorship is a communal activity (Holland). As stated above this digital era we’ve entered is the perfect stage for just such a redefinition of authorship. But the ease with which this Orphan Works Act can be abused, and will be abused, will only serve to weaken the already tenuous hold artists have over their works of art, and by proxy, their livelihoods.
Conclusion
Artists are not above the needs of a society. But does society really need this much access to manage and manipulate an author’s creative work? The Orphan Works Act has been released to Congress during the last week of April 2008. The Illustrator’s Partnership of America has taken up the battle cry of “Preserve Visual Artists’ Copyright,” and is doing their best to fight this Act that, if enacted could destroy not only illustrator’s rights, but any visual artist’s rights. But they are faced with years of critical theory from convincing thinkers who say that the world would be a better place if we remove the rights of authors and return all creative work to the people. If done, artists will at the very least start to lose the ability to support themselves, and unless we return to a patronage society, will fall into oblivion; living in a society that holds no value in their work, and support no creative inspiration above the most meager of expectations.
Works Cited
Woodmansee, Martha. “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’”. Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (1984): 425-448.
Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. An Introduction to Book History. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Hearn, Michael Patrick, Trinket, Clark, and H. Nichols B. Clark. Myth, Magic, and Mystery: One Hundred Years of American
Children’s Book Illustration. Colorado: Roberts Rinehart, 1996.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. 1936. 9 May 2008 <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm>.
Heller, Marshall Arisman. Inside the Business of Illustration. New York: Allworth, 2004.
Graphic Artists Guild. 10th Edition Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines. New York: Graphic Artists Guild 2001.
Joyce, Criag et al. Copyright Law. New York: LexisNexis, 2005.
Holland, Brad. Personal interview. 5 April 2008. <http://www.sellyourtvconceptnow.com/orphan.html>.
As the authors of individual creative works of art, picture book illustrators are faced with the challenge of defending their rights to their art, all the while working within a culture that is moving away from ideas of individual authorship, and towards an “information wants to be free” society. The current United States copyright laws are being challenged and might soon change to unfavorably reflect our society’s desire to provide equal and broader access to creative work. Does this shift indicate a change of attitude towards the value of individual authorship of art, and how does this shift affect picture book illustrators?
Authorship
What does it mean to be an author of a creative work of art? The question seems simple enough. If I create a work of art, I own it. I am the author, and therefore the fruits of my labor are my own. Martha Woodmansee, in her essay titled The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’, says that “in contemporary usage an author is an individual who is solely responsible – and therefore exclusively deserving of credit – for the production of a unique work” (426). But as she quickly points out, this is a fairly recent development, and in fact social norms in Europe in the eighteenth century dictated a much different authorial landscape.
Authorship: What it Was
In the wake of the Renaissance, writers, artists, and poets were considered craftspeople above all else. They were repositories of generations of knowledge and skill, which they spent years mastering in order that they could then “achieve the effects prescribed by the cultivated audience of the court to which they owed both their livelihood and social status” (Woodmansee 426). But sometimes there would be an instance of inspiration in which the craftsperson would seem to rise, not only to meet the expected requirements of her craft, but also achieve new heights. These inspirations were said to be provided by either a muse or by God. So in both cases, an artist wasn’t considered personally responsible for authoring their works of art. They were considered to be either vehicles of tradition or vessels of divine inspiration.
This situation provided well for the artist as long as a patronage society functioned. But the reproducibility of printed texts, which started in the late fifteenth century and slowly spread and sped up through the Renaissance, would flood an eager reading public with an exciting new form of entertainment. With this new interest in printed texts, “writing became an individualized activity, a potential source for recognition and social advancement” (Finkelstein and McCleery 70). This is also around the same time that we see the emergence of authors signing their work. “The result of attaching a name to a text was critical evaluation, recognition, and in some cases an enhanced reputation” (Finkelstein and McCleery 70). Elizabeth Eisenstein concurred that the “drive for fame itself, may have been affected by print-made immortality” (qtd. in Finkelstein and McCleery 70).
Writers and artists no longer felt shame for accepting money for their work, although this idea of individual authorship remained a hot topic for debate through the nineteenth century. In 1772, the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in his essay “Live and Let Live”, a proposal for reorganizing the book trade: "What? The writer is to be blamed for trying to make the offspring of his imagination as profitable as he can? Just because he works with his noblest faculties he isn’t supposed to enjoy the satisfaction that the roughest handyman is able to procure – that of owing his livelihood to his own industry?
…
But wisdom, they say, for sale for cash! Shameful! Freely hast thou received, freely thou must give! Thus thought the noble Luther in translating the Bible. Luther, I answer, is an exception in many things. Furthermore, it is for the most part not true that the writer received for nothing what he does not want to give away for nothing. Often an entire fortune may have been spent preparing to teach and please the world" (qtd. in Woodmansee 436-7).
Here we must consider Lessing’s words in relation to a picture book illustrator. It is true that illustrators and writers would both toil to learn their crafts, and “often an entire fortune may have been spent preparing to teach and please the world,” both in an emotional and monetary sense. But most poets and writers work alone and do not collaborate. Unless an illustrator was a master engraver, so that there was no middleman between conception and execution, a book illustration usually involved two or three “authors.” In the case of George Cruikshank, who illustrated Europe’s first great example of children’s literature, the first English translation of Grimm’s fairy tales; German Popular Tales, he was the one who conceptualized the drawings, transferred it to copper plates, and made the final adjustments during the final etching. But John Tenniel’s famous illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) were drawn by him directly onto the wood block, and then the Dalziel Brothers, his engravers, would interpret his drawings (Hearn, Clark and Clark 9).
So who would be considered the author, the illustrator or the engraver? The drawings and woodblocks hold different steps of creative evolution, but the print produced from both efforts is the intended work of art. The important thing to consider is whose intentions produced the print? John Tenniel persuaded Carroll to repress the first edition of Alice in Wonderland because he was unhappy with the printing: "That of the White Rabbit as herald in Alice in Wonderland was scrapped and reworked for the final version. A completely new rendition of Hatta in person in Through the Looking Glass replaced the first even after it had been engraved and a proof pulled, and several of Alice as queen on the chessboard also were redone to give her dress less crinoline; “plugs,” or pieces of wood, were inserted in the blocks to make the corrections. The wood engraving was the final work of art" (Hearn, Clark and Clark 10).
It’s the intention of the illustrator that drives the work of the engraver and makes her the unique author of a work of art. So from the beginning of picture book history, when books began to be reproduced for the media market, the concept of authorship was a sticky problem for illustrators, and remains so today.
Authorship: A Modern Evolution
An industrial evolution began to change societal expectations in Europe and America and consumer culture began to take a more prominent seat in every day life. As Walter Benjamin noted in his famous 1937 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, “during long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” (par. 10). The historical circumstances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was of a burgeoning commodity culture, slowly permeating and “simplifying” concepts, actions, and art, through the vehicle of reproduction.
Writers, artists, and illustrators began to be treated like celebrities. They became larger than their work, and their personalities and private lives began to become enmeshed into the aura of their “work.” As Steven Heller and Marshall Arisman note in their book Inside the Business of Illustration, “before radio, motion pictures, and television the printed page was the exclusive entertainment for the American public. Illustrators were household names. Many received fan mail and were paid as “celebrities” to advertise and endorse products” (86). Michel Foucault noted in his famous essay What is an Author, “it would be worth examining how the author became individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given, at what moment studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization the author was involved, at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes, and how this fundamental category of ‘the-man-and-his-work criticism’ began” (qtd. in Woodmansee 426).
Authorship and the Relation to Copyright
This new commodity culture offered up authors of texts and art as geniuses who were not only personally responsible for creating masterpieces, but sole owners to the rights of those masterpieces. Copyright laws began to acknowledge this author authority, by not only extending economic rewards and protections, but by making it clear that those rewards and protections were the best way to encourage the dissemination of ideas (“Graphic” 29). By instilling copyright laws that were effective, both the artist and the public would be well served.
Copyright: What it Was
While the earliest recorded English copyright law, The Statute of Anne of 1710, only protected against anyone but the author reproducing a work, today’s copyright laws are more focused on giving an author the right to authorize “use” of the work (Joyce et al 3). Not long after the American Revolution, a copyright clause was added to the Constitution and enacted in 1790. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 gave the Federal Government the right to legislate regarding copyright and patent: “Congress shall have Power…To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times, to Authors and Inventors, the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (qtd. in Joyce et al 19). Then in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered a revision of the copyright law so that it might better reflect modern conditions. In the 1909 Act that followed these revisions, copyright was effective the day of publication, instead of the moment of copyright registration. The 1909 Act did not protect unpublished works.
Copyright: What it Became and Why it Works
The 1976 Copyright Act changed this so that a work of art is protected by copyright laws the moment it is “fixed” in tangible form. Even without a copyright notice, or failure to register, once a work of art or text is created, it is protected. The 1976 Act also made it clear that an author’s copyright is actually a bundle of rights, and the author can choose to transfer or license all or part of those rights. The author has rights to her work for life plus 50 years, which was extended in 1998 to life plus 70 years by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Also in 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act broadened copyright law, but specifically Section 512 which, in general, limits internet service providers from copyright infringement liability for simply transmitting information through the internet. However, thanks to Section 512 the internet service providers must promptly remove material from their user’s websites that appear to constitute copyright infringement (“Graphic” 42).
The 1976 Copyright Act brought the United States closer to the standards of the Berne Convention, which was a multinational treaty for the protection of literary and artistic works that accepted moral rights as a matter of course. Moral rights are a kind of doctrine that recognizes “certain inherent personal rights of creators in their works, even after works have been sold or the copyright transferred” (“Graphic” 51). The 10th edition of the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines outlines the four rights that the doctrine traditionally grants to artists and writers:
1. The right to protect the integrity of their work to prevent any modification, distortion, or mutilation that would be prejudicial to their honor or reputation.
2.The right of attribution (or paternity) to insist that their authorship be acknowledged properly and to prevent use of their names on works they did not create.
3.The right of disclosure to decide if, when, and how a work is presented to the public.
4.The right of recall to withdraw, destroy, or disavow a work if it is changed or no longer represents their views (51).
The members of the Berne Convention were required to “frame their copyright laws to certain minimum standards and to guarantee reciprocity to citizens of any other member” (“Graphic” 51). By joining the Berne Convention in 1988, the United States extended protection of American works in an additional 24 nations, thereby significantly slowing the foreign piracy of American works.
Certainly picture book illustrators, and illustrators in general, are greatly affected by these copyright laws. Under current copyright laws, an illustrator may create, let’s say a children’s picture book, and transfer all of her rights to the illustrations to the publisher, and then ask for a royalty agreement that will ensure that if the book is popular enough with the public, she will be compensated for her hard work. The mastery of the illustrations is a major component to the success of a children’s book, and the author of those illustrations can, if agreed upon before it is published, reap the benefits of a media market. An illustrator may want to reclaim her rights to those illustrations, and may do so if the publisher agrees, or if she waits till 35 years after the initial transfer and through a simple process, terminates the original copyright agreement. The illustrator of the picture book may also decide to license the works for limited usage, so that the publisher can print a book, but can’t create a cartoon based on the characters within the book. Or the illustrator can agree to license those rights to the publisher so that if her book gets turned into a major motion picture, like Polar Express by Chris van Alsburg, she will be compensated for being the author of the original book, which inspired the movie.
And if an illustrator creates a work of art and then realizes that someone has, without her permission, misused it in an advertising campaign, a campaign that has made millions for whatever company is being represented, she has the legal recourse to stop the representation and get fairly compensated for the misuse. Because illustrators have always worked within a commodity culture, instead of in opposition of it, copyright laws have been important tools to maintaining economic independence. How can an illustrator survive if her rights are easily stripped? And if illustrators can no longer create, can no longer afford to make art, how does that serve the dissemination of ideas that seems to have become so central to American life.
Copyright: Where Will it Go?
This stripping of an author’s rights and protections has recently taken a disturbing turn in the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008. To preface this discussion, we should turn back to the concept of authorship. The individualization of the author seems to hold no place in this new commodity culture, where information flows freely, and the demand is outpacing the reality of laws. If an author holds pure authority and truth to her works, and society believes in that authority, she has the power to defend her rights to her works. But with Roland Barthes short essay The Death of the Author, published in 1967, came a new kind of perspective on the authority authors bring to the table regarding their own work:
"…an author did not exist once his work passed into the public domain. Remove him, and you created room for new meanings, you liberated the text. In an attempt to shift critical emphasis from author-centered enquiry to reader-based analysis, Barthes argued in dramatic fashion that how readers interpreted these texts was now all-important to critical reflection.
…
…readers created their own meanings without the aid of this concept of an author – they, in a sense, were authors in their own right. Each time readers read something they would come away with entirely different meanings and significations" (Finklestein and McCleery 81).
This idea of the death of the author was supposed to be liberating and freeing to society, as well as to artists. It was supposed to make room for diversity and new interpretations. Of course it rang hollow with groups such as women and minorities, who hadn’t yet had the chance to develop the same kind of authority that came with being a white male author. Yet critics like Barthes and Foucault continued to drive home the point that even though an author creates something, her choices are influenced by many social factors, and that free choice is not quite so free. Sure she owns what she creates, but her creation can change at any time through interpretation, appropriation, etc.
This view of authorship is much more agreeable to the digital age, an age in which everyone is an author through blogs, websites, and online forums. Everyone’s opinion counts, and everyone borrows from everyone else. The personal respect that was the norm for authors, is fading through the impersonal vacuum of the internet. How can one hold an author’s work as being the highest form of truth, when that author’s work is easily manipulated through photoshop, collaged into anyone’s self portrait, or taken completely out of context?
The Orphan Works Act promises to use this new attitude to favor this “information wants to be free” society. The title of this Act is misleading at best. The supposed purpose of this Act is to free up works that are still under the 70-year copyright protection, but the author has passed away or is missing and the work is languishing in limbo, unable to benefit either the author or the public. Say a work of art was created and then the author passed away and it’s now 50 years later and no one has kept up with the copyright of this work. Under current copyright, this work is protected and therefore cannot be used by anyone, not even libraries and museums, for another 20 years. The Orphan Works Act will free these works up for general consumption, but it will do so by freeing ALL works from copyright protection.
Artists will have to register, for a fee, all drawings, sketches, doodles, etc. with privately owned and operated online registries if they want their work protected. No longer will a work be copyrighted the moment it is created. Even works that have previously been registered with the Copyright Office will have to be registered with these online registries in order to be protected. The point of the online registries is to give people who are looking to reproduce works of art, the ability to perform registry searches, in order to determine if the work they want to use is in fact an orphaned work. If this person can prove that they have done a reasonable search for the work of art, they can assume it’s ok to use for whatever purpose. But the Act doesn’t stipulate the allowed number of registries. There could be hundreds. So even if an artist has done the work and registered with an online registry, if the person searching for your work doesn’t look at that particular registry, they are in the clear.
An illustrator could spend thousands of dollars and many more hours registering all her work in as many online registries as she can find, and someone could still reproduce her work without permission and, if caught, only have to pay what they normally would pay if they had commissioned the work. Hardly a great deterrent.
This Act will not only affect artists and illustrators, but will also impact anyone using social networking sites or photo/file sharing sites like Flickr or Snapfish. A photo could be chosen from one of those sites, after deemed an orphan work through a feeble search through one or two ineffective registries, and used in a product campaign for something that the original author of the photo might morally oppose, or not want their work to be associated with. The scope of abuse if this bill is enacted is tremendous.
This bill was originally written by eight American University law students under the direction of a law professor named Peter Jaszi. Jaszi wants to overthrow the romantic notion of authorship and reinstate the idea that all authorship is a communal activity (Holland). As stated above this digital era we’ve entered is the perfect stage for just such a redefinition of authorship. But the ease with which this Orphan Works Act can be abused, and will be abused, will only serve to weaken the already tenuous hold artists have over their works of art, and by proxy, their livelihoods.
Conclusion
Artists are not above the needs of a society. But does society really need this much access to manage and manipulate an author’s creative work? The Orphan Works Act has been released to Congress during the last week of April 2008. The Illustrator’s Partnership of America has taken up the battle cry of “Preserve Visual Artists’ Copyright,” and is doing their best to fight this Act that, if enacted could destroy not only illustrator’s rights, but any visual artist’s rights. But they are faced with years of critical theory from convincing thinkers who say that the world would be a better place if we remove the rights of authors and return all creative work to the people. If done, artists will at the very least start to lose the ability to support themselves, and unless we return to a patronage society, will fall into oblivion; living in a society that holds no value in their work, and support no creative inspiration above the most meager of expectations.
Works Cited
Woodmansee, Martha. “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author’”. Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (1984): 425-448.
Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. An Introduction to Book History. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Hearn, Michael Patrick, Trinket, Clark, and H. Nichols B. Clark. Myth, Magic, and Mystery: One Hundred Years of American
Children’s Book Illustration. Colorado: Roberts Rinehart, 1996.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. 1936. 9 May 2008 <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm>.
Heller, Marshall Arisman. Inside the Business of Illustration. New York: Allworth, 2004.
Graphic Artists Guild. 10th Edition Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines. New York: Graphic Artists Guild 2001.
Joyce, Criag et al. Copyright Law. New York: LexisNexis, 2005.
Holland, Brad. Personal interview. 5 April 2008. <http://www.sellyourtvconceptnow.com/orphan.html>.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Paper - Children's Books and Emotions
Children’s book illustrators work within a range of constraints that most artists might find limiting. Their work is commissioned by publishers, who therefore have some control over content. Some have to illustrate someone else’s words, leaving no room for personal editing. And children’s book illustrators always have to keep in mind that what they create will only be seen as a reproduction within a specific book format. But another challenge that they face, which is not widely discussed, is the one that makes children’s book illustration a field of incredible potential. Children’s book illustrators must visually weave stories that are driven by human emotions, and to do so, they must understand their audience, the psychology of their art, and the cultural context their work will belong to.
How are they able to do this? Unlike writers, illustrators don’t have the advantage of literally spelling out a scenario. They have to take a sentence like “Billy is sad,” and create art that can express that Billy is sad, hint at why he might be sad, offer a sense of empathy towards Billy, be careful not to discount their own feelings about Billy, all the while enticing the reader to turn the page. The character’s emotions, the overall emotional theme of the storyline, the reader’s emotions, and the artist’s emotions are all considerations when planning a children’s picture book. The successful books are the ones that are able to create a unity between those things.
The intended audience of a children’s picture book is an important consideration for an artist. Are emotions instinctual, or learned? Children have very little learned experience by the time they are old enough to read, or be read to, between the ages of one to seven. Therefore something like empathy, which requires you to know from past experience just what someone is going through in order to understand and relate to them, is perhaps a harder thing for a child to grasp. A child’s range of emotions is limited, so an artist has to put aside her own vast arsenal of emotions and all the adult associations that come with them, and focus on the fundamental ones. They must ask themselves, “How can I make this relatable to children?”
However, children are rarely the ones who choose which picture books are worthy to be printed or taken off the bookshelf. An artist cannot disregard that peripheral adult audience, or herself for that matter. Doing so would only strip the potential from a picture book, as Selma G. Lanes points out in Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures & Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature. “Adults should never discount their own reactions to books written for children, for no young child’s picture book has any claim to being a work of literature if it appeals only to children. If the work has no resonance for an interested and intelligent older reader, the chances are it has little growing room or lasting appeal for a child either”
After taking the audience into consideration, an artist must then look closely at the storyline. Regardless of whether the artist is also the writer, the artist has to be respectful of the words, but also should feel comfortable asserting her own take on the story. Illustrating a book is, after all, a form of individual creative expression, and that shouldn’t change just because a publisher pays an advance
The storyline may have a certain feeling to it that is obvious at first read, like Corduroy, by Don Freeman, which is about a lonely bear in a department store who wants nothing more than for someone to buy him and take him home.
His actions and inner dialogue throughout the story mimic what a little child might feel in a similar strange situation, with no friends or family to guide them. The feeling is fear.
Corduroy is afraid and helpless because the one thing he needs to do, find a button to fix his overalls, is the one thing he can’t do.
To an adult, this sounds ridiculous, but to a child, that feeling of helplessness is common and often frustrating. A child reading the story knows that Corduroy is searching for his missing button because that’s the reason why someone wouldn’t buy him and take him home. Again, there is a fear of someone not loving you or wanting you because of something you are lacking. The illustrations however do not show little Corduroy paralyzed by fear.
The artist has chosen to show a bear who is curious and a little unsure of himself. When Corduroy tips a lamp over and is discovered by a night watchman, his expression is one of helplessness, which changes to relief when he is put back on his shelf and bought the next day and taken home.
So even though the main emotion behind the storyline of Corduroy is fear and helplessness, the words are encouraging, the illustrations are subtle, and the conclusion assuages those fears. Not simply for the sake of having a “happy ending” but because the audience needs to know that it’s ok to be afraid. If little Corduroy had been left on the shelf and then thrown away in the trash at the end of the story, that would only show the audience that your reward for facing something scary, is something else even scarier.
Expressions, like those on the face of Corduroy, are only one way of showing emotion in children’s picture books. Other tools that illustrators use to create emotional responses in readers are color, shape, and line; the building blocks of art. How can the color red invoke a feeling of anger? How can a drooping line portray sadness? How can an abstract shape feel animated and happy?
To answer those questions, first take an example of two drawings, both done by Van Gogh. The first, entitled “Sorrow” is of a drooping and bent nude woman seated with her head buried in her hands.
The second is of a tree, bare of leaves, with twisted and knotted roots.
In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh explained that he tried to convey sorrow within both drawings, “…clinging to the earth convulsively and passionately and yet being half torn up by the storm. I wanted to express something of the struggle for life, in that pale, thin woman’s figure as well as in the black, gnarled, and knotty roots” (qtd. in Arnheim 452). Why do those roots look sorrowful to us? It could be because of something introduced by John Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy, which is “a notion…intended to describe, say, the sadness of weeping willows as a figment of empathy, anthropomorphism, primitive animism” (Arnheim 452). However, Rudolf Arnheim, author of Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, believes otherwise: "The comparison of an object’s expression with a human state of mind is a secondary process. The willow is not “sad” because it looks like a sad person. Rather, because the shape, direction, and flexibility of the branches convey passive hanging, a comparison with the structurally similar state of mind and body that we call sadness imposes itself secondarily." (452)
According to psychological research, young children prefer color over form. As they mature and age, there is a slow shift to preferring form over color (Sharpe 10). By studying how children express themselves through their own drawings, researchers Alschuler and Hattwick were able to determine a bit about the relationship between color preference and personality.
…children’s use of color, line, form and space, can give distinctive insights into personality. Color has been found to give the clearest insights into the child’s emotional life…children who emphasize color tend to have strong emotional orientation. Specific color preferences and specific patterns of color placement give clues to the emotional makeup of the child. Our data support the view that red is the most emotionally toned of all the colors…Emphasis on red has been found to be associated with either of two extremes: (a) feelings of affection and love; (b) feelings of aggression and hate. (qtd. in Sharpe 14).
Now examine an illustrator who exemplifies the use of color, shape, and line to unify the emotional theme of a children’s picture book; Ezra Jack Keats.
In his book, Whistle for Willie, Keats uses his signature collage style to great affect. He uses bright colors, but not exclusively. He breaks up the flat colors with textures and patterns.
His forms are simple and clear,
and his lines are used strategically to propel the story forward.
The story, about a little boy named Peter who lives in the city and wants nothing more than to learn how to whistle so his dog Willie will come running to him, has an emotional undertone of happiness.
There is no real outside conflict in the story. The challenge of learning to whistle is something Peter imposes on himself. It’s not something he has to do. There is a playful ease to the story that is mirrored in the simple forms and easy gestures of Peter.
Ezra Jack Keat’s stories were driven by clear easy emotions and he used the psychology of color, line, and shape to engage his audience. But the cultural context in which his books lived, was of a racially divided nation in the 1960s. Ezra Jack Keats was one of the first illustrators to create picture books about African American urban life, and even though he strove to do this with sensitivity and compassion, he was castigated “for representing stereotyped details and for not speaking with a Black voice” (Hearn, Clark and Clark 88). Keats, who grew up in Brooklyn, was a white man trying to chronicle a black child’s experience.
So even though Keats understood how to use emotion within his stories to create a bond between artist and reader, his choice to use African American characters as his own vehicle of expression failed to recognize the complicated cultural context in which his books would be viewed and critiqued. Does that make all of his books failures? Absolutely not. If anything his choice to use African American characters in books that became widely popular only opened doors for African American artists. Those artists, like John Steptoe , then went on to provide African American children with truly unique stories that spoke to their own cultural heritage.
All successful children’s book illustrators have learned to take what they know of their audience, their psychological response to color, shape, and line, and their cultural context and use that to create stories driven by emotion. Despite the limitations that come with being a children’s book illustrator, these challenges provide consistent exploration of creative limitations. That is what keeps the field of children’s book illustration interesting, and it is what will keep it populated with talented artists.
How are they able to do this? Unlike writers, illustrators don’t have the advantage of literally spelling out a scenario. They have to take a sentence like “Billy is sad,” and create art that can express that Billy is sad, hint at why he might be sad, offer a sense of empathy towards Billy, be careful not to discount their own feelings about Billy, all the while enticing the reader to turn the page. The character’s emotions, the overall emotional theme of the storyline, the reader’s emotions, and the artist’s emotions are all considerations when planning a children’s picture book. The successful books are the ones that are able to create a unity between those things.
The intended audience of a children’s picture book is an important consideration for an artist. Are emotions instinctual, or learned? Children have very little learned experience by the time they are old enough to read, or be read to, between the ages of one to seven. Therefore something like empathy, which requires you to know from past experience just what someone is going through in order to understand and relate to them, is perhaps a harder thing for a child to grasp. A child’s range of emotions is limited, so an artist has to put aside her own vast arsenal of emotions and all the adult associations that come with them, and focus on the fundamental ones. They must ask themselves, “How can I make this relatable to children?”
However, children are rarely the ones who choose which picture books are worthy to be printed or taken off the bookshelf. An artist cannot disregard that peripheral adult audience, or herself for that matter. Doing so would only strip the potential from a picture book, as Selma G. Lanes points out in Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures & Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature. “Adults should never discount their own reactions to books written for children, for no young child’s picture book has any claim to being a work of literature if it appeals only to children. If the work has no resonance for an interested and intelligent older reader, the chances are it has little growing room or lasting appeal for a child either”
After taking the audience into consideration, an artist must then look closely at the storyline. Regardless of whether the artist is also the writer, the artist has to be respectful of the words, but also should feel comfortable asserting her own take on the story. Illustrating a book is, after all, a form of individual creative expression, and that shouldn’t change just because a publisher pays an advance
The storyline may have a certain feeling to it that is obvious at first read, like Corduroy, by Don Freeman, which is about a lonely bear in a department store who wants nothing more than for someone to buy him and take him home.
His actions and inner dialogue throughout the story mimic what a little child might feel in a similar strange situation, with no friends or family to guide them. The feeling is fear.
Corduroy is afraid and helpless because the one thing he needs to do, find a button to fix his overalls, is the one thing he can’t do.
To an adult, this sounds ridiculous, but to a child, that feeling of helplessness is common and often frustrating. A child reading the story knows that Corduroy is searching for his missing button because that’s the reason why someone wouldn’t buy him and take him home. Again, there is a fear of someone not loving you or wanting you because of something you are lacking. The illustrations however do not show little Corduroy paralyzed by fear.
The artist has chosen to show a bear who is curious and a little unsure of himself. When Corduroy tips a lamp over and is discovered by a night watchman, his expression is one of helplessness, which changes to relief when he is put back on his shelf and bought the next day and taken home.
So even though the main emotion behind the storyline of Corduroy is fear and helplessness, the words are encouraging, the illustrations are subtle, and the conclusion assuages those fears. Not simply for the sake of having a “happy ending” but because the audience needs to know that it’s ok to be afraid. If little Corduroy had been left on the shelf and then thrown away in the trash at the end of the story, that would only show the audience that your reward for facing something scary, is something else even scarier.
Expressions, like those on the face of Corduroy, are only one way of showing emotion in children’s picture books. Other tools that illustrators use to create emotional responses in readers are color, shape, and line; the building blocks of art. How can the color red invoke a feeling of anger? How can a drooping line portray sadness? How can an abstract shape feel animated and happy?
To answer those questions, first take an example of two drawings, both done by Van Gogh. The first, entitled “Sorrow” is of a drooping and bent nude woman seated with her head buried in her hands.
The second is of a tree, bare of leaves, with twisted and knotted roots.
In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh explained that he tried to convey sorrow within both drawings, “…clinging to the earth convulsively and passionately and yet being half torn up by the storm. I wanted to express something of the struggle for life, in that pale, thin woman’s figure as well as in the black, gnarled, and knotty roots” (qtd. in Arnheim 452). Why do those roots look sorrowful to us? It could be because of something introduced by John Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy, which is “a notion…intended to describe, say, the sadness of weeping willows as a figment of empathy, anthropomorphism, primitive animism” (Arnheim 452). However, Rudolf Arnheim, author of Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, believes otherwise: "The comparison of an object’s expression with a human state of mind is a secondary process. The willow is not “sad” because it looks like a sad person. Rather, because the shape, direction, and flexibility of the branches convey passive hanging, a comparison with the structurally similar state of mind and body that we call sadness imposes itself secondarily." (452)
According to psychological research, young children prefer color over form. As they mature and age, there is a slow shift to preferring form over color (Sharpe 10). By studying how children express themselves through their own drawings, researchers Alschuler and Hattwick were able to determine a bit about the relationship between color preference and personality.
…children’s use of color, line, form and space, can give distinctive insights into personality. Color has been found to give the clearest insights into the child’s emotional life…children who emphasize color tend to have strong emotional orientation. Specific color preferences and specific patterns of color placement give clues to the emotional makeup of the child. Our data support the view that red is the most emotionally toned of all the colors…Emphasis on red has been found to be associated with either of two extremes: (a) feelings of affection and love; (b) feelings of aggression and hate. (qtd. in Sharpe 14).
Now examine an illustrator who exemplifies the use of color, shape, and line to unify the emotional theme of a children’s picture book; Ezra Jack Keats.
In his book, Whistle for Willie, Keats uses his signature collage style to great affect. He uses bright colors, but not exclusively. He breaks up the flat colors with textures and patterns.
His forms are simple and clear,
and his lines are used strategically to propel the story forward.
The story, about a little boy named Peter who lives in the city and wants nothing more than to learn how to whistle so his dog Willie will come running to him, has an emotional undertone of happiness.
There is no real outside conflict in the story. The challenge of learning to whistle is something Peter imposes on himself. It’s not something he has to do. There is a playful ease to the story that is mirrored in the simple forms and easy gestures of Peter.
Ezra Jack Keat’s stories were driven by clear easy emotions and he used the psychology of color, line, and shape to engage his audience. But the cultural context in which his books lived, was of a racially divided nation in the 1960s. Ezra Jack Keats was one of the first illustrators to create picture books about African American urban life, and even though he strove to do this with sensitivity and compassion, he was castigated “for representing stereotyped details and for not speaking with a Black voice” (Hearn, Clark and Clark 88). Keats, who grew up in Brooklyn, was a white man trying to chronicle a black child’s experience.
So even though Keats understood how to use emotion within his stories to create a bond between artist and reader, his choice to use African American characters as his own vehicle of expression failed to recognize the complicated cultural context in which his books would be viewed and critiqued. Does that make all of his books failures? Absolutely not. If anything his choice to use African American characters in books that became widely popular only opened doors for African American artists. Those artists, like John Steptoe , then went on to provide African American children with truly unique stories that spoke to their own cultural heritage.
All successful children’s book illustrators have learned to take what they know of their audience, their psychological response to color, shape, and line, and their cultural context and use that to create stories driven by emotion. Despite the limitations that come with being a children’s book illustrator, these challenges provide consistent exploration of creative limitations. That is what keeps the field of children’s book illustration interesting, and it is what will keep it populated with talented artists.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Mentors and Moving
Susan Sherman, art director at Charlesbridge Publishing, has agreed to be my mentor. I met with her about two weeks ago, and showed her close to everything I've done this past year. She had some wonderful input, and honest critiques of my work.
She reacted very positively to the oil work I had done my first semester, and let me know the many obstacles to getting my collage style published. I understand how competitive it is for illustrators, and apparently, with cut paper collage, it's even more competitive, and you have to be really skillful in order to get work in that medium. But I'm up for the challenge, and have no desire to go back to oils at this point. I can admit to myself though that I still have a ways to go to get technically good enough to compete with other cut paper illustrators.
In terms of the black and white "Dark" illustrations, Susan thought the dark character was way to scary for a children's book, and needed to be portrayed as mist. The patterned ink work was too much for her, and I think I agree that it needs to be toned down a bit (although it was a fun experiment!) She suggested printing out xerox copies of the spreads, and just taking some black paint to areas to try to tone down the patterns. She also said that my character's faces were not as expressive as my animals...She said that the daughter and mother looked too similar and needed to be differentiated more.
We talked about my idea for a children's book story that will take me through this next year to finish. I'll synopsis it in a later post, but she gave me some great advice on how to get started. She suggested that I focus on the emotion of the characters throughout the story. What is the driving emotion? How many children are in the story? How many grownups? The story takes place in a garden similar to the Boboli garden in Florence, so she suggested creating a map of the garden, and planing the characters route through the garden. I thought that was brilliant!
One of her other "homework" assignments was to read at least 50 children's books this semester, from different age categories, and write a brief paragraph on each of them. I read children's books all the time and have a pretty large collection of them, but I've never tried to write little reports about them. So this will be interesting, and I think very helpful.
So Susan and I met on a Friday, and then Saturday, my boyfriend Wayne and I moved into a new apartment! Two weeks later I've finally emptied all of my boxes and have taken over most of the closet space with my clothes. My studio sits in the extra bedroom, and it's a small miracle that I fit all of my crud into this new place. (When I say "all" of my stuff, I really mean everything that I use on a regular basis, and everything else is sitting in my parent's basement...thank you parents! You light up my life!)
Moving is exhausting and I thank my lucky stars that we live on the first floor. Now that all the boxes are unpacked, I can perhaps start to put down on paper what's been floating around in my head since meeting with Susan. Hopefully this move doesn't put me too far behind. I have high hopes for myself this semester, and it'd be a bummer to disappoint myself.
She reacted very positively to the oil work I had done my first semester, and let me know the many obstacles to getting my collage style published. I understand how competitive it is for illustrators, and apparently, with cut paper collage, it's even more competitive, and you have to be really skillful in order to get work in that medium. But I'm up for the challenge, and have no desire to go back to oils at this point. I can admit to myself though that I still have a ways to go to get technically good enough to compete with other cut paper illustrators.
In terms of the black and white "Dark" illustrations, Susan thought the dark character was way to scary for a children's book, and needed to be portrayed as mist. The patterned ink work was too much for her, and I think I agree that it needs to be toned down a bit (although it was a fun experiment!) She suggested printing out xerox copies of the spreads, and just taking some black paint to areas to try to tone down the patterns. She also said that my character's faces were not as expressive as my animals...She said that the daughter and mother looked too similar and needed to be differentiated more.
We talked about my idea for a children's book story that will take me through this next year to finish. I'll synopsis it in a later post, but she gave me some great advice on how to get started. She suggested that I focus on the emotion of the characters throughout the story. What is the driving emotion? How many children are in the story? How many grownups? The story takes place in a garden similar to the Boboli garden in Florence, so she suggested creating a map of the garden, and planing the characters route through the garden. I thought that was brilliant!
One of her other "homework" assignments was to read at least 50 children's books this semester, from different age categories, and write a brief paragraph on each of them. I read children's books all the time and have a pretty large collection of them, but I've never tried to write little reports about them. So this will be interesting, and I think very helpful.
So Susan and I met on a Friday, and then Saturday, my boyfriend Wayne and I moved into a new apartment! Two weeks later I've finally emptied all of my boxes and have taken over most of the closet space with my clothes. My studio sits in the extra bedroom, and it's a small miracle that I fit all of my crud into this new place. (When I say "all" of my stuff, I really mean everything that I use on a regular basis, and everything else is sitting in my parent's basement...thank you parents! You light up my life!)
Moving is exhausting and I thank my lucky stars that we live on the first floor. Now that all the boxes are unpacked, I can perhaps start to put down on paper what's been floating around in my head since meeting with Susan. Hopefully this move doesn't put me too far behind. I have high hopes for myself this semester, and it'd be a bummer to disappoint myself.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
One piece of paper
Wow! This is just about the coolest thing I think I've seen recently! This is an entry from a contest through the Hirshorn Museum in DC. The entrants had to create a piece of art using one piece of paper...
Check this link to see the rest of the entrys.
Thanks Jess for sending me this!
Check this link to see the rest of the entrys.
Thanks Jess for sending me this!
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
3rd Residency Summary
It’s amazing how 10 days of talking about art can regenerate enthusiasm for creating art. This last residency was probably the best I’ve had so far for several reasons. Number one, I didn’t get sick. Huge accomplishment. Number two, I felt more confident about the work I presented, which allowed me to be relatively relaxed during critiques. Number three, and most importantly, I now feel like I have a handle on the direction of my artwork.
My first two semesters were spent trying to justify being an illustrator in an MFA visual arts program amongst painters, photographers, etc. I whined, I complained, I grappled with trying to fit illustration into a “fine art” mentality. I now feel like I have a better understanding of what people have been saying to me all along about illustration. It’s not about high or low art. It’s more important to understand the context in which you work, and to try to understand the history and underlying influences of the work. Without that effort, you will be adrift in a world you don’t understand and have no business working in, regardless of whether you are a painter, photographer, installation artist, or illustrator.
That, along with something Laurel Sparks said during our Professional Development seminar lead me to another revelation. She said something along the lines of “you should always be working towards the kind of artist you would like to be.” So that made me wonder. I’m calling myself an illustrator, which is a vague term used for artists who work as caricaturists, conceptual illustrators, etc. But I would like to be a children’s book illustrator. So that’s what I should be working towards. It seems like an obvious conclusion, but it made me shift my perspective. If I’m unwilling to take a freelance illustration job that would pay well, but requires me to do a technical illustration of a building, then I’m certainly not going to do “edgy” cut paper porn just to legitimize me as an artist as I try to get through this graduate program. (The technical illustration was a real job that was offered to me the day after I got back from Boston, and the cut paper porn was an actual suggestion during my residency.)
So keeping both those things in mind, my goals for this next semester are as follows:
1. Focus my reading and papers on issues dealing with important aspects of children’s books and children’s book illustrations.
2.Concentrate on creative writing as a way of “remembering” my childhood, which will hopefully help in creating inspired illustrations that are personal and relatable.
3.Continue to pursue the two styles of collage and pen and ink, pushing my boundaries with exercises that don’t necessarily end in finished illustrations.
4.Find reliable ways of photographing and reproducing my artwork in book form!
Comments and suggestions from teachers and students:
1. Have a professional photographer shoot my work. – Laurel Sparks
2. Try to make my characters into aspects of myself so that things like the “Galumphing Grizzly Bears” are more relatable. – Laurel Sparks
3. Get past fine art and low art. It’s all about context. – John Kramer
4. Don’t lean on my skills as a way to legitimize my work. – John Kramer
5. Do small exercises using just shapes, either on the computer or by hand. – John Kramer
6. Reproduce the work I did in the previous semester into a small book, because I need to see what it looks like as a reproduction, especially if I’m claiming that an illustration is only meant to be seen as a reproduction. – John Kramer
7.Try to decide which body of work I should bring to completion for my thesis semester. – John Kramer
8. Keep in mind that I can create a finished children’s book for my thesis project. – John Kramer
9. Use something other than tulips to create tulips. – John Kramer
10. Use my childlike style to create more adult themed illustrations. – Kathleen Philbrick
11. Likes placement and composition of illustrations. Helps bring a sense of narrative. – Hannah Barrett
12. Likes the 3d quality of the collage, more so when you can see the edges. – Hannah Barrett
13. Enjoys the texture and patterns in the pen and ink drawings, which become values. – Hannah Barrett
14. Be mindful of contrasts and shadows. Perhaps do more black and white value studies before I make the paper? – Hannah Barrett
15. Push figures even more. Loosen up and push my boundaries. –Hannah Barrett
16. Read more biographies about children’s book writers and illustrators such as Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson, and Lewis Carroll. – Hannah Barrett
17. Look at William Hogarth, Walton Ford, Amy Cutler, Wilhelm Busch. – Hannah Barrett
18. De-personalize my work. No one cares about what I think, what I feel. The world is more interesting. – Constanze Ruhm
19. Look at Trina Robbins, Ella Moore, Larry Clark, Gus Van Sant. – Constanze Ruhm
20. Submit work to illustration related competitions and magazines such as Communication Arts. –Keith MacLelland
21. Move towards deeper, unpredictable, shocking, and edgy subject matter. – Keith MacLelland
22. Try some cut paper porn, or a field full of penises. – Keith MacLelland
23. Make list of possible topics for projects and see where that leads me. – Keith MacLelland
24. Look at Sue Coe and Henrik Drescher. –Keith MacLelland
25. Go darker. – Linc Cornell
26. Examine childhood fears or scars. – Linc Cornell
27. Read about the history of graphic design, artist books, posters, types and fonts, and of the alphabet. – Oscar Palacio and Deborah Davidson
Possible books
1. As many children’s books as possible!
2. Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature by Selma G. Lanes
3. Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture by Rukmini Bhaya Nair
4. The Child’s First Books: A Critical Study of Pictures and Texts by Donnarae MacCann
5. Words about Pictures: The Narrative art of Children’s Picture Books by Perry Nodelman
6. Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism by Peter Hunt
7. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America by Beverly Lyon Clark
8. Picturing Text: The Contemporary Children’s Picturebook by David Lewis
9. American Picturebooks from Noahs’ Ark to the Beast Within by Barbara Bader
10. Ezra Jack Keats: Artist and Picturebook Maker by Brian Alderson
11. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye by Rudolf Arnheim
12. Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book by David D. Hall
13. Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary by Scott E. Casper
14. An Introduction to Book History by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery
15. Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences by Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandras K. Hinchman
16. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self by Dan P. MacAdams
17. Illustration: A Theoretical and Contextual Perspective by Alan Male
18. The Psychology of Illustration: Basic Research by Dale M. Willows
19. Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century by Hal Foster
My first two semesters were spent trying to justify being an illustrator in an MFA visual arts program amongst painters, photographers, etc. I whined, I complained, I grappled with trying to fit illustration into a “fine art” mentality. I now feel like I have a better understanding of what people have been saying to me all along about illustration. It’s not about high or low art. It’s more important to understand the context in which you work, and to try to understand the history and underlying influences of the work. Without that effort, you will be adrift in a world you don’t understand and have no business working in, regardless of whether you are a painter, photographer, installation artist, or illustrator.
That, along with something Laurel Sparks said during our Professional Development seminar lead me to another revelation. She said something along the lines of “you should always be working towards the kind of artist you would like to be.” So that made me wonder. I’m calling myself an illustrator, which is a vague term used for artists who work as caricaturists, conceptual illustrators, etc. But I would like to be a children’s book illustrator. So that’s what I should be working towards. It seems like an obvious conclusion, but it made me shift my perspective. If I’m unwilling to take a freelance illustration job that would pay well, but requires me to do a technical illustration of a building, then I’m certainly not going to do “edgy” cut paper porn just to legitimize me as an artist as I try to get through this graduate program. (The technical illustration was a real job that was offered to me the day after I got back from Boston, and the cut paper porn was an actual suggestion during my residency.)
So keeping both those things in mind, my goals for this next semester are as follows:
1. Focus my reading and papers on issues dealing with important aspects of children’s books and children’s book illustrations.
2.Concentrate on creative writing as a way of “remembering” my childhood, which will hopefully help in creating inspired illustrations that are personal and relatable.
3.Continue to pursue the two styles of collage and pen and ink, pushing my boundaries with exercises that don’t necessarily end in finished illustrations.
4.Find reliable ways of photographing and reproducing my artwork in book form!
Comments and suggestions from teachers and students:
1. Have a professional photographer shoot my work. – Laurel Sparks
2. Try to make my characters into aspects of myself so that things like the “Galumphing Grizzly Bears” are more relatable. – Laurel Sparks
3. Get past fine art and low art. It’s all about context. – John Kramer
4. Don’t lean on my skills as a way to legitimize my work. – John Kramer
5. Do small exercises using just shapes, either on the computer or by hand. – John Kramer
6. Reproduce the work I did in the previous semester into a small book, because I need to see what it looks like as a reproduction, especially if I’m claiming that an illustration is only meant to be seen as a reproduction. – John Kramer
7.Try to decide which body of work I should bring to completion for my thesis semester. – John Kramer
8. Keep in mind that I can create a finished children’s book for my thesis project. – John Kramer
9. Use something other than tulips to create tulips. – John Kramer
10. Use my childlike style to create more adult themed illustrations. – Kathleen Philbrick
11. Likes placement and composition of illustrations. Helps bring a sense of narrative. – Hannah Barrett
12. Likes the 3d quality of the collage, more so when you can see the edges. – Hannah Barrett
13. Enjoys the texture and patterns in the pen and ink drawings, which become values. – Hannah Barrett
14. Be mindful of contrasts and shadows. Perhaps do more black and white value studies before I make the paper? – Hannah Barrett
15. Push figures even more. Loosen up and push my boundaries. –Hannah Barrett
16. Read more biographies about children’s book writers and illustrators such as Beatrix Potter, Hans Christian Anderson, and Lewis Carroll. – Hannah Barrett
17. Look at William Hogarth, Walton Ford, Amy Cutler, Wilhelm Busch. – Hannah Barrett
18. De-personalize my work. No one cares about what I think, what I feel. The world is more interesting. – Constanze Ruhm
19. Look at Trina Robbins, Ella Moore, Larry Clark, Gus Van Sant. – Constanze Ruhm
20. Submit work to illustration related competitions and magazines such as Communication Arts. –Keith MacLelland
21. Move towards deeper, unpredictable, shocking, and edgy subject matter. – Keith MacLelland
22. Try some cut paper porn, or a field full of penises. – Keith MacLelland
23. Make list of possible topics for projects and see where that leads me. – Keith MacLelland
24. Look at Sue Coe and Henrik Drescher. –Keith MacLelland
25. Go darker. – Linc Cornell
26. Examine childhood fears or scars. – Linc Cornell
27. Read about the history of graphic design, artist books, posters, types and fonts, and of the alphabet. – Oscar Palacio and Deborah Davidson
Possible books
1. As many children’s books as possible!
2. Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature by Selma G. Lanes
3. Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture by Rukmini Bhaya Nair
4. The Child’s First Books: A Critical Study of Pictures and Texts by Donnarae MacCann
5. Words about Pictures: The Narrative art of Children’s Picture Books by Perry Nodelman
6. Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism by Peter Hunt
7. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America by Beverly Lyon Clark
8. Picturing Text: The Contemporary Children’s Picturebook by David Lewis
9. American Picturebooks from Noahs’ Ark to the Beast Within by Barbara Bader
10. Ezra Jack Keats: Artist and Picturebook Maker by Brian Alderson
11. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye by Rudolf Arnheim
12. Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book by David D. Hall
13. Perspectives on American Book History: Artifacts and Commentary by Scott E. Casper
14. An Introduction to Book History by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery
15. Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences by Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandras K. Hinchman
16. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self by Dan P. MacAdams
17. Illustration: A Theoretical and Contextual Perspective by Alan Male
18. The Psychology of Illustration: Basic Research by Dale M. Willows
19. Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century by Hal Foster
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays to all my friends and family! I couldn't afford to send Christmas cards this year, but I wanted to do something to show you all some holiday cheer...so enjoy this partridge in a pear tree, from me to you, with love!
And just for fun, here's some pictures of Wayne, his nephew Tyler, and myself next to our annual gingerbread house masterpiece!
And just for fun, here's some pictures of Wayne, his nephew Tyler, and myself next to our annual gingerbread house masterpiece!
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