On Paper…

Pencil, pen, crayon, charcoal, on paper…create a world of meaning – where? In our minds.

In the book/film, Black Robe, the story of French Jesuit missionaries in Canada in the early 17th century, there is a passage in which one of the priests demonstrates the power of writing to the Algonquins. They have no equivalent tool in their culture. He takes aside one tribe member and asks him to whisper his name into his ear. He writes the name on a piece of paper and then hands it to another missionary who is standing some distance away. The second man speaks the name of the Algonquin and all the tribesmen are amazed. How did the name travel across space? There was no sound, no hand signs. Somehow, the name was captured in the scratches of black on the piece of paper!

Works on paper take the ideas and images of the creator and capture them for us to see, so that we can digest them in our minds. I have always thought about this a lot, this is what art is (and not just on paper) but lately I’ve been thinking about it on paper because of my preoccupation with James Gillray and comics. If you doubt that last connection, click on this thumbnail and examine this work from 1800 by Gillray: “Democracy: or a Sketch of the Life of [Napoleon] Buonaparte.”

Could not this have been produced, just this year, by Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury fame? (Many versions of the image were hand colored.)

For a superb social history of the English satirical print in the time of Gillray, I recommend the immensely enjoyable and beautifully produced book, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in 18th Century London by Vic Gatrell. You will even get a history of laughter!

The history of comics, and its relationship to art and ideas is wonderfully presented by Scott McCloud in his book, Understanding Comics.

Of course, the title is a nod to Marshall McCluhan’s Understanding Media, which is the inspiration for his text, although I think McCloud is better at explaining his more clear and sensible ideas than was McCluhan. Perhaps too, McCloud is a fan of the book that I never tire of promoting,

Prints and Visual Communication, by William Ivins. This book delves into the fundamental philosophical issues of just what reproduced images, i.e., prints, are, and what they do to us and for us. It tells us how they became ubiquitous – the movement towards mass reproduction of photographs in periodicals is the epic challenge motivating the ‘plot’ of the book – and lets us imagine what the world would have been like before this earthshaking change.

Meanwhile, these panels are from the comic tale, “One of the Wonders of the World,” by Richard Sala. This is, perhaps, my all-time favorite. I hope to post more on comics, with more examples, later.