Chasing Light

José Saramago, 1922 – 2010

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they’re there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it’s the other side that matters

- José Saramago

Every man has his own patch of earth to cultivate. What’s important is that he dig deep.

- José Saramago

David McCullough | The Johnstown Flood

A locomotive whistle was a matter of some personal importance to a railroad engineer. It was tuned and worked (even “played”) according to his own particular choosing. The whistle was part of the make-up of the man; he was known for it as much as he was known for the engine he drove. And aside from its utilitarian functions, it could also be an instrument of no little amusement. Many an engineer could get a simple tune out of his whistle, and for those less musical it could be used to aggravate a cranky preacher in the middle of his Sunday sermon or to signal hello through the night to a wife or lady friend. But there was no horseplay about tying down the chord. A locomotive whistle going without letup meant one thing on the railroad. It meant there was something very wrong.

The whistle of John Hess’s engine had been going now for maybe five minutes at most. It was not on long but it was the only warning anyone was to hear and nearly everyone in East Conemaugh heard it and understood instantly what it meant.

-David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood

He saw the whole Mussante family sailing by on what appeared to be a barn door. Mussante was a fruit dealer on Washington Street, a small, dark Italian with a dropping mustache, who had been in Johnstown now perhaps three years. He had had a pushcart at first, then opened the little place not far from the Heiser store. Victor knew him well and his wife and two children. Now there they were speeding by with a Saratoga trunk open beside them, and every one of them busy packing things into it. And then a mass of wreckage heaved up out of the water and crushed them.

But he had no time to think more about them or anything else. He was heading for a mound of wreckage lodged between the Methodist Church and a three-story brick building on the other side of where Locust Street had been. The next thing he knew he was part of the jam. His roof had catapulted in amongst it, and there, as trees and beams shot up on one side or crashed down on the other, he went leaping back and forth, ducking and dodging, trying desperately to keep his footing, while more and more debris kept booming into the jam.

-David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood

Weak and shivering with cold, she lay down on the mattress, realizing for the first time that all her clothes had been torn off except for her underwear. Night was coming on and she was terribly frightened. She started praying in German, which was the only way she had been taught to pray.

A small white house went sailing by, almost running her down. She called out to the one man who was riding on top, straddling the peak of the roof and hugging the chimney with both arms. But he ignored her, or perhaps never heard her, and passed right by.

‘You terrible man,’ she shouted after him. ‘I’ll never help you.’

-David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood

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Ellen von Unwerth | Revenge

I love all the old pictures–of spanking and Bettie Page and corsets. But you can’t do spanking in fashion, so I wanted to do a project where I could really let go and get girls who also love those things. I thought it would be even more sexy when there was a story to go with it, so it wasn’t that difficult to write a little storyboard.

I had chapters, so there were 10 drawings in total. Each girl had a character and I used the storyboard to explain the story to the girls. But there was still freedom to play.

-Ellen Von Unwerth

Ellen von Unwerth | Jean Seberg

For more than twenty-five years, Ellen Von Unwerth has celebrated movies through her fashion photography. Her photographs are generally straightforward, without special effects of the allusion to a more complicated narrative; she simply uses characters from noted films as the protagonists of her fashion essays, such as the piece for the October 1990 issue of Vogue (available here, wm) in which models are used to reincarnate Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave counterculture film Breathless (1959). Von Unwerth’s fashion essay concentrates on the breezy life of the doomed lovers as they tool around Paris riding a motor scooter, smoke at cafés, and snuggle in bed. Von Unwerth exploits readers’ identification with the characters in the film, especially the generation that came of age in the 1960s, when European culture and bohemian antiestablishment lifestyle were the vogue. More specifically, the New Wave French films radically changed the way movies were made. They were consonant with the disjunctive and nonlinear literature of the time. Their off-beat characters (often based on American movie gangsters) and the details of their behavior and dress helped create an identity for members of the American couterculture.

-Susan Kismaric & Eva Respini, Fashioning Fiction

André Kertész | The Place de la Concorde , Paris, 1928

Look at the atmosphere, the reflection. Why did I do it this way? Instinct. I have no other explanation. The subject offered itself to me and I took advantage.

-Andrés Kertész, Kertész on Kertész

Robert Frank | London & Wales

Black and white are the colors of photography. To me they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.

-Robert Frank

Washington, DC | Lincoln Memorial

Offutt talked big about Lincoln as a wrestler and Bill Clary, who ran a saloon 30 steps north of the Offutt store, bet Offutt $10 that Lincoln couldn’t throw Jack Armstrong, the Clary’s Grove champion. Sports from miles around came to a level square next to Offutt’s store to see the match; bets of money, knives, trinkets, tobacco, drinks, were put up. Armstrong, short and powerful, aimed from the first to get in close to his man and use his thick muscular strength. Lincoln held him off with long arms, wore down his strength, got him out of breath, surprised and “rattled.” They pawed and clutched in many holds and twists till Lincoln threw Armstrong and had both shoulders to the grass. Armstrong’s gang started toward Lincoln with cries and threats. Lincoln stepped to the Offutt store wall, braced himself, and told the gang he would fight, race or wrestle any who wanted to try him. Then Jack Armstrong broke through the gang, shook Lincoln’s hand, told them Lincoln was “fair,” and, “the best feller that ever broke into this settlement.”

-Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln – The Prairie Years

André Kertész | Rooster, New York, 1952

Here is a picture I took the first day I moved in — a rainy day full of atmosphere.

-André Kertész, Kertész on Kertész

Frank Frazetta | 1928-2010

The great pulp painter Frank Frazetta died yesterday. His brushstrokes were the literal entrance into the world of pulp novels when I was a kid. A Frazetta cover would herald the different worlds inside those cheap mass market pages, enthralling me as a suburban kid, reading Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft and others.

He may have been the first artist I actively sought out, not to buy paintings or monograms but to purchase cheap Dell paperbacks with those fantastic luminous covers.

Here are some of his more famous paintings. I will post a collection of his sketches, pencil drawings and pen and ink work which I always favored, maybe because the deftness of his hand was so readily apparent.

Rest in peace, Frank. And thank you.

Note: two great articles in the Los Angeles Times on Frazetta, one by Lance Laspina, the director of Frazetta: Painting with Fire and one by Guillermo del Toro

When it came to my art, I went my own way and did not follow the trends.

-Frank Frazetta

By the time I was a teenager, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I was a born draftsman and liked all forms of art, so I just knew that’s what I wanted to do.

-Frank Frazetta

Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving were my big days. I guess I drew more Santa’s, bunnies, and turkeys on blackboards than anyone could count. At the insistence of one of my teachers, my parents enrolled me in the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts when I was eight. The Academy was little more than a one floor/three room affair with a total of thirty students ranging in age from eight–me!–to eighty. I still remember the Professor Michele [Michael] Falanga’s look of skepticism as I signed in. He was rolling his eyes and you could almost see the thought balloon over his head, “Oh no! Not another child prodigy!” He sat me down with a pencil and paper and asked me to copy a postcard featuring a group of realistically rendered ducks. When he returned later to see how far I had progressed, he snatched up my drawing exclaiming, “Mama mia!” and ran off waving it in the air, calling everyone over to look at it. I thought I was in some kind of trouble.

-Frank Frazetta

He [Falanga] died when I was twelve, right about the time he was making arrangements to send me off to Italy at his own expense to study fine art. I haven’t the vaguest idea of whether it would have really affected my areas of interest. I don’t know, but I doubt it. You see, we never had any great conversations. He might look over your shoulder and say. “Very nice, but perhaps if you did this or that…” He spoke very broken English and he kind of left you on your own. I think I learned more from my friends there, especially Albert Pucci. Falanga would look at some of the comics stuff I was doing and say, “What a waste, what a waste! You should be in Italy and paint the street scene and become a very famous fine artiste!” And that didn’t thrill me! After he died the students tried to keep the school going; we had become such close friends that we couldn’t bear to close up shop so we all chipped in and paid the rent and continued to hold classes. I did nude life drawings and still lifes; we’d paint outdoors. It was all totally different from the way I work now, but it taught me a lot about brush technique and perspective and helped me to develop my own style.

-Frank Frazetta

When I was about 15 someone in my family introduced me to John Giunta. He was a professional artist who was working for Bernard Bailey’s comics publishing company and he really wasn’t a very personable guy. He was very aloof and self-conscious and hard for me to talk to, but he was really very talented. He had an exceptional ability, but it was coupled with a total lack of self-confidence and an inability to communicate with people. Being around him really opened up my eyes, though, because he was really that good. He had an interesting style, a good sense of spotting and his blacks worked well. You can see a lot of his influence even today in some of my ink work.

-Frank Frazetta

I hope my work has inspired young artists. I have always tried to maintain my freedom as an artist and I feel it is one of the main reasons I have been successful.

-Frank Frazetta

When Ralph [Mayo] took over he pulled me aside and said, “Frank, you stuff is great, but you need to learn some anatomy.” When I was in school with Falanga the emphasis was on feeling, not on the nuts and bolts, so I really didn’t understand what he meant by ‘anatomy.’ So Ralph handed me an anatomy book and when I went home that night I had decided to learn anatomy. I started with page one and copied the entire book – everything in one night, from the skeleton up. I came back the next day like a dumb kid and said, “Thank you very much, I just learned my anatomy.” Of course Ralph fell over and roared with laughter. “Frankie, you silly bastard! I’ve been studying for ten years and I still don’t know anatomy, and you went home and learned it last night?!” But the thing was I had learned an awful lot. I had the ability to absorb things and he saw an improvement in my work right away. It amazed him and that meant a lot to me. From that point on I developed pretty rapidly: I started to do things with figures that made sense. I worked for Mayo and Standard for a few years, doing things like “Looie Laziebones” and all the funny animal stuff.

-Frank Frazetta.

What I do is create images, period.

-Frank Frazetta

André Kertész | Landing Pigeon, New York, 1960

This was taken around 59th Street where they had demolished the houses, and I saw a pigeon flying in and out. The original idea for this photograph dates back to my days in Paris, where I also saw some old run-down houses and wanted to photograph them with a pigeon. But the pigeon never came. Here in New York I sat and waited. Time and time again I went back to the same place, but it was never right. Then one day I saw the lonely pigeon. I took maybe two or three pictures. The moment was here. I had waited maybe thirty years for that instant.

-André Kertész, Kertész on Kertész