h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Enjoyed this one thoroughly spim.

Thank you. Perhaps I should draw in the nude more often.

If you say it's in the name of art you may just be able to get away with it. I didn't, but that's just me .

Wowbagger, once again impersonating Sid James ('cor blimey!)

Yes, but *you* were a pavement artist at the time.

Yes I two like both of your wonderfull cartoons, off to the restroom then --->

-- DoctorMO --

There now you have it. The warmth of the early work, the abstracted minimalism of the later - both, to the max.
*lights pipe, relaxes*
Ahhh..
Thank you.
~jwf~

Thank *you* ~jwf~. It was always bubbling away underneath... have you ever spent a happy ten minutes watching peas as their water boils? I needed someone to turn the heat up underneath me so that I could shiver and shake, taking tentative hops from the bottom, looking side to side, waiting for the nod from my comrades, before suddenly breaking for the surface.

Peas ..? I think I gave 'em up for Lentils. A small sacrifice to be sure. Can Spring be far behind?

The work under discussion, The Reclining Smoker, is at once so elegantly and so essentially 'simple', consisting (apparently) of only a few graceful strokes of genius. One can feel the fluid repose. Picasso got pretty good at it too, but he was cross-eyed.

And it's so nice to see (in my view anyway) a relaxed male figure so elegantly and simply splayed. James Thurber used to convey a similar grace and relaxed poise to some of his women, but his men were always ...trepid and on edge. Or already in full flight.
I can feel the tension easing away even now.

peace
~jwf~

Should any of that seem OTT or otherwise give you pause to doubt the sincerity of my praise, then please be aware I have stolen The Reclining Smoker" for my homepage.
U162344.

~j~

So you have; I'm flattered. I like OTT and don't think it connotes insincerity. As for the few simple strokes, if you look closely you can see them betrayed by the ghosts of former lines, but I quite often incorporate those ghosts in more complicated works. Get to work you wraiths! I'm not having you floating around here like a bunch of bone idle boneless good for nothings! And take those shades off!!

Apart from when I'm grinding my teeth over a carefully constructed, I mean, effortlessly flowing line, that is the sort of position I tend to adopt myself, so my years of training in mastering the slouch have not gone to waste.

Do lentils shiver with excitement? I can't imagine that they do but perhaps I'm wrong.

The lines of a an experanced man.

-- DoctorMO --

> the ghosts of former lines, but I quite often incorporate those ghosts in more complicated works. <

Yes, and in a most amazingly efficient and economical way! And so long as they don't 'darken' the elegance with a sinister quality (as some have suggested) they do 'work'. For me, even the darkest ones work!
And yet I hasten to add, Let nothing I or anyone has said, about the darker side of your images, impede you. Remember the 'bad guy' wizard in LOTR is wearing a pure white coat and Gandalph is in dire black. My comments about the warmth of 'the young boy with pipe' (earlier one) were really my delight to see your 'range', to realise you weren't confined, in some 'savant' way, to the dark side of anorexia and alcoholism that passes for high style in some circles.
Experiment, experiment, push and push harder. Your genius will be rewarded. Your talent is too great to be ignored.
And except to continue to quietly appreciate your future works, I will shut up now and let you get on with it.
peace
jwf
PS: [I lied, apparently I have more to say.] I have just had a vizion of the 'young boy with pipe' far off in the background, on the banks of a river, wrapped in his tweed cloak and deerstalker cap, holding a fishing pole, smiling - a line reels outward toward us across the water, and in the foreground, filling the frame, rising from the river, a large angry fish, dancing on its tail, with fear and hatred in his eyes and a hook in his mouth is staring off toward his 'angler'.

PS: Just a courtesy note to advise that I have moved 'The Reclining Smoker' farther down my page to give it more time to load up.
I wouldn't want you to visit and think I'd thrown it out .
peace
~jwf~

Thanks for the courtesy note. I can get around to replying to your previous message now. As I've said before, there will always be a dark tint to my work (those shades again) but, like you, I was concerned that I'd worn myself a rut of misery, which didn't necessarily reflect how I felt about life. I was also concerned because it seems that it is far easier to express fear and loathing than joie de vivre (my favourites are Miss Tibia and The Seagull, especially the former, where I think I came closest to this). I think of Winston in 1984 and his ease in joining in the... three minutes' hate was it? Perhaps this is to do with a level of exorcism that needs to take place: joie de vivre is its own reward but melancholy needs letting. Nevertheless, I was growing sick of it. But progress comes in leaps and plateaux I have found.

I've greatly enjoyed your most constructive of criticisms, ~jwf~, do drop by again.

Am I the only one who saw this and thought immediately of the New Yorker?

Hello Frag, long time...

No, you are not the only one. It is similar to the style of anorexic fashion adopted by the New Yorker illustrators. The magazine's style is most influenced by James Thurber who was an important writer and cartoonist for that magazine as well as being a published 'author' in his own write.

In those days before TV and the Web, Thurber combined visual arts and literacy in a way that films, animations, and now even TV and most online ventures have failed to do.

First there was the word, the written word and the book. Then there was a period of 'illustrated' books and newsmagazines in the 19th century - from Audobon to Lewis Carrol to Beardsley and the Police Gazette.

Then there was James Thurber who brought literacy to art or perhaps the other way round to The New Yorker illustrated magazine. It was this new mixed media sophistication that is at the roots of the 'New Yorker'-slim-cigarette-holder style, which exists now without much content. Or what content there might be, is at odds with the the art department which is trapped in the '30s longing for the '20s.

Spimcoot's vision, like Thurbers, is beyond mere 'high style fashion'. There is comfort and humanity to his art that is lost to the rigid anorexics in their painfully expensive clothes that represent the good life to generations of New Yorker readers. It is probably the only magazine that would still illustrate a cigarette holder even though no one uses cigarette holders anymore. Well perhaps as many as still wear top hats and tails.

peace
jwf