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I'm going out of town for a long weekend, so I'm leaving you with this, a cover feature I wrote at the height of my obsession with big-eyed art in the mid-1990s. The cover features elements by
Paul Mavrides composited (badly!) by Frank Kozik. This was a fun feature to work on, and I was thrilled to interview some of my favorite artists for it:
Bill Griffith, cartoonist
auteur of Zippy the Pinhead; Dan Perkins, better known as
Tom Tomorrow; extraordinarily talented illustrator
Mitch O'Connell, who frequently includes Gig's "Potato Chip" in his work; and John Waters, who should require no introduction here. Enjoy.
Note: I no longer believe the story about Walter Keane "stealing" the idea of painting big-eyed children from his crazy wife, nor do I believe she painted his works for him. I'll write more about this bizarre case later.
5 comments:
Nice article! That's a fine collection of kitsch messiahs you interviewed.
I've been putting a ceramic Gig on top of the ol' Xmas tree for a couple decades - it seems to like it up there.
Nice piece. I knew even as a child that those big eyed paintings were kitsch. In fact, when I was a teen and first heard the word kitsch, I immediately connected the big eyed movement with the word.
The cover art was "borrowed" from an early National Lampoon cover in 1973. It was really startling and funny because it was so startling.
http://lampoon.rwinters.com/Lampoon1973.htm
Uh... yes, I know.
OOops..sorry Peteykins...didn't scan that article as carefully as I should have. The big-eyed trend is a hoot, though, and I'm enjoying your blog in any incarnation.
I now view tour buses in an entirely different way as I walk around Washington. So, so, so many of them!!!! I have nightmares of being run down by one. (or the people spilling off of them in mid-July...oh, the people-watching possibilities there!)
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