Getting Sketchy with Gary Panter

Satiroplastic

The opening pages of Gary Panter’s Satiroplastic (Drawn & Quarterly, 2005) include sketches made while Panter was in Oaxaca, Mexico. In the introduction to the book Panter explains how the sketches are not chronologically ordered. Each time he did a drawing, he opened the book up haphazardly to a page and began drawing; further evidence of Panter’s random-abstract brilliance.

The sketches in Satiroplastic are in many ways more accessible than Panter’s most popularized classic comics, Jimbo in Purgatory and Jimbo’s Inferno. In fact, his loose line and highly impressionistic responses to his surroundings are an inspiration—they “give permission” to stop worrying and just draw. Compared with other cartoonist-artists who have published work from their sketchbooks (in no particular order, Adrian Tomine, Peter Kuper, Seth, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, Hernandez Brothers), Panter’s sketches are on the whole far less refined—in the best sense of the expression. But then, Panter is…different. And the raw reflections of Panter’s inner world are a welcome change from the more stiff and fastidious approaches of other artists.

The jacket cover of Satiroplastic suggests, “SATIROPLASTIC is the first of a three-volume sketchbook series by the legendary artist Gary Panter. Each volume will be an exact, unedited reproduction of Panter’s own sketchbook, allowing the reader a stunning, inside look of a visual genius.” The second and third volumes are slow to arrive, if they will be published by Drawn & Quarterly at all.

Gary Panter (Monograph)

 Volume two of the opus magnum Gary Panter (PictureBox, 2008) is a collection of Panter’s work in monograph form, edited by Dan Nadel. Volume 2 of this exquisite two-volume boxed set includes 323 pages of drawings taken from Panter’s sketchbooks. Many of the sketches span a two-page spread, and every even footer of the spread includes the title of the sketchbook from which the drawing has been reproduced, as well as the date it was drawn.

The opening pages of Gary Panter Volume 2 display a stack of eighteen sketchbooks. The end section entitled “Some Sketchbook Covers 1973-2006” includes photos of 67 different books, and “Some Sketchbook Title Pages 1973-2006” shows six pages of title pages from 43 different sketchbooks demonstrating Panter’s voluminous output.

Of particular note in Volume 1 is an extended meditation found on the sketches Panter drew (included in Satiroplastic) during the bombing of the twin towers on September 11, 2001, and worthy of quoting in full:

 Excerpt from “Gary Panter: Taking Inventory”

Perhaps the most significant observational drawings done by the artist are contained in the sketchbook entitled Satiroplastic, which was completed between December 1999 and November 2001. This sketchbook stands alone in the sense that of its 102 drawings, all but a handful are done from life. Toward the end of the book the flow of landscapes, city scenes, and interior views is interrupted by five drawings: Where Was the Air Force, The Tower Left, Empires, The Second Tower, and The Impossible; all first-hand depictions of the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. In my opinion, these stand among the handful of most important works made by any artist with reference to the events surrounding September 11, owing their power to a humble lack of hyperbole.

While on that day many citizens of New York—artists and non-artists alike—reached for a camera or just turned on the TV, Panter reached for his sketchbook. This simple act reveals not only how drawing is an essential and natural activity for the artist, but more importantly, it shows his true colors as a humanist of the first order. If one believes that art, and drawing in particular, is a means for thinking, feeling, and understanding the world, then drawing the Trade Center towers as they collapses is perhaps the most rational thing one could do when faced with the incomprehensible. On the page in Satiroplastic that follows The Impossible is First Day of Soccer, a simple drawing showing a schoolyard scene later that September when Olive, Panter’s daughter, began a new after-school activity. Gary Panter’s drawing is a true compendium of life as lived in this world: alternatingly absurd, beautiful, strange, and poignant. Thankfully for us, he continues to use his pen to diligently take stock of all human affairs (205).

–RICHARD KLEIN

Richard Klein is exhibitions director of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conneticut, where he organized Gary Panter’s 2008 exhibition Daydream Trap.

Source: Nadel, Dan (Ed.) Gary Panter. PictureBox, Brooklyn, 2008. Excerpt used by permission of Dan Nadel.

Diario de Oaxaca by Peter Kuper

Now that I’ve signed up as a participant in the Sketchbook Project, I’ve managed to devise a clever distraction from actually sketching regularly, in the form of conducting “research” into the sketchbooks of other artists. It’s led to the realization that there is an important body of sketchbooks that have been reproduced and made commercially available by various publishers, documenting comic artists’ process in addition to finished works. Without exception, the most striking feature of all of these’ sketchbooks is the breadth of representation that these creators are capable of depicting; their artistry extends far beyond the medium of cartooning. Here is the first in a series of posts that I plan on writing on cartoonists’ published sketchbooks.

Diario de Oaxaca by Peter Kuper (PM Press, 2009)

Kuper’s “sketchbook journal of two years in Mexico” was an especially timely read for me, since when Kuper was in Oaxaca, teachers in the city were in the midst of an ongoing strike. Teachers in BC have spent the last eight months at the bargaining table, and they are engaged in a limited job action—with no signs of reaching an agreement any time soon. Though the BCTF’s circumstances are arguably very different, in these interesting times one cannot help to draw comparisons between the attitudes of Big Government worldwide and public servants’ demands for greater work equity.

But politics aside, Diario de Oaxaca was a pleasure if only for its lush language and illustrations that we as readers are invited to vicariously live through. Kuper reminds us at every turn that the world is bigger than us. His drawings are testament to a tremendous cross-section of life in Mexico, from tacky tourists to teachers’ strike occupants, local police, insects, vegetation, its vast array of wild dogs and Oaxaca’s indigenous peoples.

On many pages, a dynamic media fusion transpires, with pen and ink, coloured pencil, watercolour, photographs and bilingual captions conjoining in any number of combinations. Among the stunning pages included in this book are:

• People blurred with movement, loosely sketched in coloured pencil over top of a static setting, seemingly some sort of a mall or metro station (84)
• Kuper’s vivid description of the Monarch butterfly’s migration site (70-75)
• Works from an exhibit curated by Kuper, with contributing artists providing self-portraits based on the theme of the Day of the Dead (78-79)
• Photographs of local resistance art (134-139)
• Heads designed entirely out of various dead insects and insect body parts (121, 123)
• Sketches and photographs of a clash between protestors and riot police (35-41)
• A lucid description of the many odours Kuper encounters on a walk, with visual representations of each sense impression follow immediately afterwards (162-163)
• Wild dogs! (166-167)
• Flying temples! (92-93, 172)

Some points of similarity that I found intriguing about Kuper, over and above what I already knew about him from Stop Forgetting to Remember–I also went through a very early fascination with insects, and used to “map out” their body parts on graph paper, using a Peterson Field Guide to Insects that I still own to this day. And our daughters were both born in the same year. Without knowing Kuper, reading his description and seeing a photograph of his daughter holding baby turtles, about to let them go into the sea (128), was a rapturous moment even for me.

I grew up reading Spy vs. Spy and was recently turned onto World War 3 Illustrated, in particular because the Graphic Radicals exhibit came to Victoria last year, with Seth Tobocman in attendance. Seeing such a wide variety of comic artists’ work up close isn’t an opportunity that I’ve had very often. I took full advantage of it, returning several times for another look.

Diario de Oaxaca is the work of a fully matured artist. Kuper’s snapshots of his time abroad demonstrate his versatility with brush, pen and coloured pencil. The colours in Kuper’s drawings are vibrant and full. One of the joys of artists’ sketchbooks being made public is the emphasis on process, and the free flowing collage of ideas displayed on the page. In between the covers of this sketchbook journal, we see the breadth of inquiry that Kuper brings to his work, and we recognize that for all his cartooning greatness, his genius extends even further beyond.