“Slugs are a symptom of a problem – they always want plants that are dying or overfed. It’s all about having healthy plants and a balanced holistic garden. If you don’t want caterpillars, you need birds that eat caterpillars, but you have to have some or they’ll go somewhere else. It’s all about balance”.. Don now prides himself on being a bit scruffy to encourage hedge-hogs, bugs and the birds which feast on insects.. “Curlews have perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful of all birdcalls, and their call marks the seasons. Then they were silent. And starlings..” (Monty Don, DT)
In such milieux, line and time are more or less in rhyme, with the constant movement and metamorphosis of materials. An organic farm works on exactly the same principle of messiness that allows in predators.
Messiness and untidiness basically imply there are many more broken lines and interesting fiddly bits. Another way of saying it is that this isn’t resolved space.
Whereas modern societies increasingly live in resolved space, where such as mini-drones are cruising about, a healthy society lives in unresolved space – fields, prairies and the like.
Where there are dirt and prey and crumbs of soil the human organism is exposed to germs and develops immunities, especially frolicking children().
The problem is that resolved space is very attractive to the ego, being composed of numbers and perspective. This issue is hinted at in Greek pottery, where the abstract, geometrical designs are sketched out manually, meaning they are not perfect. They have individual expression.
The vitality of expressive line in Greek art is attested to by New York’s own Fine Arts Building
Motto “No day without a line”
Attributed to ancient painter Apelles.
Pliny tells two anecdotes – the first of which relates to skill of cartooning.
Many years later, while travelling by sea, a storm forced Apelles to land in Ptolemy's Egyptian kingdom. Ptolemy's jester was suborned by Apelles' rivals to convey to the artist a spurious invitation to dine with Ptolemy. Apelles' unexpected arrival enraged the king. Ptolemy demanded to know who had given Apelles the invitation, and with a piece of charcoal from the fireplace Apelles drew a likeness on the wall, which Ptolemy recognized as his jester in the first strokes of the sketch.[6]
A straight line drawn by an artist is not perfect; it fluctuates with the tremor of creativity. The second anecdote could relate to this tensile vibration that animates even lines that appear straight.
Apelles travelled to Protogenes' home in Rhodes to make the acquaintance of this painter he had heard so much about. Arriving at Protogenes' studio, he encountered an old woman who told him that Protogenes was out and asked for his name so she could report who had enquired after him. Observing in the studio a panel Protogenes had prepared for a painting, Apelles walked over to the easel, and taking up a brush told the servant to tell Protogenes "this came from me," and drew in colour an extremely fine line across the panel. When Protogenes returned, and the old woman explained what had taken place, he examined the line and pronounced that only Apelles could have done so perfect a piece of work; Protogenes then dipped a brush into another colour and drew a still finer line above the first one, and asked his servant to show this to the visitor should he return. When Apelles returned, and was shown Protogenes' response, ashamed that he might be bettered, he drew in a third colour an even finer line between the first two, leaving no room for another display of craftsmanship. On seeing this, Protogenes admitted defeat, and went out to seek Apelles and meet him face-to-face
The two aspects of geometry and expression in nature and in traditional crafts (and Renaissance art) always go together, whereas in modern societies perfection is seen as the accurate and factual reality. The problem is, an expressive line is not factual, it doesn’t inhabit resolved space. It is muscular coordination, flexing of hand, primal rhythm and instinctive intensity.
Therefore, that entire area of expressive reality is outside the bounds of modernity. In one of CC Beck’s columns (TCJ 121) he describes his designing work for cross-stitch embroidery. The abstraction makes it a craft, in his opinion, and the good craftsman can be an artist.
These two things, abstraction and expressive line, define art and craft – but also a society that lives in time in the sense of allowing natural events and metamorphosis to take place in the messy, untidy areas of village, town and prairie.
The patina of time is stopped when everything that counts as rubbish is swept away and all is in resolved space. The ego () is satisfied and all is apparently well.
Except that the basic health – physical and psyche – is left out of the equation. A resolved space is right for robots and druggies! Irresolved space is healthy, messy and with a physical and psyche vigour that applies especially to kids. The tidy premise is essentially wrong and can just become a type of logical junk.
Another way of putting it is that a line has quality – see Pirsig
Going back to ancient history, the portrait of Alexander the Great by Apelles’s contemporary Lysippos established a leonine type that resounded through the centuries.
As Kirby said in an interview, fans lionise the characters in comics, and the propagandist Alexander was the first in history to appoint an artist for that task.
Like all such illos, it’s not realism but heightened realism by way of the vibrant line of a master craftsman.
Without that establishment of line, the muscular hand loses its grasp on reality and the abstractions of the head take over. This is where we are today in the geometrical world of sorcerers! Geometry is not expressive – the greatness is lost.
Quality and rhythmic line cannot be kept hermetically sealed in a box that is specifically to attract the ego of acolytes. It is our physical reality, compulsive and erotic.
Alexander the Great’s mother, Olympias, was a devotee of Dionysus and allegedly slept with snakes.
Tensile stress of convulsive line and writhings. This is also the land of scatological puns a la Mozart and such jokes as “Cleopatra’s asp.” (see HB18)
The ancient world in that sense is realistic and expressive and not trapped inside a head of illusory reason (see Aristophanes )
The problem is that a political world – of the head – is not aware of primal
line, or the thing that expresses in time what things become.
Comic artists, since they deal in figurative art, have to constantly be aware of the expressive line. Their universes in that sense are more realistic in terms of the physical reality of flesh and blood and bone that we inhabit.
I tend to contradict BWS’s views, in that I can see value in the likes of Liefeld (and guys like Kordey) whose strength of style creates habitable worlds.
As I was previously saying, I live in an area where there is a lot of building work, and it gets steadily less habitable! (like London town, natch.) They are basically paving-over quality and line, as well as the patina of time.
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