The intensity of line in Jaime is something else and self-admittedly this is something that has previously been made less than clear. Pictorial 12 comparing Durer and Leonardo with confusedly abstract results!
It’s worth noting that the complete mix of geometry with line is very classical, for a start. The fact the geometry ISN’T perfect makes the style so great.
Modern cartooning styles would be inconceivable without the geometrical underpinning; but on the other hand the intensity of line is equally essential or you end up with Pixar. The Spanish tend to have a flair for this, with guys like Esteban Maroto and Jaime (not to mention Picasso).
It’s the flair for dashing a line down that has a solid basis in geometrical curves. The line is expressive but the geometry is not.
Durer seemed to come at the midway junction between medieval and classical in that he was much more fastidious as opposed to classically geometrical. Leonardo had both cartooning ability and the eye for sensual line.
If you relate this to societies, feudalism is unresolved action and much more tied to the expressive line than to the certainty of geometrical space. Our societies are the exact opposite; everything takes place in resolved space, composed of factoid “bits” that are endlessly spouted.
A geometrical society of perspective and “facts” is very persuasive for that reason, but lacks the subtle grace and truth of the expressive line.
The expressive line is the world of action, of decay, the hunt, regrowth and revival. Cartoonists, because they have to deal in line, you could say have more facility in depicting those aspects of reality than does the mainstream media.
Free-form line doesn’t judge what is desirable from a perspective of order and government or economics, merely what is desirable aesthetically and morally. The socially undesirable are given equal sway. One thinks of Watchmen, Swamp Thing, facets of Love and Rockets. Kirby’s monstrous forms.
Kirby’s creative truth is a mixture of geometry and intensity (HB142). Smith’s insistency on his greatness demonstrates a faith in the power of line to express truth.
Line doesn’t exist without time – ie the expression – and this is what the modern world seems to have lost in its all-out pursuit of technique (geometry, perspective.)
If one looks at medieval philosophers, they were basically believers – people of faith – who dabbled in Aristotle. Faith was the given, the psychic reality that expresses truth.
Thomas Aquinas was a churchman first, a philosopher second. Quite a good example is William Ockham – of Ockham’s razor – to whom Aristotle dealt in facts rather than truth (faith). Facts can be manipulated. One example is that Aristotle talks of a coiled rope and a straight rope being “different things”. Ockham contradicts this by stating that a coiled rope can be measured and uncoiled, so it is the same thing.
These are purely technical matters of viewing nature (like Ockham’s razor that classifies by simplifying) rather than a psychic truth. However, since Galileo, maths has become “truth”. Where is the psychic reality hidden?
It could well be hidden in time. The Latino magic realist Borges wrote a great deal on time. Especially the idea of moving along a labyrinth that forks; the routes one takes dictated by temporal events.
If faith is temporal then it is also the expression of line in time. In terms of the rope cited, a snake coils in convulsive movements of line; it’s the line that is the reality, the muscular convulsions in time; oiled lightning.
The expressive force is primal and creative, a reality outside the geometrical one of maths and number. This reality is hidden in a modern society (of order, of the head) but become visible in comic art and rhythmic musical patterns like dub.
The modern order convinces the ego with a type of nothingness of number, almost a type of junk without the primal rhythmic patterns of old. Words displace the old order of muscular action in-the-fields.
Primitive expressive line is seen in the expressions of magic realism that reflect the psyche. The lines are not factual, but are true psychically.
