{"id":4763,"date":"2010-08-09T08:34:41","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T12:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=4763"},"modified":"2010-08-09T08:34:41","modified_gmt":"2010-08-09T12:34:41","slug":"westermann-and-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=4763","title":{"rendered":"Westermann and friends"},"content":{"rendered":"

Judging from Frank’s most recent posts, he\u2019s spending this month swimming and drinking, which is the way to play it in August. Sadly, I have no pool and I get drunk really easily, so I went to art galleries instead. Lucky for me, though, I discovered a small show of lithographs, woodcuts, and linocuts by the great and massively influential H.C. Westermann at George Adams Gallery. In addition to a few superb color works, such as Red Deathship<\/em>, from 1967 . . .<\/p>\n

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. . . the show includes his \u201cDisasters in the Sky\u201d series, small black-and-white linocuts that depict futuristic cities and horrific plane crashes.<\/p>\n

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The mask-like faces, like the one above, resemble Basil Wolverton’s grim, rubbery caricatures. Some from this series seem to suggest a narrative, and I thought of wordless novels, like Laurence Hyde\u2019s Southern Cross<\/em> and any one of Lynd Ward\u2019s books. Westermann, Hyde, and Ward all wrote\/drew tales with a political, antimilitary stance. The city’s undulating architecture and elevated, snaking roadways made me think of Jimbo<\/em>‘s La Bufadora, which would be a great place to spend the summer\u2014poolside clambakes, robot fights, special group rates.<\/p>\n

I also saw Gosha Ostretsov\u2019s huge comics-influenced paintings at Claire Oliver. Instead of referencing comic-book via enlarged Ben-Day dots \u00e0 la Lichtenstein, Ostretsov\u00a0uses splashes of color and and tonal washes and prototypical situations, expressions, and symbols to create a kind of immersive, thrilling, perplexing collage of panic and mayhem. I especially like that the paintings are called Action Packed Super Heroes<\/em>, but he’s taken out the essential ingredient\u2014super heroes\u2014leaving just citizens and criminals.<\/p>\n

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Last one. Lee Krasner at Robert Miller Gallery. This doesn’t really have anything to do with comics, but, aside from being one of the finest artists ever<\/em>, Krasner has a magnificent sense of color. I see similar bold, vibrant choices and juxtapositions in work by Dash Shaw, Frank Santoro, Paul Hornschemeier, and others. And then there’s this:<\/p>\n

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That’s Krasner on the left and Chippendale on the right. Coincidence? Well, yes. But what a great comparison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judging from Frank’s most recent posts, he\u2019s spending this month swimming and drinking, which is the way to play it in August. Sadly, I have no pool and I get drunk really easily, so I went to art galleries instead. Lucky for me, though, I discovered a small show of lithographs, woodcuts, and linocuts by the great and massively influential H.C. Westermann at George Adams Gallery. In addition to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[98,162,271,512,532,782,789,816],"class_list":["post-4763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-wolverton","tag-chippendale","tag-comics-vs-art","tag-gosha-ostretsov","tag-h-c-westermann","tag-laurence-hyde","tag-lee-krasner","tag-lynd-ward"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}