Saturday, September 5, 2009

Gives Me Hope

Every once in a while I lament the passing of the golden age of illustration, feeling that the magic has been misplaced among modern illustrators. And inevitably I find myself mistaken.

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4 comments:

Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...

Even as we mourn the loss of great illustrators, we should remember that more are developing continually.

I think that what really changes are standards of acceptability. Even though the amount of really fine work has almost surely increased, the total volume of other work has also increased. And sometimes the arbiters of taste push that other work to the fore, so that one has to move through more of it to find the better work.

Of course, this picture by Ryan is remarkable not simply for being of high technical quality, but for capturing some of the style of the golden age. Frankly, if you'd not told me otherwise, I wouldn't have thought it contemporary.

September 5, 2009 at 8:40 PM
Thomas Haller Buchanan said...

Daniel, that's a really good point about capturing the STYLE of the golden age, which is what I miss. Modern illustrators are superb in their execution, but theirs (ours) is a different culture from a century ago, so ultimately what I mean is that I miss the zeitgeist of the early 20th century, n'est pas? And certain modern artists are of like mind and find themselves delving into and emulating golden age aesthetics, and those are the artists I gravitate to.

Thanks for the insight!

September 5, 2009 at 9:24 PM
Norman Boyd said...

Can you please tell us more about where this appears and more about the artist?

September 8, 2009 at 12:11 PM
Thomas Haller Buchanan said...

I'm sorry. I made a mistake of relying on 2nd hand information that had the artist's name spelled incorrectly. I have corrected that and put in a link to his really nice website. There's even another version of this particular image over there. I'm not sure where I got this particular version.

September 8, 2009 at 3:35 PM

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