Wednesday, June 30, 2010

You Cheat Dr Jones, You Cheat!

A funny scene from the Temple of Doom movie is where Short Round (Ke Huy Kwan) accuses Indy of cheating in their card game, "You cheat Dr. Jones, you cheat!"

I realized I've been cheating too. In the last post I made the bold claim that Warwick Goble is in the top five of my favorite classic illustrators. Geez, I have so many favorite artists, how can I figure that?

I cheat, because I have so many categories that I can land just about anybody in a top 5 favorite somewhere. Favorite Renaissance artists. Favorite 19th century allegorical artists. Favorite jazz age photographers. Favorite comic book artists working in 1948. Favorite artists who work in pastel. Favorite sculptors born on a Wednesday.

I'll find some way of making them fit in the top five of something, cuz otherwise why would I collect their work in the first place. So ignore me when I talk about favorites (I'm sure you do anyway). We ALL got favorites.

Here's a really bold claim: My favorite #1 movie poster artist (and probably yours too): Drew Struzan.

I love looking deep into Struzan's rendering details & textures.

3 comments:

Sam G said...

Can't wait for Drew's new book out in September! Incredible artist!

Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...

I certainly have favorites, but I generally don't worry about who or what they are or might be. When people ask me to name my favorite X, for most sorts of X, I tell them that I don't think that it's worth my time to figure that out; it would be a very boring sorting problem, and the answer would rarely be of much use to anyone, including me.

Thomas Haller Buchanan said...

Sam, I didn't know about that book, I'll look for it.

Daniel, I don't ever think of favorites until it's time to blog an introduction to some images. I ask myself what do these images mean to me, why am I bothering to spend time scanning, cleaning, organizing, uploading and sharing? Ah, it's because I find favor with them. What shall I write about them? Well, if time is short, and it always is, I can always mention that I have a particular fondness for the stuff.

I'll try to withhold that descriptive as much as I can.

But geez, my category of A few of my favorite things is now up to 154. And I've tried really hard to be selective what goes in that category.