AN ARTIST'S ATTIC, part 3

Leonard Starr's attic contained dusty stacks of original comic strips with drawings of complex and subtle facial expressions.

     

 

Two frosty expressions that are very difficult to capture

 

 

Starr put a lot of effort into crafting thousands of facial expressions over the decades. Today there's not much demand for such skills. We've put them in our cultural attic, along with other unwanted artifacts.

  

 

 

Starr was able to capture the most delicate expressions, such as an encouraging gaze:

The size restrictions of the comic page didn't seem to daunt him. The smallest faces in Starr's backgrounds could be used to reveal significant feelings:

Few of today's popular cartoonists and graphic novelists even try to draw such facial expressions.  In this recent New Yorker cartoon by Ruben award winner Roz Chast...

...the faces of the three characters are  supposed to show irony, sarcasm and passive aggressiveness, yet their expressions all seem identical-- kind of a demented rage:

If not for the labels, her faces would tell us almost nothing. Like many others, Chast relies on words for facial expressions.  When Starr wanted to convey sarcasm, his viewers never needed a label saying "this is sarcasm."

 

Chast is hardly alone.  Several top  cartoonists and graphic artists today substitute words for pictures because their facial expressions are indecipherable:

Alison Bechdel's version of an "abject and shameful mien"

Kate Beaton's version of "consumed with lust"

Artists from Garry Trudeau to Chris Ware have mastered the art of drawing smiles and frowns, but beyond that their drawing ability cannot keep up with the sophistication of their concepts. 

I should emphasize that my point has nothing to do with a preference for loose or tight drawing. In previous generations, even loose, freely drawn faces could be expected to add value to the underlying concept:

William Steig

William Steig

Our generation does not seem to place as much value on the skillful treatment of faces. One reason may be that much of skill and accuracy in drawing can now be simulated with cheap software. If tight, observant rendering can be purchased from Adobe, it seems less admirable.


But the old sketchbooks piled up in the corner of Starr's attic help explain how he wrote and drew those faces into his strips for all those years.
 

Starr's preliminary drafts contained very specific comments about facial expressions. He noted when he wanted "wry acceptance" or a "sweet nostalgic smile." More importantly, Starr's drafts show that as he zipped along at lightning speed he was able to summon up these expressions from his finger tips.

"Modest smile"

"Incredulous"

Part of Starr's ability comes from drawing a lot.  Also, his sketchpads reveal that Starr formally studied the muscles and bones of the face.

Facial expressions are one of the rare phenomena that tie together the physical and the non-physical worlds. They are physical manifestations of non-physical emotions.  Scientists (including anthropologists and evolutionary biologists) remain fascinated by them, believing they are rooted deep in what makes us distinctly human.  (Some believe that over a million years ago when we became the only mammal to loose our fur, we simultaneously developed facial expressions to convey messages-- such as anger or warning-- that might once have been conveyed by fur.) But regardless, today they remain one of our most eloquent means of communicating feelings and thoughts and that made them a potentially rich tool for the visual arts.  Our current fashion of replacing these visual cues with text makes life easier for people with poor draftsmanship skills, but it comes at a price.

When you hang around a cold attic long enough, you start asking yourself odd questions.  My question was: why do so many graphic novelists who can't draw facial expressions elect to draw faces instead of just writing about the underlying emotions?  Why choose this medium?  When we see drawings of faces, perhaps we should ask ourselves, does this drawing contribute anything to the written concept?