Peeling The Onion

  From pre-adolescence I aspired to get one of my cartoons into the New Yorker magazine. My mother and I pasted scores of covers onto a hinged room divider. There was something about the direct and playful quality of the drawing and painting styles that set them apart from the dominant realism that comprised most of the post-war magazine trade. While I had not yet learned to look down on Norman Rockwell, I sensed that he would never do a New Yorker cover, nor would they request one from him. Perhaps she was trying to encourage me to look elsewhere than Mad  magazine for artistic inspiration; though it was the hey-dey—I had just biked through a blizzard to get issue #25.
  After some half-hearted & assed attempts to get published at the highly esteemed venue, I finally had a spate of cartoon drawings appear in the early ‘90s. After the initial elation, I quickly came back down to earth. Perhaps an illusory barrier had finally been broken, but I was no happier than before. I had merely peeled a shard from the onion, and there were scores to go. Now rejection was even more painful than before. 

Out of Season

Ink and Watercolor, 4" x 12", 2006, from Signs Of The Times ©Justin Green

 These fabulous pelts were forfeited by the original owners when they suddenly became out-of-season.

The Thrill of Meat After WWII

From "Justin Green's Sign Game," which appeared monthly in SIGNS OF THE TIMES magazine from 1986-2007

A Forgotten Genre

A Brief History Of Emblem Prints Under Image

  Emblem prints were the first posters produced by the new print technology. There had been popular woodcuts produced earlier which made facsimile art available to the masses. But these prints lacked the complexity and subtlety of the new art form. From the 15th Century on, there was a wide demand for complex and refined images and text. The prints could be religious, didactic, poetic or naturalistic. Often they were printed as folios that were thematic to entice collectors (and perhaps to elicit subscription front money).
  Today the word “emblematic” is merely an adjective than an NPR reporter might use to describe an action or event that embodies a new zeitgeist. Yet some emblem images had “legs”. For Vermeer, among many other painters, to reference certain emblem prints in the background of a few interiors suggests that they had a timely cultural significance. Google EMBLEM NETHERLANDS (then EMBLEM….ITALY, GERMANY, ENGLAND, SPAIN, FRANCE) and you will be richly rewarded with hundreds of surprising and beautiful images. The basic components of an Emblem image are simple:
A title
A frame
An image
Some expository text

  These building blocks have varying degrees of emphasis depending on the individual artist and country of origin, not necessarily in that order. The Italian prints I’ve seen tend to have the most elaborate borders. But I am a babe-in-the-woods when it comes to this wonderful, forgotten genre. If any readers take the trouble to Google the source countries, please share your discoveries with me…justin.inknib@gmail.com
  This pen and ink drawing was done by me in late ’10, specifically for a show in Seattle titled, “Medieval Minds.” My use of central text is unusual because most emblem narrative occurred at bottom. Even more apostate is my use of satire.

Love Profane

Though this image is now apropos, the timing of its original publication couldn’t have been worse. On Dec. 7, 1993 a madman named Colin Ferguson boarded a crowded Long Island Railroad commuter train and methodically killed 6 passengers and wounded 19 others. Living in California at the time, I was aware of incident, though my cartoon had previously been conceptualized and the preliminary roughs were done and approved by the esteemed New Yorker magazine. Perhaps as an acknowledgement of the crime, I included the NRA hat as the final deadline approached. I didn’t realize that the volatile trial was scheduled for Feb. 17, 1994—while this Valentine’s Day issue was still on the stands. My cynical gag, intended for those who had ever been wounded by Cupid, was now an inadvertent statement about mass murder.
  As my dear mother often said, “Fool’s names and fool’s faces are often seen in public places.”

Former Sign Painters

Another promising sign painter who left his sable brushes for a musical instrument was the great jazz guitarist Tal Farlow (1921-1998).  But he kept his hand in, occasionally painting signs for his own gigs even when he was well known (Coltrane once saw him perched on a fire escape just before a performance). Remembering the lean times, he probably wanted to have a skill he could depend on long after the fickle public turned a deaf ear. But the growing jazz audience never tired of Farlow’s innovative fret work, so he eventually stopped bringing his sign kit along to musical engagements. But after his great albums of the ‘50s, he returned to professional sign painting in Seabright, NJ. Then there’s Woody Guthrie… see “Bound For Glory.”
  This strip originally appeared in Signs Of The Times magazine. That’s not my current email address…it’s justin.inknib@gmail.com.

National Postcard Campaign

Idea for Nation-Wide Postcard Project

  Just before Wall St. tanked I did this retro postcard as a pilot version for an entire series of State Postcards using their 2-letter designations. I’m now thinking that local artist-denizens familiar with the culture, attractions and quirks of each state would provide better insight than myself.
  In addition to the design and execution of artwork, this idea would take a lot of research, networking,  editing and writing (there also needs to be a verbal explanation of the imagery for each card).
  Though it would probably be more a labor of love than financially rewarding, all participants would at least have a nice portfolio piece and a personal postcard to send to friends and family. I’m sending this one to you from The Bluegrass State,  like a message in a virtual bottle: “Go ahead…take this idea and run with it.”