Posted: 08 June 2007 at 6:24am | IP Logged | 1
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I am absolutely NOT and I can not use the word NOT enough in this sentance, making any commentary on JRs working habits, speed, ethic or anything else of the sort.
Let's say that some artist (for the sake of arguement we can use JR if you would like) get's a last minute assignment to do a 10 page back up story for a book because the regularly scheduled penciler doed in a tragic snipe hunting accident and the completed work was somehow destroyed in a freak cosmic ray accident. The artist has only a long three day weekend to complete ten pages, where their normal work speed is 2-2 1/2 pages per day. This artist RUSHES and gets all ten pages done in the alotted three days. He asmits that he would have liked to spend at least another day and a half to get the pages to where he wanted them to be, but he did get them in under the wire on short notice.
Now follow me close here folks.....
Let's say that in this hypothetical case we are talking about a 10 page Thor back up story by JR. We have probably all seen JRs Thor work and when we here JR did a Thor back up story, we get a certain expectation of how it is going to look, based on the previous exposure to similar work. Now you hear that JR admitted that he had to really rush through those pages, and that the quality wasn't really what he wanted in the end product. OK.....picture what YOU would imagine that artwork to look like in this hypothetical Thor story. You can imagine something that looks like JRs work, but if it was not done to a full level of satisfaction and completeness.
If you can make THAT leap of imagination, by picturing what a few pages by JR would look like if they WERE in fact rushed, then my using the description "looks rushed" is ENTIRELY valid, because I am using an adjective to give an indication of a particular LOOK of a piece of artwork, that evekes in the reader/listener a particular LOOK to picture as a frame of reference for how I view the art. Nowhere in my earlier posts do I EVER say that JR didn't have enough time to do the job right, I simply expressed the opinion that the pages look to me like they could have used more work. So if you complete a task (as I stated pretty clesrly above) and you could have done a better job by spending more time on it, and you don't spend more time making it better, that COULD imply that someone rushes their work. The end product is something that there is no temporal aspect to. It is and it just is. Time elements come into play when describing an action, such as an act of drawing. However a thing is just a thing, particularly when that this is a thing that actually DOES nothing. Artwork just pretty much sits there and gets looked at.
To say that art looks "rushed" is no more inappropriate than the words crude, raw, undeveloped, sketchy, or fragmented. Each gives a very similar connotation when used to describe a visual style (be the style intened or not) and or visual charachteristics.
Using Colatta's work as an example is perfect. In fact just the fact that many people can point out his work as visual examples of what rushed artwork looks like actually wins this point for me. His act of inking the pages was in fact very rushed, since he was always the "go to" guy when thhey needed something absolutely last minute and it often showed in the finished product. You can tell by looking at many of his pieces that it would look so much better if he had another few days to work on the pages. When you say that some particular art looks rushed, you might immediately think of Vince's work and mentally apply some of the deficiencies from that work to what you are envisioning the work being described, that is why the word can be used as an adjective, not just as a verb.
If you took the WORST Colatta page, where he just erased 2/3 of the pencils and it shows, then you had someone (we will take JB for example) spend three days doing a perfect line for line, dot for dot reproduction of that page. What would the end result be? You would have a page that took three days to draw, and the finished artwork would STILL look RUSHED.
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