Painting cartoons

Good painters don't always equal good cartoonists. Good cartoonists don't always equal good painters. I think it's hard to put those two world into one world where both make sense and even harder for both to be exceptional. Pound is an exception. Todd School, Mark Ryden, Dave Cooper and Robert Williams (Low Brow artists). It takes time to formulate the kind of approach that your cartoon work needs to build its strength and message. I started off essentially painting really closely over Lynch's concepts, but Lynch wasn't a realistic painter. He was a great cartoonist who painted some really awesome paintings in a different kind of non-realistic style. I think Bunk fits into that world. Robert Crumb the same thing. Those are Underground Comix guys. The majority have no real clue to the way painting works, but Pound, Williams and Schorr do in their cartoon paintings. You have to understand the rules and know how to push them and push them some more. Make them you're own. Have the confidence to bend them and don't just rely on simply the Pound-copying method. I think a lot of painters disregard this kind of artwork, but it's unfortunate because I guarantee that the best painter out there can't make a decent GPK if they give them a decade to do so. You have to love cartooning and have loved it since you were a kid. Cartooning is a language. You either speak it or you don't and if you haven't started since you were a kid it's very hard to be good at it now. From what I briefly read yesterday JungHwa didn't know what GPKs were until much later. It's unfortunate. GPKs changed us all. The groundwork is there for all of us if we know what they really are. A piece of them is in our soul. If we understand its satire. Its take on the language of our world and our fears. To understand the references and the underlying history of how they were shaped by playing card games, Looney Tunes (and Surrealism), Mad Magazine, Underground Comix scene and lastly Low Brow Art.(Unfortunately GPKs commercialism is what has retarded their fine art status, but that is another story). To be a cartoonist who let all this push and pull you while including your personal story and adding all these other pivotal artistic moments in an artist's life is what makes your vision unique and is what can make you great at it. If you just like copying a photograph or a picture or a model and not use that creative spark (imagination) then you are just a craftsman. It is fine if you are. You can be pretty successful at it, but you can't teach imagination and you can't teach determination and applying all your skills and all your history into the work you do. It's just too many things going on. You have to be a wielder of magic. That is what it takes to be a good creative cartoon realistic painter.