Art (Updated)

Long-time readers will know that I've occasionally had some fun at the expense of artist Shepard Fairey. Although I'm not his biggest fan, I think that he's getting a raw deal in the coverage of his current contretemps with AP. (See here and here.)

A lot of people seem to be under the false impression that Fairey created his Obama poster simply by running AP's photograph through some Photoshop filters. That impression was created, in part, by this web page. In truth, you can't make a Fairey by using that site's engine. Simple Photoshop tricks won't do the job. Neither did Fairey make the image by running the photo through the LiveTrace function in Adobe Illustrator, which automatically translates images into vector art.

No, he made the thing the old-fashioned way -- by drawing.

I'd like to know precisely how he drew it. One possibility is that he hand-vectorized over a copy of the AP photo. Creating vector art by hand (even using a photo as a basis) is no easy thing, and the result is, in my view, an original work. If you want to see examples of how such pieces are created, check out the videos here and here and here.

(Trust me: There was a photo beneath the truck painting; the artist hid it for the video. If you are unclear on the difference between vector and raster art, go here.)

Why would one vectorize a photo? Lots of reasons. Vector art is infinitely scalable. More importantly, the results do not look like raster imagery. Vectorization translates a shadow or highligh into an area marked by a hard boundary. That area can then be manipulated. A vector image is thus inherently more abstract.

Fairey probably created his underlying drawing the old-school way, by actually moving a pencil over a sheet of paper. That's how I would have done it.

There is no denying that Fairey has made a habit of "appropriating" and "recontextualizing" already-existent graphic images, as Mark Vallen demonstrates. Actually, "recontextualizing" is one of those godawful lit-crit terms; pros prefer to use the word "swiping." As Jules Feiffer once said, good swiping is an art in itself.

The Obama poster is an indirect swipe, not a direct one. That is to say, it is not a tracing. Fairey clearly used the photo for reference, but he did his own drawing, as you can easily tell if you conduct a point-by-point comparison -- look closely, for example, at the ears. Using Photoshop, I laid the original over the Fairey, and found that -- in this instance -- the artwork does not fully match up to photo. (Unfortunately, I would need to make an animation in order to demonstrate the point.)

Let me tell you a secret. Pretty much every illustrator who has had to create a realistic image of a public figure has used photographic reference. That has been the case since the dawn of photography.

A long time ago, I was a student of Nancy Ohanian, who is perhaps best-known for the work she did for the Los Angeles Times Opinion section. She's one of the greatest pen-and-ink artists who ever lived. (I got my first paying gigs doing crummy imitations of her style.) I invite you to visit her site and click on the 1973-1989 work. The online samples do not give you a true indication of the insane level of detail that went into that work, some of which I had the honor of seeing in the original. I wish to hell she would publish a full-sized reproduction of just one of her drawings from that period online, because any of her major pieces offers a master class in cross hatching.

(Incidentally, she used a rapidograph. I hate rapidographs; they clog too often. When I mimicked her, I used a crow-quill.)

It's fair to bet that there was once a photograph behind every one of those face shots. Her Jackie Kennedy, for example, obviously came from a very famous photo. She told the class that her first task after receiving an assignment was to speed off to the library in order to find photo reference.

Nancy certainly had the ability to draw an excellent likeness from life; I've seen her do it, and she taught others how to do it. Every artist would love to have someone like Nixon or JFK pose for an hour or three, but the celebrated rarely can accommodate the lowly pencil-pusher working under deadline. (And you can't draw dead people from life, with the exception of St. Bernadette.) Thus, of necessity, she used photographs.

But she changed everything. She didn't trace; she translated -- using thousands of tiny hatch-marks to imbue the work with an energy and sense of design which simply did not exist in the photos.

If you could find the original photograph behind her Nixon illustration, you would understand that all she took were the basic shapes. The photo will not display those elements which make the drawing endlessly interesting, such as the beautiful interplay of pure white and shaded areas in his cheek, or the subtle curves in the skin beneath the nostril. That's what an artist brings.

Call this piece a mere tracing and I'll dig out my old crow-quill and stab you in the eye.

(Incidentally, although Nancy did a lot of political artwork, she wasn't a political animal. Once, when she got an assignment to do a picture of Menachem Begin, she asked the class: "He's not the one with the eye-patch, is he...?")

Bottom line: I can't think of a way to condemn Shep without also condemning Nancy Ohanian and hundreds of other illustrators. It's hard to make the lay person understand that, in most cases, the least interesting aspect of a piece of figurative art is the contour drawing -- the outlines of the basic shapes. (Contour drawing is what you see in a newly-purchased coloring book.) The magic happens when you render, when you imbue the most basic forms with color, texture, gradation, contrast. Square millimeter by square millimeter, the artist decides what to leave out, what to put in, what to emphasize, what to subdue. He transforms. He makes the thing snap and flicker and punch and sing.

As for AP -- I agree with this writer. Their policies are nuts. Also, it appears that the guy who took the actual photo now claims that he never assigned his rights to AP.

Update: A short while ago, I became infuriated at the comments offered by a dolt over on Pajamas media. Said dolt pretended to know how Photoshop artists operate, despite a lack of hands-on experience with the program. Here's what he said:

“By contrast, the transformation of Obama’s image in Shephard Fairey’s poster is something that most likely took twenty steps or fewer in PS to accomplish. There is a filter that will do the red, white & blue coloring for you automatically, or any one of many other color combos. It’s not like Fairey sat down & meticulously used a tool to pick out the hair, ears & suit as one layer, then cut & pasted and filled them in blue; then repeated for the white & red & in-between layers, etc. The effect you see is 98% Photoshop, 2% Fairey’s pointing and clicking.”

This is pure bullshit. You cannot accomplish the Fairey piece simply by adjusting filters.

Yes, he really did meticulously use "a tool" to pick out the hair and so forth.

If you think that filters can do the job automatically, then fire up Photoshop and educate us all as to how -- exactly -- one may accomplish the trick. If you don't know how to use the program, then SHUT THE FUCK UP.

The first thing you have to do is to translate the photograph (which, like all photographs, is made of continuous graded tones) into five discrete hard-edged area based on value. (If you don't know what the word "value" means in art, SHUT UP ABOUT ART FOREVER.) In Photoshop, one might attempt this by using the image/adjustments/posterize function or by using the filter/artistic/cutout function, with the levels set to 5.

After you have those five areas, you can adjust the colors to your heart's content.

The posterized version looked absolutely ghastly, so I'm not going to reproduce it here. (Feel free to try it at home.) Frankly, the "cutout" filter doesn't look much better. That filter offers three adjustment sliders, but none of them would get me anywhere near Fairey's piece.

Here are the results -- and please click to enlarge, because the reduced version may give a false impression. The simple "cutout" filter version is on the left and the Fairey is on the right.


That's as close as I could come to reproducing Fairey's work by applying filters to the photo. I think you will agree that the results look awful -- not at all like Fairey's piece. If you know of a way to get better results using filters and nothing but, please share your technique with the rest of the class.

Look, I don't much care for Shep and I don't enjoy having to come to his defense. But he drew this piece. He drew it. He drew each area. By hand.

There are lots of realistic illustrations depicting politicians on the net and in magazines and newspapers. You'll have a hard time finding one that does not have photographic reference at the back of it. If Fairey is guilty of copyright infringement, then so are thousands of other illustrators.

(Please note the word "realistic." I'm not referring to work that is cartoonish, abstracted, or highly expressionistic. I'm also not referring to official portraits for which the subject actually sat in front of the artist.)