A ghost of Christmas past

A Sanjay Patel self-portrait

Let us now praise Sanjay Patel. It's long overdue.

All you need to stop me cold is bobble a bauble of fine illustration in front of me. My Achilles' heel.

So surprising, then, I have gotten any work done at all since a couple of Christmases ago, when Santa left a copy of Patel's book, Ramayana: Divine Loophole.

It's taken this long to spout off about him because I've been busy spouting off about, well, me. And I've finally come across nice images from the book that would have been disserved by my dodgy scanning acumen.

In Ramayana, Patel latently taps into his Hindu heritage and retells a centuries-old epic good-vs.-evil tale in his vivid, magnetic illustration style.*

Patel is a supervising animator and storyboard artist for Pixar, and finds time to write and illustrate books ["The Little Book of Hindu Deities" and "The Big Poster Book of Hindu Deities" (which is really a collection of posters but I'm not quibbling)] and do such and sundry as designing exhibits for the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

The word you're reaching for to describe Sanjay Patel's career is cherry.

And the word for his work — for me anyway — is truly magnetic. As much as I hate online ads with my morning news and trivia gathering, I was surprised to be drawn immediately to one for the Asian Art Museum. It featured Patel's work promoting "Deities, Demons and Dudes with 'Staches: Indian Avatars." It's part of that museum's efforts to reach out in a fresh way, and wow, did it!

The color! In such combinations! So stark, so complicated! (staring, drooling)

Patel masters Adobe Illustrator™®, my medium of reluctant choice (really more of a forced marriage, but I've been at it long enough to see how someday I can learn to love it …).

Illustrator©™ allows its masters precise shape and placement to create patterns — tools which Patel puts to optimum use in the visual opulence of Hindu culture.

Precision also enables Illustrator®™ masters to pare visual communication to the smallest unit, the simplest shape, the extravagant economy of line and shape.

Patel marries the vast and the simple in his work. I'm so, so jealous.

I told him so once, and he emailed me back (little ol' me!) to aw-shucks my admiration:

"If there is anything good about my work it's from staring at other artists' creations for a really long time," he said. "Nothing original here, just rearrangement of ingredients."

Elsewhere on the Interwebs — Patel's in a lot of places, thankfully — he has said he and all his classmates at the California Institute for the Arts were obsessed with mid-20th Century illustration style, which I call "cookbook art." Should you be at or near my age, you remember the spare iconography of cookbook illustration, foods and people reduced to the flattest, sparest shape and line, artwork held together with clever use of negative space (the white paper as color), and depth and sophistication suggested with overlapping tones of a single color.

Charley Harper was a chief inspiration, said Patel. You see echoes of the mid-Century style today in the work of Bob Staake and Edwin Fotheringham, for example.

The Interwebs also show Patel's attention to detail before his illustrations reach their digital apex. Tissues and vellums (vella?) filled with fine lines and circles, weaving to shapes colored in combinations so strange to me, but combinations that work to stunning effect.

(drooling again)

See for yourself, these selections from the epic Ramayana. And find the book. Immerse yourself. I learned more than I ever have of Hindu mythology, which was inseparable for Patel culturally as a child growing up in the Southland, but has grown with him spiritually.

I learned enough to know, for instance, that the worn-out little sculptures I discovered a couple of months on the beach of the lake where I swim are of Ganesh, and that it's sometimes custom for Hindus to cast Ganesh into the water with a prayer for destroying life's obstacles.

*All these samples are by Sanjay Patel, which I obtained from multiple sources. It's all copyrighted by Patel, I'm sure, and probably by Pixar®™, and since Disney®© owns Pixar™®, and Disney™© can rain holy hell on preschools which have the unmitigated gall to paint Pluto™ (not the erstwhile planet) on their playroom walls without paying licensing fees and prostrate homage, what chance do I, a lowly blogger, have? I throw myself on the mercy of the court of public opinion.

Root of all evil

David Suter, a great illustrator, inspired this study.

Suter mastered mashing multiple disparate elements to create a single dominant (if concealed) message.

The message emerged from the shape of the elements in concert, or from the nothingness held bound by them. Suterisms, they're called.

This is for a magazine story on the pinnacles and pitfalls of owning a retail space.

(Can you spot the message?)

Maybe soon I'll post the finished art; I'm not sure if it delivered on the potential of the study.

That's why I love sketches and studies. So much promise! So much life!

Jim Borgman knows this. The former editorial cartoonist is the illustrator for the Zits comic strip. The first throw-away panel on the Sunday strip always contains a pencil sketch of a scene from the body of the story. Our newspaper luxuriates in publishing the throw-away panels instead of lopping them to make space for other comics.

The same for Disney art books. I looooooove the development sketches for animated characters, so lively, so … animated! By comparison the production stills from the finished animation are so … dead and still.

Here's to our potential!

Here's to the crazy ones*

Shawn, drawn on a Mac …

For my 100th blog post, it's fitting to thank Steve Jobs, who made this blog possible.

Co-creator of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs died last week of pancreatic cancer.

(I know, I'm the opposite of news.)

The best descriptor for Jobs is "visionary." He dreamed and imagined what might be. Of course, many people do this, but Jobs was able to marshal minds and hearts, collecting other dreamers to turn his and their dreams into tools. Without which, it turns out, we cannot function. Or think we can't, anyway. 

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford states Jobs' place in the world even more strongly: He effected change around the world, from the way products look to the way people work.

Without such dreams made real, I would not be using an Apple iMac right now to get on the Internet and fashion this blog post. Or attaching this art, which I drew on a Mac.

I don't really admire Jobs for these manna, though. I'm a reluctant consumer of the products he caused to be; though I've owned several Mac computers, each one came to me only after it was absolutely necessary to part grievously with my money for it, after this computer broke irreparably or that one couldn't handle the ever-changing operating system requirements.

The first Apple I got was a clone (geez, remember those? Jobs, deposed early from the company he created, eventually returned and almost immediately killed the clones) from a freelance graphic designer who was moving on to an agency job. I got the computer because all I had was an electric typewriter, which was an infeasible tool for the graphic designer clients with whom I supplied copywriting. Back then I dragged the massive text file onto a floppy disk (one file per disk, usually), and drove it over to the client. Ah, so late 20th Century.

Since the graphic designers used Macs — a direct result of Jobs taking a calligraphy course after dropping out of college and resolving that his computers should accommodate multiple fonts — I got a Mac too, so all of our computers would speak the same language without hassles. When I started drawing on the Mac, I already had the technology that my clients could use. I have loved the Mac mostly because I didn't have to know how it works (that would have spelled the end of me); I just had to know that it works.

That's the limit of my Apple connection, though. One of my children has an iPhone (and wants the newest one, released the day before Steve Jobs died) and an iPad; another has a form of iPod; both have Mac Workbooks; my wife has another form of iPod which I don't think she uses. I have just the iMac on my desk in my office. I have iTunes — I upgrade the software dutifully, as the computer directs me, lest the computer retaliate on its own to impede my work — but I don't buy any music. I'm the same with major software, extremely disinclined to upgrade, and doing so only when clients finally can't read the files I'm exchanging.

I've evolved a disheveled frugality: Unless I absolutely need it, I go without. So many of these Apple products offer wonderful capabilities, many of which I hadn't imagined were necessary — my son has shown me! Look! — but so far I've managed to get through the day without them. I don't even know where my cell phone is most of the time. What a terrible candidate for Apple discipleship I am.

Though I love his chutzpah, this is a side of Steve Jobs I didn't much care for: Engineering hunger in us to replace one shiny cool bauble with another before the first has worn out, and to desire the next shiny bauble and its promises, long before it is even conceived.

Instead, I admire Jobs for that most maddeningly elegant of slogans his company once used: Think different. 

Elegant because that spirit is so inspiring. See it here, an unaired commercial featuring Jobs' own voice (the one broadcast used Richard Dreyfuss' voice). Maddening because it's so often a gift, not a practiced skill, to think different, to see what others do not, to see ahead, to see the way.

{Beautiful copywriting, by the way (see below …)}

Already among the world's most prominent different thinkers, Steve Jobs in death is now among the most revered.

He's at the top of a great heap of different thinkers, whom I encounter every day. People constantly amaze me for what they are able to do, the jobs they have that I didn't know even could be jobs, the places they traveled, the thoughts they think. So different, so far ahead of what I do and think. As the owner of a couple of books on the art of Disney animation, I am flummoxed to see the work of dozens of artists, churning out thousands and thousands of gorgeous concept drawings that no one but the films' art directors, and a few readers of these books, will ever see. They are fantastically beyond my ability to draw, and yet they're often postage-stamp sketches of color and amazing form and depth. Breathtakingly depressing.

When I heard of Jobs' death, my first thought popped out before I could choke it down: My God, he's only seven years older! What have I done?

You're right to say, "Yeah, what have you done?" Of course, you'd be just as right in saying, "Measure different."

I agonize like everyone else — in ways that vary as much as each of us are different — about what I've accomplished, what good influence I've made on anything, and what to do about that deficit now.

My son says I'm too hard on myself, which is my nature. When I measure different, I realize my children are becoming more and many splendored than I imagined — and I imagined much splendor. I'm married to my best friend, who saves me from myself every day. Steve Jobs is reported to have wanted a biography so that his children to learn about him, because Apple and Pixar and everything else had taken him away from his kids. What price global influence?

As far as the other stuff, I still have time, though I take heed the much-played commencement address Jobs delivered to Stanford University's graduating class of 2005. He told the graduates they don't have that much time.

"Death is very likely the single best invention of life," he said. "It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life," he continued. "Don't be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

He admonished the graduates in Stewart Brand's words, from the Whole Earth Catalog: Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

*"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. (Think different.)" Apple commercial.