Caricature: Exploring the Light Side

[Victor Pross]

Caricature: Exploring the Light Side

By Victor Pross

In ancient Greece, when people set out to interpret the world they lived in, to find instruction or moral guidance, they’d look to stories of Zeus, Jason and the Argonauts, Sophocles and Narcissus. An ancient Greek man’s whole worldview would likely be colored by the mythology of his times.

In Europe in the middle ages, people facing similar crossroads would seek answers in the lives of Saints, finding there instruction and example and ways of understanding the world.

Facing a similar desire to comprehend their world here in the early years of the twenty-first century, we turn to our television sets or to the pages of ‘People’ magazine. To the mythology of our age: The Cult of Celebrity.

Michelangelo gave us God reaching out to Adam. Warhol gave us Marilyn Monroe blowing kisses at the lens.

The impact of celebrity and pop culture is all around us: a charismatic, good-looking young man will remind an onlooker of John F. Kennedy. A suspenseful situation will strike us as Hitchcockian. When we encounter style we think of Sinatra. Marilyn Monroe’s life story is constantly related as being symbolic of innocent beauty consumed by a culture of lust. Madonna’s as symbolic of cunning sex appeal triumphing in it. And while, in our photographic age, the smile of celebrity more often favors the beautiful than the deformed, it seldom, however, makes values-judgments in addressing the spotlight: sinner and saint, genius and dunce, hero and anti-hero, lawmaker and criminal—all enjoy an equal opportunity to occupy fame’s warm glow.

It is this amorality which provokes the loudest grumbles about the way we choose our icons: Albert Einstein and the likes of O.J. Simpson occupy roughly the same amount of space in the public imagination. There must be something wrong with such a star system.

While high-minded accusers, usually among the middlebrow press, ask how we can celebrate violence and greed to the same or greater degree that we revere insight and valor and benevolence, they fail to see that our system of celebrity is more analogous to ancient mythology than it is to the catalogue of saints or heroes. Or mythology of film stars and politicians and musical celebrities is much less about reverence than it is about interpretation--and what we’re interpreting is our own lives.

Our fascination with celebrity is about the story. People love a good story. The appeal of Entertainment Tonight is similar in kind if not in scale to the enduring appeal of the Bible or the Ancient Myths—a collection of stories that provide inspiration and warning, scolding and instruction, comedy and tragedy. Our celebrities shape the way we see the world.

It is with all of this before me that I have approached the art of caricature. As I said in some other article: “I was part of a generation that has absorbed the powerfully seductive influences of the mass media. In my youth, I absorbed all the noise and images of popular culture with the whole spectacle spinning around me in a Max Reinhardt Cinerama.”

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My portraits examine—admittedly through my own subjective prism—the famous, those who shaped our times. Politicians, rock stars, actors, philosophers, authors—the famous. The grand idea, in an age in which our celebrities are the story of our times, is that if you paint a portrait of those who’ve shaped our culture, you paint a portrait of the culture itself.

It’s fair to say that the art of caricature—or even more broadly speaking, illustrations—doesn’t get its due respect among the artistic literati. However, this snobbish attitude is disappearing in subtle increments as time moves along.

I have been a professional artist for a number of years. I have experienced many different reactions to my art over the years—from joyful laughter to awe-struck appreciation to disconcerted confusion to even hostility. The more mild responses of protest have ranged from “Don’t you draw real people?” to “Why do you draw such weird stuff” to “What kind of acid trip are you on?” This could crush the heart of a sensitive artist. Of course, I always retain my cool as the jovial bohemian emeritus that I am.

I have been asked if my caricatures would only manage to offend the famous, or whoever else that may become my unsuspecting subjects. It’s a query that did concern me at one time. After all, it is a possibility that prickly personalities would lash out. I have discovered, for the most part, that in facing the famous, the opportunity to be depicted in caricature is welcomed and has met with great enthusiasm. As caricaturist Len Redman said, “Celebrities thrive on caricatures. It’s a symbolic stamp of their success. When a person has been caricatured, it means he or she has arrived.”

Redman’s outlook may very well be true, but he fails to take into account if the “arrived person” is either an honored or reviled figure. Caricature art, it is true, can serve both objectives: it can honor an individual in a good-natured humorous manner or it can skewer that individual with the poison pen of contempt. It depends on the intentions of the artist. There is nothing “intrinsic” to caricature that it must be one thing or the other. It can pay tribute or it can sting. It can be the dark or the light.

For example, I was commissioned to render a caricature of the Hollywood noteworthy and award winning Ron Howard, who was in my home town of Toronto scouting locations for his film ‘Cinderella Man.’ The heads at the Toronto film studio wanted to get the famous director something he wouldn’t forget, something entirely original. So they decided on a caricature painting. The painting is greatly exaggerated, but it is a work that was done with a great deal of respect for the man and his work. Ron Howard, according to reports, was ecstatic with the finished results and the portrait hangs proudly in his home. The point of mentioning this career highlight is to point out that caricature is not an inherently malicious art form—although it certainly can be that, as I tried to make clear in “Exploring the Dark Side.”

It has been said by a media commentaries that my work conveys “smirking irony and hilarious juxtapositions” and I suppose one of my paintings comes to mind that would fit this description: the miserable looking existentialist playwright Samuel Beckett stands with a fixed gaze as a Pollyannaish 1970s ‘happy face’ hovers above. In another portrait we see John Lennon and Yoko Ono standing front and center, as they appeared on their album ‘Two Virgins’ --naked as Jaybirds. Yoko is holding a rather tempting apple…to suggest the Garden of Eden...or perhaps the business venture, Apple Corp.

Why am I attracted to the art of caricature at all? I am reminded of a quote from no less a source than Leonardo da Vinci—an artist who explored exaggeration in his own art: “Faces display in part the nature of men, their vices and temperaments.” Indeed, in my portraits I have tried to convey the whole stories about the lives of my subjects: Mick Jaggaer’s dark sex appeal, Ronald Reagan’s cartoon patriotism, Humphrey Bogart’s hard-edged masculinity.

In the end, my own views toward pop culture are radically ambivalent. I see it as the end and the beginning, as archetypical and superficial, as dark and light. I look at the culture and I see it as both disturbing and irresistibly funny. For these reasons, it is the culture that I want to caricature.

**

Edited September 30, 2006 by Kat

[BAMF]

The impact of celebrity and pop culture is all around us: a charismatic, good-looking young man will remind an onlooker of John F. Kennedy. A suspenseful situation will strike us as Hitchcockian. When we encounter style we think of Sinatra. Marilyn Monroe’s life story is constantly related as being symbolic of innocent beauty consumed by a culture of lust. Madonna’s as symbolic of cunning sex appeal triumphing in it. And while, in our photographic age, the smile of celebrity more often favors the beautiful than the deformed, it seldom, however, makes values-judgments in addressing the spotlight: sinner and saint, genius and dunce, hero and anti-hero, lawmaker and criminal—all enjoy an equal opportunity to occupy fame’s warm glow.

THIS is the idea behind Marilyn Manson! Just had to bring him up again...