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Post by Montana Bab on Apr 3, 2007 20:18:13 GMT -6
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Post by Montana Bab on Apr 3, 2007 20:33:11 GMT -6
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Post by harpskiddie on Apr 4, 2007 1:00:21 GMT -6
That picture of Buffalo Bill by himself on the geocities site is actually J.B. Hickock.
Gordie, Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!!!!...............................
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Post by gary on Apr 4, 2007 11:31:19 GMT -6
Thanks for the links Bab. Some interesting pictures. I particularly liked the Reusswig and the 7th Cavalry web site pics.
Gary
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Post by BrokenSword on Apr 4, 2007 14:17:30 GMT -6
Bab-
“What's your preference?”
Wow. That’s a tough question to answer. I actually like them all, and have problems with them all too, and for different reasons. The various artists have all had different motives or themes behind their interpretations. Some wanted to capture the sense of action and fury of the Indian response to attack, but didn‘t worry about accuracy of details. (W.R. Leigh for example) Others wanted to depict the uniforms and equipment, clothing and weapons accurately. (Paxson made perhaps the first sincere attempt at accuracy of details) Many others were producing illustrations for the print media, and as such, had a commercial need to depict what the audience wanted and expected to see. (One early lithograph actually shows Custer and all his troopers in full-dress and immaculately donned uniforms straight from the dry cleaner) Most appear, to me anyway, to have either leaned away from accuracy in order to achieve ‘artistic merit’ (if you will) or commercial acceptability, or they have sacrificed in the other direction. They unfortunately (fortunate for me?) have ALL missed one very interesting historical feature. Burial detail soldiers, some (at least one) Indian account/s and a few soldiers not in the Custer fight but only the Reno fight mentioned it as well. I intend to depict it prominently in my attempt. AND- NO! I’m not telling’ at this time. As the author of the Book of Revelation wrote, “Let he who hath understanding…..” It shouldn’t be difficult to figure out.
My ‘style’ would definitely be called realism. And probably needs to be for this project. Just my opinion, but paintings of this particular subject beg for a realistic approach. A seascape, landscape or a still life can be successful however far across the range of expressionist styles the artist chooses to venture. But, the Little Bighorn fight (specifically the Custer part of the fight) has a huge mystery involved. ‘What happened?’ I think we pretty much have to admit that no ‘stubbornly determined stand’ was made - at least not as far as how it has been depicted until now. Events just seemed to have happened too fast, the numbers were lop-sided and terrain unsuitable to have allowed for that. It doesn’t mean that the soldiers all threw their guns away at the start and were all killed while running in pure panic. It tells me more that there was simply not the time to organize a ‘stand’ - heroic or not. Every Custer movement seems to have been made amid a rapid cascade of overwhelming responses or counter measures and, “Couldn’t have happened at a worse time,” progression of scenarios.
No single painting can, of course, tell the whole story or show everything. But the stage can be set. One can (I hope) come close to catching a sort of snap shot that wouldn‘t be argued with by historians, art critics or the eternal sea of uniform and weapons experts ever laying low and awaiting a chance to pounce. Drama can be depicted without throwing off an accurate over view of the action and without resorting to a false depiction of the participants in their poses.
A good painting needs a center of interest or focal point. George Custer’s figure is the natural focus of most paintings. He is usually depicted as standing and determinedly flinging ‘hot lead’ at massed warriors, while others crouch or kneel about him. In fact, I think his status was mostly what amounted to ‘just another player’ after the first shots were fired. Simply a part of the crowd falling beneath the steamroller. He was one of a small few trying desperately to get out in front of the collapse and attempting to regain control. I don’t think he ever had much, if any, control once the unraveling started from almost the beginning. It was like a pyramid of acrobats once a man on a lower level has a knee buckle under him. What follows can’t be stopped by any member of the pyramid.
The easiest knot to trip over is the battlefield’s appearance. Aside from the man made additions, the battlefield today doesn’t look like it did then. Years of government programs promoting grassland reclamation and seedings have changed all that. Several varieties of grass and other plants there today weren’t found outside Asia at the time of the battle. I still haven’t sorted it out. What was the weather like at that time is another question. Some years the battlefield is green from rainfall. Dryer years change that. I know that THAT day was hot, dry and dusty and the sky apparently cloudless, but what of the month or weeks before that? Rain? Some, a little, a lot or none? Green, grayish or brown? Lush or sparse? A few of the white accounts give faint clues. Indians called June “the time when the ponies are fat.” So… were the ponies fat? Let’s all sing: “Crazy Horse, Crazy Horse, how did your pastures grow?” And just what WAS the time of day? An hour’s difference in the afternoon sun’s position has a huge impact on the shadows it casts. Were the Indians on the lower ground, fighting from the shadows so to speak? Were the soldiers higher up shooting into the shaded areas from and threw the bright sunlight in their eyes? Its important to me to get it all correct.
I started one version in oils years ago, that I abandoned -horse furniture was wrong. I drew out another version. Abandoned that one too - misplaced the characters, BUT some basic parts of it are salvageable. I am leaning to acrylics for this one -- Acrylics are easier to re-paint and change completed portions with, when I discover that I have screwed this one up too.
M
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Post by harpskiddie on Apr 4, 2007 15:15:01 GMT -6
M
I, for one, hope that I am around to enjoy your work and to pounce, because that's what I do best. Enjoy and pounce. Like a big cat. Maybe I'll even finish my book before you finish your painting, but I probably do a lot more rewrites than you do paintovers, so I think you'll beat me.
Gordie, here's the lethal leopard, lurking, leering, leaping....................................
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Post by Montana Bab on Apr 4, 2007 22:52:45 GMT -6
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Post by Montana Bab on Apr 4, 2007 23:10:27 GMT -6
Michael;
I'm tickled to hear that realism is your "style" of art. One of my favorite western artists is James Bama. His art is so real, you'd think you're looking at a photo. Now, I know there are those who'll say, "Why not just take a picture?" But as an artist you'll know, as I do, how hard it is to paint realism. My goal is to paint like a photo!
It sounds to me like you have thought of almost every aspect of your masterpiece, from a to z. You verbalize it beautifully. I wonder if you've thought that instead of trying to put everything into one painting, focus on one aspect of it. For instance, the painting of the bugler trying to save Hodgeson. ( I love that painting.) Do several different aspects, and work up to that one grand final masterpiece.
And don't tell anyone your secret unique feature, SHOW THEM! IT'S GONNA BE GREAT! Me and Gordie can't wait !
PS, Gordie, wish I could see your painting of Custer's FIRST STAND!
Sure am nosy=Bab
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Post by harpskiddie on Apr 5, 2007 0:05:14 GMT -6
BandB:
You must have misunderstood - I never painted Custer's First Stand, merely mentioned that there are some paintings of Trevillian Station.
My two masterworks were the one I mentioned [Fetterman] and another wonder of the ages titled Dawn on the Llano Estacado, which was a vision in umbers, ochers and yellows [and was actually splotched and bladed over a failed painting of an adobe hut and a burro, which had come out looking like a bicycle rack in front of a collapsed Coke machine. It did wind up in a museum in St. Catharines, Ontario, as an example of Modern Canadian Painting [pay particular attention to the deft brushwork and use of somber tones to convey mood].
One has to laugh, or throw up...........
I have never in my life painted anything that looked like anything. I was rather like that chimpanzee they used to let loose with buckets of paint. On the other hand, I did have a talent for the guitar, and I could always not only sing but remember the words to the songs.
One of my girl friends in the old days used to say that I could sing and play the birds out of the trees, or shoot them out, if they didn't care for my singing. None of which is helping me with my book.
Gordie, a bundle of mostly useless talents, but really a decent person, underneath it all.....................
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Post by shan on Apr 5, 2007 4:17:28 GMT -6
Re some of what BrokenSword had to say, I have been trying to make a painting that gets somewhere near to the truth of those last final moments of that battle, well. as I see it at any rate, for the last thirty years or so so now, I suppose there must have been twenty odd versions if memory serves me right, some only small, loose colour sketches of a particular moment, some large Hollywood productions with a cast of, . . . well dozens at least, some have been sold, some lost to life's transitory pattern, and yet others painted over in favor of other subject matter. The trouble is, one is often overtaken by new information, so that you find to your horror that your long labored over masterpiece is now full of mistakes, mistakes that are just too numerous to rectify. A case in point is a large painting of mine, { I am sending the imagine to Diane who says she will kindly post it,} which had Custer playing the doomed hero facing the Indians final mounted charge,{ Something that probably never happened, } wearing his buckskin jacket. This painting was painted some dozen years or so before I spent all my money on books on the subject, several of which informed me that a number of witnesses state that my man had taken that jacket off hours before the final battle. That was fairly easy to rectify, but for some reason I had painted Adj., Cooke in a linen jacket, and this I refused to change. Call it what you will, artistic belligerence, downright stubbornness, or just attachment to a piece of painting, the jacket stays. And that's my point, the adherence to the accuracy over anything, in any subject can often kill the painting stone dead. That I'm afraid is the problem with most artwork on this subject, the need to get every detail right, the need to cram most paintings with everyone the artist considers of importance in the same small space, makes most of them seem completely unreal. I know that most of us want an accurate rendition of the battle, we are fed up with sloppy films artwork and books that have not bothered to do their homework, but there must be a middle way. Shan
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Post by elisabeth on Apr 5, 2007 4:32:56 GMT -6
Perhaps the time is ripe for a new cyclorama, or something along the lines of the Bayeux Tapestry -- not just one "snapshot" moment, but a sequence of them?
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Post by BrokenSword on Apr 5, 2007 7:10:16 GMT -6
www.artrenewal.org/This is a great site and it has NOTHING to do with LBH. However, many high res images by Old West masters are on here: Remington, Russell, Schreyvogel and others less well known. The emphisis is heavily focused on the 'Classical Realisim' school of art. On the menu bar at the top, select 'museum' and it will present a link leading to the extensive list of artists. HUNDREDS of works by scores of painters. Gordie: He-Whose-Pencils-Have-No-Erasers-Left (Seminole) Perhaps something here will inspire you to try painting again. Tip: 'Forget the trowel. Use the brushes.' paraphrased from "The Godfather" M
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Post by Diane Merkel on Apr 5, 2007 7:47:15 GMT -6
Great site, BS! I wish they listed the location of each painting, rather than just "public collection" in some instances, but a lot of their locations are identified.
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Post by harpskiddie on Apr 5, 2007 9:35:15 GMT -6
shan:
Nice work!!!! But shouldn't that Indian over on the right................................?
BS:
Dabbling with paints was supposedly therapeutic for me. The doctors finally decided that enough was enough..........
shan:
Getting it right, and discovering that you were wrong, is always the big problem, hence the umpteen thousand rewrites I've gone through.
Gordie, part of whose brain is located in a glass jar somewhere..............................
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Post by BrokenSword on Apr 5, 2007 9:54:10 GMT -6
Shan-
Very good job. You have really caught something here that I was trying to express in my original posting. (Literally, ‘One picture… worth a thousand words’)
The sense of a ‘steam-roller’ effect is portrayed quite effectively. Custer - central yet only one of the crowd - another point illustrated quite well. Horses bolting from fright, disorganized effort, helplessness and hopelessness, a sense of over-whelming odds and over-powering force - its ALL there.
As too Cooke’s white coat, it goes squarely to the ‘artistic merit’ notion. If YOU (the artist) think that it works, then by all means it should stay. If someone like ‘Gordie the Pouncer’ speaks up - just tell them it’s Dr. Lord.
I agree 100% with everything you have said in your earlier postings on this thread‘s subject. The ‘middle-way’ is likely the goal that one should aim for. Rarely does a photographer catch a truly aesthetic composition while recoding the story through his camera lens. (The flag raising at Iwo Jima comes to mind as one of those rarities) And usually, a photographer needs a series of pictures to tell the story. The artist must tell the story (greatest part of it, anyway) in one frame - a ‘snap-shot‘ if you will. The artist who fails to do that will need a bucket-full of excuses to explain the shortfall. Your depiction, Shan, needs no excuses what-so-ever.
M P.S. - I neglected to mention, in my first posting here, that this subject also screams for LARGE. May I ask the size of the painting that you posted?
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