Glenn Barr - Michigan Ave.

The mid-90s was an interesting time for young artists looking for a break - the spread of the internet made buzz travel faster than ever before, and in the art world buzz is the only way to gain any ground. Nowadays there’re way more people using the ‘net, but there’s also so much noise in the form of useless search results that it’s simply harder to find your audience. In the 90s, if you were on the ‘net and somebody was even remotely interested in what you were doing, they’d find you.

That’s how I first discovered Barr - surfing the limited selection of new art on the 90s internet. I still have images of his work from that era saved to my hard drive - surviving multiple transitions to new drives and computers, I posess ones and zeroes representing Barr’s works that are fifteen years old.

I haven’t actually thought about Barr’s work in quite a long time. I was obsessed with his stuff when I discovered it, but haven’t crossed paths with it since.

It was while I was thinking about artists to feature on my site Oh Boy, CAKE! that I realized I should definitely do a spotlight on Mr. Glenn Barr, that guy who’s stuff I loved so much way way way back when. Once I really went digging to find some of his older work, I realized something else: this guy’s stuff had a massive impact on on the evolution of my own work.

Many people would probably cite Barr’s subject matter and “coolness” as the most striking aspects of his pieces. As a male artist discovering Barr’s work in my early 20s, I can affirm that yes, drawings and paintings of trouble-maker babes, vampire chicks, and rugged slices-of-life had some serious appeal. More striking to me though were the telling gestures behind his characters. The people he painted had weight - not just of the gravity variety, but of the life-is-rough variety.

Perhaps it’s easy to classify his characters as jaded - I’ve never seen a Glenn Barr painting where the subjects are surprised by something in the environment he’s illustrated for them to inhabit. Car crashes, vampires, hookers, or a pimped-out Jesus - nothing’s alarming to Barr’s characters. Their neutrality to their surroundings is both curious and calming - this strange world you’re looking at is completely accepted by its denizens, and suddenly your own personal strange feels a-okay.

My argument against assuming these fringe-dwellers are just jaded hipsters is this: Barr’s characters exist on the over-stimulated edge of society, but they aren’t champions for it - they’re tired, and marginally self aware, and for them it’s just another day of brushing against the underbelly. They’re not so much as ‘cool’ with their surroundings as they are just too damn worn out to give a crap about that giant monkey in a space helmet driving a gold Caddy. 

In the late 90’s, after spending months staring my impressionable eyes at whatever of Barr’s works I could find, it seems I came away thoroughly informed and inspired - though apparently unaware that any transformation had taken place.

I realize now that I’d found truth in Barr’s figures. There’s a kind of distorted, languid quality to the characters, especially in his work pre-2001. These fringe-dwellers have no reason to fake anything. Even if a character is doing something active (the stripper hanging off the pole, above) there’s a human casualness present in their pose. The weight of their inner dialogue never seems to disappear behind their immediate circumstance. That weight manifests itself as swayed backs, hunched shoulders, hanging arms, and loose hips. It’s that honesty that stuck with me - posturing is for assholes and super heroes. Real people don’t have the energy for that shit.

For these characters, life is rough and exhausting and Barr says it through their posture and movement. Despite his penchant for graphic silhouettes and warped angles, the humanity of Barr’s subjects always seeps through the distortion in big, thick, recognizable puddles.

Thankfully I was able to catch a few lingering stains from his efforts.

• # glenn barr

John Byrne - Fantastic Four Cover #243

John Byrne was my absolute favourite comic book artist, and his run on FF was my favourite stuff to read.

X-Men was always a bit harsh to me, and Spider-Man was, I dunno - but Byrne’s Fantastic Four issues felt like home. There was something about that family dynamic and the way he helped weave it that I really liked.

I think one of the things that helped make it work so well was that Byrne seemed to take his time.

He would take time out from the action to have a meaningful dialogue scene, but he would also take the time to make those panels engaging. The environments were usually rendered with lots of detail to get lost in, and he took the time to make sure the people seemed to be really conversing. The result was a rich world full of defined characters that you were invested in, so when they went off and battled some unstoppable menace you actually gave a damn about their chances of survival.

There was also something incredibly appealing and touching about Byrne’s inking and line work in the 70s and early 80s. It felt… warm? His thicks and thins were deliberately placed yet unique to him. I’ve never seen anyone else put emphasis in the places Byrne did. The fact that you could also see a kind of rhythmic, subtle wobble to some of his ink work made it organic, honest, and obvious that this guy was laying things down with care. He could lay down beautiful, sweeping, rhythmic lines, but he’d offset that with areas of concentrated texture.

His stuff was playful, patient, and engaging.

I used to hope he looked like Santa.

• # john byrne

Shogun Warriors

These things were the holy grail for me as a kid.

I first saw these 2 foot tall plastic dream machines at a house I would visit with my parents - their son (who was maybe 10 years older than me) had all of them. After a few years went by, and he presumably began to find skateboarding and girls more interesting than plastic robots, I got to play with them a bit.

It was like touching jesus… or something. It was good.

Their fists shot off and they shot ninja stars and missiles and they were HUGE and they smelled and felt kinda different than other toys. And man did they ever look SERIOUS.

I didn’t actually got to have any of my own Shoguns until I was in my mid-20s and Ebay made it so easy to spend money on nostalgia, but those few visits during my childhood were definitely formative.

• # shogun warriors

Colargol (Jeremy the Bear in Canada, Barnaby Bear in the UK)

This show may have had the greatest influence on my aesthetic. Based on a series of French children’s books written by Olga Pouchine in the 50s, the character of Colargol was turned into an stop-motion series by producer Albert Barille and Polish art director and animator Tadeusz Wilkosz with the studio Se-ma-for (a state-run studio in Poland).

While the character design on the show was certainly terrific, it was always the sets that caught my attention. Everything was stylized and to some extent interpretative. Everything looked like an illustration made three dimensional - and it was consistent, but always fresh. Not every interpretation of a tree looked the same, but they were each similarly simplified and treated as representations of trees.

The world of Colargol was always inventive, and its playful influence was inescapable.

• # colargol

Christopher Walken

Once upon a time I did a little acting.

I told my agent at the time that really, I wanted to end up doing work like Christopher Walken, and not the average mainstream kid’s stuff I was doing.

Even I didn’t really know what I meant by “like Christopher Walken”, and of course I was indeed a kid, and my acting was indeed average, so of course the only work I could get was mainstream stuff.

And also: Only Walken is Walken.

• # christopher walken

Choppers

Just look at all those amazing little parts.

Vroom.

• # choppers

Choppers

My love of choppers probably kicked into gear with Easy Rider, but I also grew up within walking distance of a few biker clubs which were all over the quiet east end of Toronto at the end of the ’70s. My mom used to walk over and ask one of the nice, grizzled dudes for help when she couldn’t open a stubborn jar.

Captain America’s bike in Easy Rider was a strange kind of bad-ass - it wasn’t an obvious monster like Billy the Kid’s bike, but instead it possessed a touch of the lovelies. It was all chrome and long lines and had narrow tires and a rhythm. Billy’s bike was awesome, but the Captain’s bike was beautiful.

Once I started really looking at how these pieces of machinery were constructed, I found a whole new beauty was at work, and it was one that wasn’t easy to interpret in cartoony drawings - not with any authenticity. The chopper aesthetic is based on the simple appreciation of necessity. Nothing’s covered up or disguised. Every bolt, hose, spring, and working component is proudly on display - a chopper is precisely the sum of its parts.

As soon as you try to simplify and stylize a chopper in a drawing or cartoon, you loose the essential heart of what makes them so fantastic.

I should probably just buy one and get it over with.

• # choppers
• # easy rider

Jack Kirby

It’s impossible to grow tired of Jack Kirby’s work.

Phenomenal use of black (as usual), and an incredible application of colour means this chaotic piece is completely understandable. You can clearly see the 3-dimensional structure that could easily become muddled in anyone else’s hands.

… and just look at those shapes! Kirby was pure inventiveness.

• # jack kirby

Doug Johnson - “Judas Priest - Screaming For Vengeance”

Insane - so ferocious! These album covers cemented my attitude toward metal (love).

I just found out that Doug Johnson, the illustrator behind my three favourite JP album covers, was born and raised in my home town of Toronto.

Cools.

• # doug johnson
• # judas priest

Kittens

It’s characters like this that seem to find their way through to my character design aesthetic the most.

Appealing and even adorable, and most likely not too sharp in the traditional sense - but certainly full of personality.

• # kittens