In searching for visual metaphors for this exercise I spent a lot of time looking at newspaper editorial cartoons. I’ve never done this explicitly before, to try and look for archives of political cartoons, websites, community forums, etc. I have to say, I found the whole ordeal pretty depressing. There seems to be a lot of new artists with large twitter followings making these very hateful, ignorant cartoons, sort of profiting out of the whirlwind of xenophobia and hatred stirred up by Mr. Trump in recent years. I looked at a few artists like Ben Garrison and A.F. Branco who were frankly just awful.
My one shining light in this research was this episode of the podcast Chapo Trap House where they do a sort of tour of a number of prominent right wing political illustrators. In the words of one of the hosts- “Newspaper editorial cartoons, which are, already you know, bad. Known for being not funny, incredibly poorly drawn, and generally just the scribblings of octogenarian cranks.” They went through comic strips such as Dry Bones, Mallard Filmore, and Day by Day. They walked through a lot of the tropes of the format, including very hokey attempts at metaphor where they will just use obtuse visual references but just excessively label everything for clarity, for example have a politician pulling a large weight and then write “the debt” on it. This sort of humourless, obvious work wasn’t appealing to me.
I did find two artists that were interesting. One is the syndicated editorial cartoonist for The Irish Times, who produces some pretty funny illustrations, also doing some pretty good caricature work. See an archive here: https://www.irishtimes.com/profile/martyn-turner-7.1837410
Also Adam Zyglis, who works for The Buffalo News- https://www.caglecartoons.com/archive.asp?ArtistID=%7B0BC09513-7316-44BD-9263-376ACC549066%7D
In digging through these editorial cartoons I thought of another medium which frequently employs visual metaphor, street art. Straight away I thought of Banksy-http://www.banksy.co.uk/
Some images from the website that I found very poignant and utilising visual metaphor without resorting to just labelling every individual item to get the point across, a very good example of what savvy illustrators can achieve-
At this point I remembered a book I had read at the library a few months ago, so I decided to go back and take it out again. It’s called Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine, compiled by William Parry. It showcases many photographs of beautiful street art done along the border wall in Palestine. Some examples of such art can be seen on this pinterest board: https://pin.it/fvgsn4rhrdxzf6
Satisfied with my research I moved onto doing my drawings.
I decided on “Censorship of the press” for my phrase.
Inspired by the work in exploring ideas visually in the Words into Pictures exercise, I sketched out some ideas, and then used a fine liner to give them a bit more visual fidelity. I tried to avoid spending a lot of time finding references, focusing more on getting the ideas out, and I’m happy with the results. I also wanted to avoid overexplaining things and relying on text as a crutch, so hopefully I communicated the ideas effectively.
I asked my girlfriend what she thought the images meant, and I was happy that I got the intended meaning across.
Ref
Parry, William. Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine. Chicago Review Press, 2011.
Josh Robbins OCA Learning Log 