Dave the Chimp & others

I lose track of who I have and haven’t mentioned on my blog now as I’ve had these things swimming around my head for a good while now.. but I want to add Dave the Chimp, purely because of the humour in his work and also the simplification of some of his characters… firstly, the execution and humour in his work reminds me of my running with scissors piece again and I need to worrying and get back to the fun I had making that piece with all my other stuff… basically the thick black outlines used in his work reminds me of comics and cartoons I used to see as a child, e.g for about the 100^th time this technique defuses any quiestionable subject matter through the use of this medium purely because it is suddenly viewed as child like and you allow yourself to appreciate the humour more than if this image was photographed or painted realistically…


I love his cartoon inspired line art, everything is simplified but also exaggerated slightly to emphasize the cartoon nature of the work...

Now I know I am too much of a pussy to go out and paint graffiti on a wall if Im not commissioned to do so.. or to even stay up till 4 in the morning just to fly poster one of my designs up on a wall… but what I like about some of Dave’s work is that he has openly sought out thrown away mattresses and painted his own cute and aesthetically pleasing characters on them but also he’s bringing attention to homelessness and sleeping on the streets..

such a simple idea also has a deeper meaning… now in a tenuous way… I’m going to reference 2 other artists here...

Abram Games has influenced me ever since last year.. not because of his work per se, but more through his working method… First off, he didnt have a computer so everything he created was hand painted.. but the accuracy in which he created his works in phenomenal. But as I said, it was his working method… Games coined the phrase, Maximum meaning, minimum means… which he employed in all of his work… he believed this so much that if a client didn’t like the idea he put forward then he wouldn’t change it but instead recommended the client seek another artist for the work. Games would start with an idea and then set about boiling it down to a minimal design but whose message was still strong and clear… he achieved this by first thumbnailing all possible compositions of his idea, sometimes changing the scale of elements within the piece or by removing it completely… but he also added colour to some of these thumbnails before applying it to the final thing only then would he ask others what they thought of his design… often he would ask his children as he believed if a child couldn’t understand the work then neither would an adult. It was this constant revision of his work that allowed Games to create some of the most iconic posters in British history… it’s a shame I seem to struggle with this method of working at the moment… I can thumbnail for days, weeks even.. but I can never settle on an idea.. this needs to change!

In Scott McCloud’s book “understanding comics” he mentions how the human brain still recognises imagery even when it is reduced down to its simplest form as a symbol almost… a photograph of a man’s face can be represented by a line and 2 dots yet these simple marks are universally recognised as a “face” .

in a similar way, Chimp has reduced his characters down to universally recognised shapes formed by lines in which we read them as arms and legs… but we suddenly project a personality onto these cute critters and feel some form of pity for them… I’m not saying this is what Chimp openly does in his work.. he could have the same approach as Mark does and just draws whatever he wants.. but what I’m getting at is that if I can do the same as Games, McCloud and Dave the Chimp.. then I will hopefully start realising that I am sometimes over complicating the idea…