THE ART OF MARK GRAHAM

What does this picture mean? I’ve been thinking about it ever since I saw it again, after many decades. It’s in a 1975 book I read again and again as a child called Make Your Own Comics by Richard Cummings. I loved the book when I was younger because it showcases children’s art alongside the art of professionals. In some cases it includes the professional’s childhood work as well. In this case, this drawing of a dog scratching its ear was made by a 10 year old boy. Now not

For the past four years I've spent most of my creative energies on a project I call Deep Time. It's the story of a recently-discovered bird-like dinosaur from Jurassic China named Caihong juji. It began as a simple story about a day in the life of an extremely obscure extinct creature. I planned it to be a picture book for children. This did not work--primarily because the story I felt increasingly compelled to tell was not the sort deemed suitable for children. That is,

She's originally from the palace of Nineveh, the citadel of the last great king of the Assyrians, Ashurbanipal. Around the years 645-635 BCE, a master sculptor created a series of reliefs for the king that depicted him "hunting" lions. I put hunting in quotations because it is more like ritualized slaughter, akin to bullfighting. The animals naturally don't stand a chance of escape. Far from a hunt in the wild, the massacre begins with dozens of animals brought to the kil

Style is what's left when you've tried and failed to copy somebody else. Put a little more positively, style is what emerges after you've thoroughly digested the works of those who are your teachers--both alive and dead. It's the little bit of yourself that puts a new twist on their work--that insists on itself in spite of their example and their authority. For some reason this reality eludes many people involved in teaching and learning art. Work that is "unoriginal" is