Last night, looking at my copy of Dave McKean's impressive graphic novel
Cages, I was struck again with the great sense of strength and freedom that pulsates from his work. It is a vivid, intense feeling: the sense that there's no 'trick' in this art, no formula that's being followed; that we are in the presence of something like raw invention... Something a bit inchoate needs to be expressed: a mood perhaps — a hypnotic, slightly menacing intimation of the dreamlike free-floating tenuousness of everyday experience. And to arrive at this goal, many options, many possibilities are explored simultaneously. These various experiments find their coherence in the "clawmark expressionism" of a style that marshalls everything (lines and textures and inkspots and photographs and noise and hatchings and bones and thread and shadows and accidents and rips and distortions and transparencies and juxtapositions and absences...) to fight the good fight.
Of course, when I look at this stuff I am always reminded of Barron Storey's work. And I wonder if he influenced McKean or if it is a case of convergent evolution. Here are some Barron Storey illustrations:
Another great artist that also has a similar style is Bill Sienkiewicz:
When I look at stuff like this, I find it wonderful and exciting, but also a bit dispiriting, because I wish that I could be so free!
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