Prolific artist Freddy Age Seven has recently turned from single images to the demanding art form of juxtaposed sequential graphic narrative: cartoons. Here is an untitled composition in 25 panels that tells a pirate story. But it is no mere entertainment: it is both a searching study of human greed, and an exploration of the limits of narrative form. Yes! Look closely. ...
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The stagecoach, horse, and cacti are all drawn in red, with sharp angles and spiky corners everywhere. I can testify that Freddy Age Seven learned some of this technique from books by Ed Emberley, who can teach anybody to draw simple symbolic forms. The spokes are sharp, the cactus needles (OF COURSE!) are sharp, the legs and face of the horse are sharp. The viewer's tired ...
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Phoebe Age Five recently accepted the challenge to draw 18 cats as fast as she could. She completed the task in well under five minutes, and the result is a set of cat drawings with a striking range of compositional choices. In drawing, composition is the art of arranging visual elements on a page. It is of more fundamental importance even than draftsmanship or rendering, b...
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Popular internet artist Freddy Age 7, in a rare signed artwork, pays homage to the first president of the United States (see Freddy's extensive online art gallery here). Patriotic images, especially ones inspired by national holidays, are a staple of this young artist's ouevre.
This image features a George Washington figure recognizable by his white wig and numerous subtle ...
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Knight versus dragon, but note how the dragon is a biped who seems to be communicating via sign language. His mouth is politely closed, and the flame shooting from his nostrils barely extends further than his claws. The knight, on the other hand, holds his means defense off to one side, and brandishes his weapon of offense menacingly.
Actual narration from Freddy Age Se...
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Freddy Age Seven interprets the great American holiday, Thanksgiving, with this image of mayhem.
At first glance, I took it for a battle between pilgrims (tall black hats, blunderbusses) and indians (feathered headdresses, tomahawks, bows and arrows). But upon closer examination, neither side is clearly chasing the other. Everybody's running to the left, firing bullets an...
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It's got a geometric simplicity that is mesmerizing. The repetition of circular and triangular forms creates a visual field in which every line is significant. This is a front view of a steam train coming down the tracks, or at least trying to come down the tracks. SOMETHING is in the way, and the engineer is upset.
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It's not exactly 36 Views of Mount Fuji, but this set of drawings by Phoebe Age Five does keep the viewer on the move. There is a dance between the human figure and the flowerpot that draws the viewer in. You realize that you are not just watching a person dance around a flower (which would be enough, wouldn't it?), but that your own point of view is being manipulated by the ...
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Vikings: "They're cool," says Freddy Age Seven warily, "but they're not good." These Vikings, though, are happy enough adventurers. Their tiny boat has a grin of its own as it rocks through the spiky waves. Rows of oars dip down into the sea and a strange, boxy, union-jacky flag structure surmounts the truncated mast. Loot, pillage, and burn, YAY! No wait, those aren't oa...
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An enormous horse carries seven people in comfortable seats with cushy backs. He is led by a helpful cowboy (note the hat and spurs) whose expressive lasso guides the beast and covers the vehicle. The people inside have a range of emotional responses.
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"It's a grand old rag," wrote Irving Berlin, but nobody wanted to sing it that way, so eventually he changed it to "grand old flag."
Freddy Age Seven provides a 9/11 patriotic montage with a giant Star Spangled Banner waving in the sky --okay, so it's spangled with exactly two stars, but you get the idea. In front of it is a giant golden eagle whose expression is joyous w...
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Moseyin' along in the wild west, this stick-figure settler encourages his stick-figure horse to keep it movin'. The stick figure wheels keep turnin' over, bumpin' along on the long line of holes in the printer paper, I mean territory. The stick-figure sky is bright blue, and the settler sings out, "My heart's as big as a baked potato!"
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As John Ruskin says in his 1857 work The Elements of Drawing,
"Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded." To the eye of a painter, everything is color-patch bumping into color-patch. At the thin edge where some color patches bump into others, there is sometimes ...
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