Daily KOS will have an extraordinary visual treat tomorrow. Epppie, the newest KosArtist to join our growing group of artistic talent, will be hosting Saturday Morning Political Cartoon. Stop by tomorrow morning and see his marvelous cartoons. I won't give away what they are, but here's a hint: they involve the SOTU.
Epppie's creations have the look and feel of the classic definition of Cartoon:
Cartoons in the Fine Arts
In the fine arts, the cartoon is a full-sized preliminary drawing for a work to be executed afterward..
combined with political editorial emphasis. When I asked Epppie for some information about himself for this intro, he replied, (on the flip side):
What to say about me! Well, I grew up in Boston and now live in the Midwest, which may give me an
interesting perspective, as I've experienced both the
Dem heartland and the Pub heartland! I'm primarily a
painter, but I've always loved cartooning and have
been searching for a voice in that field. With that
in mind, I've been trying to quiet down the internal
critic, as you suggest, and have some fun with
cartooning. I'm more and more aware of how important
that is when it comes to politics - the more serious
the issues, the more VITAL it is to encourage some
lightness of thought and feeling to go along with all
the bitter and heavy thoughts that can inundate!
Epppie is so modest! He has a powerful, honest voice both in his artistic expression, and his written words.
From his diary archives here are some snippets of Epppie wisdom:
Eppie on family legends:
John Kane was a kind of irish immigrant Mike Fink. Marty Scorsese should make a film about him! Like Mike Fink, he was a wanderer, a lover of rivers and railroads. He was a brawler extraordinaire. In his autobiography, Skyhooks, he claims to have handled Jim Corbett easily in a few rounds of sparring.
But what he is famous for today, some seventy years after his death, is his paintings. Here is a link that shows some of his work:
http://www.leninimports.com/...
When I was young, I didn't really know what to make of John Kane. He had died long before I was born. He DID look a little like my Dad, and more like my Grandpa, I thought, but his paintings looked very primitive to me. And his life story was so different from mine. I wasn't a lazy child, but John Kane's childhood was at least partly spent in the coal mines in Scotland. I wasn't lazy as an adult either, but John Kane was something else. He was proud of his body, of his strength, because of something that was far more important to him than the boxing matches he fought; he was proud of the steel he helped work, when he came to America, the coal he helped mine, the roads he helped pave, and so on. John Kane talks a lot about this in Skyhooks, but I think it's really in his paintings.
I'm romanticizing, no doubt, but I say that when you look at his landscape paintings, you can sense that the same hands that paint the bridges and buildings and railroads and rivers and roads and horses and carts and cars and people of the Pittsburgh area in the glory days of industrialization, were the same hands that built those things. I'm a painter, but my hands could never paint them the same way. Oh, I've built stuff. However, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, it was still, I think, a time when everything that got built, dug, moved got touched by human hands. John Kane's were the hands that did those things.
Epppie on art and work:
Interestingly, artist and writer William Morris hammered at a similar theme during the 19th century. Morris associated cultural decline with industrialization, war and the excesses of capitalism.
snip
We often use the phrase "that's why they call it work", to mean that work is inherently drudgery. Morris would have hated that.
He challenged the notion that work is doing what we don't want to do. He suggested that if society is not beautiful, it must be because the relationship between worker and work has been corrupted,
drained of joy.
In politics, we often forget the human need for joy. It ISN'T just fear that motivates politics, even the politics of our opponents. Like many nationalist movements that have gone before, neoconservatism offers folks the joy of being part of something greater, something represented by wars, flags, speeches and Great Cultural Achievements. Even in the form of W's threadbare rehashings of stirring rhetoric of yore, that sort of thing is a siren song for a society inured to drudgery.
Back in November, Epppie wrote about being beat up. Even then he exhibits compassion and clarity:
When you are hurt, that's when you most need your determination and will, your faith in yourself. You can almost feel your fingers holding on to life itself.
But there was a miracle for me. As lonely and ashamed as I felt, I also felt deep inside me a fearlessness that I had never been sure was there. And around me I found people who cared about me and genuinely went out of their way to care, in simple ways that were also so helpful. My best friends were there for me, but so were the medical professionals I turned to in my hour of need. They were strangers, but they almost seemed to care for me more than I cared for myself. I'm feeling much better now.
Here are some samples of his Cartoon voice:
Republicans on a ball.
Another one, an outbreak of Spinhead:
A well spun head can combine opposing ideas, such as "escalation" and "exit strategy" into one, and can shake novelty into such jaded concepts as "last throes" and "give the President's policy a chance".
Please come by tomorrow morning by Searching for 'Epppie''s page and/ or for 'Saturday Morning Political Cartoon", and share some mojo with him! If you are also a KosArtist, feel free to post your own creations in the comment section.
I plan to show up, even though I will be going to the big demonstration tomorrow. I hope you will too:-)