Drawn

The previously blogged and frightfully talented Paul Pope (of Batman: Year 100 fame) now has a blog, called Pulphope. And it’s not all “Hey look an old sketch” and “Jeez, don’t ya just hate winter?” (uh, like mine is). He talks all smart about art and stuff. Why, he even quotes Picasso!

In one of his very few published interviews, Picasso calls his pictures “a sum of destructions.” Even from decades beyond the grave, this prolific painter-sculptor-printmaker telegraphs to us the startling, singular image of artist-as-destroyer. Every cheerful demolitionist, loving his job, knows that in order to create you must first create space. It’s only logical. You must remove what was there before — you must destroy it — you must destroy the blankness of the white canvas or the white page as the demolitionist destroys the old building or carpark, consume it with colors and lines and forms as the cheerful demolitionist consumes his with dynamite, nitro, and implosion-physics. You must swallow the thing with work in order to build something new in its place. Picasso’s destructions led to Cubism.

One must destroy in order to create. This is a poetic notion and perhaps not properly a philosophy, however the idea suggests to me what I take to be an elemental truth of our world– Life exists by eating other life. This sad observation is my credo. Life itself is an ignited consumption, a violence, a continuing energy exchange, sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, beginning with birth and ending in death, consumption, and destruction. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go blog about my new shoes.

EDIT (Dec 6, 2006): I also just found Paul’s Flickr page which you might want to bookmark as well. RAD! (Do the kids still say “Rad?” Is it still cool? Do the kids still say “cool?”)