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Joseph Fiedler
What to Draw
posted:
Factories 2006
End of Year Reflection Blues


Some people feel that the year is ending and other people feel that the year is beginning.
Loos Loferés, 1998

Currently, I’m trying to develop a type of visual iconographic lexicon that can be drawn on freely and in combinatory ways for making pictures [and money] that resonate in a certain way, I suppose, for certain people.  I can’t imagine being liked by a large mass audience such as In-And-Out Burger fries are in California for example.  What’s that all about anyway?  I never aspired to KFC and I only ate that stuff when my parents foisted it on me.  Now, I try to follow certain retinal cues as well as those with literary- historical- intellectual associations.  Some are rational and some are whimsical and interweaving the two seems to make nice pairings.  In addition, some things are purely formal.  It all looks a little sloppy to me, but at any rate, it’s fun to do and it’s good work if you can get it.  I am so totally the Cottage Industry Guy [It sounds like Garage Band.  Maybe that’s a good title for an illustration themed TV show]!

Anyway, so far I’ve gotten natural forms, especially those with the imprimatur of amateurish instructional images, somewhat retro [old dictionary illustrations] stuff, various tools and scientific products [as too are random archetypal actions like a high diver, wood chopper or a ball player doing heroic or mundane things] and icons. 
Wild Lettuce
Not too long ago, I started to make paintings of the various forms of lettuce.  I had noticed that I didn’t see much lettuce [or greens of any kind for that matter] in painting today [my goal is to be the “painter of lettuce”] and began to incorporate them along with pictures of waterfowl cribbed out of my Golden Nature Guides [One must not forget the underlying political connotations here as well!] all juxty with the anon symbolic stuff.
Golden Nature Guides
Collard 2006
The ducks led to bird people [the founding fathers of ornithology- yes! even ornithology is sexist] and eventually hunters shooting. An old litho of John Audubon reminded me of Jesus so the grisly back-story of the Birds of America became Audubon Jesus!  The weapons also resonate with the current war vibe. I see forced repetition as a kind of Zen like exercise [I’m not at all naturally inclined to any sort of physical exercise myself] that helps stimulate creativity and helps achieve a healthy, interconnected body of work.  I have to force myself into it.  It’s like an arranged marriage. I believe that the love will come to those with patience.
Flagelation, Piero della Francesca
I love the idea of just making up a picture, meandering here and there, finding this or that and connecting them somehow with the story and the whole history of art.  I’m not at all interested in replicating a camera [after all I do have a mind AND binocular vision!], but I’m not above mimesis now and again.  I love early Renaissance masters like Giotto and Piero. 
Those are our true ancestors. Well, mine anyway. They just started painting [mostly due to the particular demands of their difficult and unforgiving medium-fresco]. Sure there’s a theological objective and a sketch but after a sound arrangement is made, you’re off on a wonderful trip just like Billy and Captain America.
I love that trip as much as I love real road trips. You always come across something that you don’t expect and as I’ve been told [in Michigan], “sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you.” Oh, and it’s good to do this while listening to Otis Rush [I once sat next to he and his wife at a bar in Chicago where he was on the bill. Every time I hear him, I think of Miller Lite!]. You can substitute Albert King Live at Montreaux 1973 if you’d like.  They’re both grumpy old men.
Factories [detail Cherries]
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Fiedler is teaching at TutorMill, an online mentoring site for students of illustration!