Pretensions on the Edge of Forever: New Age Comics #1

“Megaton Man artist … Donald Simpson,” from New Age Comics #1, 1985:

With Megaton Man #4, artist-writer Don Simpson began to add depth to his cast of madcap characters.

Who's the Greatest Artist Alive Today? Meet Arne the Android!

I've written elsewhere on the death of drawing; suffice it to say, over the course of my lifetime, I've watched hand drawing go from just about its midcentury peak in Western Civiliation to its virtual extinction in the twenty-first century. Hand drawing (and its offshoot, painting) once appeared in and on everything including newspapers, magazines, hardcover dustjackets, paperback, editorial illustration, advertising, album covers, billboards, signs on the sides buildings, and everywhere else. Except for a few specialty purposes like children's books, comics, and The New Yorker, imagery of the hand has almost completely disappeared as photography and digital technologies have conquered every realm.

Too Secure for Words: Academia's Plain-Language Problem

I recently heard a news story on WESA-FM, the National Public Radio affiliate in Pittsburgh, on a program at the University of Pittsburgh on coding. It seems that some zillions and zillions of jobs are going unfilled nationwide, and some eight thousand in the Pittsburgh area alone. The story said that mid-career professionals who were contemplating a career change was the perfect applicant they were looking for the program.

When a Giant Pencil is Worn to a Nub on South Craig Street: Yet Another Pittsburgh Arts Casualty

Just two weeks after the announcement that the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (once the flagship of a national chain of trade schools), and only a week after a realigned Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media tacitly announced a downgraded role for traditional manual arts such as drawing, painting, and sculpture in their newest incarnation, an iconic Pittsburgh art supply store has abruptly announced it will be going out of business after 48 years.

Spectrum Disorder: Whither Drawing? Part 2

Another sign that drawing is withering away from our culture: The newly-rebranded Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media, ostensibly a fine arts .org composed of the ashes of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, issued a press release today touting its "agenda for advancing excellence in film, digital video, photography and the spectrum of visual arts." Drawing, painting, and sculpture, once a mainstay of classes at the old PCA are never mentioned by name, presumably falling under the "spectrum" category.

Presumably, such quaint traditional arts too insignificant anymore to break out individually.

Update: read the entirety of their press release here. 

Full disclosure: I took all three kinds of classes and taught several cartooning workshops there myself over the decades.

Some latter-day student work from the Carnegie Museum of Art adult studio program, before 2014.

This demotion of actual art in favor of recording media follows the news of the closing of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, flagship for a chain of design schools that abandoned traditional art in favor of digital animation and other newfangled media at the turn of the millennium. (I once attended and taught there as well.)

Less than a year ago, the Toonseum shuttered its downtown gallery location and entered what was described as a year-long "curtains drawn" hiatus. Whether it will ever draw anything again besides curtains remains to be seen. (I was shown there and participated in a drawing workshop.)

Less than six years ago, Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art discontinued its adult studio art classes, including drawing. (I taught several cartooning, drawing, and sketching workshops there.)

As I remarked on Facebook, Pittsburgh, once a haven of culture, is becoming a drawing desert.

More: Whither Drawing? Part I