Influence Map
It has been a little while since I posted anything here, but I wanted to take part in the Influence Map meme, and neither of my blogs are about my creative endeavours, so I'm back here for the day.
The Influence Map started with DeviantArt user Fox-Orian as a way for graphic artists to present their influences in a handy-dandy visual format. I write rather than draw, but I wanted to get in on it anyway, so I put together a list of my own influences and... got very confused.
You see, artists appear to primarily use the influence map to present influences on their aesthetic style - as you would expect. As a writer I felt compelled to include writing influences - but I have aesthetic influences as well. Conflating them together made for a confusing and crowded map. So I decided to produce two Influence Maps, because I'm greedy. One is my aesthetic influences, by which I mean visual style and standards of beauty. The other is my narrative influences, by which I mean writing, plotting and non-visual storytelling.
First up is Aesthetics. If you're a non-writer, or a writer-artist, you may wonder why a writer would need an aesthetic influence map. I'm an especially visual person, but I think most writers have strong visual influences. I'm not just talking about how we describe a scene - though that is part of it - but about what motivates us. Aesthetics can inspire a character, or a dynamic, or an event. Most especially, aesthetics can inspire a mood. Often times a writer seeks to communicate an idea in prose that was communicated to him in art. I don't think writers talk very much about their visual influences, but I think they should. So I will.
The size of each image is meant to correspond to the scale of the influence. Click for largeness.
And because I'm a writer, I can't just let the images speak for themselves, so here's another big chunk of text to expound upon the above. Oh, writers!
The British Museum is my greatest fount of inspiration, and here's a secret about me and museums; I don't spend a lot of time reading the text on the displays. I like to drink in the artefacts. Museums make history visual, and that's a great inspiration for any writer interested in history.
Powell & Pressburger and Orson Welles are my directorial inspirations. P&P are for scale, splendour and the intimacy of madness (the image is from Black Narcissus). Welles is for his uses of shadow and iconography - think Touch of Evil and his version of the Scottish play (pictured). You might also want to think about The Third Man, but, of course, that wasn't his direction. It is also an influence, though.
Winsor McCay is the author of art nouveau fantasias that push the boundaries of the imagination. The other comic artists on the list are: Will Eisner, for the humanity of Dropsie Avenue, but more so for the pulp noir of The Spirit; Tom of Finland, for his iconic reinvention of masculine sexuality; and Sergio Toppi, for his wealth of texture, depth of diversity, and exemplary composition.
Art Nouveau gets its own nod, which covers the perennial influences of Mucha, Gaudi, Klimt, Lalique and Tiffany, plus the Musee d'Orsay and the architecture of Paris. Also included for architecture is Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the great defining visionaries of the 20th century. His style is something I have wanted to capture in words ever since Hitchcock did it in film in North by Northwest.
There are only three 'classical' artists in my list. JMW Turner is my favourite painter. His later works are so wonderfully turbulent, so isolating and emotional, while his mid-period works are exemplary storytelling - see the Fighting Temeraire, which is one of the most beautiful paintings of all time. Sargent is included for his appreciation of refinement and beauty - the painting is another favourite, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. Canova is included because I love the iconography of classical Greek and Roman mythology, but I love it best reinterpreted and idealised through the neoclassicists, and Canova is the best of them.
There are a lot of commercial illustrators on my list. In addition to the comic artists, there's Rockwell, Gruau, McGinnis and Leyendecker. Rockwell is a bit of a cliché, but he shapes my vision of the American 20th century. Leyendecker is another masculine idealist - his square-jawed heroes with an invert's soul are my heroes as well. McGinnis presents a more conventional view of masculinity. His paperback covers show adventure - sex, intrigue, death, betrayal - in a single image. I'm not much of a fashionista, but I adore Gruau. He is an object lesson in how expressive a simple line can be. Writers need to appreciate that lesson just as well as artists.
On the subject of fashion, I was going to include photographer Edward Steichen, but I discovered him only a year ago. More enduring is Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of photojournalism and the captured moment, who was anything but a fashion photographer. Like Sergio Toppi (and Hugo Pratt), he opened a window on the world. At the other end of the photographer spectrum are the hyper-contrived Pierre et Gilles, masters of the gay aesthetic, incorporating everything from sexualised goddesses to weeping soldiers. They are character builders.
Finally, there's Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen's ugly gods and rickety monsters are probably the reason I ever wanted to tell stories in the first place. he is not my biggest influence, but he is among my first.
The second Influence Map deals with my more expressly 'writerly' influences. It's impossible to entirely disentangle both schools of influence - film in particular is inevitably present in both - but I've tried to make it make sense.
I'll try to be a little briefer here. Try and fail.
Questions will be asked and eyebrows raised about some of these inclusions. CS Lewis? Chris Claremont? Rudyard Kipling? What sort of purple-prosed imperialistic choir boy am I, by jingo? But whether or not you agree with the politics of an influence, or even still hold them up today, you cannot pretend they were not influential. I can only read Claremont through a nostalgic mist these days, and god forbid I try reading any of his new work - but his strong women and tangled world-building are certainly an influence. Because of Lewis, there will always be God in my writing, and because of Kipling my writing will always be... well, a little imperial. I am fascinated by ideas of empire and culture clash.
On which subjects, there are two historical figures in my list whose stories have been major influences on me. I have read a dozen versions of the story of Alexander, and I'm not bored of him yet. Then there's Lady Hester Stanhope, crazy English adventurer and impromptu queen. Mad and brilliant. The colonial theme is also present in two of my favourite works - Shakespeare's The Tempest, which gave me some of my favourite character dynamics in fiction, and David Milch's Deadwood, which boasts the best character work ever seen on television.
Jim Henson's The Storyteller is probably not of the same high standard, but like Harryhausen, it lit the fire of my love for stories. Disney is not in here for its/his bowdlerised fairy tales, but for its lavish love of villains. My love of a good villain is also why Sax Rohmer is in here - his Fu Manchu is my Sherlock Holmes. More respectable pulp comes from Dashiell Hammett - regarded as hard-boiled, but in some ways as mannered and witty as Jane Austen.
America mores are also represented by Fitzgerald and Williams. The Great Gatsby remains my favourite novel; Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is my favourite modern play. Morality, repression, glamour, decay - this is the stuff great stories are made of! Class, culture and propriety are also recurring themes, which is why Chekov is in there to balance out those flashy Americans with his elegant subtlety.
Not that I don't also love melodrama. If you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Hitchcock movie, you know how good - and layered - melodrama can be. Hitchcock is my favourite movie storyteller. Brad Bird is my favourite living movie storyteller. Even before The Incredibles, he set a new standard with The Iron Giant. Movies also gave me James Bond - with the books coming later. Bond established my mental template for a ripping yarn.
The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton is a very recent discovery for me, but in reading it I discovered that it has been influencing me all my life. He is the author of a very English, very Catholic sense of subversion. He is absurd, heretical and ambitious, and his fingerprints can be found in everything from Monty Python to The Prisoner. Chesterton was a subtle knife compared to Lewis Carroll, but anyone who grew up loving Carrol's queens, cards, rhymes and inventions will probably claim him as an influence. And finally there's Dylan Thomas, who fed us brutal truths and transforming revelations inside the most exquisite lyrical rhythms. Read Fern Hill and be transported. That's what words can do.
The Influence Map started with DeviantArt user Fox-Orian as a way for graphic artists to present their influences in a handy-dandy visual format. I write rather than draw, but I wanted to get in on it anyway, so I put together a list of my own influences and... got very confused.
You see, artists appear to primarily use the influence map to present influences on their aesthetic style - as you would expect. As a writer I felt compelled to include writing influences - but I have aesthetic influences as well. Conflating them together made for a confusing and crowded map. So I decided to produce two Influence Maps, because I'm greedy. One is my aesthetic influences, by which I mean visual style and standards of beauty. The other is my narrative influences, by which I mean writing, plotting and non-visual storytelling.
First up is Aesthetics. If you're a non-writer, or a writer-artist, you may wonder why a writer would need an aesthetic influence map. I'm an especially visual person, but I think most writers have strong visual influences. I'm not just talking about how we describe a scene - though that is part of it - but about what motivates us. Aesthetics can inspire a character, or a dynamic, or an event. Most especially, aesthetics can inspire a mood. Often times a writer seeks to communicate an idea in prose that was communicated to him in art. I don't think writers talk very much about their visual influences, but I think they should. So I will.
The size of each image is meant to correspond to the scale of the influence. Click for largeness.
And because I'm a writer, I can't just let the images speak for themselves, so here's another big chunk of text to expound upon the above. Oh, writers!
The British Museum is my greatest fount of inspiration, and here's a secret about me and museums; I don't spend a lot of time reading the text on the displays. I like to drink in the artefacts. Museums make history visual, and that's a great inspiration for any writer interested in history.
Powell & Pressburger and Orson Welles are my directorial inspirations. P&P are for scale, splendour and the intimacy of madness (the image is from Black Narcissus). Welles is for his uses of shadow and iconography - think Touch of Evil and his version of the Scottish play (pictured). You might also want to think about The Third Man, but, of course, that wasn't his direction. It is also an influence, though.
Winsor McCay is the author of art nouveau fantasias that push the boundaries of the imagination. The other comic artists on the list are: Will Eisner, for the humanity of Dropsie Avenue, but more so for the pulp noir of The Spirit; Tom of Finland, for his iconic reinvention of masculine sexuality; and Sergio Toppi, for his wealth of texture, depth of diversity, and exemplary composition.
Art Nouveau gets its own nod, which covers the perennial influences of Mucha, Gaudi, Klimt, Lalique and Tiffany, plus the Musee d'Orsay and the architecture of Paris. Also included for architecture is Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the great defining visionaries of the 20th century. His style is something I have wanted to capture in words ever since Hitchcock did it in film in North by Northwest.
There are only three 'classical' artists in my list. JMW Turner is my favourite painter. His later works are so wonderfully turbulent, so isolating and emotional, while his mid-period works are exemplary storytelling - see the Fighting Temeraire, which is one of the most beautiful paintings of all time. Sargent is included for his appreciation of refinement and beauty - the painting is another favourite, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. Canova is included because I love the iconography of classical Greek and Roman mythology, but I love it best reinterpreted and idealised through the neoclassicists, and Canova is the best of them.
There are a lot of commercial illustrators on my list. In addition to the comic artists, there's Rockwell, Gruau, McGinnis and Leyendecker. Rockwell is a bit of a cliché, but he shapes my vision of the American 20th century. Leyendecker is another masculine idealist - his square-jawed heroes with an invert's soul are my heroes as well. McGinnis presents a more conventional view of masculinity. His paperback covers show adventure - sex, intrigue, death, betrayal - in a single image. I'm not much of a fashionista, but I adore Gruau. He is an object lesson in how expressive a simple line can be. Writers need to appreciate that lesson just as well as artists.
On the subject of fashion, I was going to include photographer Edward Steichen, but I discovered him only a year ago. More enduring is Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of photojournalism and the captured moment, who was anything but a fashion photographer. Like Sergio Toppi (and Hugo Pratt), he opened a window on the world. At the other end of the photographer spectrum are the hyper-contrived Pierre et Gilles, masters of the gay aesthetic, incorporating everything from sexualised goddesses to weeping soldiers. They are character builders.
Finally, there's Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen's ugly gods and rickety monsters are probably the reason I ever wanted to tell stories in the first place. he is not my biggest influence, but he is among my first.
The second Influence Map deals with my more expressly 'writerly' influences. It's impossible to entirely disentangle both schools of influence - film in particular is inevitably present in both - but I've tried to make it make sense.
I'll try to be a little briefer here. Try and fail.
Questions will be asked and eyebrows raised about some of these inclusions. CS Lewis? Chris Claremont? Rudyard Kipling? What sort of purple-prosed imperialistic choir boy am I, by jingo? But whether or not you agree with the politics of an influence, or even still hold them up today, you cannot pretend they were not influential. I can only read Claremont through a nostalgic mist these days, and god forbid I try reading any of his new work - but his strong women and tangled world-building are certainly an influence. Because of Lewis, there will always be God in my writing, and because of Kipling my writing will always be... well, a little imperial. I am fascinated by ideas of empire and culture clash.
On which subjects, there are two historical figures in my list whose stories have been major influences on me. I have read a dozen versions of the story of Alexander, and I'm not bored of him yet. Then there's Lady Hester Stanhope, crazy English adventurer and impromptu queen. Mad and brilliant. The colonial theme is also present in two of my favourite works - Shakespeare's The Tempest, which gave me some of my favourite character dynamics in fiction, and David Milch's Deadwood, which boasts the best character work ever seen on television.
Jim Henson's The Storyteller is probably not of the same high standard, but like Harryhausen, it lit the fire of my love for stories. Disney is not in here for its/his bowdlerised fairy tales, but for its lavish love of villains. My love of a good villain is also why Sax Rohmer is in here - his Fu Manchu is my Sherlock Holmes. More respectable pulp comes from Dashiell Hammett - regarded as hard-boiled, but in some ways as mannered and witty as Jane Austen.
America mores are also represented by Fitzgerald and Williams. The Great Gatsby remains my favourite novel; Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is my favourite modern play. Morality, repression, glamour, decay - this is the stuff great stories are made of! Class, culture and propriety are also recurring themes, which is why Chekov is in there to balance out those flashy Americans with his elegant subtlety.
Not that I don't also love melodrama. If you've ever listened to the dialogue in a Hitchcock movie, you know how good - and layered - melodrama can be. Hitchcock is my favourite movie storyteller. Brad Bird is my favourite living movie storyteller. Even before The Incredibles, he set a new standard with The Iron Giant. Movies also gave me James Bond - with the books coming later. Bond established my mental template for a ripping yarn.
The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton is a very recent discovery for me, but in reading it I discovered that it has been influencing me all my life. He is the author of a very English, very Catholic sense of subversion. He is absurd, heretical and ambitious, and his fingerprints can be found in everything from Monty Python to The Prisoner. Chesterton was a subtle knife compared to Lewis Carroll, but anyone who grew up loving Carrol's queens, cards, rhymes and inventions will probably claim him as an influence. And finally there's Dylan Thomas, who fed us brutal truths and transforming revelations inside the most exquisite lyrical rhythms. Read Fern Hill and be transported. That's what words can do.