Dumb Luck: The Art of Gary Baseman

Gary Baseman is a very successful illustrator and everyone who reads magazines will recognize his unique style and recognizable imagery. He uses cartoon characters to populate his paintings and these figures are usually involved in some devious and chaotic activities that are full of dark humor. He has limited his palette to the three primary colors of red, blue, and yellow along with white and black. Green, orange, purple, gray, and the earth tones rarely are used - though you will find some pink used for flesh tones. The imagery of cartoon characters involved in some acts of menace, cruelty, absurdity, and chaos constitutes the majority of the subject matter of his work. He has created a self-contained reality where little emerges from outside to divert the central themes he conveys. When he does use something from beyond his own imagery, such as newspaper clippings or magazine photographs, he manipulates the image to integrate it into his visual vocabulary. For the majority of the work, the visual field is not deep and classical perspective is not used. This is because cartoon images do not covey to the viewer that they live in a completely realized reality but are a self contained statement. His brushstroke and painting style is direct and resembles the painting style of the naive and primitive non-academic painters. There is just enough shading and color variation to make his point with no need to create lush and beautiful surfaces. Baseman uses popular imagery; images used to amuse children, and have these images doing very absurd adult nonsense. The book contains a short essay by Barry Smolin which links Baseman's work to his early influences of Warner Brother's cartoon characters, MAD magazine, and the Marx Brothers. Smolin also identifies the three primary images in Baseman's work, the dorky everyman with oversized nose, the devil, and the unattainable female. The nose is very phallic. There is also a short artist's statement from Baseman where he identifies humor and desire as primary themes in his work. To rise in the world of illustrators, an artist must develop a recognizable style that has a broad enough vocabulary and possibilities that it can address the needs of a broad range of customers. Baseman has accomplished this. This book is full of over 200 of his paintings, all reproduced in color, that disturbingly entertain.

Love this book! If you are a fan of Baseman's work, then this book is for you.

There's something about this guy I really love. His art appears simple at first, but after awhile it can get as complex as I want to imagine it to be. It's funny too. Large book and very well printed and bound. Just an all around great art book, nice on the coffee table too.

This is a great addition to any resource library. Fans will gush and newcomers will be thoroughly introduced to Baseman's unique style and ironic themes.

interesting write ups, a lot of variety in content.

The book was broke

Finally got my hands on this bad boy, and just have to say, Wow. This book is big (in every sense of the word), jam packed with pictures of Baseman's art and designed incredibly well. Coffee table books watch out, there's a new kid on the block.Paging through this massive tome you become fully immersed in Baseman's World; a world full of amputee Bunnies, drooling ice cream cones, masochistic snowmen, doggie Dunces, feline pinatas, plus unattainable beauty and human desire. Though many aspects of Baseman's career are on display (advertising, animation, editorial, packaging and product art), it is his paintings that truly shine. This is where Baseman can let go, and let go he does with a torrent of cute and fuzzy creatures mired in the most horribly painful human experiences. The humor is oftentimes juvenile and sadistic, but somehow it manages to engender a smile from the viewer, maybe because we're glad it's the Snowman who is getting his heart broken (by a mermaid no-less) and not us. There is something else, that elusive "indefinable" quality, that gives Baseman's work it's mass(ive) appeal. His characterizations harken back to old Warner Bros. cartoons (who hasn't grown up on those?), which tickle the child inside, but the emotions and situations are purely human, which grabs the attention of our grown-up self. Baseman's greatest trick, however, is creating what appear to be very simple paintings. As with most great art repeated viewings are required to be able to peel back all the layers, and really see what's going on. And believe me, there is a lot going on.I doubt that many people unfamiliar with Baseman's work would get this book, but anyone who has been exposed (a very appropriate term actually) to his paintings, magazine/book covers or toys should jump on it. Highest rating possible from me.

You gotta love Gary Baseman. His stuff is just so damn much fun that it's really no wonder he can parlay it into such diverse projects as Disney films and Starbucks board games. The surprising thing is that I can still look at it after all that - but "Teacher's Pet" IS exceptional for the schlock-factory that is Disney, even though it represents a somewhat cleaned-up version of Baseman's style. But if you prefer the Baseman of Blab! and Juxtapoz, the gritty oil renderings of his bug-eyed psycho cartoon world, here you go. You've got your naked chicks, your "dorks," your devils and skeletons, often in pinata form, often clubbing each other to death or otherwise violently expressing their angst and ennui. Spare yourself the really laughably pretentious forward by Barry Smolin, by the way: "Baseman's multivalent imagination conceives a panoply of diverse characters..." Please give me a break. "Sometimes a nose is just a nose," meaning that sometimes it's obviously a phallus; but we don't really need to invoke Freud to analyze the mysteries of Baseman's work - it's simply not that deep. It's "Dumb Luck." Let's not suck all the fun out of it!

I discovered Gary Baseman's art in a compendium called Illustration Now published by Taschen. His art is very distinctive, rough brush strokes and a semi-cutesy design. If you could imagine a world in which cartoon characters could have nightmares then you might get a vague idea of what to expect, sort of like loony tunes meets salvador dali. The illustrations seem to work on two levels, initially you just see a cute if surreal scene or landscape and then the more you look at it, the more nightmarish it seems to become as if there is something very dark hiding behind the superficially innocent characters, death, lust, isolation, fear... they all jump out at you when you really start to look deeply in to each piece.There's a lot of art for your money in this thick book and the quality is excellent too, glossy, well printed pages and the book itself has a nice cloth-bound cover inside the dustcover. Inisde the book the artwork is grouped in to several different themes but the overall styles are fairly similar. Also none of his sculpted pieces or vinyl toys make an appearence but I can't take a star off for this alone.If you're a fan of his artwork you can't really go wrong with this title. It would make an excellent coffee table book and would certainly start a few conversations. I hope another volume follows in a few years time.