Ford Heberle is a photographer and illustrator; here he offers us one of his illustrations, Sycophant/Parvenu. Ford also placed the platform and the orange trees, and a divan that he designed. While I was talking to him, he placed an extension of the platform and a second chair, allowing an observer to sit and look at somebody in the divan in front of the picture. (The photo in the blog was taken before the additional chair was placed. It is taken at sunset for dramatic lighting, but otherwise unaltered.) The vase to the right of the divan gives out a short information notecard that invites viewers to sit on the divan and send pictures of themselves in front of the work to the artist, so I did; he got an in-world version, and the blog gets the full-sized picture.
I spoke briefly with Ford. The notecard says that a high-resolution archival real-world copy of the work is available, so I asked about that; what is available is the drawing, not the rest of the setting (orange trees, divan, etc.) I didn’t talk to him about the background or intent of the work (I wanted to write about it without first hearing that), but I invite Ford to comment.
According to the artist, this piece is inspired by Los Angeles. By that I assume he’s talking about the high prevalence of both sycophants and parvenus there; click on the words for definitions if you need them. The orange trees also evoke southern California, helping to set the mood.
I found this piece rather puzzling. The drawings didn’t tell me enough about the characters to have any idea why one should be a sycophant and the other a parvenu, nor why they felt compelled to say those words to each other. It feels confrontational, but it seems an odd conversation. The drawing felt like something from a comic book, but without any further context it didn’t say much to me. I think there is more to say about this subject, and that the artist meant to tell me more about it that didn’t come across.
The ornate and old-fashioned frame struck me as dissonant with the style of the drawing. If that was the artist’s intent, bravo; if not, yet another puzzling element.
Hey, thanks for writing about my piece. The awfully formal platform is there so that you can make yourself part of the action in the drawing, to offer yourself for display and perhaps have a viewer judge you as the two characters in the picture are doing to each other. As far as your narrative desire is concerned, Shirley, I’m glad you’re puzzled and want to find out more about the guys in the picture, but to me it’s a freestanding moment and you may imagine any past actions that led to it and any future ones that may result from it. Two people meet, size each other up, perhaps feel envy, perhaps contempt, and dismiss each other as unworthy — happens every day.
Left by fordheberle on June 20th, 2008