Word: pens
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Throughout his life Leonardo da Vinci was plagued by a sense of failure, incompletion and time wasted. His favorite phrase, unconsciously repeated in whole or in part whenever he scribbled something to see if a newly cut pen was working, was "Tell me, tell me if anything got finished." And indeed very little did. His big projects for sculpture were never completed--the huge clay model for one of them, meant to commemorate his patron Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, ended up a shapeless mound, shot to pieces by occupying French archers. His big mural commemorating a Florentine victory...
...drawing: the making of marks but also the making of the instruments with which to make them. In the 15th century one did not walk into a shop and buy a pencil. One had to make the silverpoint or the twig of charcoal. One had to cut the pen and shape its nib from a quill. All of this was wound in with the technique of drawing and helped to determine its intensity. That is one of the reasons why small drawings (and most of Leonardo's drawings were small, in some cases hardly more than thumbnail sketches...
...comic muralist left an inadvertent history of 20th century entertainment. For dozens of dailies and weeklies but mainly for the New York Times, Hirschfeld drew--and drew out the spirit of--virtually every celebrity from high art (Toscanini, Natalia Makarova) and popular art (Roberto Benigni, Natalie Wood). Through his pen, inanity became animate, and caricature met character study. The fun in a Hirschfeld sketch increased after 1945, when his daughter Nina was born. He began concealing her cognomen in and around his portraits of famous men and women--in a Gwyneth Paltrow gown, in a Groucho jacket fold--placing...
...Luddite; he was ever open to the Next Thing. As Anais Nin apostrophized to a lover in "Henry and June": "There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation." Hirschfeld was anti-stagnation too. Like his thin pen-lines, he was lithe, blithe and on the move...
...creator of an inadvertent history of 20th century entertainment was ready for the 21st. In "The Line King" we see him fiddling with computer drawing. At first he resists; then he gets the gang of it. "I suppose it's possible to control," he says of the mouse-pen. "It just requires another lifetime to do it, that's all." And he was game for that next lifetime. "Living is an art, you know, it's not a science. You make it up as you go along." Maybe Hirschfeld, who made it up while sitting in a barber chair...