As an inveterate browser of the Internet and all of the intriguing art related sites upon it, I have found a lot of fascinating things.
One of the things that surprises me most, is my ability to recognize, when I see them, examples of artworks that were repurposed and reused by artists other than the original maker.
This is one of those cases.
I was looking at examples of Austin Briggs artwork and I ran across a Flickr account, compiled by the illustrator Matt Dicke, which had posted a few pages from Briggs' "How I Make a Picture".
After checking out the Briggs pages, I took a browse through whatever else Mr. Dicke had posted, because I love to see what other artists find inspiring and of interest.
That was when I found this:
(Robert McGinnis, Argosy magazine, July 1967)
and it rang a bell, in my memory banks and amazingly, I even remembered why...
Way back, in September of 1977, when I was still living in England but I was here, in Toronto, on vacation and visiting family, I had my first visit to The Silver Snail.
One of the items that I found and bought, at that time, was this fanzine:
Heritage Presents Amora by Gray Morrow (Heritage, 1971)
which I have treasured ever since
and on it's back cover, was this Jungle Girl:
and it's similarity, to the McGuinness illustration was too close a match, to be accidental.
Robert McGuinness (1967)
Gray Morrow (1971) Flipped Horizontally
Anyway, here I am, forty two years later, chuckling into my cup of coffee with glee and marvelling at the fact that every artist, even those in my personal pantheon, all have used "swipes" at some point in their careers.
There is "nothing new under the sun" and novelty, for the most part, is in how we rearrange and reinterpret, the information at our fingertips.
Just in case anyone should think that this is a "knock" at the amazing and wonderful Gray Morrow, that is not my intent. I merely wished to show, that the skillful use of reference materials, is all part and parcel of the graphic artists' trade.
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