Celebrating Bishop 14

11-17-2016
Although Bishop has risen to prominence really after he started to use the airbrush, I very much like his pen (or rather brush) and ink style, too. In a piece like this one you can see that fully fledged out. Whereas some of his earlier stuff was more sketchy and more free, here he gets really tight and precise. As always, I admire the way how he renders the different textures, in this case skin and hair. Even with these simple means, he succeeds in giving them a totally different feel.

Speaking of feel: the center importance of this drawing is of course the way her breast reacts to his hand. I've been studying that dozens of times; it is done so wonderfully. You can feel the softness, the way it's malleable, it's just great. Of course there are other aspects that contribute to the quality of this page: the apprehension on her pretty face in contrast with his taunting features, and the subtlety of the way he is removing her last piece of clothing (ever so slowly, one would imagine). And the way that those panties are designed, solely to that end.

Yes, the bondage is so strict as to seem impossible in real life, but hey, that's what we have art for in the first place, don't we? One last puzzling aspect though, is the way the figures are related to one another: it seems that, like Picasso, or Escher he has been working with two perspectives in this work. But then again, it doesn't put me off, rather, together with the incompleteness of the male figure, it gives this work a kind semi abstract character, a poster like quality that I really like. All in all, another masterpiece in my opinion.

Coco

Updates in New, Lunagirl and the Sketch page!

CBAP