Did Picasso get his hands on us or something?
Sonic the Hedgehog
It’s not every day I get a mention in a cartoon video.
This drawing of Sonic and Amy is deliberately dreadful, which makes it kinda’ good (I’ll explain]. I made it when I was teaching English at a university in the middle of China, nearly a decade ago, and I got paid vacations for the first time in my life. One fine break I decided not to travel, but instead to stay in my apartment and start making art again. I began participating on DeviantArt — you can access it in China — and was a little frustrated that the highest rated posts of all time were cheesy fan art and similar dreck. I responded by making godawful fan art of my own and submitting it to the appropriate groups. This is one of a series of such ghastly images.
Recently, “Sonic & Amy” Googled themselves, and so there is a video in which the two famous video game characters discuss this work by me, among others. You can watch it yourself below. My segment starts at 5:24, when Amy says, “What the heck is this?!”:
My art has appeared in some unexpected places, including two PBS Art Assignment videos, but I was tickled when Amy articulated the name of my blog, “Art and Crit by Eric Wayne”. The video has been viewed over 500,000 times, which is more than half the hits my blog has received in over 8 years. Even something as ridiculous as this is mildly validating. Maybe some of my more serious art will eventually go viral.
Just a funny note about the style of this piece. There’s a band called Ween, which has a rather large cult following, which includes yours truly. I bought several of their CDs, and I had a theory that the secret to their unbridled creativity was that they started their songs by deliberately attempting to make something that sucks. Some of the music sucks so hard it’s brilliant, and even beautiful.
It’s liberating to cast off all the constraints of quality and convention, in which case any abomination is possible. However, in that freedom unexpected new connections are made, and an awkward new aesthetic can be forged. Sometimes I make art that makes me bust up.
My Spider-Man, above, was the first in my series of abominable fan art images. Curiously, when everything is wrong, then everything is self-consistent, and hence right. Upon discovering this, I seriously wondered if Picasso was laughing his ass off over some of his creations. No matter how cruelly you distort a visage, no matter how jagged the features, or if they are all jumbled on one side of the head, it’s still recognizable as a portrait. Lately, I’m completely on the other side of the spectrum, making realistic 3D art.
I wonder if I could make some stunning crappy art in Blender. I’ll have to put that on my to-do art list.
~ Stay tuned for the next exciting episode, and don’t forget to pulverize that like button.
Your own, personal, undiscovered fine artist, Eric Wayne
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
You may well be right about Picasso!
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Nice! 😀
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Yes, I’m sure you could. Also, I think Pablo was very serious in his artwork, but, I agree he must have laughed at some of the results. It was probably lots of fun breaking all those rules and regulations. A bad little boy riding the tide of rebellion. Pushing the limits. Innovation. New grounds, anything goes. Trick the photos. Double exposures without a camera. Bipolar point of view. Schizophrenic sketches. Twice the fun. All of the Parisian Art World in on the joke? The art world was smaller then. Did everyone know everyone else? Naturally. Who is going to stop it if it keeps the economy going? It won’t be the last time. I gotta get one of those. The whole world followed. Why burst the balloon? Just join the fun. Jump on the bandwagon. Play the game. Keep on pushing. Works for you. Works for me. Congratulations. And, so it goes.
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My thoughts immediately went to Picasso’s intentions as well. I was just telling a friend her work is perfect because of its imperfections. It more closely references who and what we are. Congratulations on the fan art fame!
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Thanks, periwinkleblur. Ah, perfection requires a certain amount of imperfection. I see. That’s the human touch. If something is absolutely perfect — and isn’t minimalism,etc. — it may not reflect our subjective, relative, individual identities. Nobody is perfect, and we are all looking through our singular portholes.
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Definitely maybe, something like that.
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I like it. it threw me back to when i taught beginners digital illustration classes where at first glance it’d be almost “good” Only a closer inspection reveals the not so good. Even the worst of my students wouldn’t do hands that bad, they’d hid them first.
Reminds me of Leslie Cabarga’s “bad typ” font ( https://fontsgeek.com/fonts/BadTyp-Regular) where everything is wrong on purpose, but it takes someone who knows what’s right to see that. Which beginner students of typography or illustration are not. I used that font to teach beginning type classes and I would have used your work to do so in dig-ill as well (w/permission of course!) were I still teaching.
Funny though re: Picasso. ( i’m not a big fan of his cubism. I like the suite vollard and later prints more) But it’s hard to find “mistakes” in his art, because as disjointed his figures are, if you let go of them as figures the compositions are almost flawless and that is some that is lacking in your intentional and beginners unintentional efforts.
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Thanks for the link to the abysmal font.
Yes, of course, Picasso, like him or not, is a great artist with a keen aesthetic sensibility. There’s no necessary contradiction in monstrously contorting anatomy, and doing so coherently according to aesthetics of line, shape, color, and arrangement of form.
And, yeah, I tried to botch the composition as well as the perspective, proportion, and everything else. It’s difficult to deliberately make an abomination because you inadvertently shift to a different aesthetic, which becomes modestly appealing if you aren’t careful. Imagine a pianist trying to make a terrible sonata, when all his instincts want to make it beautiful and coherent. If it’s genuinely horrible, nobody will want to listen to it.
This reminds me of how Duchamp signed “The Fountain” with “R. Mutt”. He tried to give it an ugly signature, and was fairly successful, but not completely.
In these kinds of deliberately bad drawings, I was going for humor. Well, at least I made myself laugh. I wouldn’t likely share them in a portfolio, except perhaps for the Superman, which succeeds unintentionally at failing at failure. In other words, I sorta like looking at it.
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