While image searching for George Grosz drawings the other day I stumbled across this master of dynamic black & white illustraion of whom I had never heard. Much like the way that almost every computer in every home or office has the font Gill Sans pre-loaded but no-one knows who Eric Gill is, Arntz also left his mark in iconic history by creating a style of drawing the human form that is so bleak and masterful it is used to tell each gender which room they need to go in to squat. You can see in some of these earlier images how he was attempting to refine his style to a point of purity & perfection where the blacks & white are always in perfect ratio and the forms, although being quite human are neither comical or expessive. They are so start in their design it is as if he was more interested in the designs and forms than the often political points he was making in his work. I think Arntz reached a perfection that some of us (myself included) strive fro every time we sit down. not to draw from the right side of the brain but to draw from the left. To make an iconic system in which anything can be rendered and look stylistically the same. I will certianly be ripping of his style for a couple weeks and then add Elvis Studio elements and then get frustrated and go back to drawing art deco plants. Well done, Gerd. You can tell me which door to walk through to piss any day.
