Dumb Luck: The Art of Gary Baseman [Hardcover]

Gary Baseman (Author), Pao & Paws (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2004

Mucking up the pages of the New Yorker, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Forbes, the Atlantic Monthly, Blab, and more, Gary Baseman has populated the finest publications with his inimitable brand of illustration. Now Dumb Luck, presents the first complete collection of his work, spanning more than ten years. According to Baseman himself, his art inhabits "that muddy spot where the line between genius and stupidity has been smudged beyond recognition." Dark and dopey, hokey and heartbreaking, his world is populated with freaky folks, maimed bunnies, weird wiener dogs, and anthropomorphic ice-cream cones that yearn and burn just like we do. Baseman's particular genius lies in capturing those ridiculous and all-too-often appalling aspects of being human. Hilarious testimony to the mind of its creator, Dumb Luck is both an art manifesto and a raw celebration of idiocy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Eradicating the boundary between sick and silly, Baseman’s paintings and illustrations inhabit a world of cute-and-cuddly depravity. Populated by goofy, wide-eyed dogs, winking devils and decapitated clowns, each work is a self-contained narrative of cartoon mayhem, each character a collision of the adorable and the grotesque. Even Baseman’s more mainstream work, including the designs for the popular "Cranium" board game and his Emmy Award-winning animated series, Teacher’s Pet, engender a freak-show fascination, a lingering hint of the Grand Guignol. That the few (and refreshingly brief) essays sprinkled throughout this massive monograph should belabor these less-than-subtle contrasts ad nauseam is hardly surprising. Even the artist himself avers that his work is about "smudging the line between genius and stupidity beyond recognition." After all, since the visual language of cartoons is his primary tool, simple oppositions and immediate, gruesome gags are a prerequisite. This is not to imply that Baseman’s work is trite or disposable. Although he wears his influences on his sleeve, serving up healthy portions of Looney Tunes, underground comix, Charles Addams and Red Grooms, these reference points lend each image an eerie familiarity. His characters (not to mention the blazing primary colors in his compositions) are vivid, outlandish and genuinely funny. A cheerful, peg-legged bunny holding a rabbit-foot keychain is hilarious by any standard. And therein lies this volume’s greatest virtue: the text is downright minimal, leaving ample room for hundreds of large, richly colored illustrations. In this case, each picture is truly worth a thousand words.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Baseman is an acclaimed gallery artist and a successful illustrator. His distinctively off-kilter work is familiar to readers of the New Yorker and many other mainstream publications, and his profile was significantly raised a few years ago when he created the animated kids' show Teacher's Pet. The disparate, intertwined facets of the prolific Baseman are all on view in this bountiful collection. The wildly loopy paintings and drawings--influenced by Warner Brothers cartoons, vintage comic strips, Hieronymus Bosch, Day of the Dead artifacts, and Japanese pop art--display obsessively recurring figures: crimson cats with phallic noses, cuddly devils, spiral-necked hounds, fez-sporting skeletons, and characters that are simply unrecognizable or indescribable. Their visceral impact is heightened by Baseman's vivid, sometimes jarring colors and bold, simple designs. The overall effect veers from cuddly to off-putting, usually within the same work. Somewhat creepy and frequently sexual, Baseman's quirky critters are ultimately harmless and oddly inviting. This dazzling volume attests to Baseman's success at breaking boundaries between fine art and mass media. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (May 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811844234
• ISBN-13: 978-0811844239
• Product Dimensions: 11.8 x 8.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,287,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good clean stupid fun., October 16, 2004

By 

B. Erickson "boycorrupted" (Overland Park, KS United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dumb Luck: The Art of Gary Baseman (Hardcover)

You gotta love Gary Baseman. His stuff is just so damn much fun that it's really no wonder he can parlay it into such diverse projects as Disney films and Starbucks board games. The surprising thing is that I can still look at it after all that - but "Teacher's Pet" IS exceptional for the schlock-factory that is Disney, even though it represents a somewhat cleaned-up version of Baseman's style. But if you prefer the Baseman of Blab! and Juxtapoz, the gritty oil renderings of his bug-eyed psycho cartoon world, here you go. You've got your naked chicks, your "dorks," your devils and skeletons, often in pinata form, often clubbing each other to death or otherwise violently expressing their angst and ennui. Spare yourself the really laughably pretentious forward by Barry Smolin, by the way: "Baseman's multivalent imagination conceives a panoply of diverse characters..." Please give me a break. "Sometimes a nose is just a nose," meaning that sometimes it's obviously a phallus; but we don't really need to invoke Freud to analyze the mysteries of Baseman's work - it's simply not that deep. It's "Dumb Luck." Let's not suck all the fun out of it!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dumb Luck Counts Too!, September 17, 2004

By 

Mark Begley "Letterpressed.com" (Fresno, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dumb Luck: The Art of Gary Baseman (Hardcover)

Finally got my hands on this bad boy, and just have to say, Wow. This book is big (in every sense of the word), jam packed with pictures of Baseman's art and designed incredibly well. Coffee table books watch out, there's a new kid on the block.
Paging through this massive tome you become fully immersed in Baseman's World; a world full of amputee Bunnies, drooling ice cream cones, masochistic snowmen, doggie Dunces, feline pinatas, plus unattainable beauty and human desire. Though many aspects of Baseman's career are on display (advertising, animation, editorial, packaging and product art), it is his paintings that truly shine. This is where Baseman can let go, and let go he does with a torrent of cute and fuzzy creatures mired in the most horribly painful human experiences. The humor is oftentimes juvenile and sadistic, but somehow it manages to engender a smile from the viewer, maybe because we're glad it's the Snowman who is getting his heart broken (by a mermaid no-less) and not us. There is something else, that elusive "indefinable" quality, that gives Baseman's work it's mass(ive) appeal. His characterizations harken back to old Warner Bros. cartoons (who hasn't grown up on those?), which tickle the child inside, but the emotions and situations are purely human, which grabs the attention of our grown-up self. Baseman's greatest trick, however, is creating what appear to be very simple paintings. As with most great art repeated viewings are required to be able to peel back all the layers, and really see what's going on. And believe me, there is a lot going on.
I doubt that many people unfamiliar with Baseman's work would get this book, but anyone who has been exposed (a very appropriate term actually) to his paintings, magazine/book covers or toys should jump on it. Highest rating possible from me.

5.0 out of 5 stars Bold and playful illustration and cartoons for adults, July 18, 2010

By 

C. B Collins Jr. (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dumb Luck: The Idiotic Genius of Gary Baseman (Hardcover)

Gary Baseman is a very successful illustrator and everyone who reads magazines will recognize his unique style and recognizable imagery. He uses cartoon characters to populate his paintings and these figures are usually involved in some devious and chaotic activities that are full of dark humor. He has limited his palette to the three primary colors of red, blue, and yellow along with white and black. Green, orange, purple, gray, and the earth tones rarely are used - though you will find some pink used for flesh tones. The imagery of cartoon characters involved in some acts of menace, cruelty, absurdity, and chaos constitutes the majority of the subject matter of his work. He has created a self-contained reality where little emerges from outside to divert the central themes he conveys. When he does use something from beyond his own imagery, such as newspaper clippings or magazine photographs, he manipulates the image to integrate it into his visual vocabulary. For the majority of the work, the visual field is not deep and classical perspective is not used. This is because cartoon images do not covey to the viewer that they live in a completely realized reality but are a self contained statement. His brushstroke and painting style is direct and resembles the painting style of the naive and primitive non-academic painters. There is just enough shading and color variation to make his point with no need to create lush and beautiful surfaces. Baseman uses popular imagery; images used to amuse children, and have these images doing very absurd adult nonsense. The book contains a short essay by Barry Smolin which links Baseman's work to his early influences of Warner Brother's cartoon characters, MAD magazine, and the Marx Brothers. Smolin also identifies the three primary images in Baseman's work, the dorky everyman with oversized nose, the devil, and the unattainable female. The nose is very phallic. There is also a short artist's statement from Baseman where he identifies humor and desire as primary themes in his work. To rise in the world of illustrators, an artist must develop a recognizable style that has a broad enough vocabulary and possibilities that it can address the needs of a broad range of customers. Baseman has accomplished this. This book is full of over 200 of his paintings, all reproduced in color, that disturbingly entertain.