Paul Palnik's cartoon style is readily understood by its symbolic form. Although he has demonstrated that he can draw and paint in other contemporary modes, his choice of the common cartoon image is deliberate. He is truly a child of the TV generation, and his visual and pictorial inspiration is the animated TV commercial cartoon.
It is interesting to note the career of yet another successful former student and colleague, Roy Lichtenstein. Roy's work is acknowledged as high art while Paul is content with success as a popular artist. yet both began their early careers influenced by the immediately accessible popular advertisements -- illustrated catalogues, cartoon strips, popular romances. For example, roy Lichtenstein's Masterpeice, an oil painting of 1962, depicts "Barbie" and "Ken" types in a cartoon panel format. Barbie is "saying" in her balloon: "THIS PAINTING IS A MASTERPIECE! MY, SOON YOU'LL HAVE ALL OF NEW YORK CLAMORING FOR YOUR WORK."
Paul Palnik's Someday I'm gonna own this town!! (Yes, indeedy do), expresses the same confident notion that dreams can become reality. While the text has disappeared from Lichtenstein's work, its role in Paul Palnik's drawings continues unabated.
What the Currier and Ives prints were to the 19th century, Palnik prints seem to be to our time. But unlike the Currier and Ives documentations which depicted race horses, steamboats, fires and other catastrophies, the palnik prints deal with people - the long, the tall, the short, the lean, the fat - the war between the sexes, humanity with all of its inspired yearnings and its feral reality.
Paul's generation was weaned on television and his lifelong exposure has ingrained indelibly on his awareness that life includes constipation, headaches, hemorrhoidal discomforts among a long list of "easily" remedied ailments. Paul's people allow us to examine these realities with a humorous light approach that makes us aware of life's rich possibilities within ourselves. he tells us that despite bad cooking, belching, zits, nose picking and the additional alimentary canal dramas, we are, or may be, beautiful. These and other human factors are communicated by "just some lines on paper," as Pitzel, the character in his PITZEL poster tells us. How we live our lives is how we live our lives.
The moral imperative underscores all of Palnik's outrageously absurd humor. "SHAPETH UP...AND GETETH THINE ACT TOGETHER!!!", a bearded figure on the mount tells the assembled multitudes. Clearly faith - the Old Testament kind - is his message. FREEDOM recalls the parting of the Red Sea; JUDGEMENT wittily parodies the medieval didactic prints on Judgement Day, Redemption and Damnation. Verily, some of us will never make it to heaven.
Even Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings of creation are not immune to Palnik's pen. In the poster, BE UNIQUE, the pointing hand emerges amidst thunderbolts with the message: BE UNIQUE HAVE A MYSTICAL REVELATION FROM GOD, to a very benign recipient.
The posters multiply to my pleasure. Each new one provides surprises and humor which are sometimes painfully profound in their impact. LIFE IS THE MUSIC AND NOBODY CAN RESIST DANCING catalogs various ways humanity comes to terms with life, beginning with "The dance of the dancers who dance in order to dance. They dance because they dance," and ends with "Dance of the depressed, worried and self-pitying with befuddled lives and confused priorities...What a shame!"
PROVERBS (The wise are happy and fools know not why), best sums up the artist's philosophy and purpose. "Faith can cause an artist like Paul Palnik (c)1983-5743 to create a PROVERBS poster and actually believe (very strongly) that his poster will cause happiness and make this world a little better place to live in," he communicates.
All that sums up pretty much what kind of person Paul Palnik is. The lines between confidence and inanity, banality and profundity, are very thin ones indeed. For me, a Palnik poster transcends its genre and becomes a poem, or a religous tome translated into the vulgate. What kind of person would make a poster such as, Hi world, I'm ME!?
If I had to choose only one poster, my choice would be PITZEL, bacause in it Palnik's genius explicates the reality of graphic communication possibilities. The magic of perception is marvelously demonstrated with wit, humor and simplicity. The rich possibilities of human understanding are visualized in a manner which is open ended by its imagination.
Here is an artist who understands the power of faith and love. When I first wrote about his gentle art, he already had decided on what kind of artist he wanted to be. As a teacher, my purpose always has been to encourage uniqueness, to provide the kind of environment in which creativity might occur. Paul Palnik was one of the few who were content to do their own thing. He had the confidence, imagination and intelligence to do it.
Indeed, these Palnik Posters are truly without malice. I believe they are a valid form of art. In a culture which classifies art as high and low, popular and arcane, I am reminded of a New York Times review of an exibition of Saul Steinberg's drawings. The critic concluded his observations with: "Is it art?" "No." "Is it art?" "Yes"
So we must decide for ourselves. Examine these gentle drawings of Paul Palnik and enjoy.
Sidney Chafetz
Professor Emeritus of Art
Ohio State University
Columbus, Ohio