Friday, May 05, 2006

Oski (El Maestro)






Oscar Conti (Oski) Born 1914 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and died in 1979. He was a genius. Oski was the most admired Argentinean cartoonists among his peers. A man of enormous humour and formidable erudiction, he was also a painter of note, his paintings were reminiscent of those of Paul Klee.
The drawings above belong to the "Comentarios a las tablas medicas de Salerno"...Soon I'll post his illustrations for the "Kama Sutra" and "Vera Historia de Indias".

10 Comments:

Blogger Elliot Cowan said...

Applause!!!!!!
As I kid I would have gone nuts over this!
It has put me in mind of some books I enjoyed in primary school...
Perhaps it is the same fellow.
The only one I can recall is a Tarzan tale told entirely without dialogue...
Similar style.
Perhaps you can think of who I'm talking about.

11:20 am  
Blogger Oscar Grillo said...

No, I cannot...Would it be that erotic parody of "Tarzan" drawn by the Belgian Pichá?

12:17 pm  
Blogger Matthew Cruickshank said...

Oscar, you have a grip on Blogging tighter than Johnny Weismueller. This Blog is Golddust.

Tantor

12:24 pm  
Blogger Oscar Grillo said...

Tell that to the artists, forgotten and remembered, who grace these pages (Screens?)

Gomangani Tarmangani, Umgawa.

12:48 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

hi! my name is micaela and i've been journeying through your blog, its has got a lot of really cool stuff. Congratulations! And thanks for sharing.

I'm happy that you've put Oski among your stuff, I know about him, since I am argentinian too, and I would like to know if you happen to know Quino, who is another argentinian cartoonist, who I like a lot more than Oski, actually. If you do, I hope you agree with me, Quino is certainly one of the best visual communicators ever! :)

Cheers!

9:24 pm  
Blogger Oscar Grillo said...

Dear Micaela: Thanks for your comments. Yes of course I know Quino, and I have great admiration for his immense talents, but Quino, who was a very good friend of Oski, would agree with me in accepting that Oski was the true "maestro". He was an amazingly skilled artist and his humour was deliciously quirky and subversively surrealistic. Oski never stop provoking with his humour, he made many jokes about illness and death (He used to do humour about health matters, such as venereal diseases, in medical publications and ironically died because of a bad blood transfusion in a hospital!)
Many of his colleagues chosen a more liberal and confortable route. Oski, like his mentor, Saul Steinberg, chosen to be a universal artist rather than a "local hero"

11:35 am  
Blogger Matt Jones said...

Is she dusting that unfortunate peasant for lice or salting up his buttocks before she takes a bite?!
Wonderful drawings, could it be possible these influenced Dick Williams' Thief & Cobbler? From the patterned floor tiles & bg layouts to the shape of the characters, especially their noses, they all look like the Thief! Perhaps there was just a universal influence from Persian miniatures in the 60's & 70's?

2:05 pm  
Blogger Oscar Grillo said...

How curious you said that, Jonez!..I don't believe they influenced Dick's work but seeing how "Nasrudin" (Thief's original title) was looking like I've showed Dick these drawings. Williams was looking at Persian miniatures and Oski at medieval engravings.

6:07 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Un delirante maravilloso. Único.

2:32 pm  
Blogger Jazmin velasco said...

Hola, una pregunta... al final pusiste aqui en tu blog algunos ejemplos del kamasutra de Oski? Me encantaria verlo!

8:12 am  

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