In some ways, this page feels like a long time ago. I’ve moved on to another chapter – different characters, different textures, different self.
In other ways, it feels like exactly where I am right now – suspended between the past and the future, between the known and the unknown. Not much to do but breathe, float, dream, and panic. And keep drawing. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Let’s see if I can post directly from the iPad where I’m making these images! Usually I transfer the images to my laptop because I like to do my writing on a device with a real keyboard. But I’m in the studio today, and it’s raining. The laptop is at home. I’d have to get wet before I could use it.
(I love that it’s raining. We’ve been having a drought here, and it was a very hard summer for my garden.)
Sometimes I feel a pressure to get the whole story out. But it’s impossible. Stop. Rest. Kiss the ground. This book is not a sprint, or even a marathon. It’s a pilgrimage.
Drawing is seeing. Seeing what moves through the body, the mind, the soul. After I finished this page, I cried for the better part of an hour.
Writing is seeing too. I might cry again when I finish this post. Left Otter and Right Otter (yes, it’s true, I’m terrible at naming things): off they go, into separation.
In my head, I can hear my father picking this page apart. Shut up, Dad.
I think everyone in this book is going to have monster feet.
There’s so much about the world that feels bad and uncomfortable right now. It feels a little wrong to be holed up in my studio making art. Sometimes it feels terribly wrong to be having fun. But it makes me feel less like clobbering my fellow humans when I have to go food shopping, so I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s worth doing.
I decided to do the graphic novel on an iPad, and there’s a big learning curve. It’s going very slowly. But I love being able to erase things cleanly without tearing the paper. I love having a permanent marker that never runs out of ink or makes a mess of my fingers. I love not doing the lettering by hand.
(Full disclosure: nobody paid me to say any of that. Nobody pays me for anything. I am quite possibly the least essential worker ever, at least by any of the usual metrics.)
Page 1 of all the newspapers today is about a certain public figure testing positive for coronavirus. Page 1 of this book is about something else entirely. Here is the news from my studio:
The weird fish is a reference to a little comic I made several years ago. It makes me ridiculously happy.
I seem to be writing a graphic novel. It’s a weird little love story. I kind of don’t want to be writing it, and yet I can’t seem to stop. It feels like chewing my way out of a cocoon. My jaw hurts and my teeth are getting worn down. Why not just stay inside? It was pretty comfortable in here for a long time. But I can’t stop. Something wants out.
Here is part of a sketchy little cartoon that I made a few weeks ago, while I was storyboarding:
…the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad…
Good grief, I’m sad. And I notice that I don’t want to be sad, and large parts of me aren’t sad. Maybe it’s more like I have a Big Sad in me. And I try to paint over it with “at least” and “look at everything I learned,” but it’s still there.
Please don’t let me fuck this up by making it a Hate Story disguised as a love story. I want it to be something trustworthy.
My brain often finds Bayo Akomolafe‘s written words inscrutable, but interesting things happen in my body when I listen to him. “Yes,” says the body. “There’s no clarity in here. There may never be clarity. Maybe it doesn’t matter.” The brain struggles to remember what he said. “Shh,” says the body.
What does any of that have to do with the story I’m trying to tell?
Shh. There’s no clarity. It doesn’t matter.
More from the pandemic diary canvas:
This time the words came to me while I walked the labyrinth this morning:
“in the eye of the storm, in the mouth of the predator, with or without you, i dance”
I wish I had a very pale pink Sharpie to give her feet some color. But I don’t, and I am committed for the moment to using only what I’ve got in the studio, so she has little ghosty feet.
Fun fact: I found a mouse like this in my desk once. I scooped her out and put her in a bucket while I went out and bought a cage for her. She was my office-mate for three years. I called her The Poopsmith because of what she’d done in my desk.
This is from a canvas I’ve been working on – a sort of pandemic diary:
The words came to me while I was drawing:
i pray for enough light and courage to take one small step
I’m not sure when I started her. How can I say when these things begin? Is it when I start taking steps towards making a tangible object? The earliest photo I have is from late 2018, but by then she was pretty far along. Is it when the idea first appears in my head, having arrived from who-knows-where? I was writing about her in late 2017.
And what about when it begins as one thing and turns into something completely different? What then? Who’s to say she wasn’t always a swarm of smaller sculptures waiting to happen? She had a name, but I have forgotten it.
It was mid-February when I started taking her apart. I’d moved everything into the new studio a few weeks before that, and had finally done enough unpacking to begin to feel at home. I was grieving, like I do when something ends. Like I do, for longer than most people would say is reasonable. Like I do, even when it’s been over for years and life is actually not so bad. I sometimes think that when-life-is-not-so-bad is the best time for grieving.
Anyway: I was enormously sad, and I started taking her apart. Here she is, without her lower half, without her back.
I made a couple of smaller sculptures with the wire I salvaged, plus other things I found around the studio – a handful of blue beads, an assortment of washers and springs, a worn wire brush that someone left behind after cleaning a furnace.
And I started to feel a little less bereft. And I made a couple more.
And then we were in the middle of a pandemic. Remember the year you thought you were going to have? Kiss it goodbye.
I kept making little sculptures until I had used up all the salvaged wire. As I worked, it seemed more and more appropriate to be giving up the thing I had thought I would be doing. They had names, these smaller sculptures. They had names, but I have forgotten them. By the time I finished, I wasn’t sad about the same things I’d been sad about when I started.
People sometimes ask me how long it takes to make a sculpture. The answer is: however many years I’ve been alive when I finish it. This swarm of little sculptures took me 52 years.
This makes me kind of want to visit Zurich before the end of the month.
Over the winter, I finally made another sculpture. I call her “lumpy crossing.” She’s full of spray foam insulation, which I added during a severe cold snap that left people nervously watching the gauges on their propane and oil tanks. Adding the foam was a very slow process: if you add it all at once, it blorps out all over the floor.
The name comes from a story about the name of a place in the Northern of Ireland, Corrymeela:
Corrymeela is often translated from the original Irish as “Hill of Harmony” or “Hill of Sweetness.” But there is another and more probable translation. The name comes from a neighbouring townland, Corrymellagh, in the parish of Culfeightrin. Culfeightrin means in Irish “The Corner of the Stranger.” Corrymellagh means “The Lumpy Crossing Place.”
Perhaps the latter etymology is more apt for us: a place where differing groups, strangers to each other, are offered the opportunity to cross over into another space. And the crossing is “lumpy,” not easy, full of pitfalls.
What can I say about this last year? Not much. Except, maybe, that it has been a lumpy crossing.
also: 