Dear Stranger

I’ve been a feverish mess all week. This is another sketchbook page that was done partially during a class, hence the Auden note… Sometimes, you just want to draw a naked girl. I’m pretty sure 9 years in art school qualifies me to draw just that.

A side thought: I keep thinking about all that time and energy my teachers put into convincing me that I needed to develop a consistent style. And for very brief moments, I do try… I mean, I know it’s what people want from an artist, to be able to pin down their work as belonging to them specifically…. but, I feel like my style has more to do with the mood of a drawing than it has anything at all to do with materiality or visual consistency. There are words and pictures, that’s what I do… sometimes they have everything to do with one another, sometimes they just occupy a page together. I like to think that even when it’s simple happenstance that brings them together; a note from class that happens to be on the same page as a drawing done at 4 am that I expected to tear out of the book in the morning, they still manage to inform one another in some way. It’s a collage of ideas, emotions, thoughts…

My work is about the way we process what we see, hear, think… it’s about the relationship between pictures and words, even when that relationship is arbitrary. Hell, the more arbitrary the better.

(Oh, and the poem the text is from is SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, by WH Auden)

“…Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?…”

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Comic, Dreams, Sketchbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.