Dear Stranger

My interpretation of what i heard from amy’s room last night
Or, Amy looks for jobs and is met with nothing but unpaid internships:

Something of mine was posted on drawger.com as part of an online showcase of women illustrators work. The comment that the host made when posting it is rather interesting to me.

I’ve posted this image because it is beautiful and emotional and it serves as an example of the kind of work I’ve been getting and not knowing what to do about adding it to the show.

To my mind, this isn’t conceptual work. This show is meant to strengthen our confidence in thinking in an op-ed kind of way…

…Or is it that we are wired another way and that emotional work is our forte and shouldn’t be messed with? [I hope not*]

[*editted from: I really don't know.]

- Nancy Stahl

http://www.drawger.com/show.php?show_id=36&image_id=1294&view_comments=1#comments

I kind of wish I could respond, but I’m not a drawger member.

I’m not sure about other women, but I know myself. Emotional work is my forte, and I’m not ashamed of that, or scared of it… I stood up for it in art school, and I intend to stand up for it throughout my career. I think it’s sad that there isn’t much of a place for it in mainstream illustration, and that the work that I truly enjoy doing doesn’t seem to translate well into the realm of “conceptual” editorial illustration.

I work with concepts just as well as the best political illustrators. It’s just a different kind of concept. Emotional concepts are under represented in the world of illustration. I don’t know if that’s a gender issue, but it might be.

By the way, I just printed up a couple of hundred promotional post cards with that image on it. Leave me a note if you’d like me to put your address into the mix when I start mailing them out.

Me: Of course it fits like puzzle pieces when they finally come together.

Her:That doesn’t mean anything, just because the puzzle pieces fit together doesn’t mean the picture makes sense.

Me: What? What the hell do you mean by that?

Her: You know. Didn’t you ever do that?

Me: Hmm, “didn’t I ever do that?” Yeah, no, I think you’re going to have to elaborate on this one.

Her: You know! When you get pissed off at the puzzle and cut off all the edges so you just have a bunch of rectangle and squares. Come on, you’re the artist! You never did that?

Me: No, no, I never got pissed off at the puzzle. I put it together the way it fit.

Her: It fit this way too. And the pictures were more interesting by far. My point being, just because they fit and they were interesting doesn’t mean they made sense.