from a rod mckuen poem

I found these while working on a massive clean up of my apartment. They’re really old. I used to make them whenever I was bored in highschool, I still have a little box full of scraps from magazines and books of things that I thought might fit into a point. These are all of the ones that I found in tact.

A great variety of rumors, of course, run high and wide about the extraordinarily, the sensationally creative artist – and I’m alluding exclusively, here, to painters and poets and full Dichter. One of these rumors – and by far, to me, the most exhilarating of the lot – is that he has never, even in the pre-psychoanalytical dark ages, deeply venerated his professional critics, and has, in fact, usually lumped them, in his generally unsound views of society, with the echt publishers and art dealers and the other, perhaps enviably prosperous camp followers of the arts, who, lie’s just scarcely said to concede, would prefer different, possibly cleaner work if they could get it. But what, at least in modern times, I think one most recurrently hears about the curiously-productive-though-ailing poet or painter is that he is invariably a kind of super-size but unmistakably ‘classical’ neurotic, an aberrant who only occasionally, and never deeply, wishes to surrender his aberration; or, in English, a Sick Man who not at all seldom, though lie’s reported to childishly deny it, gives out terrible cries of pain, as if he would wholeheartedly let go both his art and his soul to experience what passes in other people for wellness, and yet (the rumor continues) when his unsalutary-looking little room is broken into and someone – not infrequently, at that, someone who actually loves him – passionately asks him where the pain is, he either declines or seems unable to discuss it at any constructive clinical length, and in the morning, when even great poets and painters presumably feel a bit more chipper than usual, he looks more perversely determined than ever to see his sickness run its course, as though by the light of another, presumably working day he had remembered that all men, the healthy ones included, eventually die, and usually with a certain amount of bad grace, but that he, lucky man, is at least being done in by the most stimulating companion, disease or no, he has ever known. On the whole, treacherous as it may sound, coming from me, with just such a dead artist in the immediate family as I’ve been alluding to throughout this nearpolemic, I don’t see how one can rationally deduce that this last general rumor (and mouthful) isn’t based on a fairish amount of substantial fact.

While my distinguished relative lived, I watched him – almost literally, I sometimes think – like a hawk. By every logical definition, he was an unhealthy specimen, he did on his worst nights and late afternoons give out not only cries of pain but cries for help, and when nominal help arrived, he did decline to say in perfectly intelligible language where it hurt. Even so, I do openly cavil with the declared experts in these matters – the scholars, the biographers, and especially the current ruling intellectual aristocracy educated in one or another of the big public psychoanalytical schools – and I cavil with them most acrimoniously over this: they don’t listen properly to cries of pain when they come. They can’t, of course. They’re a peerage of tin cars. With such faulty equipment, with those ears, how can anyone possibly trace the pain, by sound and quality alone, back to its source?

With such wretched hearing equipment, the best, I think, that can be detected, and perhaps verified, is a few stray, thin overtones – hardly even counterpoint-coming from a troubled childhood or a disordered libido. But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from?

Isn’t the true poet or painter a seer? Isn’t he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist. (Surely the one and only great poet the psychoanalysts have had was Freud himself; he had a little ear trouble of his own, no doubt, but who in his right mind could deny that an epic poet was at work?) Forgive me; I’m nearly finished with this. In a seer, what part of the human anatomy would necessarily be required to take the most abuse? The eyes, certainly. Please, dear general reader, as a last indulgence (if you’re still here), re-read those two short passages from Kafka and Kierkegaard I started out with. Isn’t it clear? Don’t those cries come straight from the eyes? However contradictory the coroner’s report – whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death – isn’t it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say (and everything that follows in these pages all too possibly stands or falls on my being at least nearly right) – I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

My credo is stated. I sit back. I sigh – happily, I’m afraid. I light a Murad, and go on, I hope to God, to other things.

JD Salinger
Seymour, An Introduction.

Posting old images when I don’t have time to make new ones feels a lot like cheating… but I’ve got midterms. I got a 91.2 on my exam in “brain and behavior”. So here’s an old drawing. And here’s a bit of what it looked like before it became a comic page.

Not my best, but it was time for me to post whether it was finished or not.

I’ve got a busy few weeks to look forward to, so for the small handful of people who actually do pay attention to this website I make a pre-emptive apology because it may be a while before I get time to do any drawings. Of course, if you’d like to take my midterms for me, we might be able to work something out…

This is a detail from the page I’m working on at the moment. I’ll have the full image finished soon, but I figured I should post something in the mean time.

This is a sketchbook page for a finished comic page I did a while back.
Sorry for the lack of posting, between finals, holidays, and work I haven’t had time for drawing. I’ll get back into the updating groove soon.

This is an old drawing. One of the first comic layouts I ever did. I sometimes work on little stories about this pair of characters. Aubrey may or may not be Arienette’s imaginary friend, but he’s certainly her best friend. All of the stories about the two of them are about that strange loneliness that even the closest of people sometimes share, rather than filling in the gaps that cause it for one another.

I got a C when I turned this in for class. Newgarden wasn’t much of a fan.

Anyway, I’m posting this because I started drawing a panel for Arienette a few days ago, and I figured this would give it a little more context. I’ll post Arienette’s bio with that drawing. This is Aubrey’s:

Aubrey:
Aubrey is pretty convinced of his own existence, but has trouble convincing others of it. For the most part he walks about unseen and talking to himself. He has the body of a cherub but, much to his dismay, his wings can hardly lift him half a foot off the ground. He wears a pair of WWII fighter pilot goggles at all times, to hide the fact that he has one blue eye and one brown one, also because he thinks it might make it seem like the wings are just another part of the costume.

Arienette claims that he’s her imaginary friend, and that he’d stop existing if she did, but he has some other theories. For a while he thought he might be a ghost. He spent months trying to work out the dynamics of walking through walls, and came away from the experience with a newfound contempt for his own solidity. After a 48-hour sci-fi channel Quantum Leap marathon, Aubrey entertained fantasies of being a holographic entity sent back from the future to guide a leap-er (which should be carefully distinguished as entirely different from a leper or one might be subject to the wrath of Arienette when one suggests that she is indeed the leper one means to be guiding). He and Al had so many things in common (or one thing specifically), like being completely unseen by all except for small children, the mentally “absent”, animals and people near death… oh and, um, Arienette. Arienette’s conviction that she was in fact inhabiting her own body and therefore perfectly content to lie about on the couch and not “change her life for the better”, combined with his previously discovered contemptuous solidity, grounded the Al Theory mere hours after it had lifted off. But he still likes to fantasize about it.

Aubrey is an amnesiac character. He remembers tidbits of details of a past life that could be his. Like the fruit trees that grew in his grandfather’s yard: pomegranate, peach, and lime. Or the color of his mothers best dress. But has no recollection of the people or places themselves. He is ageless. When he speaks you sometimes get the feeling that you are listening to an ancient, at other times a child.

It’s a recurring theme for me, water, floods, drowning, tidal waves… and so it comes up in my drawings and paintings often. Like this one, that was done when I was barely over a year into art school.

The dream dictionary tells me water dreams are symbolic for your emotional state. Flood dreams represent overwhelming emotion, etc and so forth. That makes sense to me… 

But, I also dream a lot about zombies.

Process:

Rough Idea: http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y234/hlaoroo/Stranger1illus.jpg

Sketch: http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y234/hlaoroo/Stranger1sketch.jpg

Wash: http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y234/hlaoroo/Stranger1paint.jpg

Beginning of detail work: http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y234/hlaoroo/Stranger1paint2.jpg