Dear Stranger

Sometimes I find myself wishing I knew just a bit more about righteous anger, and a bit less about resignation.

But, to act on anger requires you to earnestly believe that your actions can and will change something, whether it be the world, a situation, another person…

Do you ever lay your hands on a solid surface and, brief though it may be, find yourself convinced you’ll just fall through it if you push? Like a ghost, or a figment of the imagination.

I don’t push outward, the world and it’s people don’t seem to change much except in size and shape, and when you push they only seem to pull.

I push inward. At least I can feel myself changing.

A song for the moment:

Here’s a thing I’m working on for a boy.
This is an early stage, I’ll post it again when it’s
closer to the finish line.
I wonder how it’ll change.

Words are enough, when words are all you’ve got. 

A man on the subway begging for change says,
“I’m not greedy, I’ll take a penny if a penny’s all
you can afford to give. It may not seem like much to you,
but nothing’s too small when you ain’t got nothing.”

Every little word gets tucked away.
Cause no word is too small, when words are all you’ve got.

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.

I can’t get this Sufjan Stevens song out of my head

This is from a couple of years ago when I was working on “Dear Stranger” as a thesis project at parsons.

I forgot how much time you spend pretending to be something other than what you are when you actually have a social life. I am beginning to resent people for being around. For asking me out to dinner and scowling if I just order a coffee.

Today my thesis teacher was going through the sketches for my “Dear Stranger” book, and she got to a page where the text is:

“I spent weeks starving myself to compete with her
convinced it was the only things she had over me
when he saw me he grasped my hip bone where the fat used to be
looked at me dissaprovingly.”

And she flinched at it, started to respond to it but backed off and decided to pretend it wasn’t there.

She wants me to make the book blue because it’s so melancholy.
I told her that I’d rather make it pink.
Pink for the women who know how to pretend that everything is ok when they’re falling apart.
The women who don’t wear black and grey to tell the world they want to die, but still wake up wishing they had.

Everyone knows that blue is the color of sadness.
It’s a cliche. It’s not real.
When I feel the worst I always wear a dress with flowers on it.
And I paint my nails pink.

That’s my color for sadness.

Sitting in the back of the class when she turns to me and says, “You scare me.”

“What?”

“You’re really nice and all, but you intimidate the hell out of me. You’re half my age and somehow make me feel like a child when we talk. And when you don’t say anything at all you just have this look, like somethings on the tip of your tongue but you’ve decided it’s better if we figure it out for ourselves.”

“Oh.”

Hi. I like building lego towers. I keep M&M’s under my tongue until they’ve melted away because they go too quickly when you chew them. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a rabbit, and every year when my birthday came around I’d be a little disappointed that growing old didn’t mean growing a cotton tail. I like to watch and I don’t like to act. I go through life with only half a plan, but I never leave unfinished what I’ve started.

I stopped talking at some point and started writing because my voice cracks when I speak, and it’s too quiet, no one ever seems to hear me.

Maybe this will get a drawing, maybe not.

She shifts in her sleep.
The bedroom window faces the street and bars of light are projected onto the ceiling every time a car turns on their corner. Aubrey is lying on the floor at the foot of the bed watching the lights pass overhead. During the long lulls between cars he counts her breaths. Arienette snores. 549 Exhales between the garbage truck and a little red Toyota.

Aubrey tries to mimic her breathing but it is senseless. He doesn’t need to breathe, his lungs -presuming he has lungs, part of him thinks he might be stuffed with cotton or autumn leaves- his lungs are unresponsive. He pushes his chest out and then pulls it back in, a bit of air rushes through his ears, and he snorts in amusement.

She shifts again, this time more forcefully, kicking the comforter part way to the floor. Another car passes, but Aubrey misses the light show, his view obstructed by a sea of flannel. Aubrey embraces this temporary darkness. He lets his mind drift back over the day. This is the closest he ever gets to dreaming.