I don’t know why, but I’ve never been the type who was able to really devote herself to making art. I mean, I graduate from art school excited to finally have some time on my hands to make things my way– and within a year I go and throw myself back into school to study in a field that (at this level at least) has nothing at all to do with art. So I’m stuck trying to divide my time between attempting to memorize cell anatomy and statistics formulas, and mixing paints… Even in art school I couldn’t just settle into a life of drawing and painting classes, I had to stuff my schedule with HTML and ActionScript, or random ass architecture classes just cause I get bored so easily and needed a challenge.

I like to think that some day I’ll figure out a way to synthesize the vast database of random knowledge that’s stored in my head at this point. Instead I mostly just feel useless for knowing a ton of shit that no one needs to know all at once and not being able to put almost any of it to use in real life.

Ok, rant over.

According to the NY Times kids these days just don’t get Holden Caulfield.

“Today’s pop culture heroes, it seems, are the nerds who conquer the world — like Harry — not the beautiful losers who reject it.”

…

Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”

I guess my kind is getting to be rather passé.

oh… I gave in and got a http://twitter.com/pitseleh_

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.

The text in this one is taken from two Margaret Atwood poems. The upper part is from Dream 2: Brian the Still-Hunter, the bottom from Highest Altitude.

Just a random one.

Update: 6/4/2009

Actually, not so random. I’m going to be posting a few of these ones. I like them. They have a different quality from the type I normally post. Subtle and erie.

Someone requested a print of the version that I have of this drawing on my portfolio website. In the process of attempting to make said print available I realized that I had no high res version of the image saved and had to dig up the sketchbook with the original to rescan. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the full page. This is really old, but it’s one of those drawings that I actually really enjoyed making. It’s also one of the few that i’ve done entirely without references.. which is why it’s so rough, but also why I like it so much. So enjoy another old Aubrey and Arienette page, and if you like it, there’s a print available on the cafepress site: http://www.cafepress.com/ursulaviglietta

Clementine: Joely? What if you stayed this time?
Joel: I walked out the door. There’s no memory left.
Clementine: Come back and make up a good-bye at least. Let’s pretend we had one.
[Joel comes back]
Clementine: Bye Joel.
Joel: I love you…

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.