Sorry, Tolstoy.

Collage of notes for a comic meet-up plus self-Portrait. Magic Cephalopod character is Lynda Barry’s

 

I read What It Is by Lynda Barry this week and was very moved. This book was one of several wonderful graphic novels I got my hands on recently, and it is reassuring how varied they are. It becomes easy to see that art is not only arranged in a scale of poor to great but perhaps more consequentially in broad and overlapping spectrums, where quality takes many forms. All unhappy artworks are unhappy in their own way. All happy artworks are happy in their own way, too.

I am being unnecessarily vague. I just mean, the variety of great artwork is comforting now, whereas it used to be overwhelming. I was afraid I would not be able to make a contribution. I felt I needed to be the best. Finally, I see that there is no such thing.

When I had little time and energy for art, my reaction to other people's good works was always envy. Now it might be admiration, intense interest for the purpose of my own learning, the desire to provide resources or other support to the artist. When I look at very good artwork now, I still have a first emotional reaction of insecurity, something like, "I could never do something that good!" I find, though, that my follow on reactions are swift, and more constructive, now that I have more time and energy for my own work, now that I am finally doing my work. My second reaction, it might be something like, "they are very good at what they do! That is not what I want to do, but I like it." Or, "I could learn a lot from this person. I wish I had mentoring opportunities."

The many beauties of Barry’s book include its countless unexpected therapeutic moments nestled within its colorful tapestry. I was able through reading her book to identify a growing wrongness I have been feeling over the last few days. When I left my job in August, I reveled in the increased time I have for my children and my artwork, and how both are benefiting, as I am. But lately I am finding myself constantly refreshing social media stats. Worrying about my shoulder pain. Fretting that I don’t know exactly what to do at every minute of the day. Just having a lot of distracting thoughts, that are clearly pretty useless. It's the sort of anxiety I feel when I don't have certainty.

But I am new to all this, and of course I don’t know very much right now, and have a great deal to learn, and this is a lovely thing – beginner's mind – when you can accept it. Frankly, at the moment I don’t need to ask myself if something I make is good or bad, or even if I am using my time exactly as I should at a given moment. I don’t know if I am doing the right things, and I shouldn’t know. You can see in the picture above a kind of squid creature. Barry calls this the magic cephalopod, and as I understand her, it seems to represent the part of ourselves, or our whole self, that we listen to when we're making our art. It is the antithesis of two questions that close an artist down and distance them from the connection they need to have to themselves. The two questions have to do with judging, is this good? Does this suck? Through my life, they have had a terrible influence on me, as they always do on everyone, I guess. The cephalopod lives in the don't-know space, and that is where I'm trying to stay.

I tried a first exercise, included at the back of this beautiful and wise part-biography, part visual guide, meant to lead artists (back) into their imagination. She asks readers to picture cars that have had significance in one's life, and eventually we are asked to call up an image related to one of these cars – an experience, a memory – and write about it.

So I thought up my ten cars. I remembered a lot of cars from my youth in the 70s and 80s, station wagons, orange Volvo, and my own cars later in life. Next, I focused in on a particular moment with one of them. Wrote about it, using her many writing prompts. I chose to write about a large pickup truck my family had when I was a teenager. It was a Dodge Ram, red, with an extended cab and extended flat.

I remember taking my drivers test in that car, and how the tester told me he'd never had someone do the test in a vehicle that long. I think it was 13 feet, something like 4 m? I couldn't perform the three-point turn in the tiny space provided. I did not find the test very challenging, because I had recently done a weekend motorcycle course with my mom that she and I pushed to finish despite a weekend-long torrential downpour. We were soaked, rain in our underwear and bras, but by Sunday night we were legal to drive the new family dirtbike. 

After completing Barry's exercise, I decided to sketch the truck, because the mental image of the lineup at the testing facility of all the cars, with my gigantic red truck in the middle, was so strong.

But when I draw the truck, I'm not the person behind the wheel. Instead, it's my dad I see. And, the lines of the truck, its color, metal, the shape of the lights, they appear under my pencil more similar to that old Volvo from my childhood. And he is not the age he was when I was a teenager. Instead, he is almost a young man, a young father with his first wrinkles on his brow. He looks afraid, again, not something that I drew on purpose.

I realized earlier this week how unhappy my parents where when I was a child. We did not have an easy time. A story for a different day. It's funny how we can take decades to recognize something so simple.

In Every Direction

With the goal of building up a modest business for myself making graphic novels and other projects, I work nowadays in many directions to learn what this venture could look like. It’s not possible to jump from obscurity to novel publication, sadly, so I have to figure out what to do beyond The Engineeress. Not that I mind. My failing has always been an inability to focus on one thing.

This process is a bit like going for a bra fitting. I have to take my clothes off, and take a look in the mirror at what I am trying to hold up to scrutiny. Then I measure my dimensions, and make a selection of possible styles. I’m more punk than frilly, but my favourites are the comfortable ones. I am trying on many different things.

Over the last two months, I’ve tried on a few that are very exciting for me - Additional comic-making in order to get some publications. Blogging. Social media presence. Web comics. Attending events. Reading a ton of other people’s works. Contributing to things, pitching into the community. Meeting influential people in the industry. Joining groups with other artists or interested folks.

A big one is figuring out where my work “fits”. And, chief among bra-choosing activities: getting advice from experts.

The next thing I would like to do is find a mentor. Not sure how to go about that yet.

I have just one page left of Eight Weeks, my comic memoir of miscarriage to complete. Above is the probably final design of text - positioning it below the artwork was the only way I could steer people through the comic before they leapt to the words. Seductive little things, words.

Took me a few tries. While the artwork is drawn and one in one step on paper, I added the text in Adobe Photoshop, my go to program after trying the cheaper and free competition. No, I am not sponsored! I wish. I make countless trials and too many errors to ever write on my comics!  

Intuit don’t script it

 

The word is mightier than my wordless comic

 

I am not an optimistic person, and tend as a result to see things a bit more clearly than most, and more clearly than is helpful. But I have many blind spots and naturally one of those is my own artwork. 

Example - I created a wordless comic memoir about a miscarriage I experienced. I redrew this comic after a couple of magazines expressed interest but rejected it. It was rejected again. I am re-drawing it again, this time quite differently. It’s much better, I see that. 

I also see finally after two years that it is too difficult to follow. 

How do you draw a doctor offering a woman the choice between a D&C and waiting it out? Especially when many readers won’t even know* what either option even means? 

I used to show the woman mulling over an OR theatre door and an hourglass. It looked terrible.

It’s just clunky to rely on tired symbols to get important and intimate topics across. It’s not a humour comic FFS.

So I decided to add text narrative. This of course brings me down. I wanted to produce a successful wordless comic, art that stands on its own! As soon as there is text on the page, it becomes the lode stone, the main event. Argh. 

But the piece is not an artistic exercise, it is a memoir and I need to stay true to that. True to telling the story the way it seems to need to be told!

So I’m reviewing the text narration styles in my personal collection. So gorgeous! Let me know if you want book titles. 

Clockwise: Alison Bechdel, Barbara Yelin, Birgit Weyhe, Gipi, and Nora Krug in the centre. 

*D&C is the removal of the foetus tissues with a special tool by a doctor, especially useful as sometimes the foetus is not intact and it is a health risk if dead tissue remains inside the woman. 

Waiting it out just means waiting for your body to expel everything. This can take hours or weeks.

For the love of made-up things

Recently it has dawned on me how often graphic novels are based on historical events or biography. Most graphic novels are graphic memoir, graphic histories or revisionist histories. There is an amazing vein of novels that reimagine the world if, say, the Nazis won the war or what have you. I totally want to check these out but am a bit intimidated. Anyone know where I should start?

I’ve been reading Im selben Boot (In the Same Boat) - a graphic novel about east and west German athletes post-fall of the wall (by Zelba) - that is so well-drawn and so confidently told that I’m fighting imposter syndrome again.

Writing such books confronts the artist with the serious challenge of adapting real life into autobiography. What are the significant moments that should be selected that together will tell this story? 

Often the writer reaches for literary tools like foreshadowing and character development etc by collapsing several events or characters into one, by changing timelines, exaggerating the importance of a moment for frame or suspense, and so on. Everyone must worship at the altar that is Jason Lutes’ trilogy Berlin, where his invented characters live for our enlightenment the vertigo that was Weimar Berlin.

The work improves its appeal to audiences. Reading Stephen Pressfield is how I understood Thermopylae. Yet in many cases, most?, the work distorts reality so that the work is no longer education. Often this sacrifice is worthwhile in the pursuit of awareness raising, for example. Simplifying real life events to make them more palatable at least may result in whetting people’s appetites for facts, right? Based on a true story. 

With all due respect to memoirists and the like - of which I am sort of a member, as some of my better works are autobiographical - I am still a bit freaked out by how little fiction there is in serious comics. Am I looking in the wrong places? Am I trying to find literature on the wrong bookshelf? Is fiction in our post-truth era dead, because truth is so appealing all by itself? Are we in a post-artifice era? Are there only a handful of comic artists allowed to produce works of fiction? Is there no market? 

Or is it just too much to ask of a single author, that they should simultaneously possess the rare elixirs of creative writer, artist and cartoonist all in the same imagination?

I took out Adrian Tomine’s Killing and Dying translated into German (Eindringlinge) from the library the other day. I had not read it before. I made a deal with myself a few years ago, that - knowing I had time for making art or for anything else but not both - that I would do art. 

This is why I have a complete script for Engineeress and eighty percent of my roughs and a bunch of completed line art and two children whom I have managed to keep alive... but I could not tell you what has been published recently. 

So I got this book out of the library along with a few others. Then I ended up buying the book Long-Distance Cartoonist by the same guy, and I was a bit turned off and so I put Killing and Dying aside for a bit. 

Anyway, when I got around to reading it, my expectations were low. I just thought it would elaborate on some of the angst he showed in Long-Distance Cartoonist. Not my thing.

But it is so lovely to climb down from a wrong opinion. (I love changing my mind.)

Killing and Dying was medicine. Comfort, though not because the themes are easy to swallow, or whatever. 

Comforting because his short stories are lovely. They belong in comic form, they exploit the medium beautifully, though I don’t have the means to articulate how, not yet. And simultaneously the stories preserve the short story feel of great fiction. Economy, the short sharp glimpse.

I felt like I was reading fiction, and I love fiction. And I humbly thought it was quite good fiction. 

Which always feels very good. Like a balm. 

I am so relieved to find an author who treats this form, the wonderful graphic novel, in this way. As a form that enjoys the possibilities of both fiction and of art, shortcutting through layers of text description with an image, or in reverse relying on comic exposition over the tired fiction Modernist doctrine of Show Don’t Tell. 

If you know others working in this way, please let me know!

I will go find his other books now.

ComiXconnection

The Museum for European Culture extended the run of ComiXconnection a stunningly curated exhibit of east euro comics. The museum is out of the way in Dahlem on the grounds of Free University, unfortunately.

(But while you’re there you could sneak into the graphic novel collection at the JFK institute. I don’t think they mind visitors, but I have a card, so cannot be sure. Anyway, the books are all in the original languages, and represent likely the biggest collection of North American comics outside Germany.)

The curators of the east European collection have a wonderful eye for space. Throughout the middle of the room, comics and infographics are arranged at eye level on metal displays that look welded together from raw steel. A long and simply gorgeous graphic work about the development of the collection itself ripples along one wall, while blown up images hang on the opposite wall.  

One can also enter a small lounge area through a curtain marked No Entry with yet more displays, this time artifacts behind vitrine. A second room repeats the welded-metal display format, which altogether feature several dozen artists, alongside a second display of comic journalism.

This is how I discovered La Revue Dessinée. This is a quarterly news magazine done entirely as comics or sequential art. This is the most gorgeous thing I have seen since Astrapi.

Part of me wonders what additional value comics bring to news journalism. After all, they add another layer of interpretation. 

When I read the news, I ask myself what the writer might have missed, misinterpreted or even misrepresented. Photographs are accurate but present the same challenge. With comics, unless they are totally copied from photographs (in which case, the question is, what is the point? Is it informative or even creative to reproduce another art form exactly?), they add even more questions. Where did the artist get the content of the photo? Were they there? What made them compose the images in that way? 

I believe fiction can bring us closer to universal or broader truths, but not necessarily to the facts of a live, current news issue. 

On the other hand I have long loved war art, which is not totally dissimilar to comics journalism. War art does not pretend to do current affairs journalism, though. Yet the idea of comics journalism really excites me. It’s so beautiful!

But it is too early to form an opinion.  La Revue can be borrowed from the Mediathek of the Institut Français. I will pick one up sometime soon, and feast my adoring if doubting eyes upon it.

***

Go and see the ComiXconnection exhibit is my gentle advice, and if you do, check out the Slow Fashion exhibit that I did not have time for, and let me know how it was. You could also have a coffee at the café, a tribute to European coffee culture:

The wisdom of middle age

from “Eight Weeks”

Tonight I began my recovery from two weeks of grant applications. I applied to the Canada Council for the Arts, and then when a trusted friend told me to, I applied for the Berlin Comics grant. After my last submission Wednesday I took a few days to feel disoriented and to catch up on emails. Finally today I went for a run, did a workout. I need my routine back. I have chronic pain that I can keep at bay if I exercise. A two week break means pain plus headaches. Shitty.

I feel like I am starting a new software company in my garage. Writing art grants is an intense process that requires the applicant to develop a rationale for the work, explain their artistic development and directions, put together a project plan and budget for exactly how they will spend the money, etc. It is intense!

I remember when I tried to do this project while I was living  on my parents’ farm in 2005. I gave up after a few months because I was lost in all of the planning and organization required. All these years at my previous job I finally know how to plan and organize a project, balance the administrative burden, track progress, make budgets, weather the emotional ups and downs, plan my day, and so on. 

I wish I had figured all this out earlier. Well, I did, now that I think of it. I was accepted into an art school in 2010 but I decided that I wanted to have another baby instead. I got pregnant, but then I miscarried at eight weeks.

That miscarriage became the subject of my first completed sequential art. I’m re-drawing it  again. 

I was reading advice on grant applications from people who work for the Canada Council for the Arts, and they said that the primary problem is that people underestimate how much effort and time artists put into such tasks. Going to high school for visual arts, studying music, doing my Masters degree in creative writing were all very important for artistic development, but when it came to managing multiyear projects, I was unprepared. 

I've never been a particularly self-aware person, so I just took my confusion as a sign that I should give up. 

It’s not for the country, it’s for the world!

 Adrian Tomine and ARTE on Kanada

Tuesday provided an unexpected juxtaposition and very timely window into how artists do things, organise their thinking and their work, their artistic practice. I forced myself to chat to the guy at Grober Unfug, a very important bookseller of graphic novels. I hate talking to people about my art, am super shy, but I’m trying to treat it as a job. 

That’s how I always managed at diplomatic functions - I wasn’t doing it for me, but for Canada. For the country! Hah. It was a thing I did in my head to turn on my artificial inner extrovert.

But I hung around the store for a few minutes, fogging  up my glasses because of my overly-large handmade mask, and finally the other customer left, so. 

He was full of advice and it was awesome and I had better leave that for another post.

To pay for the advice I bought an Adrian Tomine book. „The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist” (Drawn & Quarterly 2020). It’s about the artist himself reckoning with his envy, ambition and narcissism, and I couldn’t relate. I certainly have all three of those qualities, of course, but I am not at all driven to do this art thing for those reasons. 

I am thankful that he wrote the book, because it is a foil for the reader. It helped me, as someone reading a book by a master of the craft, see more clearly what kind of artist I am.

That night I happened to attend an ARTE film screening of documentary portraits of Canadian writers. I suppose the intent was to showcase Canadian literature for the Frankfurter Book Fair. But it spoke to me as a rare view into the studios of six mature writers. (See Kanada - Literatur im Ausbruch at www.ARTETV.com/Buchmesse if you understand German).

I am surprised by how easy it is to see already, though I’m no professional artist, what my own practice and motivations and preoccupations are. This makes it easier to identify all of the many things I do not know, or rather, the things that I should know about myself and my work. 

I clung to each moment in the documentaries when the filmmaker honed in on a studio space or shared footage of a writer reflecting on their process or goals. Usually it wasn’t very elaborate. You would think, with the richly creative output, that the kernel of the thing, the intention, would be complex. But no.

This used to bother me. I thought most artists were just not too bright, or that they were ignorant, and they often are. It’s hard, after all, to understand the world when the modern rigours of artistic craft and of  hustling for money take so much time. 

Like how so many professionals are so busy getting the job done that they cannot stay abreast of developments in their field. I know all about that one, regretfully.

I was mistaken, though. The longer I examine this project, The Engineeress, which has possessed me for so many years, the simpler it gets. I am afraid of losing my children. I feel guilty having children. I believe these stories belong in the collective imagination. 

So I laboriously gather reference photos and read websites because that is why I draw pictures.

Blick ins Studio

 

It‘s go time

These words from these pages back in 2017 seem uncannily accurate now. 

“Everything I need is in front of me. The story, the pictures. But I don't have much knowledge, time or technique. It's hard not to be discouraged. It's also one thing to do the planning and thumbnails with my bits of time sprinkled here and there. But inking and painting happen at a desk.”

I took the decision a year later to stop working full time and to devote myself this project (and to parenting better, though that is another story).  It took two years to actually get to quitting. 

In the meanwhile I finished several years of updates to the education and multimedia centre I was managing. Those project management skills and resilience and determination are getting a full workout now, as I push ahead on this book. 

Next I was embedded into the German foreign ministry - an unexpected assignment that taught me a lot about surviving loneliness and self-reliance and self-motivation. That is not Germany’s fault or credit. The pandemic broke out, so not only was I the lone Canadian in their system with no handholds or longtime friends, I was actually literally... alone. Connecting daily with my team by visual link.

I hate Zoom now.

So now it is 2020. I left my job last month. 

It’s a new world. Lots more economizing, grant applications, artist meetups and coworking, reaching out to experts to review my work. Lots more art. More pyjamas and less expensive cappuccino. More diving back into what I was working on yesterday instead of spending an hour just trying to remember what page I was on. And, bad art days don’t mean as much, when I have the chance to try again tomorrow!