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.