Thirty-five plus

​If you happened to see me on the way to work or in a restaurant on a Tuesday (art night, yeah!) you would see a red cloth bag on my shoulder. It's from Dussman, a huge bookstore everyone knows, with a good English-language art graphic novel section. I carry the bag everywhere, and so far no one has asked me what is in it. Whenever I have a few minutes, I haul out my book to do some work. After a year, the book is now ​35+ pages of plans long. I have lots of time, but most of it is after a long day of work and childcare, and I don't have the energy. After 9 pm, the only thing I want to do these days is watch kung fu and action movies. I skipped Canada Day to see Wonder Woman at the Odeon on Hauptstrasse at ten p.m. 

Here is a scene from the middle of the book. The main character, Liv, gets pregnant after years of IVF treatments. This part takes place four months into the pregnancy, when she's at work. In the first scene, she finds blood on her underwear.

The reason I am not starting from the beginning is that the earliest pages are super-rough, like almost stick-figures. I thought I would draw sketch out the book roughly then go back in and do more detailed plans. Nope. You can see that progression even in these pages - the last few pages look more like comics than the first ones.

If you can't see the images clearly, open each image in a new tab (right-click on the picture to get this option).

If you have any comments or suggestions, I'm all ears. 

*****

 

 

 

all images copyright Lia Hiltz 2017

In the waiting room

My first boyfriend and I got back together in university. He developed cancer, was successfully treated after surgery and radiation. It was a very rough time for him. The cancer was testicular, and aggressive, and at the outset we didn't know whether it had metastasised.

Throughout, I was not a comfort to him (our relationship was already crappy) but he got some laughs out of a book of humour for cancer patients, I think by Ben Wicks. Haven't been able to find it since.

A friend and the drummer of a garage band I joined for a little while died of brain cancer. Peach cracked a lot of jokes on the way out. Tumour humour, he called it. He would've loved that Ben Wicks book.

We have a book at home written and illustrated by a husband and wife with a daughter with autism. It's called, Don't Touch the Buttons on the Microwave: An Autism Social Story. Who knows how we got it. I buy things out of bargain bins, bring them home. The book is for insiders. It's comforting, since there's a bit of that in the house, undiagnosed.

It helps to have a picture in mind of where you want something you draw or write to go. I did my best drawing and painting when I was blogging seriously because I figured there were a few people paying attention. It felt like I was talking to someone.

Maybe my little book is for people in infertility clinics or people who have had miscarriages. For the people in their lives who want to know what they are going through. It might end up being too grim to be useful to anybody, but that might be the idea.

This is a panel from a point in the story when the couple is in the waiting room of their clinic. There's a lot of waiting on the TTC (Trying To Conceive).

A possible collaborator (sounds so Cold War) asked me about working again on a graphic novel project. This galvanised my thoughts around Engineeress, which I'd originally conceived as a short graphic novel about ten years ago. I couldn't find those pages when I looked recently - and it's probably just as well.

Working with the comic format over the last few weeks has been a revelation. The story as I wrote and re-wrote it isn't suitable for a comic. Comics let you communicate a great deal in a few words and images, like poetry. Yet they also have a lot of the same constraints of short stories. How do you get from one scene to the next, or to a new point in time - namely, plot. My little story, as I originally wrote it, was almost a prose poem. I've written in new scenes and plot elements. Because comics is a much more developed medium than what I had had in mind - a shorter short story with a few images - I'm able to explore areas that are pertinent to this story that I thought couldn't be part of it.*

On the risky side, this is a long undertaking, and longer than what I had already had in mind. I would really like to finish a major art project. I haven't done that in many years, I guess since I wrote my book of short stories in 1999.

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.

If you want to follow the development of this story, all related posts are labeled The Engineeress.

Some pictures that didn't make it

I've been plugging away on my illustrations for The Engineeress, and have finished or planned out all but one (maybe two) of the images. Altogether I hope to have six, and then I think I will send it to some magazines that might like to publish original writing and art together. It is an abnormal format for adult lit, and would be risky for a book publisher, but a magazine might go for it.

I'm feeling a bit sad, though, because I may need to abandon the idea of painting this project, despite having painted two already.

I have found less than two hours to paint since I moved here. I do the vast majority of the childcare, and after the kids are in bed, I still have much to do in the form of finding summer camps, children's activities, etc.

It is very challenging in an environment where you know few people, little of the terminology or customs. My time is rarely my own (- except times like when I eat too much sweet dessert while interviewing a possible new babysitter, and can't sleep from all the sugar!)

Painting is time-consuming, and can't be fitted in around other things like drawing can. And, frankly, after all these years of drawing-because-it's-portable, I'm also better with a marker than a paintbrush anyhow.

Well, whatever. I'll just do it twice if that is what it takes.

I enjoy this project very much. I have learned that in my process, the actual production comes at the end. I don't enjoy re-writing or re-painting, so I prefer to do a lot of preliminary thinking and sketching, and a bit of researching, before settling down to do one kick at the final product. I'm not one for the process espoused by many of my creative writing teachers of the late nineties who thought the story was best started right away, and re-written until it seemed done. Ugh.

The couple at the top are imagining a future baby, and it is a nice enough idea, I guess, but it is couples-oriented. As the story is about a woman and the lonely journey of infertility, it has the wrong concept. These two sketchbook pages also give another idea I had, but I decided in the end not to show the labour in the story, since again the story is about anticipation and disappointment, not the act of giving birth. The flower is a freebie, drawn at the restaurant on the corner of my street, at which I eat several times a month.

Leaf in the wind

The Human Library/Nuit Blanche invited me to be a Human Library Book - I was almost excited, until I saw that they wanted me in my capacity as an artist. One of life's little bitter ironies. If only I were. I wonder where they found their 'librarian"?!

I finally finished a mediocre painting, next in my Engineeress series. Pictures to come. Maybe if I just stuck to subjects I knew how to do, I would not have to be confronted weekly by my total ineptness in most every other area of painting. At one point I got so tired of the ugly voice in my head, that I wrote what I was hearing down, and stuck it on the wall. The voice didn't have much more to say after that.

I find looking at the nonsensical list rather comforting, at least for now. It's hard to ignore the thoughts - they are SO loud. But, looking at them spelled out on a piece of paper, they look kind of silly. I mean, it's simply not true that I have no ability. I'm not uber-talented or accomplished, but who cares? And it's also crap to say that there's no point to me doing art. There doesn't need to be a point. Besides, I like doing it. So there, Mr. Nasty-nasty.

Yesterday I had an important talk with a friend, not something I have much time for. I'm careful who I talk intimately with and I am glad I opened up this time. I'm turning forty this year, and since I'm still, as ever, not satisfied with my life (over-think much?) it was nice to talk to someone else with the same nagging doubts. Great job, lovely family, nothing I wish I hadn't experienced. But, knowing I took many wrong turns.

I know exactly what I would do if I could do it all over again. I would ignore the boredom I felt that day, during my second last year of highschool, when I was sitting in front of my mother-and-child painting, brush in hand. I would not have applied to university to be a mathematician (sounds cool, great one-semester experience, ack I can't regret it...). I would have pursued hobbies aggressively, instead of changing my studies and later my work over and over, searching for who knows what. I see now that I could have had all of that interest and excitement in my spare time, and kept the joy and the toil of art for the day, fed it even.

Or, maybe I would have pursued art as a career, and turned 40 wishing I'd done something more interesting with my life. Art sounds cool, but it doesn't actually leave that much money and time for other pursuits.

I have ever just wandered along.

Next stop:
Berlin.

Berlin, where there are over 600 art exhibition spaces. One of the great art capitals. Where next week I will travel to look for a home for my family, including visiting (.hopefully. the agent is recalcitrant.) one apartment across from the Kaethe Kollwitz Museum. Kollwitz, who was an inspiration to me as a teenager with her incredible paintings of labourers.

There are many redeeming features to my work in the foreign service, and the next part of my life is only one of the many reasons I feel selfish and guilty every time I dream about having a different life.

We're leaving in August. If you come to town, drop me a line through lia@liahiltz.com. I would love to meet you.

The Engineeress, revisited

The Engineeress, March 2015

You might remember this picture from a few weeks ago. I spent the last few Mondays doing this Acrylic version.

The pose and mood present the mother's perspective in the first moments after child's birth. It's a singular moment.

I saw Wild last night. I've never seen a movie like it. I saw women's experiences I've never seen on-screen before. Woman to woman, mother to daughter, woman to man, and most crucial, woman and self. It's incredible that it took so long for a movie like this to be made.

Wild is a special movie, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

The Engineeress

February 2015

Lying in bed, in the falling asleep time that is lost now to my middle-aged, perpetually exhausted self, came to me all at once an entire story. I don't get a lot of creative ideas, and I certainly don't normally get them fully formed. The story was about a woman trying to have a baby, and it's probably the one original thing I've ever come up with. It has stayed with me ever since, over 16 years.

I decided a few days ago to illustrate some parts of the story, and this drawing is my first one. I'll type out the story in here soon, but in short, it's about a woman, the Engineeress, who wants to have a child so badly she imagines she's pregnant. Late at the office one night, she goes into labour and gives birth to a rose.

The story originally ended poignantly with the Engineeress holding her baby out to the paramedic. "Go on. Take her. Hold her in your arms." But I rewrote it last week to give it the kind of ending that only my middle-aged, perpetually exhausted self can imagine. A life-goes-on sort of ending.

I also changed it because of something that happened many years ago when I was studying creative writing under Di Brandt. We were workshopping a painfully embarrasing piece of creative non-fiction I had written about learning to orgasm. It was a bit of a manifesto. She responded to the story by telling me, "You've got all this energy in this story." She raised a clenched fist in the air. "Now where is it all going?"

I had no idea. I thought that the outpouring of emotion, the confession itself, was the point. For years I felt that my inability to answer her meant there was something missing in me. I'd had a similar comment from a previous writing teacher (P. Scott Lawrence). "There's no doubt you write very well, but..." A sort of, what's your point question.

Well, now that I'm middle-aged (and perpetually exhausted), I know that I just didn't have much of a point back then. Things make more sense now, a bit. Now I  can imagine what comes after everything has fallen off the cliff.

The landing, I guess. In this drawing I tried to show the tenderness with which we mothers hold our newborns, how our world encircles and turns on this new life.