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THE LANGUAGES OF DRAWING
Everybody codeswitches all the time, often without thinking about it. How someone talks to their mom (if they talk to their mom) differs from how they talk to friends, how they talk to their teacher or a boss. When I was first getting laser hair removal, I told a couple of non-trans lady friends that I was getting “laser stuff,” and they asked what that was. “I’m getting a Mega Man arm cannon,” I said. “I’m transitioning to Mega Man.” Visual vocabularies, like verbal vocabularies, change tone and effect in neat, unexpected ways ways.
I use the term “drawing vocabularies” to describe how different artists make marks in a 2D space, like a piece of paper or a drawing tablet screen. I’ll mostly be talking about comics. I’m curious about how different ways of drawing affect both the reader and the artist, and about artistic trajectories. Everything we do as artists and people exists in context to our pasts, and so the traumas we’ve lived through, and the traumas that have been passed down to us, must affect the way we draw.
Let me give you an example of a drawing vocabulary. The Love and Rockets co-creator Jaime Hernandez will draw, for the most part, illusionistically. I like to use “illusionistic” rather than “realistic” because I don’t believe in “realism” — in referring to typical perceptions of the world as an objective Real. So, I use “illusionistic” to describe a drawn version of the illusion of the world as people typically see it, because it refers to the kind of illusions that most people see as “reality.”
Jaime’s drawing vocabularies shift playfully: in one moment, he draws his character Terry Downe illusionistically. Then in the next panel when Terry gets mad, she suddenly has giant gnashing teeth that are bigger than her head was in the panel before — a “cartoony” drawing vocabulary. If you grew up reading certain kinds of comics like Jaime and his siblings did — Archie, etc — this makes perfect visual sense, even though it’s totally bananas if you think about it out of context. It makes an emotional, narrative sense. The Hernandez siblings were blessed with a mom who loved comics as a girl and kept all her old ones, giving them to her own kids when she had them. A sense of safety, early on especially, fosters the ability in a kid to play, a central instinct to artmaking.
RECOVERING SAFETY
I believe that like the cartoonist Lynda Barry suggests, moving our conception of artmaking to a playful place can be healing and generative. In her book What It Is, she talks about how just about how, typically, kids seem to know how to draw instinctively, but when they reach a certain age, they get self-conscious, and their drawing freezes up, and they usually stop.
It’s a little woo-woo (I’m a little woo-woo, too), but in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, she begins her book with a chapter called “Recovering a Sense of Safety.” “Parents seldom respond ‘Try it and see what happens’ to artistic urges issuing from their offspring,” Cameron writes, “They offer cautionary advice where support might be more to the point.” Cameron mentions “try it and see what happens” in the sense of following art in general as a path, but “try it and see what happens” is a great mantra for anything that a person might try when they’re in the studio or at their desk making things in the moment.
But that can feel hard, since if we’ve internalized toxic ideas about art and artists, we might feel afraid to try it and see what happens. But that’s how one lands on fun ideas, like Jaime making Terry Downe turn from a typically-drawn figure to a smoke-snorting, teeth-gnashing anger monster, codeswitching from a literal reality to a dreamed one. I believe drawing and artmaking is about our emotional realities, inner lives, dreams, and dream languages. The comic strip Krazy Kat, pictured above, played with comics in wild ways: the mesas in the background would change shape from panel to panel, limbs were no more than sticks when they needed to be, the moon hovered over a brightly-lit ground. Fear can hold us back, keep our drawings constricted. John Gaunt, a teacher of mine at MCAD, referred to the artist Andrew Wyeth’s oil paintings as “constipated” while he admired his looser, more gestural drawings and watercolors. As someone who gets constipated when they get stressed out (when I graduated college, I pooped mountains, later realizing that I hadn’t shat in three days), that metaphor makes a lot of sense to me.
CONTROL
In high school in NJ and college in Minneapolis, I got obsessed with slick, cartoony illusionistic comics by Dan Clowes and Chris Ware. While I’m still interested in Ware’s work, both cartoonists lean heavily on technical skills, sometimes to a fault. Looking at Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook sketchbook collections, I wonder why he holds back so much his observations from his comics work. His sketchbooks are full of tender pen and watercolor drawings from life, and often I miss the tremulous quality of those drawings in his comics work, which he sacrifices for an almost unyielding unity. Both cartoonists are beholden in their work to a high level of craft.
In comics, “craft” vs. “art” has been a debate from at least the time of a mid-90s feud in the letters section of The Comics Journal between “cute brut” artist James Kochalka and several cartoonists and writers. In retrospect, Kochalka’s slick lines look as much as part of the comics establishment as anything else. I don’t want to come down hard on craft, because I am not interested in upholding binaries. As my old teacher, the sculptor Kinji Akagawa pointed out, craft and design is essential to artwork, as long as inquiry is there too. I used to get confused when I would go to art museums and see furniture, coffee pots, and architecture. But the most striking of these “crafted” things ask the same questions as much fine art does: how does one exist in the world? What is our relationship to spaces, and what are those spaces’ relationships to us? In these questions, and responses, one might find as much playfulness and spontaneity as in a John Coltrane solo.
In Franz Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis,” which begins, “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed into a monstrous cockroach on his bed” (trans. Michael Hofmann). Kafka’s protagonist is haunted by work, seriousness, labor, and a cultural antagonism towards play, hobbies, free time. “‘Whatever I do, I musn’t loaf around in bed,’ Gregor said to himself,” even though he finds himself afflicted with a nightmarish condition. (The loafing reminds me of the uninhibited queer joy of Walt Whitman: “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease…. observing a spear of summer grass.”) Play comes back to Samsa when he tries to get out of bed to get to work: “As Gregor was already half-clear of the bed — this latest method felt more like play than serious exertion, requiring him only to rock himself from side to side — he thought how simple everything would be if he had some help.” Like much enduring art, Gregor’s plea is one for care and support. Gregor’s mother speaks to the Chief Clerk of his office, who’s come to chastise Gregor. Gregor’s mother says that almost all Gregor does is work, and he is no loafer. She says, “His only hobby is a little occasional woodwork. In the past two or three evenings, he’s carved himself a little picture-frame, I think you’ll be surprised by the workmanship…” I like the image of Kafka toiling away as a lawyer, spending his evenings at play, thinking of a story in progress as “a little picture-frame.” I’ve been intrigued by the idea of movie and play adaptations of Kafka, like Orson Welles’ version of The Trial with nervous cutie Anthony Perkins, but I never want to replace the pictures in my head. The playfulness of Kafka’s choices is a gift, one that belies his sad-sack image.
André Gregory, speaking from his and Wallace Shawn’s script in My Dinner with André, talks about directing an acting workshop in a Polish forest with a language barrier between him and the women, and he said that it was a group of adults learning to play again. Gregory discusses a moment an hour and a half into the workshop in which he, on instinct, threw a teddy bear into the group, and how the group responded in this rapturous, beehive-like energy. “It was something like a kaleidoscope, like a human kaleidoscope,” he says. I’ve felt moments like that, especially with music, and I think of Pamela Colman Smith’s image for the Tarot card of Judgement, the second to last card in the Fool’s journey of the Major Arcana. This image is of literal rapture, gray corpses being awakened from their graves and praising the heavens.
ZOMBIE BRAINS
In Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, Daniel G. Amen, MD shows how trauma literally shrinks the front lobe of your brain, and severs neural connections, making one less flexible and more fearful. Art is all about flexibility and making connections: “Try it and see what happens.” However, the brain is as malleable going forward, and neural connections can be repaired by changing neural habits. This, to me, is one of infinite proofs of manifestation, the idea that our ideas about the world shape and reshape physical reality, since there is no true separation between ourselves and the world, since we’re made of energy and we don’t really exist. The malleability of art can help illuminate the ever-shifting ground we stand on.
PLAY TRAJECTORIES
In Lynda Barry’s book Blabber Blabber Blabber: Everything Vol. 1, she traces her artistic development through youth through her college and early post-college years. “After I learned to read,” she writes, “I liked to copy pictures and trace them and I still do. To me it’s like singing along with the radio following all the notes because it takes you somewhere.” She talks about how sweetness overwhelmed her style for a long time. “This seems to be the trick with comics: bitterness and sweetness need something else; some third thing. And it’s hard to say what that thing is, but it’s something like what music is to lyrics. It’s the thing that brings the feeling-change.”
The sci-fi writer Samuel R. Delany wrote in About Writing that the most important thing in work is begeisterung, a German word literally meaning “be-spiritedness.” Less literal translations include buzz, zeal, or rapture. I like rapture. I talked to my housemate, DJ Delish yesterday, about a song that gave her that rapture on the dancefloor one night. I said that I love that feeling, and that it feels religious to me — she said that when she’s in that it was like being taken over by the spirit, and who is this preaching to me? Jaime Hernandez, similarly, said in The Secrets of Life and Death that he looks at old comics, not to draw like them, but “to get religion.” He said that when he looks at old superhero comics by Jack Kirby, he’ll laugh, “out of joy.”
Barry says she ended her strip Two Sisters and began a wilder comic, Girls and Boys, because the sweetness felt stifling. “I wanted to make comics with trouble in them and I wanted to draw in a way that was not sweet because the stories weren’t sweet, and because something interesting happened when I stopped trying to control my drawing: I got that feeling back from when I was a kid, that feeling of the line being alive again.” The first page of the collection of Girls and Boys is a tiny, ratty, almost stick-figure drawing of a man with sunglasses, and the text: “What is wrong wih [“wih” crossed out] with this picture?”
As so many artists have pointed out, one’s style often develops naturally out of their limitations. The Peanuts creator Charles Schulz developed a shaky hand over the years that became, as Chris Ware has said, part of the “handwriting” of the drawings of the comic. Lynda Barry writes, “People who liked Two Sisters were very mad at me [for ending the strip abruptly and harshly], but by then I was a punk-ass artist and it was a punk-ass time.” Barry let her limitations, the constraints of her style, bring the stories to life in new, weird ways.
There is no play without constraints, because if a piece of art is one thing, that means it isn’t something else. I go through a lot of difficulties with my body: gender junk, trauma, physical and mental illnesses. I find it comforting to say, this is what my body can do. This is what I can draw, right now.
