as i write this post, i’m desperatley trying to train my dog to not writhe on the couch and chew on my hands while i try to do something other than play with him. i think he is turning into an attention fiend.
i started writing a small comic about our cat, yusef. i know, it’s weird. like Mutts or Get Fuzzy or worse, Garfield.
no, i’m going to just throw it out there now that my comic is not a strip, it’s more like narrative of Yusef’s life with some crazy quick drawings loosely illustrating particular scenes. the first one i made is only six pages long, but it starts out the story when Yusef meets Small, who, as some of you already know, is a cat that i outright stole from her irresponsible, unworthy owner. don’t frown at me, either, cause the psycho never even called me. i’m pretty sure she had nowhere to keep her and was counting on someone at the house wanting her as their own. either that or she just felt guilty for dumping this cat off at a house she she spent two nights at over a period of four months and never bought even a bag of catfood to leave in her abscense.
so, to clarify, i’m not a crazy cat lady who is going to draw pictures of overfed cats sputtering and dribbling out Cathy-esque dialougue. i just feel like i’ve been making a lot of serious drawings for a long time (well, serious according to me, but ther e’s always those awkward moments when someone will look at one of my drawings for a long time and laugh. sometimes i think it’s what people do when they are confronted with something that they don’t connect with at all but don’t want to crate an awkward situation by not saying anything or critiquing it. i think? i’m not entirely sure, i usually just laugh with them, and act like they got some huge joke i wrote in there that no one else got) and making this little comic that i can continue on my own schedule seemed like something fun to do.
plus, since we adopted this dog, i haven’t been able to spend as much time with the cats because they are too preoccupied with hiding from him. small is often on top of the bathroom and yusef hides in the crawlspace under our kitchen cabinets, and refuses to sit on my lap. i’ve been feeling really guilty about the whole situation (because what i do, generally, is find things to feel guilty about) so i thought that making these little narratives would make me feel better.
so here is the first one (i haven’t made a cover yet):
and it’s not something that i spend a lot of time on, either. the quickness of it kind of turns into a style different than how i usually work. there’s ink splotches where some of the words smeared, and if i ever print these i’ll definately have to fix that.
while we’re on the subject of animals, and whatnot, i’m making a mural in our bedroom based off a sketch i did of a robotic bird a few months ago. what sucks is that i went over to my work area the other day, and i guess i left a half-full cup of coffee nearby, and one of the animals knocked it over onto some things- like the original drawing. which, unfortunatly, i never backed up. my fault. anyway, it’s weird to paint really large, on a wall, with acrylic, especially when the original drawing was in watercolor and ink and pretty small, like about 4″ x 5″.
here is the original drawing, complete with coffee stains:
and the text here is muddled, so i’ll reiterate here:
“i’ve come to realize that a common visual language no longer exists in the paintings of my lifetime. i don’t think one has existed for a long time. i’d like to think it’s because we’re past that now; no need for coding; freedom of expression. but for the worse, i believe it is because no one could arrive at a shared language and there is no desire for a communicative connection with one another. instead everyone is shouting from opposite directions, and everything is muffled together and incoherent.”
and at the top it says
“no one can understand anything in result”
maybe one of my more preachy in-drawing texts, but it just sort of came out while i was working on a power point presentation for a medieval art history class whose topic was iconography that represented courtly love, according to this author whose name i can’t remember. or i may have created a mental block because i couldn’t stand his writing. anyway, this bird looked like a falcon to me, which was one of the symbols of my presentation, so i made him holding a sweetmeat, or bechin, which was one of the early representations of the heart in connection with romantic love. the whole project, along with other classes heavy in renaissance/medieval iconography, made me really nostalgic for that type of communication. i feel as though now, when artists use those icons in their work to make some sort of reference or comparision, it is appreciated by few (obviously, most people aren’t art historians) and initiates a lot of eye-rolling. like “how academic. can you be more edgy, please?” and maybe this is a result of there being no shared iconography in modern art that i can think of.
ok, this arguement can get really problematic, and i don’t have it in me to answer these questions. what is considered iconography in modern art can be argeuable, and also the fact that i’mreferring largely to american art can also be problematic because the history of american art is much shorter than european, african and asian art. we haven’t had the same long history of didactic and devotional art so maybe this arguement doesn’t hold court. regardless, being very far removed from that era of explicit symbolism, i sort of find it ideal. i think it is because sometimes, when i pick up an issue of artforum or art in america or any other contemporary art rag, i feel lost.
and then i look at the other end of the spectrum, like an issue of juxtapoze (or however they spell it) and i cringe.
