Pages at my fingers

I just started interning at our local Center for Book Arts (the largest in the nation!), and I'm totally enamored with book art.

It really made me think about the relationship we build with text - our assumption is that it is the content of the book that makes it important. By cracking open a book, we ingest images, narratives, and information, and now we want to expedite that process. We want to see more images, experience more narratives, and consume more information at a much faster rate by way of the internet, our nooks, our iPods, or whatever backlit devices we have on hand.

But is content the only thing that matters?

I would argue that it isn't. The content of a book is only one part of a relationship that we build with texts, characters, and images on a page. Sure, we can take in all kinds of information, but do we appreciate it? At least for myself, those special tactile qualities of feeling a page at my fingertips, smelling its faint scent, and hearing the crisp flip of the paper as I thumb through my favorite novel are all part of a relationship I build with the narrative.

It's a wonderful thing that the content of al these books, all the stories, images, and information, can be disseminated and accessed on a screen. But will any of it carry the same preciousness when the experience of reading and seeing is divorced from the bound paper volume?

New pages up soon!

Preview images from the webcomic. I've posted up to page three, and page four will be up soon, too!

I've made a conscious choice to include a minimal bit of color into it. I'm pretty adamant about keeping it mostly in black and white, but a few accents give it just the right touch.

New Webcomic!

Hey everybody!

I've just started a webcomic! 
If you liked my art so far, I hope you come take a gander at the few pages I've started so far.

Trungles

Dying Star Series

I'm an Illustrator!

I’ve been looking at images by Harry Clarke and Winsor McCay recently. I always have, but since I’ve been looking more intensely at Western illustration at the turn of the century, it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve been working differently - it’s informed the way I lay down a picture. I work traditionally, starting with a gesture, working from observation whenever I can, and finding the way a space exists next to a space or between and around contours.

Because I am an unapologetically adamant illustrator studying in a Studio Art environment, I get a lot of flack for being illustrative or missing the point. I’ve had to work very hard in the studio to prove to my professors that, yes, I can DRAW. I can find a form and describe how it exists in space. I can find planes on a surface and describe it with a stick of graphite. I understand the importance of figure and ground. I can sight-size a figure better than most of the painters in my class, and I can do it without trying to editorialize the figure in front of me with unimportant details.

But the second I step out of the studio and back into my personal work, I am going to lasso the nuances of plane, figure, and ground with a solid, hair-thin ink line because that’s the sort of work I want to make. My love of contour has nothing to do with an inability to communicate visual planes and special relationships - I am absolutely able.

The former head of the department told me I was producing “bad art” and essentially dissuaded me from working this way for almost four years. After some research and reflective thinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not interested in making art; I’m interested in making images. I don’t want to engage the ephemeral ideological space between the misogynistic sausage fest of Modernists and the post-object Art World of the Postmodernists.

I just want to make pictures. I want to make figurative, accessible images. I don’t want to confuse the purportedly unenlightened masses with layers of lofty philosophical abstraction, nor do I want to speak in quasi-European art lingo to confuse anyone who might not be some sort of pretentious connoisseur. 

I am an illustrator, damn it.