Frankly Speaking…

Alright, my show is down. Michael Gerard and myself hauled it all off this week. Special Thanks to Wayne Vonada at the museum for his patience and help. And as always to Michael Gerard!

Now, I feel I can start breaking this stuff down. This work started one night almost a year ago. I had two of my brothers, Natural and Bacon, in town for a visit. We were sitting up watching movies and talking and I had my sketchbook out. I drew this funny little astronaut floating in a capsule and said, ” Hmmmmmmmmmm….”

It had potential, it really did. I just didn’t have time to do anything with it. I did continue to play with it. Gave him a robot. Thought about a story. Gave it time to breathe and come to life on its own. Months passed. One day in Robert Fichter’s workshop course on Comic Books and Graphic Novels-Robert suggested a jam day- you sit down with paper and medium and you see what you can produce in several hours of class- I found myself laying out the beginning of the story in three rough pages. I liked it, liked where it was going and the ideas it helped me explore. I also enjoyed the fact that it could all be done within the confines of a comic strip. Simple, iconic characters, conveying ideas through seemingly benign actions acting as metaphors for a wealth of other topics. No two people would get the same message from it, but it could be simple, fun, interesting, and provoking all at the same time. Not to mention it had the ability to speak to a wide range of cultures, age groups, etc. It had the potential to transcend mere comics.

I proceeded to make more drawings and test surfaces. I painted as opposed to making digital images to print. I didn’t want to risk high-dollar print costs for bad or wrong colors. My faculty were unimpressed with my ideas (which, at the time discussed, left a lot unanswered). The story built, and ideas flowed, but for me to come to any finality with my ideas I needed to know what my constrictions were. Where would it hang, how much space was available? It wasn’t until May that I found out what my allowances were there. I would get three walls in one of the galleries in the upstairs of the museum. I planned to hang it so that you could see it as you walked in and hopefully it would draw viewers in. Initially, I planned on making smaller images and incorporating 3-D and sculptural elements to build an environmental experience. Building it so that people experienced the comic, not just viewed it. I decided, instead to make the images larger, 4’x4′ each, and fill the three walls completely, emphasizing my overall love of graphic storytelling.

I played up on the idea of an oversized sunday comic strip. Increasing the size insured that I would have to rethink the presentation of the work, and the resulting “serpentine” layout of the paintings insinuates a coiled animal, ready-to-strike. I tried to make “reading” the layout easier, by only allowing scenes from within the ship to appear in the top tier, and scenes from without in the bottom one. It reads left to right, but anywhere there is a vertical juxtaposition of images viewers must move vertically before they can move right again. For example, the strip starts in the lower right, with the title letters dragging you into the first frame, there is nothing to the immediate right of it, so you can only move up and “inside the ship” to get the reverse pov before moving right again through the third, fourth, and fifth panels and then “dropping” into the sixth. A vertcal movement superscedes any lateral progress throughout the work, is the shortest way I can say it, if not the simplest.

I didn’t try to design it as a single strip, I drew thumbnails, of course, but when it came time to compose the panels I Drew each one on a separate sheet of paper at 8″x8″. This helped in composing images that not only worked together, but could stand alone, too.

I can’t say for sure what official reaction was to it, or even if it was understood, a couple people were good enough to give me their interpretations, and that was encouraging. It let me know that it WAS possible for some to interpret without an explanation or direction.

This work taught me a lot about myself. It taught me that I’m happiest when I’m neck deep in a project of my own creation and design. It taught me that the journey and explorations is what makes the work, not the ideas. It also taught me that I’m completely unable to take care of myself when the work takes precedence, but I guess that’s an acceptable trade up! 🙂