old journals

I've been going through some old journals from the last year, and some parts of them are insightful and coherent enough that I want to share them on this blog. Here is one of them.


October 12, 2013


For a long time I've wanted to live perceptively, open. Marijuana and, in a dark and metaphysical way, mushrooms, gave me new kinds of perceptions which cast a pall on my "regular" perceptions, made my everyday experience seem insufficient.
I looked for movies that offered perceptual openness.
Was my interest in Zen related to this? Certainly Vipassana was. My FOVA [Foundations of Visual Art, a class I took my sophomore year of college] stuff was so much about that. My life-size nude self-portrait, inside/outside, my half-baked first idea for an independent project, which was something about drawing my entire visual field.
When I was able to get more productive it was from loosening up on this perceptual intensity. Images, as I'd see in a comic book. More traditional, imaginative, as opposed to perceptual. I was working from established art, as opposed to the wilds of "pure perception." It's like the difference between normal exhalation and the deep exhalation needed to blow up a balloon. I was struggling to master the deep blow, and was barely breathing. That's like a creative process that roots deeply into your life, your perceptions, your relationships, your memories, your beliefs. But I learned to lighten up and just make things. It became less about me, and the Art had a momentum of its own. But in a way I was limiting my aims.
What informed my cartooning? I rarely drew from life or reference material.
There was a sense of balance of elements in an image. I felt like I was arranging stock elements on a flat space: a guy, a tree, the sun, a dog; each of which I rendered to a standard of sufficiency, as opposed to accuracy. I just wanted to get the point across. I want you to know it's a dog, and the dog is doing a certain thing, and is in a specific relation to the other elements in the image.

I couldn't plan. I was liberated by having no plan. That only worked because I was working in a form, comics, which I knew intuitively. Each line I drew was inseparable from the entire story, further lines.
My comics drawing did not express a particularly inspiring vision. What of it was I proud of? What did I seek, find, satisfy? While not visually spectacular, there was a kind of vision, a perspective of the world that I was proud to indentify with. My minimalism was insightful. Stripping away inessential things. That's something that's always annoyed me in comics: the disjunction of the image with the idea. The ides only requires half as much rendering, or perhaps is even entirely ill-served by the image. I strove for a unity of image and idea, and felt like I hit the mark almost every time. That required a kind of judiciousness, knowing well what the comic was not.