personal blog private post – Page 5

Haven’t drawn anything in months, and I’ve been itching to. Itching worse, this week, because I started playing YouTube comic con sketch demos on the tablet next to me while working at my desk. I should have resisted, because there’s really no time, but finally I dug the sketchbook out of a box. I just wanted to do a little Superman head, something along the lines of these. It started off badly, though, as it was bound to, and I kept playing with it for a long while — contrary to plan in every way.

I’m lounging alone on the screened-in back porch at S.’s dad’s place a few hours outside New York on a Sunday morning, browsing books, smoking an early pipe and on my third cup of coffee. (No one else is up yet.) The house — a 1950s ranch-style out-of-town place now long his and his wife’s home base, where S. spent a good deal of her teens and twenties — is packed with books. All the rooms — bathrooms, basement rooms, hallways included — have full bookshelves. It’s a writer’s haven. I have a bio of Hannah Arendt pulled from the guest room and a Penguin Graham Greene, from a stack of Penguin Graham Greenes in the basement, in front of me on the coffee table I’m propping my feet on. We’re here, incidentally, to witness her dad’s debut tap-dancing recital: ‘Me,’ as he says, ‘and thirty five–to-eight-year-old girls.’ At age seventy, with a full career of ‘new journalism,’ novel-writing, and TV-writing and -producing under his belt (and on-going), he tells people this is the most fun he’s ever had. At age forty-four, with a scant career of miscellaneous under-achievement in mid-progression and no property or savings to my name, I don’t know if this is the best I’ve ever had it, but gosh, I’ll take it. I’m very grateful to be sitting here, in such good company, surrounded by books and upstate countryside. I’d better be; I haven’t exactly earned this moment’s ease and sense of security. I’m reflecting a good deal, lately, on Jewish-American life and on finding comfort in having a little place through significant-otherhood in a corner of it (on, to be clear, the thoroughly secular side). By birth and upbringing I’m very much an outsider here, of course; and by temperament, I suppose, I’m certain never to feel entirely at home with the culture of liberal cosmopolitanism that’s developed much of its now distinctively American character out of twentieth-century Jewish experience and creative energy. I’ll never be the thorough-going New Yorker S. is. But then, S. is a thorough-going New Yorker who’s also a convert to Evangelicalism — originally to Pentecostal-flavored, even Bible-belt-flavored Evangelicalism, in fact. Her dad has explored converting to Catholicism (and been put off from it, as she tells it — by a priest, no less). This urbane Jewish world, shaped by memory of conflict and ruin at least as much as by accession and triumph, is a world replete with inner tensions and shifts of perspective, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in tireless dialogue. Not such a strange place for a twenty-first-century American-Christian discontent to find comfort, really. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, following a few paragraphs on Hannah Arendt’s New York circle in the preface to the biography on the table, extends Arendt’s comment on the life of the mind, here, curiously, to account for the character of her intimate social life. There’s something in it to account for mine as well, maybe, and that of not a few Christians making their way in the era of unsure Western dominance and rapid, unpredictable global change.

The friends of every sort and also the historical figures with whom Arendt felt special affinities, like Rosa Luxemburg and Rahel Varnhagen, had one characteristic in common: each was, in his or her own way, an outsider. In Hannah Arendt’s personal lexicon, wirkliche Menschen, real people, were ‘pariahs.’ Her friends were not outcasts, but outsiders, sometimes by choice and sometimes by destiny. In the broadest sense, they were unassimilated. ‘Social nonconformism,’ she once said bluntly, ‘is the sine qua non of intellectual achievement.’ And, she might well have added, also of human dignity. From situations in which social conformism prevailed, she made hasty exits, often with the aid of another of her stock phrases: ‘This place ist nicht für meiner Mutters Tochter;’ ‘To public relations I have an allergy;’ ‘Here there is nothing but a Rummel [uproar].’ Hannah Arendt maintained her independence and she expected her friends to do the same.

Last night I arrived in New York City not for a few days’ visit, as on other trips up to see Susannah over the last two years, but to stay. I start work at Build With Prospect, a worker-coop design/build firm in Brooklyn, on Monday. Performance-oriented builders being rare animals and small-business building companies that are also worker co-ops being rarer still, there’s a good deal more to be said about this employment move. But that’ll wait; that’s really ‘Work Notes 2015,’ and I haven’t covered 2014 yet. The thing to be remarked on here is becoming a New Yorker. I don’t have much to say about it, though. I haven’t got my head around it in the least. Not sure I entirely believe it’s under way, let alone that I should know what it means. Lord knows I never looked at New York as a site of arrival until very recently. I’d never even visited the city until two years ago (almost exactly, this weekend) when I came up to meet Susannah for the first time, though I’ve lived a short few hours’ drive from all this all my life. Anyway, here I am.

It’s not exactly news now, of course, but I’ve only learned with release of the first issue today that there’s a new H.B. series. (Being drawn by a first-rate artist, too.) This series is noteworthy particularly in that it seems set to pick up with story material never thoroughly developed in the twenty years these characters have been in print, presenting H.B. once again as American superhero fighting monsters, now in the middle rather than at the end of the twentieth century. How about that? I can’t help taking it as a little bit of a challenge to find the thread of my occasional thoughts on the subject and return to them. It’s going to be some months before I read any of this new stuff, probably, since I don’t buy until issues (in digital form) go on sale. But I’m basically interested in what Mignola’s raised or suggested with what he’s already done, anyhow, more than in what he’s going to do next. There’s plenty to talk about as it is, without new material. This new material definitely is a nice prod to get back to it, though, if I can find the time.

I’ve achieved, or suffered — a question of interpretation, there —, a nice diversity in work taken on this year. This will be the year that stands for the failure of the several previous years’ efforts to channel myself in a single field by jumping aboard the old new green economy. Or the apparent failure of those efforts, let’s say. I don’t think it amounts to failure entirely. For the present post, I’m going to keep things easy and look back at a project from spring. Last year, I helped a friend with one of his air-sealing & insulation jobs on a house outside Washington, D.C.; I was there to cut the access holes where his crew went into attic spaces to work, and to patch up the holes with drywall afterward. While we were there for that job, the owner asked about having a closet built into one of the attic spaces we were accessing. So I went back in spring and did that. It was a nice little project with a bunch of parts — sort of a micro-remodel. And a real functional improvement to the home to boot. In a hundred-year-old house, too! Call me crazy, but I like old-house work.

As I understand Christianity, it conceives of the world as wholly oriented to the call of God via the resurrection of Jesus. Christians say that God not only creates and rules over, he also redeems and restores. That he redeems and restores the world assumes first, of course, the fallenness and (therefore) the freedom within it of human beings, who are the weirdest, least obviously integrated piece of an otherwise evidently comprehensive and systematic, generative and entropic material order of God’s making. Human beings don’t introduce corruption and fallenness on their own, but in their freedom they take part in introducing it, and they’re susceptible to it by nature: susceptible, subject to its structural effects and to dealing constantly with its meaning.

I started this blog mostly out of wanting to get a handle on, and engage with other thoughtful people out there about, my sense of purpose (not to say vocation — but we’ll put that off, again, for another time) as a creative person — a sometime student of art & design, occasionally a working designer/illustrator, a (still, at that time) would-be architect. The blog’s name reflects that.

I did something unusual this past weekend — unusual for me, that is: I went away for the holiday weekend. A thoroughly conventional getaway, something my adult life’s mostly been without. The place was a lake-side property owned by my girlfriend’s family; it’s where they go during the summers to relax and catch up with each other. On this Labor-Day occasion, I got invited along. It was lovely.

Mignola’s graphic style in the H.B. and BPRD books evolves quite a bit in the titles’ first few years. That’s a common enough observation, and nothing specially to do with Mignola as an artist or a writer, for that matter. (Take, e.g., my cartooning idol Richard Thompson: the way he drew Cul de Sac — already at the height of his career as a cartoonist and illustrator, his style well established — underwent a similar period of refinement and simplification after it began in the Post Sunday magazine, and then again after he took it to syndication as a daily.) I’m interested in talking more, sometime, about the evolution of Mignola’s graphic approach in relation to his evolving approach to the stories, but for the moment, let’s just look at an isolated aspect or two of the change, in very brief terms. Check out these spot illustrations published in The Art of Hellboy. Both sets are gathered on consecutive pages in the collection, the first set in the first third of the volume, the second set in the last. None of the drawings is a panel from the stories; each stands alone, to a degree, as a single piece. The first set, published with a hardcover edition, is from ’94, the same year as the first five-title series, ‘Seed of Destruction.’ The latter set comes in ’99, illustrations for a book of Hellboy stories in prose.

In the group above, from ’94, notice particularly the thoroughgoing three-dimensionality in all of them. They’re illustrations first of all, so the rectangular two-dimensional frame is the primary thing, but in these uniform rectangles Mignola uses impression of depth, the ‘space’ of our everyday experience, as a principal design element — and with powerful effect. These feel as though they could have been drawn from period photographs, or from life. (Undoubtedly there are photo sources used for reference, but knowing a little about Mignola’s methods, and inferring from things observed elsewhere in his work (not to mention the fantastic character of the subjects), we can be pretty confident that none of them is simply a drawing from a photo.) In the later set, below, it’ll be apparent right away that impression of depth is drastically reined back, nearly eliminated in a couple of instances, as design factor. It’s not the only striking difference with the earlier set, but it’s as plain and important as any. In these you have the strictest possible figure-ground dichotomy — something also true of the cover drawings Mignola’s doing for the titles at the same time, five years in in the books’ development. Backgrounds of those covers are often very active and detail-rich, but just as with these little spot illustrations, ‘space’ in the covers is utterly abstracted — a central figure standing/flying/writhing in no definite 3-D relation to whatever arrangement of things it’s superimposed upon. There’s a corresponding reduction in detailing of the spaces characters move through in the stories’ narrative panels, too.

We’ll have to come back, another time, to the question of what this aspect of stylistic shift might have to do with what’s changing overall through this period of about five years of Mignola’s work on the books. Suffice it to say, for now, that I take it as a starting assumption that it’s not just that he was getting bored with the material, or lazy, or what have you. (Though artists will frequently enough offer this sort of explanation about themselves, of course — Richard Thompson, for preferred example, never seeming to miss an opportunity to make a joke of his own laziness).

I may not draw a lot these days, but it’s no real exaggeration to say I think about drawing all the time. What I think about — or have in back of mind at least — particularly is the problem of representing human form, not so much in the sense of portrayal and its possibilities, but in the sense of iconography, visual language, linear phraseology. It’s what makes comics and cartooning so compelling for me, I believe, in spite of my general feeling of disappointment with the medium’s evolution.

When I was a kid, I think I was about equally drawn to drawing in this respect (though I couldn’t have articulated it) and in respect of pure technique — the realism end of the technique spectrum, mainly. The balance began to shift in adolescence somewhere, though. Technique will always get my attention, but the ‘language’ problem is an ever more under-the-skin thing, an itch more than an interest, whether I’m drawing or not, whether I’ve got some image or artwork in front of me or not. It’s pretty well taken over movie- and TV-watching now. More today than a decade ago, it preoccupies me in public and even in intimate situations, persistent in mental background. It’s certainly what pulls me back to a bit of drawing here and there when I’d otherwise be motivated by lack of practice to leave it alone. It’s behind little doodled profiles & 3/4-heads like the one here, behind the H.B. doodles — partly in virtue of Mignola’s path as ‘iconographer,’ partly in virtue of his character’s well-known peculiar visual appeal. (Doodles, I call them, because undirected, never from reference, always throwaways — like noodling on an instrument, fooling with phrasing.) For me, at least, this human iconography problem is one thing with male form and another with female form. Not wholly separate, obviously, but not the same thing. That’s something I’d like to explore. I’ll add that it isn’t just that thoughts unrelated to representation & symbol intrude when you (or I at any rate) approach form that you find interesting for other reasons. Anyone who’s worked from the nude in studio knows that whatever intrusive potential those extraneous impulses and ideas have, just the act of putting mark to paper can have extraordinary (I don’t say absolute) power to suppress them — a power easily cultivated, if you want it. On the other hand, it’s not as though this divergence I’m suggesting has nothing at all to do with sex, either. I’m talking about a complex thing, many factors at once. Factors to be teased out and discussed another time, though.