WHAT’S ON YOUR PAGE? I

Hello again, and welcome to the first ever episode of “What’s on your page?”. The segment where we take a look at, and jump to wild conclusions about my subcounscious driven sketches from the previous week. So without any further waffling let’s get started.

Admittedly I knew where I was going with this pretty soon after I started it, so not off to a great start in terms of rule following for the experiment. But being that these are still early stages, I thought I’d splash around a bit, and see if I could push myself to do some sequential art now and then. Ever the hypocritical multitasker, attempting to enhance my storytelling skills, through an exercise aimed at stepping away from any kind of pressure.

I think the loose, almost lazy comic style I’m employing lately, is definitely influenced by a comic strip artist who publishes under the name of extra fabulous comics:

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Next up…

So this one worked out pretty well me thinks. It’s about internal struggle, like a lot of them.

At the time I was still working through a some emotional turmoil, and I felt like the version of me I don’t like was beating the “good” me.

Depicted on the left is the scrappy, scrawny, gollumesc, (LOTR marathon currently going on in my house) Ruben, who embodies my insecurities I guess.

On the right we have the cut, lionesc, noble, two dimensional american hero Ruben, loosing the fight.

Sara, my partner, later pointed out that maybe I was unjustly villainizing the one on the left and their roles aren’t as black and white as they seem. Maybe the supposedly good me trying to suppress the supposedly bad me is part of the problem. Nevertheless at the time looking at Gollum-me was deeply and genuinely unsettling.

Here’s where things start to get tricky.

I’ve started sharing these pieces on social media, not only because I like what I’m producing, but to push myself to deliver on a daily basis. I want it to become a daily routine as a sort of cleansing ritual, a psychological-artistic yoga if you will, but all these other objectives keep piggy-backing onto the project: practice you’re draftsmanship, storytelling style and technique, make appealing work that says something about yourself or the world…

These are the kind of things that I would very much like to come as a result of keeping up the practice, but the moment they become the objective, the exercise no longer works, as seen in this piece.

I was uninspired and frankly had no ideas, which means I was more likely to produce crap than gold. That would be fine. I feel like if creating crap more often than not, that’s a sign that I’m doing it right. The problem with this one is that my desire to create something appealing or entertaining got in the way.

It’s not the last time this will happen, but now this is an issue to work on.

This was when I made the solid decision to make this a personal project and proceeded to publicize it online.

As for the actual drawing , if read into on a deeper level, could speak to the feeling of all these different emotional episodes overlapping and spilling into each other, but in actual fact I was depicting the continually ongoing to-do list my inner-voice loves to recite.

Again my insatiable need to be productive and entertaining, capitalizing on this self-care initiative.

Though I’m not mad at myself for this one because it does convey a feeling that really irritates me on a profound level. Knowing that delivering a project and finishing, never actually means your work is done. Sure enough that day I re-delivered the project two more times.

Closure is underrated.

Here I didn’t fail, I flat out cheated.

Following solely the “a drawing a day” portion of the rules, I drew Sara, who needless to say, looks nothing like that. But I didn’t entirely dislike the drawing, which prompted the caption.

I don’t know to what degree other artists manage to harness the ability of putting what they actually want on paper, but I don’t posses that skill. I count myself lucky to have the ability to create appealing imagery, but that is never very related to the real thing I’m drawing or the image I have in my head.

There’s another very interesting thing I’ve been realizing more and more lately, is how unseemingly abstract our imagination really is. A lot of the time when I have an idea for a story concept for example, and I’m picturing the characters in my head, I think I see them as clear as day. It’s not until I actually try to get them out of my head and onto the page, that I realize how far from solid those images were.

To conclude the first exhibit of this thrilling exposée, It’s been a very eyeopening and useful practice so far and I would recommend it to a friend or two or maybe three, but no more.

I think
the real challenge of this experiment will be to keep it’s therapeutic integrity without having it bastardized by the evil forces of desire, productivity and achievement.