Another drawing for ya. Why not, eh? the shading colour was originally a light green in tribute to Ghost World by Daniel Clowes – my favourite graphic novel of all time – but it didn’t look quite right, so after going through every hue that the visible spectrum has to offer, I resigned to boring ol’ grey. Hey, you win some, you lose some.

I wrote some music today as well, which is just awesome. I’m working on a lot of projects right now and am going through a very productive period (as you can probably tell from all the blogging I’ve been doing) – expect Amateur Lovemaking Monthly ed. 4 out soon!*

Whenever I have a spare moment, I sit down and draw something tricky to draw, like a dishcloth covering a hedgehog, or I write some music or fiddle with some sounds. So I have a question for you guys – what do you all like to do in your spare time?

Tom

*the Monthly is a lie. You already knew this though.

Today I had a few hours to spare, so for the first time in about three forevers, I plugged my Wacom tablet in and started doodling. This is the end result, a nice little pic of a bloke wearing a jacket and skinny jeans. I feel horribly generic-thirteen-year-old-girl-with-a-deviantart-account because of what I ended up drawing, but I can’t be held responsible – I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired.

I haven’t really drawn anything lately – I used to practice for a few hours every day for ten years before music became such a pressing issue. There are a lot of people out there (David Heatley and James Kochalka to name but two) who treat music and comics as equal endeavors, and are as good at one as the other. Comics was always my first love, but music just came to bloom before comics did. Perhaps I should start drawing again. It seems a waste to stop doing something after I’ve spent so long practicing it and learning how to do it.

I dunno.

Three is the number of times I’ve attempted to start a proper full length comic book, and I’ve never really got past the first twelve pages. There’s a lot of planning involved that gets me down. Storytelling is everything.

There are a lot of technically brilliant artists out there who treat it as a hobby, as I do, but then there are a lot less technically able people who’ve released a lot of books and are very well respected. It’s finding that combination between what you do and how you do it that’s partly the key to the whole thing, but also a strong sense of being able to breathe life into what you draw. There are a lot of beautiful illustrations of people that are so close to lifelike but look almost dead (fan art is a brilliant example of this for some reason) to the point that it’s creepy. I believe the term for this is ‘Uncanny Valley’. Look it up. On the other hand, there are people (like the aforementioned Kochalka) who create these amazingly animated characters out of a few flicks of a brush. It’s a sort of magic that only comes with years and years of practice and skill.

This blog post is all over the place and not at all coherent, and I apologise for this. I’ll try to form my ideas about drawing – and in particular the world of sequential art – into another later blog post. I might do a Just Imagine later as well. Look out!

Some artists and works I strongly recommend you check out:

Daniel Clowes, in particular Ghost World

Charles Burns, in particular Black Hole, which is beautifully rendered and which I just finished reading

Chris Ware, in particular Jimmy Corrigan (which I gave PJ for Christmas – ask him how good it is)

Julie Doucet, who has this really intense, full style that always seems messy to the point of chaos, but isn’t

Seth, who is a lot more nuanced and grownup than his monosyllabic moniker would suggest.

There’s this terrifying perception that somehow in order to get onto this mile-high metaphorical pedestal, one has to contort oneself through a machine that exists in seventeen spatial dimensions. There is a physically human impossibility explained purely by the realm of theoretical science between most ordinary, struggling, desperate artists and the generally held consensus of ‘good art’. This is most prevalent in music (although every aspect of art is just as bloody reprehensible as the next) so forgive me if I seem a little unfairly audiocentric over the next few paragraphs. Here we go…

As a musician, I do a lot of things that a lot of very good musicians do. I listen to Neutral Milk Hotel and weep jealous tears. I read Pitchfork religiously, but at the same time hold a deep-set hatred for the subjectivity of the damn thing, not to mention a wracking fear that they’ll do to me what they did to Jet (namely link to a video of a chimp urinating into its own mouth in lieu of actually reviewing the album. Yeah.) I bash my fists in an impotent catharsis on my piano when I realise that none of the melodies I write are even remotely rememberable, and feel better afterwards. All this, not least Pitchfork’s utterly meaningless but almost obsessively geeky decimal ratings system, has led me to conclude that art is nothing more than a science.

Sure, it’s a lot more free than a lot of sciences out there, but there are artistic merits to mathematics, nobody doubts this. Why should there not be mathematical elements to art? In a way, sure, Xenakis could turn addled strings of numbers into sound, but in a much more mainstream everyman way, art is very scientific.

Way back when humans decided that just being alive and getting laid were tasks far too simple to justify existence, we started to question why we were alive. We soon began to consider the fact that perhaps we’d evolved into something that was beyond the constraints of what life intended and could provide, and so in order to further understand ourselves and create an exhaustive compendium of emotion and human transaction, we invented the most complex, distortive lens known to existence, and have fed ourselves through it ever since to produce paintings, records, books, drawings on walls, CDs, and data that will keep us alive well into the next millennium. Because of this long history and because of this ridiculous pedestal that is supported ever more by increasing numbers of people rushing to its base and lifting it above their heads in a massive pyramid of humanity, ever further towards the vanishing point in the sky, it’s very easy to believe that there’s a mystic, magical element to its creation that somehow is inaccessible to people. This is untrue. Every book ever written or translated into the english language is made of the same 26 letters. I know this is trite and oft-mentioned, but it’s worth considering again. Every popular song you have ever heard can be expressed as a wave. There is no song so magical and so astonishing that it does not conform to the physical motion of particles through air. Particles don’t care if Jeff Mangum has released a new compilation of early Synthetic Flying Machine demos. Particles will transfer those sounds to your ears just as they would a new collection of classical renderings of Andrew WK songs. We write this stuff, and the universe doesn’t give a single god-damn. We still have to conform to its regulations. We still have to do as it says.

We look upon the world that spawned us as sort of beneath us now, even though it’s, like, where we came from. We’re just a precocious kid disowning its parents, and the parents are just sitting back silently taking it because they love us. Look at a squirrel or a mushroom or an oak tree – they’re all perfectly in tune with themselves, to a level of harmony beyond what any human being could possibly achieve. We reject everything we know as inferior and yet here we are being unable to raise our children, being unable to even sustain our home, being unable to even finish our own god-damn lives to the extent where we will end it ourselves. We’ve managed to synthesise every other aspect of it apart from the animalistic part of our brain that controls crying and laughing and hitting our heads against walls while making weirdly quiet, deep little groaning noises. The intelligent part of our brains is there to try and make sense of – and create art out of – the impulses of that ancient slouching ape living inside our skulls. It’s an eternal struggle for mankind to be more than mankind can be, but the beauty of it lies in the fact that every single piece of it fails to do that, and simply becomes an expression of unique struggle instead. That horrible seventeen-dimensioned machine I mentioned earlier? That’s not what you need to go through to become an artist. It’s what art IS.

Art is occasionally, like Daniel Johnston’s recordings, or the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, beautiful because of the way it’s been created, because of the back-story to it, because of its context. Art is occasionally, like The Flaming Lips’ more mainstream albums, or the writings of David Foster Wallace, beautiful because of the very pleasure immersing yourself in them brings. But art is always beautiful because it is unerringly, indelibly, human. And so are you.

References:

“Pitchfork’s utterly meaningless but almost obsessively geeky decimal ratings system” adapted from “its utterly unscientific but geekily precise 10-point album-rating scale” – http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/pitchfork.html

“Look at a squirrel or a mushroom or an oak tree – they’re all perfectly in tune with themselves” http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/5847-neutral-milk-hotel/