The first panel in the strip that is my relationship to comics

I've just been reading a McSweeney's Quarterly devoted to comics and graphic lit. and in it various famous lit types expound on their relationships to comics. Ira Glass, john updike, and the comic artists themselves. The whole Quarterly is a good read and it jogged my memory in relation to how I came to know comics and perhaps why I'm going back to them to learn a bit more about one way that narrative and story work in quilt making.

My earliest memory of reading comics was a couple of thick collection of Peanuts comics that my folks bought for me. I read pages at random until I'd read the whole thing a couple of times and was content that I'd read every strip at least once. I still employ this hit or miss technique when reading collections of things that are not necessarily linear. It allows for a certain amount of intuitive reading to take place, it allows for a certain indulgence in the good and forgiveness of the less polished or personal. But as I think back on it I'm quite sure that I learned this technique while reading those first Peanuts strips.

Second memory. Somewhere on the edge of New York's Westchester county where it mashes up against Greenwich in Connecticut, in hunt country, there is a museum of the cartoon/comic. (The National Cartoon Museum www.cartoon.org now located in downtown Stamford). I was perhaps 13 or 14 when I went there on a rainy afternoon. I don't remember much about the framed original strips on the wall- I do remember that the resident cartoon artist was in the museum that day: Mort Walker. Walker draws "Beetle Bailey" and "Hi and Lois" and I remember his advice to aspiring cartoon artists- find a comic strip you like and try to draw it, and then keep practicing.

The idea of the master copy was a new one for me but I took his advice and that same day went home, picked a seemingly simple "Hi and Lois" strip and went to work replicating it.

I can recall story even now- the son of the family is trying to get up the nerve to call a girl he likes and he has positioned himself next to the phone and is berating himself for being a coward and working up the courage to pick up the phone. Of course when he finally does reach for the phone it rings beneath his hand and his response is appropriately exaggerated. It seemed both a plausible and an absurd story all at the same time. Perhaps too real for the comic genre and yet vividly pictured to be almost too accurate. I think I drew two panels out of the five that were offered: the one just before the phone rings and the one that shows the boy's reaction. These two offered both the meat of the story and what I thought were the most descriptive drawn elements of action and emotion. I think perhaps I kept that drawing because even as I executed it I knew that it would be the first and last time I did.

The drawing ended up, I think, as part of a large collage made from the collected detritus of my high school years that I constructed before leaving for college (the collage would now carry the comment: 'location unknown"). The fact that it ended up in a large format collage is perhaps telling of how I work and think about images and meaning.

I think the reason I have returned to comics and their relation to quiltmaking is that all along in my explorations with media I have sensed the relationship between the illustrated narrative and the patterns of spiritual and cultural meaning that make up the story that is being told. What began for me that day I tried to recreate the "Hi and Lois" strip was a process of knowing there are many different ways to draw a narrative, and to tell a story. Subsequently I have never seen a cartoon or a comic that I didn't 'get.' Comics are the daily alters or shrines where icons and fetishes of our culture exist in broad spiritual daylight as part of our mass media formats.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue Number 13, 2004

the aesthetics of working with frames

My son working in one of his favorite media: chalk.

I think it is an interesting example of how frames and edges can influence our work. First think of 'sidewalk chalk' as a specific medium. It's a fairly 'open' medium: have chalk, sidewalk, and the ability to put the two together and the opportunities for expression are vast. Here's on example. My father, Saul, is prone to telling simple stories that he learn as a child and that tend to reflect a child's sensibility. Consider this:

Saul: "When I was a kid I took a piece of chalk and decided that I wanted to draw a circle all the way around the world and I'd start on the curb at my house and head down the street and just keep going.

Me: "How far did you get?"

Saul: "The piece of chalk wore down to nothing before I got to the end of the block."

The story articulates how two apposing artistic forces, narrative and medium, are connected and yet apposed. The narrative idea of continuing the line "around the world," and the notion that the chalk, and the canvas that is the curb, itself has finite qualities and quantities that make the accomplishment of the task impossible.

Here is a photo of the slate after my son completed his drawing. (I like the piece of lichen, middle right, that was already on the slate before he began).

I won't attempt to explicate the narrative of the piece outside of the revelation that my son likes nothing more than to fill space with chalk marks, or pencil, or crayon, when working on paper. We can note that even though there were other pieces of slate available to draw on he chose a single piece and purposefully added chalk to it.

And although it would be fun to discuss the aesthetics of children's chalk art, I'd rather talk about my personal aesthetic appreciations and more generally how personal and cultural aesthetics drive the way we utilize and articulate the artistic frame, the limitations of the medium, and our desire for that medium as a narrative tool.

In the process of 'developing' an aesthetic we are actually refining our willingness to exist within the 'frame' of a given artistic form or set of forms. And yet our desire to maintain an aesthetic seems directly connected to our inability to allow it to be altered. We define certain limits for both the physical bounds and the procedural bounds that make up an art form and then begin to use these bounds, in the applied arts, to develop a suggested narrative, whether literal or figurative.

I would suggest that the above statement is too linear- we don't always see the boundaries and then the narrative, sometimes it the other way around. This multi-generational example only serves to highlight for me how much we rely on boundaries to help us to make art. I may want to expand my boundaries and develop new aesthetics but ultimately boundaries are what help us to see beyond them. What boundaries or frames can you identify in your medium and what narratives and aesthetics or art are they helping you to create?

The Lake- or the Messalonskee Snow Pond

The lake

Beautiful lake. It was still warm enough to swim in Maine.

Elou wading in.

... and getting deeper. .

We saw a loon, right as we arrived, the last time we were there.

I brought my snorkel gear and took a swim to see the world beneath the surface. Many beautiful rocks and vegetation and one very social smallmouth bass.

Obsessions and practice in making anything

I think obsession has gotten a bad rap probably from a fragrance derived from whales and some concocted blossoms.

in definition:

–noun

1.	the domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc.

As per the provincial manners of the people we tend to think of obsession as akin to a sin- like lust as apposed to love. But who has not benefited from having one's thoughts persistently wrapped around a particular theme? Isn't this what we sometimes call focus and persistence when we wish to remove the idea of emotion from our intellectual endeavours?

Alternately we fear or resist loosing ourselves in obsession (the sin of it perhaps?) and rightly so for what use is complete focus on any one thing without the balance of grounded awareness that adds context to the fixation?

It within the notions of obsession that we find practice: the foundation for making anything. The obsessions of the artist, the maker, the creative person, are quite literally necessary for harnessing the needed creative forces to make great works. I will generalize and refer to peak, zone, or flow, experiences as aspects of obsessed awareness finding its balance and relaxing into a space of optimal performance.

It is with these thoughts that I try to gauge my overwhelming interest in baking bread, making kombucha, moving into the house, writing blog entries, finding a job, networking, and a myriad of other tasks and recreations.