drawings

Swanlights

brittany — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Before we jump into this it’s important to make something clear: Swanlights is both the title of Antony and the Johnsons’ latest album and a collection of Antony Hegarty’s artwork. Sure, all transgender musical geniuses shouldn’t be lumped together, but I like to think of Hegarty as a more psychically wounded, heartbroken, and unbedazzled Hedwig.

I am a long time fan of Antony and the Johnsons and by extension, I wanted to believe that I’d love anything Hegarty placed his delicate hands on. Sadly, I recently found this to be untrue. After studying each page of Hegarty’s collection of art, I was convinced that all it takes to get a book deal is a recognizable name and built-in following. After flipping through a few pages on his own, my best friend, a reluctant artist, said what I didn’t have the heart to say: “This isn’t art.”

According to the singer, it took him three years to compile the collages, paintings, sketches, and scribbles that would eventually become Swanlights and if we’re being honest here, I can’t understand why it would take so goddamn long to compile something so random and childish in appearance. Cryptic squiggles appear on old help wanted ads; newspaper pages are color blocked with what appear to be markers; faded encyclopedia images are taped or stitched together; illegible handwriting appears next to old images of animals that have been torn or cut.

Nothing in Swanlights really spoke to me; it was all too delicate, too precious, and too nonsensical. Its only appeal was that flipping through its pages was like revisiting an old, childhood diary in which snippets or wisps of things seem slightly coherent, if only for a fleeting moment. Or, for those of us spent their younger years dropping acid and getting crafty, Hegarty’s artwork might serve as an uncomfortable reminder of what psychedelic drugs can do to an otherwise healthy mind.

Swanlights the album is markedly better, which just proves that because a musician dabbles in art, doesn’t necessarily mean an entire book should be devoted to their mournful collages. Like Antony and the Johnsons’ previous albums, Hegarty’s beautiful, almost operatic voice will hit you in the gut with longing. Swanlights is all piano and gorgeous string arrangements, with each song unfurling like a poem and repeatedly touching on the themes of water, ghosts, death, and renewal.

It’s Hegarty’s focus on water that I’m most moved by and the reason I will continue listening to Swanlights late at night when something in my brain shifts from happy to sad, on to off. When I was thirteen, my older brother snuck me out of the house and he and his girlfriend drove me around Redondo Beach in her 1967 Chevy Malibu. We listened to Morrissey all night and at that point in my young life, it was the most magical, exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I remember looking out the window at the ocean and thinking how a person could be sucked in by the waves, into the cold and dark, never to be seen again. Admittedly, it was a dark thought for such a lovely night, but the second I realized how true that was I never felt the same about the ocean again. I’m still terrified of it, but also strangely drawn to it, like many people/things in my life. The point of all of this, of course, is that Swanlights reminds me the late night drive and the ocean and strangely enough, of the overwhelming difficulty of being a teenage girl when—as Hegarty sings on the opening track—“Everything is new.”

I’m convinced that “I’m In Love” is the happiest you’ll ever hear Hegarty. Red corral is caressing him, he’s kissing his partner like a hummingbird, and all his dreams came true the day he laid his head on you, but in true Hegarty fashion the song ends with the day his partner cracks open, dies, and “ten black boys flew free from inside.” You’ve got to take the bad with the good, kids, and Hegarty knows this like no other.

Written by: Tina Vasquez, December 16th 2010

Make Me A Woman

brittany — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Vanessa Davis

Drawn & Quarterly

It’s no stretch to say that mainstream media gives us a limited range of what women can be, so much so that when we find a book that actually reflects the complexity of womanhood, we’re ecstatic. Make Me A Woman is just that book. Readers will be able to readily relate to Vanessa Davis and the daily events of her life, while also encountering just enough difference to sink into some pure escapism.

Make Me A Woman is a collection of Davis’s diary comics and drawings from 2004 to 2010. In watercolor, pen and ink, and pencil drawings torn from the pages of her sketchbook, Davis unveils the events of her childhood in South Florida, her life in New York in her early twenties, and finally her move to California, where she currently lives with her boyfriend. Davis tackles those seemingly indescribable everyday events—such as developing a crush on a stranger in her daily commute and dealing with awkward sexual encounters or unrequited love—with biting wit and aplomb.

Aspiring artists out there will find this collection inspirational. Davis details her series of low-paying jobs with an eye trained firmly on her career—a paid cartoonist. She also pens a few panels about facing the artist’s worst demon: procrastination. In addition to creating strips about her Jewish identity and hanging out with friends, this autobiographical cartoonist creates some of her funniest panels about her relationship with her mother and sister. Although Davis’s mother is the űber cool founder of the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, she makes her daughters cringe by her mere choice of words, as mothers are wont to do.

I found Davis’s collection of strips enjoyable. I loved the tiny details she adds to her comics, and the hilarious asides that she slips in. But what I love the most is the range of feelings that the cartoonist expresses in her art, such as anger, annoyance, disappointment, anxiety, physical pain, pining, self-pity, embarrassment, and bliss. What’s more, it’s refreshing to see a cartoonist who is not afraid to draw herself with some weight on her and does not obsess about her size in the book, except for the fat farm she went to in her teens, which she “enjoyed.”

I’ve read through the collection three times, and each time that I get to the end, I want more. Although her critique of artist Robert Crumb alone was worth the price of the book, I still wish that Davis had delved more into her life as a cartoonist.

Written by: Heather Leighton, November 21st 2010

My things, my grand-mother’s things

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Sarah Pinder

Bits of String Press

One of the wonderful things about living in this digital age is that you don’t have to be famous to be a real artist or a writer. You can create your vision, and then get it out into the world through the Internet if you're so inclined. And once online, you don't ever have to throw anything you create away. It can all be stored... forever.

Enter Sarah Pinder: a Toronto essayist who, for a decade now, has been a maker of zines, self-published works. And for about two bucks (Canadian currency), you can own and enjoy her brief yet insightful pondering My things, my grand-mother’s things.

What I like about Pinder’s prose is that it’s highly relatable. True, I can relate as a woman with a Depression-era grandparent who hoarded trinkets away, and as one who helped to clear those objects out of attics and basements after that seemingly ancient relative had passed on. And I can relate to her take on twenty-something nostalgia: the place when we’re not quite ready to be grown up and throw away our childhood things.

But most, if not all, people can relate to her rather haunting description of how the spaces we inhabit shape and trap our memories, not because of their own qualities, but because they become “repositories” for the things we collect along the way: “My grandmother lived in a house that was a constant archive of identity... Everything in this house was a touchstone, a trigger to summon memory... And regardless of how broken or worn things were, my grandparents’ Depression aesthetic meant that nothing was thrown out...”

This reviewer had two sets of Depression-surviving grandparents and observed two distinct reactions to the crisis. One set decided that: well, if they overcame that, they could overcome anything. They lived out their days without saving much of anything. The other parent's father became a hoarder. This man, who as a boy had shot and skinned squirrels for supper so as not to starve, secretly tucked away mountains of seemingly meaningless household items: camera film, new pens, etc. He was never content to have just one of anything after the Depression ended, and cleaning out his closets yielded hundreds, if not thousands, of things-treasures to him-that told tales of a man obsessed with getting to the bottom of how things work, and a man who lived in fear of owning absolutely nothing.

Pinder’s essay serves as a wonderful launch pad for this kind of reminiscing if you’re game. Her words seem genuine and her doodles–somewhat resembling the sketches of Shel Silverstein–might remind you of any number of seemingly frivolous objects your ancestors once collected and then subsequently left behind. “(I)t seemed callous to get rid of objects from a space that held such meaning for me, regardless of the fact that the objects I had were not the touchstones I’d hoped to use to recreate my grandmother’s life before illness,” Pinder reveals.

For more information or to purchase any of Pinder’s zines, visit her online hub Bits of String Press. My things, my grand-mother’s things was given as a lecture in October, 2009 at the Ontario College of Art and Design during a symposium called “Collectorama,” which focused on people’s obsessions with the act of collecting.

Written by: Rachel Moehl, August 31st 2010

Erotic Poems

admin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by George James Firmage

W.W. Norton

Love, sex, and springtime are fundamental themes in E.E. Cummings’ lifetime body of work, and in Erotic Poems, editor George James Firmage brings together pieces by Cummings’ that are especially sexual, exalting of fertility, and written in a voice that is at once fresh and wise, evocative of the dumb yet utterly precise instinct to procreate.

These poems, and the line drawings (also by Cummings), were selected from the poet’s original manuscripts and are diverse in their eroticism, tone, and form. Representing a spectrum of sexual desire, thought, and impulse, the poems range from humorous to romantic, graphic to tender. Some are raw, even violent, while others are philosophical, and still others are playful but intelligent. My favorites led me to laugh, delighted by both the humor and the poetic genius in the verse, or else moved me to a deep sentimental ache at the beauty and tragedy of love and the existential anguish in its inevitable loss.

A particularly evocative poem entitled "ix." has a dark shadowy edge evoking the violence of both desire and of life itself, as well as a melancholy awareness of eventual extinguishment of life. It begins:

nearer:breath of my breath:take not thy tingling
limbs from me:make my pain their crazy meal

Then climaxes with:

flower of madness on gritted lips
and on sprawled eyes squirming with light insane
chisel the killing flame that dizzily grips.

And finally concludes:

thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. inane,
the poetic carcass of a girl.

This is not your run-of-the-mill erotica! From the sound of the words themselves to the use of unconventional syntax and spacing, the poems in this collection wind up to a climax after following a cadence that varies in texture, from rocky to sinuous.

Perhaps my favorite poem, because it hit me so squarely in the heart, is "vii." After the lovers have made love and:

all the houses terribly tighten
upon your coming:
and they are glad
as you fill the streets of my city with children.

Resting now, the lovers embrace, and it is Cummings' description of the melding of their bodies and hearts that, for me, so poignantly captures the sense of oneness between them:

you are a keen mountain and an eager island whose
lively slopes are based always in the me which is shrugging,which is
under you and around you and forever: i am the hugging sea.

The line drawings are themselves poetic, expressive, and emotional. Their style is reminiscent of Egon Schiele, Chagall, Picasso, and the deco illustrative style of the 1920s. (Interestingly, Cummings worked as a portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine from 1924 to 1927.) The drawings are a great complement to the poems, as each holds large and complex movement, lovers' limbs and torsos twisting and twining around one another, floating in passion.

The book itself has been beautifully and simply executed; when I took Erotic Poems out of its mailing envelope, I had the sense of receiving a valentine. Its white cover is sparely punctuated by rose and black text and a shadowy crease evocative of the furrow at the center of an open book, or the entry point in clean white sheets ready to be mussed. The fashion in which the poems are headed—with non-sequential Roman and Arabic numerals—didn’t make much sense to me, but that wasn’t really a problem. There were poems that seemed to continue into one another and a few that could work as a triptych. While this may not necessarily be intentional on the part of the poet or the editor, it is indicative of the streaming and deeply subliminal nature of Cummings’ poetry and this collection in particular, which reveals the interior erotic landscape of both body and mind.

Written by: Matsya Siosal, April 29th 2010

Quietly Sure - Like the Keeper of a Great Secret

admin — Wed, 13 May 2009 10:31:00 +0000

By Jo Dery

Little Otsu

If I could clap for a book, I would without a doubt for Jo Dery’s newest release, Quietly Sure - Like the Keeper of a Great Secret. (Come to think of it, there’s nothing stopping me, is there?) For a book with such few words, it’s surely good at captivating your attention from the get-go. Its cover doesn’t even announce a title, but instead has a playful, twee cover that manages to suggest, “This isn’t your average child’s storybook.” Although it very well could be.

Quietly Sure is a storybook. It is also a collection of drawings that stand strong on their own, but mesh beautifully together. There is very little narration, just some freely-tied snippety statements and speech bubbles containing thoughtful wonderings exchanged between characters. These characters are ambiguous, varying from snails to a faceless person identified by the plant growing in their stomach, to a bearded hunter-looking man and what looks like lizard. The writing is sparse, and is obviously not intended to contain the most eloquent or complicated revelations, but is sweet, concise, and powerful. And of course, the drawings are so meticulous that each page is to be studied and appreciated.

I consider this the kind of book that amplifies even the most dormant creativities in one’s mind. Tucked away in these pages are the most whimsical and ornate illustrations in fine blue lines that communicate curiosities, heartfelt messages to the reader. Once again, Dery shows her amazing skill as even the simplest of her drawings use the space on her pages with craft. The amount of energy, thought and focus committed to this work is evident, and it’s proven as I look through it again and again and again.

Leave this one out on your coffee table or bathrooms, or just offer it to friends. It’s a treat meant to be shared.

Written by: Yujean Park, May 13th 2009

An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers

admin — Wed, 06 May 2009 10:08:00 +0000

By Danny Gregory

HOW Books

Danny Gregory’s An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers will inspire many to pick up a sketchbook and try their hand at drawing the world around them.

Gregory explains his reasoning for writing this book as something he had been searching for since he started drawing as a boy. An Illustrated Life is simply a gorgeous tribute to creativity, art, and getting lost in the object you are drawing. The pages are filled with examples from the sketchbooks and illustrated journals of an assortment of creative people. Some are professionally trained while others haven’t taken an art class since grade school. The pages are funny, sad, weird, and personal, yet all encourage the feeling that creativity lies within each one of us.

I’m one of those people who collect sketchbooks, but never use them. However, after reading the first couple of profiles of artists and being allowed a glimpse into their private thoughts and inspirations, I have diligently been taking my drawing supplies everywhere I go.

One aspect of Gregory’s book that is so interesting is that each profile is unique. Every artist has his or her own style. Some prefer not to attach words to their illustrations, while others write a story to go along with their sketch. Melanie Ford Wilson describes drawing as “vital as oxygen,” while Venantius J. Pinto draws because it gives him clarity and understanding.

Some of the artists keep a sketchbook to jot down ideas for future projects; others to capture a moment in time. Many use it for their eyes only. All the artists seem to have a recurring theme throughout their profiles—that sketching and keeping a journal has brought enlightenment, happiness, and contentment into their lives.

The lesson from An Illustrated Life is to draw for yourself and not worry about the person looking over your shoulder. As popular as photography has become, sketching remains even more personal and close to the artist. It is a treasure representing not just the art created, but the individual who created it.

Written by: Su Lin Mangan, May 6th 2009