Barn Burning 2: The Burnaning

    I have a few larger independent projects going on this semester. This is great, as am I am learning how to balance the workload for these along with the smaller stuff that is due week by week. I'm also way more invested in my work. It feels like a culmination of everything I've been working toward for the last couple of years.
       The most gargantuan of these is an artist's book of William Faulkner's short story Barn Burning. This story has been on my radar since 2007 when I read it for a modernist literature class. I'd already read a bunch of Faulkner's work, but this story stood out as it takes the themes of class in a postbellum and post industrial revolution south and explores them fully in a condensed fashion completely from the point of view of a seven year old boy in a sharecropper family. The father is a terrorist who, when he feels wronged by the landowners, will set fire to their barns. The boy is torn between the loyalty he feels to his father and the unhappiness he feels from being despised by the general population and from being constantly and violently uprooted. Though they are more in the background, there are also themes of race and gender which I am trying to explore more through imagery.
       So where does one start with 22 pages of text? Well, last fall I made an experimental mock up of this book for my advanced drawing class. Initially, it was going to be a one off, but as I grew more engrossed in the text and the way I made images for it as well as the book making process itself, I realized that this was just the beginning. This was a great project because I was able to experiment with using old photographs and chemicals and leafing in my drawing process. Most of all, it was fun. Often, drafting is the most painful part of the image making process for me, and this book was not about drafting images. It was about printmaking and layering and taking away and layering again and making my studio smell like wintergreen solution and bleach.

Barn Burning Mock Up, 2011

       This is what I began with this semester.  My goal with the next version was to incorporate the text into the imagery, create drawings to go along with the prints that I was doing, as well as create visual flow through the story.  I will be updating more soon with how the process is going.  I've been learning a lot, like that books have a lot of components and that they take a huge amount of planning.  Also to remember to scan the pages before I bind the book.  

Summertime

        Her mother washed her clothes in the old washer, which spat soap out of a long black tube and rumbled violently on the concrete. After she trudged outside with a pile of moist fabric in one of those five-dollar plastic baskets. Two gnarled poles jutted into the sky. They were connected by shoelaces knotted to shoelaces. Once the shoelaces had been pristine and white in crisp paper on crisp shoes with fresh rubber soles and a fresh leather smell. Now they frayed into their knots and swayed dully in the wind. Clothespins interrupted their drab horizon. Cotton and linen and poly blends hung and swung to and fro with the horizon and the breeze whispered through the holes in the weaves until the damp was blown away and what remained was dry and wrinkled. Clothes dried by the wind are permeated by it. They are duller no matter the detergent you use. 

        Today after her mother took her school uniform that she had dropped ketchup and mustard onto from a lunch full of condiment overestimations. She ventured outdoors in underwear alone and saw the pleated plaid skirt and sweater vest fluttering and dancing. She ran over in bare feet and briefs and stuck her nose into the damp. The cool must filled her and her little heart beat faster and she suddenly wanted it to rain. She gasped at a low rumble of thunder and felt wet on her cheek. The clothes grew heavy and slumped to the grass below. Her briefs clung to her body and she tugged them down her skinny legs. Her limbs slipped in the mud and drew her into a recently seeded field. There was no growth so she was flung into it. She kicked and splashed and squished. The thunder roared a giant lion roar and the rain fell harder and she felt she was so wet that she would never be dry again. 

        It wasn’t ever going to stop raining because Day-oos was angry and she was going to drown but what better way to go? She saw it clearly. Her little body floating upside down in a vast green sea. It was too late to make a raft, too late to apologize or pray. But she was naked as the day she was born and was slippery with Day-oos’ wet earth. 

This is the beginning of my final comic for my comics class this last semester based on a short piece of writing I've had floating around for a couple of years. Below is the corresponding writing. To churn out a lot of drawings fairly quickly, I worked with drybrush india ink on larger pieces of cold press watercolor paper. When it was working for me, I really enjoyed it, and it's a style that I want to explore more and feel that I'm just discovering.

Napowrimo

So, it's NaPoWriMo -- or National Poetry Writing Month. I haven't really been following it that well as you're supposed to write a poem a day, and I'm lucky if I get enough sleep every night. But last week for my advanced poetry writing class, we had to write seven poems in seven days, and when I was forced to really focus for that time and think about what had been on my mind all day, it really was very useful. I think I'm going to try a little harder to do this in future, perhaps after the semester is over. Hopefully if I get into it over the summer, it will be easier to incorporate into my schedule before the next semester gets into full swing.  At any rate here is one of the shorter ones I churned out late on a Tuesday, the night air whispering against my windows and the radiators hissing their last of the season.

Tuesday

 low breath.

     electrical humming.

             crack, hiss.

train wheels sing,

dark unknown creatures

calling out with the pitch,

the reverberation of

tuning forks made faint

by plaster, glass, wood

some more sketchbook pages, colored pencil.

Fun with sketches

It's fun to scan in pencil and ink drawings and screw around with them in photoshop.  Sometimes I have no idea what a piece will look like in the end, and that freedom is really refreshing.  I love seeing what I can do with texture to completely change the tone of a piece, and I love how I can make many different images starting from the same source. 

Comics always all the time

I've basically had comics coming out of my ears. Our prof is pretty hardcore. Anyway, here is a sneak peak of the style I'm working in! Inking on bristol, then scanning in and placing texture digitally.

Dust

This past winter session I took this class called Merging Worlds. I guess it was kind of an Illustration 101 crash course. There were a lot of freshman and sophomores in it, which was interesting and different. A lot of people used marker and ball point pen for the first couple of assignments, which was something I hadn't seen in a while. Anyway, I kind of used the course to refine the digital sketching technique I've been using a bit here and there over the past couple of years, and I was very happy with the result. The first successful assignment was a shaded pencil drawing (I KNOW). Pencil always takes me a while, but I really do love the result I can get with it. Pencil is just so pretty. The assignment was to create a human animal hybrid, so I took a photo of my room, took a photo of a deer head from the nature lab, and started piecing things together. The dress is a dress from an old photo that I basically mostly had to paint in photoshop as the light was completely wrong. The arms are my friend Esther. It was a really fulfilling process to plan something out so well and then draw it and have such a complete reference for something that I made up.

This is the reference I worked from.

This is the final drawing. Pencil, 12"x16"

Homecoming

These were a project from mixed media last semester.  I wanted to show a soldier navigating home through different times of day.  I wound up doing sunset and evening.  Morning to come at some point, perhaps?

Watercolor, Goauche and colored pencil on arches cold press

Salem

A couple of old friends came to visit me from the midwest over wintersession break which led to doing a bit of local exploring. On the last day we went to Salem, MA of witch trial fame. It was a pretty drive, and the town itself was pretty cute and, according banners and melting evidence by the roadside, had just recently had a choclate and ice sculpture festival. The highlight, however, was the Salem Witch Museum. It seems there are a number of museums peppered throughout Salem, including a Witch History Museum, a Pirate Museum, and a Witch Dungeon. This one was chosen at random, and I am so happy that we went. It cost nine dollars, but was totally worth it. It consisted of a theatrical portion in a dark room with large, elaborate dioramas with costumed mannequins and spot lights on every wall. Each portion would light for its portion of the story, told in stereo in and old, theatrical style by a deep voiced man. Words cannot express how delightful this was to watch. It was genuinely well done, but had enough cheesiness in it to make it amusing as well. In the center of this dark room was a huge red glowing circle with all the names of the victims of the Salem Witch hysteria written around it. It was a little creepy. The second part was a basic education of what "witches" throughout history have been. This also involved more mannequins (thank god) as well as a strange timeline and and entire wall that had a picture of Joseph McCarthy and the words "Scapegoats" along with several examples (gay community and aids, anyone?) written out in bold letters. I highly recommend a trip to this museum if you are in the area as it is a little odd look at history, and anytime you bring dioramas and and mannequins into the mix history is immediately amazing. This is a close second to the Scotch Whiskey Museum in Edinburgh, which was maybe the best 12 quid I ever spent.

It was also nice to be by the ocean and not completely freeze the way we had earlier that week when we went to Newport, RI. Last but not least, here is a bunny from a while ago for my mixed media class.

                                                         Gouache + Colored Pencil