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.

Me & My New Bestie

Gouache. You cheeky bastard. You had me fooled a few years ago. I thought you were annoying, stupid, impossible to work with. I will blame this partially on the lack of gouache technical direction I got from my design teacher. I tried to treat you like any other paint, but you weren't like that. You were your own animal. Why didn't anyone tell me?

I became reacquainted with gouache through the work of Kara Walker:

Untitled, 1996

They Say Water Represents the Subconscious in Dreams from the series American Primitives, 2001

Middle Passages, 2004

It's opaque and much more textural than watercolor. As I veer further and further away from literal translation of imagery (i.e. photorealism) and start to experiment with collageing and photo techniques, I think that discovering how to use gouache will be very useful. First, I already know it can be used to make very nice and graphic text that also looks slightly distressed:

This is the cover of a book I've been working on for my (now finished, whoo 8 week classes!) Japanese paper making course. I traced the type from my computer and then filled it in with white gouache. This is a look I really respond to because it's hand done but it looks really graphic and doesn't venture into Holly Hobby the way hand written text (especially text hand written by me) tends to.

I also like how it can be used kind of like white charcoal--and opaque white line on a darker paper.
This is a very simple collage on page one of the book--> the girl was a line drawing done on a darker grey paper that I cut out and glued onto the eggshell white of the page. The text on the pager was once again traced from the computer, but this time I lined it out in watercolor. All of the shadows and atmosphere color has been created by watercolor. Once again, I like the line this hovering between graphic and hand done.
I don't feel that this page spread is quite as successful as the last one, but this book was really more experimental so I'm not overly concerned. One thing I learned was to always make sure you have really sharp Exacto knives if you're going to insist on doing a detailed cut out. That was not fun. Actually, just steer clear of Exacto knives and get a surgical scalpel. They have a much more ergonomic design and are MUCH sharper. I mean, they're meant to cut through layers and layers of skin with great precision, so they can probably handle some 120 lb cold press paper. You can pick them up at Talas Online. I recommend going with handle #6 and blade #25.

Anyway, I prefer this spread:
I guess only wish I'd worked a little more of the gold into the other side. It looks a little violet heavy there.

There is more, but I'm effing exhausted. I'll post the rest tomorrow.

Also, everyone's favorite stuffed bear, Paddington, made it onto the google search page for his birthday!

This was a while ago (Oct. 13) but still, happy birthday, Paddington!

Finally, this comic made me laugh because I just turned in a (very bad) chapbook for my advanced poetry class a week or so ago:
A la pictures for sad children.

More Poetry

I've been feeling pretty inspired towards poetry lately. It's actually a great format for me, particularly if I wanted to do visual books because of the brevity allowed. I read Natasha Trethewey's entire Pulitzer Prize winning book, Native Guard tonight on the train to Chicago and there were parts of it that really struck me.

What is Evidence

Not the fleeting bruises she'd cover
with makeup, a dark patch as if imprint
of a scope she'd pressed her eye too close to,
looking for a way out , nor the quiver
in the voice she'd steady, leaning
into a pot of bones on the stove, Not
the teeth she wore in place of her own, or
the official document-- its seal
and smeared signature-- fading already,
the edges wearing. Not the tiny marker
with its dates, her name, abstract as history.
Only the landscape of her body--splintered
clavicle, pierced temporal-- her thin bones
settling a bit each day, the way all things do.

--Natasha Trethewey

I've been very interested in poets and artists who deal with race and gender. Another I've been struck by is Kara Walker. (click on it to read it)


I love this imagery of these girls leaving a man tied, a man changed by the body, the body he claimed to hate.

So here's something I've written. I think Jordan, my friend who deals with male mythology and interaction in his paintings, would like this.

Snakes

The men shake
the snakes that float
like gauze on their faces. Rough

holey gauze is sewn
into their skin so they are
careful with them, careful to let

them follow wherever they go,
to not slam them in doors or thrust
them in fires. These nerveless filmy

snakes won’t feel the sudden
squash of door and jamb as they swing
together, won’t sweat as white flames
blossom into their tails. But the bodies
follow, they will shrill when they try to move, they
will fever as flames flower them over—Hard

though it is to know the snakes, to care
for the snakes as one would care for anything
stitched to their face, it is harder still

to leave the chin bare, to feel a smooth cheek,
to acknowledge the delicately drawn jaw
line the pencil
left no hard edges no rough &

ragged lines, it’s all dove gray and white, pristine
and pretty. Don’t worry—they’ve heard don’t worry about that.
But they do and the snakes on the face, the ones that don’t feel
a thing give mettle to the snakes in the trousers, the robust ones,
the ones (tw)itching with life.

--Sophie Loubere, 2008

Earliest Memories

I was looking for writing exercises to practice with while I'm between projects (I could do a rewrite of my latest, "Father Fox", but I need to think some more about what I really want the story to be about) and I came across a website called Earliest Memory where people have posted their earliest memory in a couple of sentences. For some reason my breath catches when I read these. They are succinct, raw, and very real. It also takes me back to when I wrote about my earliest memory a couple of years ago:

"A pink room (gray magenta). Panic. My little brother has fallen again. He’s small, small enough so he can’t walk, small enough so that his hair is still wispy golden white. He’s been cut on the head and they need to give him stitches. We were visiting a museum. Or a planetarium. Or an aquarium."

I wrote that slightly over two years ago. I would have been two months into my first year of college. It just shows that even though I didn't really feel it as much then, I knew that I wanted to write and I did it on my own. I tried to get into a creative writing class the next semester, but they filled up too fast. I think it was good that I didn't. There was a gradual build up over the next year and a half of me realizing exactly how much writing meant to me and that I wanted to make it part of my career. This desire is what gave me the confidence to pull through the rough patches of my first semester in narrative writing. I know what I want and I know what I have to do to get there. Constant reading, constant writing, and constant thought.

Now if only I knew exactly what I wanted out of "Father Fox".

Horizon

They whipped down the I-88 at 80 miles per hour. The sky out the dusty window was a brilliant blue and clouds frothed over the sun down to the horizon.
“God,” Sophie said, “the sky is so beautiful. In flat places like this, the land has its own sparse beauty, but because of its simplicity the sky becomes the interest. In mountainous places the land is the interest.”
“Yeah, I miss it,” Vanessa said.
They listened to a play list Sophie had made for the five-hour journey to see Maddi. They were relaxed because at the moment Wilco was softly playing so they could still talk to each other.
“I’m not worried about being caught speeding,” Sophie said. “Because where do the cops hide? We could see them a million miles away its so flat. They hide in the middle between the two lanes. And sometimes behind bridges but not really because there isn’t often a road bit they can pull off on.”
“I’m not worried about being caught speeding because you’re the one driving,” Vanessa grinned.
Sophie scrunched up her nose and stuck out her tongue but her eyes never left the road. Vanessa took out her knitting. She only knew how to knit not to purl but she hadn’t dropped a stitch yet. It had taken Sophie an hour to teach her how to knit the night before because her fingers weren’t used to twisting and turning yarn. They had awkwardly stumbled over each pull until the coarse acrylic yarn had formed uneven ugly stitches. Now her movement wasn’t fluid, but it wasn’t confused yanks either.
“I want to make a scarf,” Vanessa said.
“Why? You’ll never use it.”
“I can use it when I visit in during Christmas.”
“True.”
Vanessa had left. Now she inhabited bleak highways littered with cars and outlet stores. In the distance were craggy blue mountains speckled with snow. Their beauty was overwhelmed by the smell of gas, smoke, and rotting lettuce. Sophie never wanted to go back there. There was too much filth. But she remembered one sunset on the Pacific that had looked like Turner painting. The sun had scattered yellow light off the ocean and there had been a hazy purple pier that felt miles away. They had been ankle deep in wet sand and for a moment the only noise was the soft rock of waves and the only smell had been salt. She hadn’t realized that she’d been holding her breath until a car alarm suddenly screamed in the distance and she had cried out in surprise. They had slumped in the sand to watch the last glow of the sun disappear over the horizon while high-pitched shrieks sounded into the night.

One of my final personal essays for Rhetoric 243. The painting above is one I just did this past summer of the Merritt Prairie for my mother of a picture she took. Putting together the writing portfolio is literally the last thing I have to do . . . at this point I'm more revising enough to get an okay grade. It'll all right if I get a B in that class because I'm pretty sure I have A's in everything else. I got my essay on Faulkner's "Barn Burning", Tin Ore Man (last punny title!) back and I got an A-. Plus the final for that class was ridiculously easy. I just hope I'm not stuck here tomorrow because of this horrid winter storm.

Weird moment last night: Vivian and I were waiting with Christine for her train when Christine called her parents because the train was really delayed. She started speaking to them in Chinese. Then, Vivian's mother called and she started speaking on her phone in Spanish. I suddenly felt extremely white. The only thing I could do if my parents called would be to speak in a British accent and say the words "loo"and "lift". Oh well. At least I know what Marmite is!

Also, I don't really speed, Mom. I swear.

listening to: Feist--1234

Heat

This heat hovers
Like a mother hen
This heat sinks under skin
Languid layered thin
Veil of sweat
This heat radiates
Off micro metal plates
Housed by
Perspiring plastic shells
This heat saturates
Steeped cinderblocks inflate
Silky strands deflate
Enlightened eyes become dead weight
Glass begs to give way to fresh
Glass begs to give way to mesh
Coquettish cracks promise
Cool clear darkness
But
Shadows shroud
Stingers proud
The wasp shall remain
Penned in the plane
Between stifling and supple.

© Sophie Loubere, 2007


There is a stupid wasp trapped in between the screen of my window and the glass so I can't open my window. Woe is me.