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Posts tagged "the image"
nearly all of these…were done by first randomly sticking on the tape, then having a look and thinking what it looks like and finally adding the lines. great fun to do!
Via Drawn. This really is a fun way to work. See also: my tea drawings.
Great interview with a cartoonist/songwriter I’m ashamed to admit I had no previous knowledge of. Love what he says here about the (lack of) difference between writing songs and cartoons:
For decades I’d flit from drawing table to typewriter to guitar with no sense of strain or contradiction. They all exercised the same psychic muscle (the Imagination), and working in one medium refreshed my appetite for the others. These days I’m less supple and more entrenched, so it’s a wrench to switch. But writing and drawing a Leviathan strip, say, isn’t all that different from composing a song. They both involve a text embedded in another medium. My father, Erik Blegvad, is an illustrator—he’s at work on his 107th title—and my mother, Lenore, was (she died last September) an author/illustrator/painter, so this symbiosis seems perfectly natural to me. My favorite artists, Marcel Duchamp being perhaps the paradigm, deliberately flouted the decree that art must not be “literary.” The musical heroes of my youth were John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Captain Beefheart, all of whom drew/wrote/painted when they weren’t composing/performing/recording. I recently learned the word liminal: “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.” That’s where I feel most at home, for better or worse.
What It Is is based on something I learned from my teacher, Marilyn Frasca, at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. I studied with her for two years in the late 1970s. Her idea seemed to be that everything we call art, whether it’s music or dance or writing or painting, anything we call art is a container for something she called an image. And she believed that once you understood what an image is, then the form you give it is up to you.
The question “What is an Image?” has guided all of my work for over 30 years. Because of what I learned from Marilyn, there isn’t much of a difference in the experience of painting a picture, writing a novel, making a comic strip, reading a poem or listening to a song. The containers are different, but the lively thing in the center is what I’m interested in.
It’s the living thing we activate when we read a book. Like Scrooge, for example. I know Scrooge came from a book, came from the hand of Dickens, but where is Scrooge really? Where is he right now? He’s not inside a book. If I say Scrooge and you know just who I’m talking about, and so do the first 1,000 people we stop on the street to ask if they know who Scrooge is, where is Scrooge located?
Scrooge is an image. Batman is an image. The alphabet is an image. I’d say Abraham Lincoln is an image, too. Although the bones of Lincoln are in a specific location, that’s not what we mean when we speak his name. We don’t mean his bones. Images are entities with no fixed location, they can occur to us at any place at any time. You and I can talk about them, though you and I have never met.
Newspaper + Marker = Poetry. Pre-order it now for $10 on Amazon.com
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