Blaise Larmee
"Comics is about memory. because when you draw a comic strip you're drawing more the way you remember things than the way that you see them, necessarily. You're drawing memories of objects. You draw idealized versions of objects as opposed to showing them specifically the way they are to your eye." -Chris Ware
When I ask a person to create as a creator, I am asking them to create in the present. If they let creation show on the page then the comics become true memories rather than memories of memories. When we create as readers we are creating as nostalgists and fetishists. Is this partly why I am uncomfortable owning books? Bookshelves are like museums and cemetaries. If anything I like magazines - ephemeral pop objects that breed quickly and die.
With memories we can experience the past as an instant, sequentially, or as an entity. As an instant the rememberer is transported to a place from the past and the original context of future/past is experienced in that moment. As a sequence it is much like a comic - made of loosely connected images and sounds, the things people said, the emotions that were felt. As an entity the Past becomes a growing mountain and you reside at the peak.
When I draw from life I document a subjectively filtered moment in time and space. I can look back at this drawing and remember where I was, what I was thinking, and so on. At the same time something becomes lost, details lose focus, emotions flatten. Sometimes when I draw I am only looking at the drawing, digging like an archaeologist uncovering new bones, seeing where lines end and forms begin. Sometimes I look back at old drawings like an anthropologist, peeling back layers of intention to reveal the spaces I didn't realize I was in. And I can read other creators' drawings this way, if I recognize the spaces they have created in.
When we are young our emotions are intensified. They become comic in retrospect, exaggerated in content and expression. Sometimes when we dream we are young again. We are in the present and in the past at the same time. Our dreams are false memories. Only in death do we look back on the present.
Images used: detail of COTEM by JTM, detail of Rusty Brown by Chris Ware, drawings by JT Rogstad
1 comment:
Yes - I think drawing is always an act of creation. You're living in the past whether it's while you're conjuring imagery from your head or responding to something in front of your face. You're overlaying your meaning-matrix on top of the visual field, making pictures that are congruent with your internal ideas of the order and constructions of things. There's a book by this woman Temple Grandin who's pretty much a genius but was born with autism. She talks about the difficulty she has translating the world into abstractions - she tends to be extremely literal, seeing surfaces without feeling her surroundings as this transsubstantiated mass of connected stuff. And autistic folks are often really skilled at drawing from life - something that's difficult for me. I end up trying to push things the other way, and where somebody like Chris Ware develops a symbol system to transmit ideas and build stories, I try to make meaning happen through context and having the drawings often be actions themselves, not illustrations or depictions...
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