The Units

I was looking back at some old sketchbooks I have laying around, and it made me realize that I have internalized much of the ideas that once seemed novel to me. I had written in the book something about the separation of visual elements from context because I'd been reading Alan Watts, I think. It irked me that cartooning is often thought of as making a rhythmic structure from elements you've defined. Figures and objects in panels are separate from the background and, in turn, are separate from each other. I've gotten to the point now where my natural mode is to blur any boundaries between figure and ground or object and object because I am uncomfortable taking the raw data of the world and building discrete, essentialized structures from it. Yet my difficulty is that, no matter how hard I try otherwise, I am someone who draws ideas as opposed to someone who is able to capture an unfiltered visual experience. But I wonder how possible it is to capture that in the first place. Contour lines are a definite act of delineation. Even superrealist artists like Chuck Close or John Salt are relying on complex systems to recreate photographs using other media, kinda like analog photography where human algorithms are used in place of the camera's ability to harness photons. So, yes, cartooning is an act of abstraction, inherently, maybe, but I want to be careful where I'm drawing the lines., I guess.