I think I may have mentioned exterminators in some earlier post, but I don't remember if I got very much into them. So I decided it was time. The idea for exterminators was born one day in my friend's apartment, reading a book he had on graffiti in New York City. I was kind of in an artistic rut at the time--this was well over a year ago--and I came across a picture of an artist spraypainting a wall and wearing a ventilator. I don't remember what she was painting but I remember the mask, and started drawing women and girls with ventilators. (The best inspiration comes from the most random things.) They became known as the exterminators and they're weird and complex and creepy. They also tend to be weirdly sexual, wearing ventilators and not much else. In truth, I don't really know what they're about, just that they are linked to beauty and disease, and seem to thrive in post-apocalyptic settings, where I guess a ventilator might be a good idea, depending on the cataclysm, although sometimes they breathe out noxious fumes. The figures that I've come to call surgeons are relatively new, and seem to have evolved from the exterminators. I don't like them. Or I should say, I don't like her, because as of now there is only one surgeon, the one you see here. She's pretty horrible--I mean, I like how she came out (although her scalpel could have more of a highlight), but I don't like what she represents in me. I have this idea that under her mask she's got a Glasgow grin happening, maybe crudely stitched back together. But that might be cheesy, I don't know. I left any sutures off of her this time because while I think she symbolizes self-destruction, I don't know if she is self-destructive herself, or just encourages others to be. The surgeon is probably the most uncomfortable of the figures I've come up with, and the one I sound the most DID talking about.
The exterminator here is actually left over from the ladybug phase (they haven't returned this winter), and she's a little exterminator, so not a sexy one. I actually think this picture is quite pleasant, especially compared to the surgeon. Both are watercolor, ink and gouache on paper, and both are about 6 X 6 inches. I don't have a lot with exterminators, but I like them, and I'd like to have more of them.
So, yeah, this was kind of a crazy post. Sorry. But it seems I tend to create little characters for the various facets of my personality because that's how I can understand them. Making them physically visual helps to confront them, in a way, and allows me a way of communicating with others. Who knows? Maybe I'll find some more in there sometime.
That's the name of the folder in my computer where these images are housed. Because they are, indeed, ancient. Like a lot of other artists I know, it's really, really hard for me to look at my older work. It's actually really hideously painfully embarrassing and it makes me want to vomit a little. So, since I've had a few beers and I'm in a soul-bearing kind of mood (don't drink, kids), I've decided to make public some of my early work.
To be fair, this isn't really "early" in the true sense of the word. I've been painting since the age of seven (and drawing since two), and so technically "early" would be the acrylic-on-canvas-board paintings from second grade (and earlier still would be my circular "face" drawings from five years prior, which my mom still has in a photo album). But I don't have pictures of those. Two of the three paintings you see here were made in my college days, in the last dramatic throes of teenage angst and the pseudo-intellectual climate of SUNY New Paltz's Smiley Art Building (yes, that was really its name), and one was made in my senior year of high school. Bet you can't guess which one.
Actually, I have a few more pictures of paintings I did in college. I photographed them for posterity, I guess, but none of them survive today. I tend to be very unsentimental about my own work, and if I think it sucks, and these did, I destroy them happily. I have literally ripped paintings apart. No, we aren't going to be seeing them. Why? Because they're stupid, that's why. These three are the least offensive to me, and I apparently was going through a three-to-four-year sap green phase.
The top image is titled Night, and was made sometime in my second or third year of college. Possibly earlier, like the summer after my first year. Painted from memory, this was back before I became very meticulous about rendering and sketching. I actually really still like this one, for all its awkward shoulder blades, and still have it. It's about 12 X 16 inches, or thereabouts. The little pink ear is my favorite part, and this was featured in New Paltz's Queer Action Coalition art show. It made a few people blush. I'm not kidding.
Next is Bermuda, 11 X 12 inches, taken from a photograph of my mother's friend Mary. Mary, Mom and I went to Bermuda the April I was six, and this was one of the many photographs that resulted. Mary is somewhat insecure about her appearance, and would likely die if she knew I made this (and posted it on the Interwebs). This is the one that I did in high school, at about the age of seventeen. It's funny because of the three, I think this is the least dramatic and emotional, and the most interestingly rendered. I still have this one, too.
Lastly is a painting that was titled Did You Hear What I Said, and was created in response to having to deal with the obtuse population of New Paltz. This was a remnant of some Cranach the Elder/John Currin/body horror thing I was going through, and thankfully have not felt the need to return to. It's, um, okay. I have absolutely nothing to say about this painting, having created it in a vastly different time in my life. All I can say is that it was inspired by my overwhelming desire to have people stay the fuck away from me. It was 10 X 10 inches, and no longer exists, and nor does its never-completed partner painting. The stretchers now hold the "Little Medieval" paintings.
All I can say about these is that it feels like someone else made them, looking at them now. They seem very foreign. Not necessarily bad--I still do really like Bermuda and Night--but sprung from a different person's brain. Although interestingly I feel more of a connection to the older ones, and the most recent, Did You Hear..., is the most foreign one to me, proving that time doesn't necessarily move, in terms of artistic development, in a straight line. This is, along with the other ones we won't be looking at, the unformed, undisciplined and primitive beginnings of the psychological aspects of my artwork. It's embarrassing to behold, but I still think it's important to remember where you come from.
Henry Darger (1892-1973) is usually one of the first artists mentioned when what is known as Outsider Art is brought up. Outsider art, also known as art brut, is art produced by people with no formal training in art, and no connection to the art world. The result is usually visually jarring, particularly to people who are ensconced within the institutionalized art world, and intensely personal, often having a narrative and symbolic system all its own.
Darger was born in Chicago, and his early life was characterized by hardship and loss. His parents had both died by 1905, and he lived for the rest of his adolescence in Catholic boys' homes and institutions, where he faced what they would have called "treatment" or "discipline" in those days, and what we would call "horrible child abuse" today. Modern research shows that Darger may have had Asperger's Syndrome, which in his time was unfortunately not recognized as it is today. In his later life, he lived in the same apartment in Chicago for over 40 years, until his death, working menial labor in a Catholic hospital until about ten years before his death, and attending Catholic Mass regularly. He was, in his own way, deeply concerned with the wellfare of children, and his work reflects this. Darger and his one close friend, William Shloder, discussed founding a "Children's Protective Society," which would adopt out orphans to loving families, but this never came to fruition.
After his death in 1973, Darger's landlords found his life's work in his apartment. It's a book, fully illustrated, called The Realms of the Unreal, and covers several storylines, totaling at 15 volumes and 15,145 pages. To put it in an extremely simplified way, it tells the stories of an alternate world in which children, namely the inspirational Vivian Girls, the victims of child labor, rise up against a draconian regime to restore peace and harmony. He provided two endings, one with the Vivian Girls triumphing and one with the Vivian Girls in defeat. He also wrote an autobiography (5,084 pages--comparatively light reading), another, unfinished piece of fiction that weighs in at over 10,000 pages, and kept a daily weather journal.
To create his images, Darger traced images found in newspapers, magazines and ads, sometimes multiple times in one scene, as seen in the top image, and he also frequently used collage, collecting old periodicals for source material. He seemed to like the Coppertone Girl in particular. He worked with watercolors, and seemed to have a natural talent for it. His scenes are typically large and epic, and feature little girls engaged in full warfare with grown men. His work can be disturbingly violent, too, showing the terrible tortures inflicted upon the girls by the evil villains. It's interesting to note that Darger focused on girls rather than boys, and even more interesting to note that though the child characters are ostensibly female, some of them have male genitalia.
I personally love Darger's work. I love its raw psychology and the fact that Darger was not interested in academic art, but was making art for himself and only himself. There's something nice about that, and refreshing. And Darger seems like a real sweetheart, too. Caravaggio, for instance, is one of my favorite artists, but he was probably a real asshole. And everyone knows how misogynistic Picasso was. Darger, on the other hand, stuck up for the children, saying that each one had a right "to play, to be happy, and to dream, the right to normal sleep of the night's season, the right to an education, that we may have an equality of opportunity for developing all that are in us of mind and heart."
I mentioned in an earlier post graphic novels/comics and I are not friends. We just aren't. Despite this fact, many people have told me that, since I like to make art and I like to write, that I should make graphic novels. My answer: No. This answer is usually followed by whining by the other person about how I should, and how they're so cool and lucrative, and how I should try because they would TOTALLY read it. My answer: No.
For one thing, I can never successfully write and draw/paint at the same time. I've been on an art-making kick for over a year, which means I haven't done any passable writing in all that time. (I should note that by "writing" I am referring to fiction. My writing form is novel-length fiction. Blogging and nonfiction writing I can always do, and I'm not counting it in this discussion.) To me, they are both forms of storytelling, but through different media, and it's hard for me to combine the two in a successful way.
I've also said before that I don't like using text with images. Illustration is one thing, but I don't like text actually in the image. Sometimes it works, but, like paint drips, it usually ends up looking rather stupid and forced when used in a serious way. Things like editorial cartoons are something else entirely. The top image is the only piece I've ever done where the text doesn't offend me. It's part of a larger body of images, none as successful as this one. It's watercolor and pen on paper, 9 X 12 inches.
However, I also really like art books and bookmaking. I only have one semi-completed book to date, which is bound but not filled in with pictures all the way. I've been painting pages for another small book, in the "medieval" style, inspired by medieval gospel books. It kind of tells a story but since it has no words it's very open to interpretation when it comes to what exactly happens in that story (spoiler: there are sexytimes). This interpretive narrative is the one that comes most naturally to me when working within the format of storytelling. The pages seen here are the first (center) and fourth (bottom) pages of the eight-page book, the only ones that are totally complete. They are about 4.5 X 6 inches, and are ink, watercolor and gouache on paper. And it's a dude. I'm also planning a fancy, possibly gilt cover it. Of course, mine will be bookboard and gold leaf (if I feel like buying it) and not gems and ivory.
I do, however, like reading graphic novels (the good ones, anyway), and I can recommend the following: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Kimmie66 by Aaron Alexovich (which was part of the now-defunct and totally awesome Minx imprint of DC), and American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. These are all people who can do comics and do them extremely well. I am not one of them.
...I mean, why wouldn't you? They're always smiling! I'm tentatively calling this painting The View, but as that's the name of a fairly odious daytime talkshow, I'm not sure if I can commit to it. Hopefully something better will come to me, but for now, that's it's name. Actually, though, in speech I rarely call any of my paintings by name, and would refer to this one as "that one with the skullheads and the red floaty trees." Something about calling my paintings by name in a conversational setting seems pretentious to me.
My camera, in other news, is working when it feels like it, and thankfully felt like it for the shooting of this painting. My current hypothesis? Gnomes.
