Non-Sequential

Before my very long hiatus from here, I’d mostly been trying to keep my blog posts chronologically in line with when the art was made.  But with my notably unceremonious return has come a newfound appreciation of social media’s inherent ability to distort space and time and lend a kind of poetry to life where there might initially not have been any.  Even throughout my initial run on the blog I quickly fell months behind what I was posting on My DeviantArt page, which in turn was behind what I had completed on my PC, which in turn was naturally a couple of weeks behind everything I was sketching.  This resulted in multiple increasingly warped artistic timelines, which, as none of them were truly indicative of my development, served only to expose the artificiality of representation on the internet (or just representation in general, I suppose).  As such, my selection of what to exhibit from when is dictated largely by what would make an interesting post rather than what order the images were made in.   This idea, I think, is quite nicely mirrored by the distance between a finished piece of work and the time of its conception.  Sometimes you have an idea, induced by fever dreams or phantom trains of thought, that no matter how nonsensical or seemingly insignificant you feel you have to see it realised in some concrete form or another.    But once you commit to this process of realisation, the work sometimes becomes increasingly divorced from the feeling that propelled it to being.  You take multiple breaks – you have a meal, you go see a movie, or you forget about it for a few weeks – and it eventually takes on a mechanical quality that seems to linger until completion.  Further compounding this temporal phenomenon is the hypothetical viewer, who looks over the creation from some indeterminate future in a matter of minutes (or seconds), hopefully laughs or frowns in all the appropriate places, and promptly forgets about it.  The whole thing would be absurd if it wasn’t so integral to art in its entirety.

Called it "Wild Shift in a Tone...ment". 'Cause puns are never uncalled for.

Speaking of inconsequential ideas, this was... fan art, I guess you could call it, of the Ian McEwan (that CANNOT be his real name) novel Atonement.  While I haven’t seen the movie, I can guess that it would still have this scene in it, or something similar, so that the reference isn’t completely lost to watched rather than read.  Without giving away any spoilers, this pivotal scene presented the main characters the last opportunity for a little clarification before everything went to hell (for no real reason, I might add, but that’s beside the point).  One question about a certain C-word would have solved pretty much all the conflicts in the book and would have prevented an entire generation’s destinies from being determined by a little sexual immaturity.  Anyway, I don’t know what possessed me to even do this but I completed the line work in little over a day, largely in one sitting (again, I have no idea) and I think I did the colouring/ shading the next week.  From what I can remember, looking at it now, I was eager to try some of Atsushi Ohkubo’s colouring/shading techniques (it’s pretty much greyscale so I don’t know what I’d call it but the process functioned largely the same way as colouring did).   I had also finally gotten round to reading the Soul Eater Manga and I remember that at a certain point (Arachnophobia Arc) the artwork took a huge jump in quality and I guess I couldn’t wait to imitate some of what I saw.

On the other end of the spectrum (in a number of ways) is this entry, which I did with a very specific and unambiguous motivation in mind.  It’s not that funny or that visually impressive, but I think it served its purpose well enough, which was to voice my opinion on the last Batman film by Nolan.  This was my first attempt, I think, at doing a short comic (with the intention of it being seen by others) and there was a lot learnt about the amount of forethought that can and ought to go into this sort of thing.  Also, using nibs is HARD.

I had a dream, once.  Well I‘ve have many dreams at many different times but this one seemed particularly well-suited to turn into a comic.  That never happened though as, apart from my laziness and my ADD addled mind, I discovered that a pretty much identical idea had been much better used by someone else (damn you, Naoshi Komi).  But I did get around to sketching some of what I dreamt (and I even wrote two very short chapters about it) and thought it was all interesting enough (or at least worthwhile from an experiential point of view) to arrange them in a short sequence and colour them.  I don’t know if I managed to capture the frantic surreality of the dream but I’m glad that there’s at least some correlation to it from my end.

This was sparked by a combination of my disillusionment with academia (I think learning is very important and I take it seriously but I don’t think educational institutions are necessarily representative of that) and a very strange conversation I had with my nephew.  I was getting a bit more experimental with the whole short comic thing but I don’t think I’d committed to pushing it yet (i.e. not reflective of my skill but more my attitude towards the intentions of the thing).  Now that I think about it, it’s actually way more allegorical than I thought ...

Lastly (I mean, there are more comic-related examples but none carrying the same thematic resonance as these), is the most bizarre example one here.  I probably put the most effort into this than anything else on here.  Like the Atonement comic, it’s probably not funny enough to justify how long it took, but it does reflect my current attitude towards the entire concept of short comics (and art in general).  Anecdotally, there were so many coincidences that occurred around this thing that it’s hard to put all into a satisfactory summary but to put it briefly: I improbably got to know the person featured in this comic a little better later on, which transformed the entire tone of the whole thing when later viewed by mutual friends.  But they (the real life occurrences surrounding the creation of the strip), however, are heavily emblematic of the artificiality and temporal compression found in the act of presentation.  Even the comic itself, mostly for the sake of narrative clarity and ease of execution, rearranges a few elements of the “real life” events that comprise its subject matter.

My point, if there even is one (beyond a pitiful attempt to validate my existence), is that reality as constructed through something as heavily mediated as social media is incredibly flexible.  Much in the same way that comic books function, an entirely synthetic narrative, whether consciously or not, can be constructed from a few well-placed posts.  The document of artistic development can be rooted a year in the past (or traverse that amount of time in a day) and a quick reflection on a surprisingly awesome encounter can become the confession of a secret love after months of fermentation.  It’s all distorted in some way anyway, so one might as well go for the more interesting option.  The presentation thus (yes, thus) serves to accentuate its own content and we enter a whole level of “meta”.  It’s an interesting exercise and I hope you’ll stick around to see where it goes.