Container and Text Proposal: Comfort Pack

Response to Miami Book Fair Event #2

     Today, Sunday the 20th, I attended the Child's-Eye View: Memories and Memoirs of Youth panel, where Emil Ferris, Tom Hart, and Meags Fitzgerald discussed this subject and relating it to their most recent works. Towards the beginning of the session, Emil Ferris provided a great response to the opening question "Why kids?"; she responded with, "The perspective of a child is a very pure perspective, they get to see things in the periphery." I highly agree with this statement and can relate to it because I've been spending a lot of time with my two younger cousins lately (one is two and the other one is five) and just being around them and observing how they interact with their surroundings is rather refreshing. They remind me that a lot of these superficial things that we worry about is 100% fiction. I was interested in the the different backstories of the authors' that inspired these memoirs. All three of them approached the task of telling a story differently but they could all agree on one thing when it comes to boiling all of the ideas that they're trying to convey down to one piece, they all agreed that one must keep the hand and mind busy, live in the moment(in the work) and find a way.
     Hearing each of the three of the authors explain their method approach and choices of mediums further informed me about our current topic. They all tailored their mediums to best portray his narrative as effectively as possible. Emil Ferris' story is about a young girl living in 60s Chicago so she chose to use regular paper and a ball point pen to illustrate her whole book to give it a diary-like quality. Tom Hart acknowledged that he was technically not the most talented illustrator so he relied on his strong sense of drive to carry his narrative all the way through, he said that he enjoys letting "the brute attempts work its way out". In her graphic novel "Long Red Hair", Meags Fitzgerald uses duo-tone to color her story; she chose to do so because the her main character deals with two sense of self and the duality of things, that's why I think it's so interesting that she considered the push and pull factor that the duo tone would create.

Response to Miami Book Fair Event #1

     On Saturday the 19th I attended the panel where Art Spiegelman and Charles Kochman discussed and celebrated Si Lewen's work titled "Parade: An Artist’s Odyssey". During this panel I learned that wordless stories quickly gained popularity after World War I and how Frans Mazreel and Lynd Ward were prominent pioneers of this genre; to me, this new piece of knowledge reinforced the belief that great art results from times of turmoil. Spiegelman briefly told Si Lewen's life story and the part that caught my attention was when Spiegelman revealed that Lewen was once a very successful painter but the darkness from his experiences with war caught up; this darkness that returned prompted Si Lewen to turn his back on the commercial galleries to make art that fulfilled his personal goals. An ideology that Si Lewen proposed to Spiegelman is that, "Art is not a commodity, art is priceless"; by following this idea, Lewen was able to paint more prolifically than ever, or as Spiegelman would put it, "better in many ways".
     Upon receiving permission from Si Lewen himself to remaster "Parade: An Artist’s Odyssey", Spiegelman decided to introduce the new version of the book in an accordion fold format. Not only did this format catch my attention because of our recent workshop in class, but the reason behind it helped me further understand relationships between narrative and the structure in which it is presented in. Si Lewen's intention for the book was for the " pictures to talk to each other" and the format does just that. Another thing that stuck to me was the actual gist of the narrative in "Parade: An Artist’s Odyssey"; the images in this book tells a story about "man's perpetual desire to destroy himself, about a generational affair with love and war, eventually people get exhausted and move on, and then it starts up again, a new parade towards destruction and war", said Spiegelman. It's amazing how this story is still so relevant in present day. 

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I got the chance to talk to Art Spiegelman himself on Sunday. We
talked about Si Lewen's idea that "pictures talk to each other" and he
gave me some advice for my art practice.

Small Work #2

The words that I chose from the story-building exercise were: intrigue, significant other, and escape.

A New Article from the New York Magazine by Jerry Saltz

On his recent Instagram post he states: 

read my latest @nymag piece "In the Time of Our Clusterfuck: What of Art Now" 

http://www.vulture.com/2016/11/post-election-pain-is-good-for-art.html

Narrative: Small Works #1

Response to "What is Comics Poetry"

     In this essay, Alexander Rothman gave me a pretty good idea of what comics poetry is. I have become more conscious of this form of work recently and have also began to see it manifest more and more around me; I've also noticed that this form of work has always intrigued me subconsciously but I never really knew how to approach it.  My understanding is that poetry and comics are difficult to comprise on their own; this new form combines both mediums and I now realize how they can seem simple at a glance but are actually "exceptionally difficult" as Rothman stated. Now that I am recalling my encounters with comics poetry, the first thing that comes to my mind is Ida Applebroog's artists' books. I deeply appreciate the exposure to Ida Applebroog's books towards the beginning of WARP because I think it was one of those things that really helped me push my ability to be aware of this "subjective bridging" that occurs in art.

      Alexander Rothman illustrates how one can go about reading comics poetry by proposing questions like "What are the effects of these choices and their repetition?" under some of the examples he gave; we must be aware of the "visual choices" of these works as we would be with any other works of art. Knowing this makes me think of Chris Ware as a true pioneer of this form of work. Chris Ware brought his bountiful knowledge of visual arts into his comics; when creating them he asked questions like "When you have all the tools of visual arts at your disposal, then why put words in balloons?". Ware also choses to avoid using perspective in his comics because to him it doesn't "effectively translates the way we remember physical space into the two-dimensional form of ­comics" (from an interview with The Paris Review). The introduction to this form of work really reinforces how important it is for us to stray from our habit to quickly consume information around us like we were shaped to but instead slow down and really try to understand works of art and as Rothman puts, "walk a mile or two in someone else's brain."

Miss Hokusai (movie)

If anyone wanted to watch the animated movie "Miss Hokusai" that was on the presentation for the Narrative: Telling Stories unit, I highly recommend it. It's a beautiful film, here's a link to watch: http://gogoanime.io/sarusuberi-miss-hokusai-episode-1

screen-cap from the movie

In-Depth: City of Baucis

I chose to depict the city of Baucis from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The final piece was done in oil, a medium I practiced using in my Street and Garden pieces.

The Garden

For this small work assignment I decided to visit Vizcaya because I've heard many great things about it. It was a windy overcast day and Vizcaya was tranquil space; I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. Towards the back of the garden I saw a piece of reflective mylar hanging among the vines. Its placement seemed intentional and caught my attention so I incorporated it into my final piece (it read more like flowing drapery in critique).