ZX Page 27: Editing

Memories go left and right and curve into themselves, they go nowhere. Skipped beats, regrets, reminders, what to do next time around, what, something different? Headless rudder left to subterranean winds. But a smart machine inside remembers the most important rule, it'll will take everything and make it neat, linear. Make it make less sense, that's what it takes for it to make any sense at all. Hold the line, hold your breath, suffocate the sounds, clip clip clip it off on the hotel floor, draw a map and take us there.

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Say yes to everything

art by me and Dave Stoner

Here's an interesting opinion piece by one Dave Eggers. I don't know who this man is or what he has contributed to the cultural landscape (probably because I'm Greek) but the piece stands on its own and it got me thinking. These thoughts I typed in on my computer and it is said that the reckless and brave may search for them below.

A noble adventurer you are!

So, the impression I get from this is that Dave Eggers is a happy man. He must have found a degree of contentment in the positive feedback loops that are built into his daily life. The phenomenon he describes (the mental trap of 'keeping it real' and being venomously disappointed in those that don't) I believe occurs first and hardest during one's puberty for the primary reason that that period is characterized the most by inner turmoil and cognitive dissonance between what one desires the world to be and what others pressure one to accept is.

I haven't met anyone that doesn't have some knee-jerk reaction against what they perceive as missteps from the true path in the lives and careers of their favorite artists. I believe that most of all this happens because that distant failure acts as a reminder of our own very proximal shortcomings in adhering to what usually is a strict moral code. A code not borne out of practicality but from a necessary interpretation of causality. This happens because that happened and that's bad. Our morality is based on simplifications and generalizations and that's not the space in which real human beings live.

Humans live in the ambiguity of constantly shifting and complex situations, where the true way is dim and even if one manages to follow it it doesn't always feel as good as one would expect it to be. That's where Dave Eggers lives but Dave Eggers is a happy man because he's successful, and I don't mean this in the strict financial sense, he is successful because he has made sense of his environment and function and has perhaps achieved a degree of inward pacification just through constant, busy reinforcement of positive routines. He can do a little bad (hang out with Puff Daddy) because he's doing a lot of good, is what he's working towards with listing his charity work. I get the impression that Dave Eggers is a huge workaholic also.

For those of us that haven't found our place yet, his words, while admirable, are more distant. His rationalization of how doing is living and not doing and complaining is poison rings true (as many "it's all MY fault" sentiments do) but is no less far away for it. Existential ennui leads to strings of smaller disappointments because second-guessing and dissecting small happenings and paralyzing/analyzing is what people without a work they enjoy and a social place in the world that respects them etc end up do for a living. Well get a job, Dave Eggers might say, say yes to all the things you say no he might continue. Some people don't get asked anything they could say no to, though.

People bitch because they're unhappy, is what I'm getting at, and while Eggers is taking a stand for his own sense of self-worth with the above text, victimizing the complainers doesn't help in understanding. He builds a straw-man, a very comfortable and common one in fact; the disaffected youth who's preoccupied with tearing down his idols and marginalizes a large part of that experience as 'poison'. He doesn't touch on what makes one like that at all. Is there perhaps a social system, a dynamic that creates disaffected youth, is perhaps the modern world not good for one's psyche? This aspect, the difficult aspect of the discussion isn't touched on, instead he explains how saying yes to meeting Puff Daddy is a good thing, otherwise he wouldnt've met Puff Daddy and he's a curious man. It's a sentiment we can all share, wouldn't we rather fulfill our curiosities instead of not? But is life this playground of curiosities to be fulfilled? Is it perhaps also a constant battle for (psychological besides physical) survival where if you misspent your time and effort you might have screwed up everything for good? Not everyone has risen above like Dave Eggers, I mean.

People are unhappy because the world is a suffocating place and not everybody will happen on the blessed circumstance where talent, ambition and luck converge to get a them their comfortable niche. I appreciate Dave Eggers' sentiment and his positivity and I'm glad that he's not successful and also disappointed anymore. if I ever get to where he is I hope I'll be saying similar things. But home is far away right now, and there's doubts and harsh judgments and self-loathing still that cannot be ameliorated with the suggested 'be positive!' mantras. Willpower will not make me a happier man, it is mostly, depressingly, luck that will. Until then I'll make what I make and complain about how this or that isn't true and has disappointed me sometimes, it's not poison in itself, it's a reflection of a world that disappoints. Sometimes when the world doesn't come knocking with beautiful, curious opportunities, the only way to keep sane is to knock on the world oneself.

-Helm
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Anatomy

Click on the image for full sized version. Preferably on a different tab than the text below.


This is the work process that I went through. The initial reference was this:



But as you can see I didn't trace it or follow it too much, actually. I just wanted to reference a real space to avoid specific issues of depth perception that would reduce the effect of feeling like you're actually in the back seat, I didn't want to fake a higher skill level than I actually have.

Generally, tracing an image is in my opinion bad form. However there are exceptions. The next shame image I am going to do is going to be a full-fledged trace of a photograph. I will discuss why it's not alright generally and why exactly I did it when that image is done and on the blog.

Using an image just as visual reference however, is as important as the artist feels it is for the viewer to directly recognize the minutia of a scene as apparent, fitting objects. Had I not used a photo of an actual taxi as reference and just went from imagination, I'd have probably completely forgotten about the voicebox, that is I think even a stronger visual confirmation of 'this is a taxi' than the running meter. However as you can see I wasn't shackled to reality here and I enlarged and simplified the meter and put it in a place where it would contrast white against darkness so as to drive the point home. Hopefully not many viewers has problems realizing this is a taxi, and the character we're going to be following is in the back seat of it.

Here I am trying to diffuse certain problems in the first small shame image where some viewers did not realize the thoughts were coming from a viewer on the street and not the sitting man himself. On the street it's difficult to implicate the viewer simply by having a vantage that befits the normal height of a human being (as I did in small shame part one) because viewers are used to these vantage points in movies all of the time and they certainly not always mean 'you are looking from the first person'. In the taxi situation however, almost all movies and comics and other visual media that employ this shot convey that the protagonist is in the back seat. So here I hope I've been more candid about what I'm going for than in the past image.

On A you can see how I space and sketch things out. Recently I've sorta abandoned working with broader, freehand brushes when setting up a scene. I have come to dislike the ambiguity of where a final line will be when you have a fat thick brush stroke that means 'here is an edge, somewhere'. There are too many potential final lines in a big fat sketch stroke, and it seems to affect my spatial relations between my various objects too much. And perhaps even worse, it seemed I had began to ink with too fat lines on the computer as compared to my hand-inked work to try to follow these ambiguous sketches, which I didn't enjoy. So I've sorta 'devolved' into working with straight, thin but strong lines for setting up a scene.

On B you can see what effect A has, with the two layers overlaid. I made various mistakes about judging the eye level of the driver and position of the steering wheel that I had to fudge around with. I'd prefer if in the future I didn't make these sort of errors, they just waste time and diffuse the clarity of the piece. On other parts of the image the inking remains very close to the sketch version, which is for my intents, a good thing.

On C we have the final inks, before I put on any gray tones. I debated leaving this piece at this level as there was something appealing about the way forms were dictated by smaller or bigger lines according to how close things were and I knew I would only hurt this effect when I laid on the gray tone. However, as you will see two steps below on the final image, there was an emotional effect that I wanted to convey that was worth the damage to the linework.

On D you can see the first layer of tone and grain. Again I could have stopped here but I felt that the scene was lacking a bit of weight and layer clarity so I added more dark grain in specific places to separate the levels. Note that I removed the insignia of the car brand on the steering wheel. I feel that any benefit the work would enjoy by using brands - in that the viewer will immediately feel this is a realer place because they recognize them - is offset unfavorably by propagating the mentality that brands dictate a realer world. They do not, the whole marketing mechanism in fact rests on the assumption that if the buying public (for the term 'people' does not occur in their lingo) integrate brands into their daily lives on the instinctual level they would be more successful in peddling their shit. There is a lot of semiotic dissonance that occurs for every human being that has to suffer through this process just in daily life, getting from place A to place B while under constant attack by brands and I'd rather not encourage it further, even if it hurts the realism of my work somewhat. The merit of the work will survive and I'll sleep better.

On E, the final image, the emotional effect I had to add is now hopefully apparent. The white glow of a beautiful day is bleeding through the edges of the glass, onto the spectral speech bubble of the driver. I can't exactly explain why this effect was so important but it came to me about midway when working on the inks and it really felt important to include. A strong separation between outside (bright beautiful and promising) and the guilt-ridden thoughts in the inside, conveyed in black and grain, the apologia of the letters in startling contrast, sharp against the forgiving blur.

One fear I have about the final image is that I might have described the car just a bit too much and instead of functioning on the emotional level the image looks a bit like a car commercial. That's ironic given my rant about branding, but I couldn't think of a different way to convey this shame without very very clearly showing a taxi in naturalist detail.

Also, I forgot to add arm hair to the taxi driver. That's probably a bigger hit on the intended realism than anything else.

-Helm
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Small Shames, part the second

When I showed this to my friend Graham Lackey last night he said "I like that these small shames are so small, because they are perfectly relatable, and perhaps seeing a small thing like this given time and care in art airs it in a useful way."

The single-panel page is the perfect format for an examination of a single moment, because its timespan is negotiable. Like a nagging memory that keeps coming back to you in inopportune moments, its importance and interaction with the whole only as severe as your subconsciousness demands. Small shames aren't small because we hide them under the carpet, where they accumulate to something bigger. Their denominator is the same. The phantasmal perfect lives of the perfect people we like to use as an excuse do not exist. Even worse, we like to extrapolate from the comfortable "dude what are you bitching about, there's children dying in the third world and you're worried you ignored a taxi driver?" because against that Spectacular misery ours seems farcical. Then we go on to loathe ourselves for feeling self-loathing.

-Helm


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Small Shames, part the first

This is new. There will probably be a catalogue of similar pictures for the next few weeks.

I have talked before of how I am resolved to rid myself of my social shames and apprehensions. I am trying, but often I find myself failing. I am keeping a recollection of when this happens. What I want to avoid is that familiar effect where you do (or do not do, more often) something and that makes you feel shame, but as time passes you rationalize it and end up finding some lame reason for what you did, you feel at peace with it. I make these now and I make them as well as I can so I will not have this opportunity to ever lie to myself.

When I have a number of them I will have them silk-printed stickers and place them in the heart of what has made me feel these shames in the first place: downtown Athens. It has taught me to hate and fear other people and this will be one thing I can do to have a bit of a proactive revenge. The ultimate goal of such endeavors is to act rightly in the moment and not to just make stupid art after it, though. Self-coaching. I will let you know of how that goes.

Keep reading

-Helm

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