Back in September, Andrea Talarico of Anthology New & Used Books (scranthology.com) in Scranton, PA, graciously permitted me to put up a show of drawings I did in her store.
The title of the show was (in)formal, because it was a combination of ultimately formal drawings and an attempt at informal discourse. I was never good at creating an air of mystery around my work, so I've given up on it and instead went the other way - to be generous with talking about my work, because I'm not going to pretend that my work can or should "stand on its own" in any way. And so every drawing in the show was accompanied with a little written piece that told a little bit about it, and hopefully enriched its experience. In this blog, I'll provide the images and written pieces that were in the show, and maybe expand on the ideas for each piece. I hope you enjoy it. There were 17 in total, so I'll split them into multiple blog posts so as to make it more digestible.
"This is the main character from my book, whose working name is simply “P”, in his Devourer form. When in this form, he becomes what is essentially a black hole, sucking everything around him into his maw. While this may seem violent, it actually stems from the frustration he experiences from loving existence so much. He wants to envelop it completely and surround it, and have it within him, everything and all at once."
P started out as a working name (see So I started a Blog/What's in a Name?), but is starting to settle into his actual name. Not much else to say about this, except that the last phrase is a Lungs of a Giant quote.
"Ah, robots. I’ve been drawing robots since I was 4, and they’re still not out of my system. I constantly look to manga and gaming as sources for truly inspired interpretations of human and animal forms. You want to see real deconstruction of the human form? Look at Toru Nakayama’s designs for Mega Man Zero."
This is Berthold. He is a relic of a bygone civilization, and was found by a little girl in some ancient ruins, long since deactivated. Originally intended for war, he has since forgotten his programming and is now the little girl's best friend. They go on adventures together, and he protects her. She is also a mechanical genius and she uses her skills to keep him repaired and in top functional capacity. I totally bit the story off of Chrono Trigger, but I don't care. And I TOTALLY did my version before the movie Iron Giant came out. So there's that. Between Chrono Trigger, The Iron Giant, Tetsujin 28/Gigantor, and Appleseed, the giant robot/little human best friend relationship has become a bit of an archetype in my mind, and this is just my version of it. So maybe that relationship is just another Campbellian myth structure we've only yet to discover, eh?
"I started messing around with 3D modeling software this year, and I love it. here I took a cube and applied a relatively simple trig distortion function to it. You can see in the second iteration that it’s still recognizable as a cube, but the third iteration, amazingly enough, was achieved by simply changing one coefficient in the function! As I raised that coefficient, there was definitely a point where my brain went “Ok, cube, cube, sorta cube...aaaand what the hell is that?” I love that something can look “wrong” to us but to the computer, is a perfectly “rational” form. I believe that “wrong event horizon” is continually expanding as our species develops. Eventually we will be able to look at the third form and say “Yeah. A cube...so?”"
Sorry, I'm too lazy to substitute the double quotes for single quotes within my double quotes. You get the idea. Anyway, the cube acts as a metaphor for our understanding of the world, I guess - I still believe, much to most of my friends' disagreement, that everything in the universe will be understood by a sentient being sometime in the distant future. It's sad to know that I probably won't live to see the day I could look up the stars and see a perfect, divine pattern in all of it. I guess chaos can be interesting. Though I can't help but think of this old sneaky Chinese curse in disguise: "May you have an interesting life."
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