On Thursday, November 28th, we had a workshop to discuss the upcoming assignment for our essay plan on our practitioner. I am lucky because I was able to contact my practitioner via email, but I am lacking on history of editorial illustration as well as the history of graphic novels/newspaper cartoons, which are the areas that my practitioner works in.

After going through to test our recall, we went through point by point in the prompt in order to catalogue the spaces where we still need additional research as well as by noting our own critical perspective/opinion.

I came away from the workshop with a clearer idea of what I needed to research in order to flesh out my outline as well as an idea for how to structure my essay plan.

After the critique on Tuesday and researching the layout of children’s books on Wednesday, I sat down to try and write a script for the Matthew story as a children’s book, as one of the potential outcomes for the narrative encapsulation of my experience of having a brother with autism. I had a general idea for the story arc based on a central premise.

To further solidify the story, I started writing a script, using very simple story language, while also trying to wrap in pieces from my family’s particular lexicon that has been created from Matthew’s very limited vocabulary. I have been thinking a lot about the way that language is used after reading Natalia Guinzburg’s ‘Family Lexicon‘. Guinzburg’s book is technically a non-fiction memoir about her life, growing up as a member of an influential Italian family in the 1960’s, but it reads like a novel which focuses on the in-group language used to build the family’s dynamic framework. My own family uses coded language based on the few words that Matthew chooses to communicate with us, and so I have worked them into the rough first draft in order to convey some of the rythm of the communciation within my family.

I started writing words a the same time as dreaming up images, so storyboarding and scripting sort of became a simultaneous process, but not all of the images line up with the words I have created thus far:

There once was a boy called Matthew.

Matthew was a little different from his other friends at school.

The other kids liked to play games together during recess and after school, but Matthew preferred to be alone.

The playground was so loud that sometimes it made his head spin, but in his own head, he could control the volume.

At the end of the day, Matthew would dash out of the door as soon as the last school bell rang.

He ran and ran as fast as he could: sprinting past the mean dog, jumping over the plants, and through the squeaky gate.

Phew! He had made it on time.

All of the balloons were still in place, but he decided to tighten the strings just to be sure.

Matthew’s house was special because all of the furniture was made out of balloons! (Might work on restructuring this.)

One day, Matthew stayed late at school, and when he got home, all of the balloons had floated to the ceiling:

The bed, the lamp, the drawers

It took him forever to get them all down again.

He kept it a secret….

The above is all I have so far, but I want there to be some sort of plot twist where one of the balloons will fly out of the house, and Matthew will have to get it back by asking for help.

Too, I want to incorporate the reason for the furniture being made of balloons: Matthew is afraid that another flood will come. Hurricane Katrina destroyed our original house in 2005, and everything was ruined because it sat in water. In this story, Matthew swaps the objects with balloons just in case it happens again. That way if water gets in, all of the furniture can float.

This is a first pass, but it is good to have a rough structure of the story in place. I already find myself questioning my justification/trying to figure out what objects need to be included. The physics of the book is a hang up as well as where exactly it will go. I do know that I would like to highlight the relationship of the other kids and not knowing Matthew’s internal anxieties, as well as the notion that the really important things in his life, the people, won’t float away.

That seems like the logical, albeit corny, conclusion, but it is a working draft.

On Wednesday November 27th, I decided to spend the majority of my day in Waterstones to look at the layout and wording of children’s books to get ideas for how my story could actually look as a children’s book.

Generally I loved it when there would be a change in pacing from the layouts–juxtaposing quieter single page spreads with a lot of breathing space to major double spreads like the one pictured below. (I didn’t like the the change in fonts for this book in spite of the fact that I did like where the text went in relation to the pictures.)

I also really loved when the picture books would have a dramatic shift in scale, such as is pictured below.

In addition to the cinematic paneling displayed in ‘Lights on Cotton Rock’, the panels allowed for a shift in color change and time in a very beautiful way. It is almost the layout equivalent of a dream-sequence, which is immediately accessible without words. This had notable links to the pacing of graphic novels created for adults. I also looked a these, but they tended to have more complex structures.

Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ seemed to have the most functional structure: it started off with small, confined panels in which the protagonist is in reality, but as the character drifts further into fantasy, the illustrations take up more and more of the page. When we return to reality in the end, the panels once again become confined. it is a beautiful way of confining the story in a very logical manner that compliments the simple story structure.

Overall, I came away excited by the possibilities of creating universes on the page by varying layout and scale, which motivated me to work on creating a script and story structure.

On Tuesday, November 26th, the communications cohort had our mid-project critique with Cato and Ian. After speaking with Mariana the previous day, I decided to dig deep and work to make some more panels in linocut of interior spaces that I associate with my younger brother Matthew, but I also decided to pitch the idea of the other components of the story that I wanted to tell. Generally, there are three outcomes:

1. Linocuts of the space/pieces of Matthew’s rituals: since talking to Mariana, I was able to create two blocks to print of different rooms in the house, and the strongest images are those using black paint.

• 

• 

2. Children’s book about the extended metaphor

3. General illustrations/writing about self discovery in understanding myself as a sister of a person with autism

In speaking about my plans, I wrote down these notes:

Generally, the notes were that I was speaking a lot about my brother, but there wasn’t evidence of me in the work itself. As a result, it would be important to document that process/incorporate my own voice as recording/writing.

Additionally, for the print outcomes in book/graphic novel form, it would be imperative for me to go and look at the layout of children’s books and graphic novels.

On Monday, November 25th, Mariana Sameiro was a guest tutor for the communications pathway. I had just spent the weekend creating prints of my childhood home to explore the concept of building spaces in panels/to experiment further with lino-cutting techniques.

At the time, I was still debating between styles to explore to shake out some version of the story I am trying to tell of my brother and his particular flavor of autism using a variety of media. Mariana and I discussed the implications of print in narrative–particularly for the application of linocut. I had been experimenting with color in the stamps I had created up to this point, but we both agreed that the images were stronger in black and white. However, as images, perhaps they didn’t say enough. Perhaps it would be beneficial to apply print to the means of adding text to the images. Because the pressure and application of the linocut to paper is so linked to the physicality of autism/anxiety relief, it might be interesting to see if I could use a letter press to apply text underneath the high contrast images.

Mariana pointed me in the direction of some artists who had created graphic works using a similar printing process, namely Giulia Garbin’s ‘The Street of Ink,” which is a publication that strives to tell a non-linear story of Fleet Street, which was an area in London which represents a fallen history of the physicality of printing after the shift to digital print.

The publication itself is a collage of stories of this place with letterpress-printed text an linocut images, so the processes of recording the story are fundamentally linked to its subject matter.

The images and text are stunning, and the graphic contrast created by the linocut images creates a slightly haunting aesthetic for the story of this fading practice of printing. It is almost like a shadow of history, created by anachronistic means. The book’s link to the process is clear and powerful. It also shows the possibility of non-linear storytelling in print and the possibilities of design layout that are possible using linocut. The double spread above shows how Giulia took advantage of the high contrast to accentuate the perspective of looking down on the street, while establishing a slightly dark, whimsical tone based on the imperfections of the lines. The image is clean, yet imperfect, highlighting the bias of the human hand in this type of print media.

In this publication, Giulia plays with different scales in her graphic storytelling. This has inspired me to attempt to create larger, connecting compositions using the linocut stamps in juxtaposition with one another. It has also made me re-think exactly what I think a graphic novel is. To me, this is a graphic publication, but it is not a comic. I like this because there isn’t the visual repetition of a classic graphic novel that, for me, monotonizes some of the images in a story.

To push the idea of playing with scale and surprise, Mariana suggest that I continue working with lino, but maybe I could go even bigger. What if I carved lino floor tiles? What if I projected into space? There are lots of possibilities in the black and white.

In order to start working with the idea of the impermanence of spaces as related to my brother’s personal rituals regarding our childhood home, I started carving the spaces into linoleum blocks. I created these spaces without furniture or figures-thinking that I could add them later on top.

• 

• 

The first image that I cut was of the living room space, which I drew from a photograph. I quite like the symmetry of the print and the stamp itself, creating a whole new visual space when put side by side.

Subsequently, I started experimenting with ink color and thickness and the perceived perception of positive and negative spaces.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Printing the same images using white ink on dark backgrounds created a much more sinister space than printing the positive on black. It was interesting to watch the variety of the tone of the spaces with the amount of ink. It was also interesting to watch them fade away after having used a stamp a couple of times.

The spaces, even without people or furniture have ended up saying more than I would have thought on their own. The linocut gives a whimsical and fun, warm tone to the space. However, when the prints inverse the colors, they become haunting, which is not at all the tone that is appropriate for a children’s books. So, perhaps the linocuts will tell the narrative in a different way than I had expected.

Lastly, I juxtaposed the Wendy’s iconography with the house, but it just made the space look like a jail. However, perhaps I will do more experiments using different ink densities and orientations.

On Friday, November 22, the Friday lecture was focused on failure. In the lecture, we heard stories of ‘failure’ from the tutors–which in discussion we discovered is a relative term of appraisal. Before the lecture, we had been tasked to bring in the work of another practitioner that we considered a failure as well as one of our own ‘failed’ pieces.

The work that I chose to speak about was the 2003 film ‘The Room’ directed by Tommy Wiseau. It is considered to be one of the worst films of all time. His work strikes me as an extra hard failure because he largely thought it to be a success. His unawareness to the quality of the work that he produced makes him seem as if he is someone who is unable to appraise his own work, which is a critical component of competency. But as a result, there has developed a culture that loves to bask in his failure. The film now has quite a cult following.

The afternoon part of the lecture involved modifying one of our pieces from the previous project, and I chose to revisit the linear version of the Guernica Parody that I completed for the Artifact project. I considered this to be a failure because the parody didn’t feel wholly justified. Picasso’s Guernica is revered to be one of the most powerful anti-war pieces of all time.

I took the piece and created a juxtaposition of the original composition with American iconography, but it felt a little in poor taste, or perhaps not entirely thought through. Picasso/me, Guernica/America, the Spanish Civil War & WWII/US political conflict. It felt as if I needed to reckon with it somehow.

So, I set out to fail harder at the parody by obscuring the imagery and using garish colors, but I found myself to be failing at failing because I wanted to keep some of the imagery. Over the images, I then wrote my key concerns of the piece: I am not Picasso, America is not Guernica.

I wrote this in acrylic paint, directly using the tube. Eventually my handwriting obscured the entire image.

Because the image was so dense with ink/paint, it was going to take a long time to dry. In order to remove some of the excess ink. The results created these interesting negatives of the words. It is still clear that the ink indicates letters, and they have a similar aesthetic to some street art tags. I liked the removal ink pieces because in a way, they were an anti-parody. The original piece was based on an image by another. However, these prints are purely what I have constructed on top of the existing image.

• 

• 

• 

I failed to create a parody because I created something entirely original with these blots. They took on a new life of their own.