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.

For this project I have decided to revisit the idea of turning some of the experiences my extended family and I have with my younger brother Matthew. Recently, I’ve seen a surge in stories about people on the spectrum. There is even a new Netflix series out called Atypical, which follows the story of a relatively high functioning boy in his family/dating life in America. Other classic autism stories include feature films ‘Rain Man’, ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,’ and a documentary about Temple Grandin. However, I haven’t seen a whole lot of stories about people who are lower functioning/with severely limited language, which is the case for my brother.

There is a central metaphor that has been sitting in my head for a while, but right now it exists best as words, which is deeply ironic. But too, I can only know my brother’s phobias through my own experience.

Growing up, my brother had/has a lot of different routines that had to happen otherwise it would be a relative ‘end of the world’. Of course, this looked ridiculous to most people from the outside, but to him, when one of the routines was broken, it seemed to be an equivalent of breaking the laws of physics. Particularly, because I hypothesized that he had a slightly different understanding of object permanence than what is neurotypical. In a way, doing to routines was a way to make sure there wasn’t a ‘Butterfly Effect’ of change. Every time a routine was revisited, it re-established a known as well as a sense of reality. However, I want to visually convey such stakes and the stakes for relative fears more broadly.

Originally, the central metaphor was that there was a boy who lived his daily life, but all of his objects at home were actually balloons. Every day, he would have to return home to make sure all of the balloons were tied down, but no one could understand why he was so anxious about the fact. No one else understood that all of his objects were balloons. That was as far as I got.

To push the idea I created a memory-based mind map of my experiences with my brother, but I hope to get some feedback/additional information from my parents as well as the other people who know him.

Additionally, I have also started to work on some character design for this boy, keeping in mind who my target audience will be. At this juncture, the target audience is children ages 6-8 who may just be encountering people with these ‘different laws of physics’ for the first time, as this is an age when kids are entering compulsory school, at least in the US. However, the story and the metaphor may change. Or they may become many stories for many different audiences.

In this project I am also going to experiment with different mediums of expression, using both digital and traditional practices.

I have just scratched the surface with these sketches, but there will be much more to come.

On Friday, our lecture was divided into two pieces: a lecture/storytelling session of our turning points/wider context of our/our tutor’s work and an ADAS workshop to talk about the main piece of writing we will do for stage II, an essay about a contemporary practitioner within our specialism.

In the first part we were tasked with identifying parts of our practice that made us shift our practice in some way. For me, that answer is certainly based in technology over anything else. When I started drawing on the iPad, the notion of what I could do and the pace by which I could produce it totally changed. Before, I had used visuals mainly as a tool for creating beautiful, physical objects: paintings. I was quite precious and exact about trying to get the image to be as correct as possible–stuck in a physicality of painting. The blank canvas/page was quite intimidating to me, as was the notion of being alone in a studio for hours on end. The loneliness of the images’ existence in one spot in a home/gallery somewhere also wasn’t particularly appealing to me.

However, working digitally flipped all of that. Somehow the pace of working on an iPad has allowed me to break free of working for exactness. In fact, somehow the shift to digital has allowed me to much more whimsical in what I create: parodies, cartoons, and other silly images–this is perhaps partially because I know that my output is largely going to be social media/the internet. Figure painting used to be about my relationship to the people that I was painting, and the paintings would often be given to the subjects themselves. However, the images that I create digitally are about concepts, jokes, and content for people who I don’t know.

In a way, these digital images become the actualization of a type of writing that is best executed visually for readability, and how my ‘hand’ affects it is sort of secondary to that readability. In terms of style, digitally, I am consequently somewhat of a chemelion.

However, when looking at the larger context of people who have had gained access to digital drawing, I am only one in a much larger community of artists and designers, who are no longer primarily making visuals for printed magazines, but for screens. In fact, a good chunk of the cartoonists that I know primarily draw on iPads.

It was interesting to hear other people’s turning points as well. Some people also had technological breakthroughs that totally shifted their approaches. Others were affected by life events/political movements/books or places that they had travelled. With small groups we made a map of how these points intersected/connected.

We all seemed to connect with the idea of community having an impact on the kind of work that we make. There is a shift in the tone when our own environment or our audience environment changed such that our relative identity and responsibility have a different context/bear a different social responsibility. Technology has enabled a connectedness in a way that bypasses the physical environment, but we still largely agreed that the local communities were still vastly important to that internal change.

It is interesting, given that the RCA is its own micro community and audience. Consequently, it makes sense that we have all seen a shift in our work here. Looking forward, it is especially important to consider.