Fires and Boxes of Tissues

A lot has happened in the bosom of the Gomez clan.

As I spend my office hours in the doctor's surgery downstairs type type typing away and recording the deepest despair of mental illness in cool, clinical language, my family upstairs has exploded. The phone calls began and this contagion of bewildering tragedy suddenly splintered across the Atlantic and the Irish sea to afflict more Gomez's. The as-of-yet un-scathed Gomez's across the globe board up their windows and hope to wait out this hereditary plague.

When personal tragedy and hardship hits families, as is inevitable, it hits them like a tsunami; hard, heavy, and one thrashing wave after the another. Then it leaves the residual flooding, the electric fires, the power outages and a major life readjustment.

And yet, somehow, when things seem so desperate and numbing, there are straws to be clutched at.

My artistic flame has kept alight. In fact, against all sense of decency, it has ignited. Like a firecracker.

I know these aren't firecrackers, but it's a Halloween-irony thing

The thing is that I don't struggle to get my creativity going anymore. At all. This is incrediby hard for me to believe. I really accepted for a while there that the fairy muses had finally given up on me. I wouldn't blame them; my decision to study Corporate Law probably didn't do anything to make them feel welcome. I was very much the lost cause of art inspiration. I sat through a few years of Art Soc classes sitting at my sketchpad like a zombie, supressing low squirmings of jealousy like maggots inside my gut. I eventually stopped attending them entirely and dabbled with the Arts Admin side of things instead.

Now, anything gives me ideas. Markings on the wooden floor, bites of the news, splinters of sentances, jewelery on a news reader's neck, flashes of scenery out of the car window, the shape of someone's nose, flies caught in the lamps, shreds of tissue in the washing machine, half collated fragments of memories, the shape of a box...

When I have a moment of repose, like when I sit on the bus for a consolatory Galway visit, the ideas just pour out and explode and sizzle and evolve over and over. For hours. I can't keep up with it.

The glorious Feda Bus from Donegal to Galway. Four hours of boring? Not anymore.

I am constantly reaching for my phone to record slivers of ideas, stories and dialogues in my drafts folder (of course, about 30% of these ideas are pure brilliance, the other 70% are strange, questionable shite). When I squeeze my mobile back into my skinny jean pocket, I will have invariably thought of another entirely unconnected idea and have to squrim all over the seat to maneouver it back out again. Derp.

I'm having a genuine Degas moment, in the sense that I'm falling in love with everyday life. It's like being a child again. There are stories spilling out from under the doorframes, whilst the sadness barks in through the windows.I will definitely have to research this as it feels like a definite phenomena - shock to the system induces long-anticipated art attack? I won't like what this already seems to suggest.

Before deciding that moving back was more financially viable, I had seriously considered a good stint of hermitage. Cezanne style, in the middle of Beautiful Fucking No-Where. I came home to discover the origins of my artistic process, to get the addiction back and let the bug bite and drink deep. Cezanne painted glorious rocks and fruit, space and dimension. The good, hard stuff of being. I will have to be like water.

The Gomez family explosion continues unabated. I feel a little like I'm 16 again, blocaded under the stairs, listening to power metal, and scribbling away furiously out of my Buffy comics to cope with the anxiety of the formative years. There is now a strong sense of powerlessness that pervades everything.

I am always less powerless when I am arting.

The momentum has started, for both ideas, and arting, and art blogging. The synapses are firing and glowing urgently.

So I keep filing, making labels, calling solicitors and trying to be cool and professional (they could employ me one day, better look good, the dreary and boring Heron says), making appointments and keeping the box of tissues stocked. In the office and in the house. I will keep being here for the Gomez's.

Whilst the mugs of tea pile up, I will keep gratefully idea gathering. The fairy muses are being generous to me now. The planting and harvesting of the finished products, however, will have to lay in wait. I trust that Gods of Diligence will appear in a shower of stars and toss me into the field with my arting boots on when the time is right.

(You are absolutely welcome for that Ted talk link btw. And you thought the Ken Robinson one was good? Pah!)

One of those work in progress. Massive antipation towards inkscaping it.  Never stop believing!

24HourComic

I attempted a 24 hour comic at the weekend. It was organised by the ever-admirable and fantastic Galway PubScrawl.

Art Everywhere! Yay!

Well, I got to the venue - 091labs in Galway city - about 6 hours late, so I attempted an 18 hour comic and fell pray to a very Gomez mistake -> coming up with a massive idea, tripping over myself to adequately brainstorm and physically create it, crashed onto the couch and slept for about 2 hours. All things considered however, I'm pretty proud of my idea and my execution was much better than expected. I think that this idea is worth a lot more care and detail. Here's 10 of the pages, including the original brainstorm. Most are not finished:

Brainstorming.

 The brainstorming process for me, from beginning a painting to formulating a blogpost, comprises of a big A4 sheet of paper from one of my many categorised notebooks (refuge of the obsessive and of the person-who-can-never-get-any-work-done) and a big circle in the middle with the theme written in it. For the 24 hour comic, I pulled out my phone and opened up my drafts folder. In there I have scribbled every random idea that is story or art related that came to me on the the go, whether I was cleaning the chandeliers (see giant chandelier monsters) or sitting on bus (which I'm at a lot).

Page 1. Cross-hatching is megahard.

 Two ideas have been knocking around my head these past few weeks - how I want to rewrite pretty much every film I watch these days and coming to terms with my aspergers syndrome traits. Oh, and of course, the early twenties, just out of college, mid-life crisis. So I managed to squeeze a comic idea out of that.

Page 2. The other 24comic people looked at this and saw a whale blowhole fetished. SIGH.

Page 3. It was around midnight and suddenly CYBORGS for 3 pages

I had a great few pages about cyborgs and I drew the most marvelous non-sexualised robot woman and it was great. You may have noticed that I dislike using panels - I read too many absolutely gorgeous, flowing, nubile manga art growing up and it stayed with me.

I really liked my cookie-cut outs in this.

I've been at this feminism-in-comics theme since I was thirteen I discovered recently whilst looking through my old sketchpads. That's right, before it was cool. Are you getting the cyborg-aspergers metaphor yet? Also I didn't want to imply that asexuality = respect for women. That would have been truly terrible.

Didn't touch up this one very much because it wasn't finished and I wanted the pencil lines and roughness to be clear.

This turned out too Ghost-in-the-Shell for me, even though I did try to normalise her as a woman by making one of her boobs a little bit wonkier than the other.

This is blue and relatively untouched up because I was playing with the Curve option and then suddenly BLUE so it stayed.

 Naturally I didn't finish this page either (I was skimming over pages and then coming back to them when I felt ready to) and those blank rectangles are DVD cases that I was going to fill in with many other films that..just could have gone a much better way.

You, Me and Dupree alternative plotline. How I really wished it went.

You, Me and Dupree was a fascinating film for it's lessons on Hollywood's How-To-Write-A-Popular-Comedy inventory sheets and the lowest current demoniator masculinity issues of the beginning of the 21st century. It will be studied in history and sociology classes in the future. Well, so I see it.

I also had ideas prepared for King Kong (shudder), Inglorious Basterds (at the request of another 24hour comic-er) and X-Men 3 (shudder again). This was the closest I came to finishing one.

Ed Wood as the Dickens-esque Ghost of Artist Integrity

I fucking love Ed Wood. He was the perfect character who could provide a breach from reality to the surreal and fantasy in this comic, as Jack Temple travels through time and space to make all the movies he hates not crap. Also yes I am implying that aspies have super powers, because they do :)

The Elemental Causes that kill Artist Integrity in the movies.

Seeing as the Phantom Tollbooth made me, I like to turn abstract concepts that effect personality and happiness into cartoony manifestations. Here are the 4 (I had yet to draw number three) causes of all films going to crap, in my opinion. The conflict here is that all of these causes are traits that aspergers as a syndrome fight against every day -> being aspergers means that you often don't understand a lot of jokes and sarcasm or take everything very literally, constant distraction and often ADD are part of everyday life, and aspies can be super naive and fall trap to manipulation easily (which they also often can't understand or fathom).


This idea definitely got a bit too heavy for the method I chose to deal with it. And too dense. But I would LOVE to make this idea my first definitive comic project. A comic dealing with aspergers primarily, and with surreal and fantasy elements, and the often sexist, racist, classist agenda in popular film culture.