"Imaginary Art Show"

I made a new comic, and I really like this one. I think you will too. Click here to read it.



This one is exactly what it says in the title: a picture I made of an imaginary art show. Actually, it's an art show I dreamed, not just imagined: one very quick flash in front of my eyes in that last moment between sleeping and wakefulness where you aren't seeing the world around you. If you want to "take a step back" and see the whole thing at once, click here. Dream images are incredibly important to me as an artist for a few reasons: first, their meaning isn't immediately clear, which makes drawing them much more engaging than simply fleshing out the details of a picture you've already consciously contrived. It's a process of discovery. Also, that lack of pre-contrivance tells you about yourself as not just an artist but a visual thinker -- like, what images are really coming out of my head when I'm not chained to the realism of capturing waking life, or even a more constructed fantasy world. Drawing dream images is a good way to figure out what your truly natural facilities as an artist are. Plus, I think they always hold a strong element of enigma, like a question without an answer. There is never a conscious idea about them, never anything they've set out to accomplish. They're simply here because they're here. Other dream comics I've drawn are here and here.

So I dreamed about a gallery exhibition, and it looked like this: two photos printed onto big canvases sandwiching a circle of eight two-panel watercolor comics with only color in them; and those sandwiching another piece, the same size, with "3120" written on it. Everything up against a beige wall, with the top of the whole thing maybe nine feet off the ground. I couldn't recall all of the color combos on the watercolor pieces, only that they looked somehow futuristic to me: color harmonies that aren't really in popular use now but looked like they would be one day. I've been going to a lot of galleries here in LA lately, and thinking more about the rather comics-specific element of sequencing that comes into the way they're hung. (Frank Santoro and I had a chat about this that you can listen to here.) It seemed like a fun challenge to create a gallery show in miniature, and so rather than drawing everything on one sheet of paper, I set about creating what's basically a 2-D diorama: I painted the "wall" sheet beige, drew the "photos" on the most canvas-y paper I had, chopped down a sheet of xerox paper into nine little pieces to do the watercolors on, and then pasted them all up in the configuration in saw them hung in my dream. Not a bad way to spend a free afternoon. Go check it out!