On Stretching
"Wherever we go, we are friends" -Sloth and Manatee
Sloth and Manatee
I recently made a little painting and the goal of the painting was for it to take all day to make it. Now it’s been a number of days, and it’ll probably take a week, or something. I’ve stopped counting.
One thing about being a cartoonist, for me anyway, is that we do our thing by reacting in the moment. We create shorthand and we use lines and words to reduce our thoughts and experiences down to the essence. I believe this is what gives comics such emotional heft; they are distilled. Cartoonists tend to mean what we say, each and every line.
But that immediacy can be bent into the idea of working fast, and that fast-ness plays into our cultural bias toward speed. Faster is supposed to be better. We got fax machines and then people wanted a reply immediately that used to take a postal-service-process to complete. Now, we want to order things from our bed and have them land on our doorstep at 4 in the morning.
This is what happens when we amortize things, or lay out their value over time. “Time is money,” we are told. When I was working making pizzas as a teen, we really internalized that we were doing a “good job” when we worked faster. We kept up with demand. Faster meant more pizzas sold. That stuff gets into your brain stem, man.
The flip side of this is, care. Care takes time and effort and investment. We know when we are looking at something that is done with great care. An oil painting. A carving. A beautiful rug or a tapestry. A roast. A garden plot. A photo album. A dress. A fence. An operating room. Care can appear anywhere.
And so, I’m wading into the care part, the part that isn’t the end-result. The learning of software, the rough drafts, the trial and error. Working with the garage door open, staying with the process, for much much longer than I am used to, in order to stretch.
And boy, it’s weird, man. It turns out, the world isn’t on this vibe at all. There was a huge earthquake, and I didn’t know. How could I not know this? The whole world knows this! Because I was doing something else, for a period of time. That’s all. But that sensation of stepping off the moving walkway is real, for sure. What a time.
My painting professor in school, Frank Lobdell, kept telling me to slow down my brush. I realize now that the brush was just trying to keep up with a me that was conditioned that faster was better, because time is money, and productivity is a thing, and all of this was landing on a brain that is already full of bees.
And so now, I am stretching.
Brainwaves
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Art!
Here is the project I was talking about above, in progress..
Here’s what it looks like mostly done, I think
BunnyFrogCatSnake
Things Of The Week
Nothing, just a new dinosaur. And don’t tell me that you don’t hear this fellow talking in kind of a derpy voice. You know that’s what he sounded like.
Is it the 80s-ness of this? Yes. Is it the colors? Also yes.
This has a swear in it but it is worth it. Motherf—king wind farms.
Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.
May you wear your special shirt, may you take great care or have someone take great care with you, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy
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