Back Again
I fell out of making blog posts because my musings came more frequently than I had time to write them. In my time away, I got into surrealism, dabbled in oil pastels, and refined my old doodle style process into something concise, now that I have a good handle on Illustrator’s pen tool. I added two books to my constant reference library, Henry Drefuss’ “Symbol Sourcebook” and Mark Fox’s and Angie Wang’s “Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing“.
Automatism and paredolia transformed my subconscious shapes into alien creatures and planets and with my surrealism work I hope to depict more contemporary themes, settings, and subjects, while confronting the issues of the conscious and the absurdity of reality. I'‘m also played with the Zorn palette albeit an antithetical version because I’m not using an art program that blends colors like photoshop but the results have been interesting of something that feels warm, drab and western like a bad cowboy movie. You’ll see what I mean if you look in the automatism section.
I’ve rediscovered the work of cartoonist and animator Winsor McKay through Taschen’s Omnibus of Little Nemo and truly surreal “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend”. They say all things are connected if you look far back enough and I was pretty floored to find that McKay and his contemporaries drew inspiration from surrealism to develop their cartoons and animation. So for me cartooning is a simplified and direct sort of surrealism and in some ways the surrealism practice is also cartooning.
Going forward I would like to keep this page active by posting some more of my cartooning work, short simple comics, wimmelbilds, as well as these diary posts. I’m calling my current work “Third Culture“. I’m a Third Culture Kid, which is simply being raised in a host culture that isn’t the same as your parent’s culture. I was raised in American culture, not my Mum’s British culture or my Dad’s Jamaican culture. So I’ve always felt like an outside observer to American culture even though I’m living it just like many of you. “Third Culture“ will cover all sorts of topics but ultimately I’m having a laugh, whether at my own expense or the absurdity of it all.
Peace and Love.
