Drawing & Painting Thesis & GradEx
May 3, 2013 at 8:17 AM May 2nd - 5th is GradEx at OCAD where I am showing some of my thesis work. Here is my Artist's Statement and my full thesis paper for anyone who is interested in reading more about my work.
Nick Etherton
Nick Etherton
The Young Artist’s Journey
“(Wishing for) a place at the table of high culture is an admission that you don’t have one. The way to get a place at the table of high culture is to pull up a chair and say something interesting”
– Douglas Wolk, from Reading Comics (pg. 64)
These are Douglas Wolk’s inspiring words to comic book creators of all kinds. In his book, Reading Comics Wolk makes a strong argument for the necessity of a confidence boost amongst the comics community. (Wolk, 60) The book chronicles the history of comics and presents a wide array of tools for critically thinking about the medium. This has been what I’ve been mulling over for the past year, in which time I’ve read Reading Comics three times.
Taking these ideas about embracing what is great about the comic book medium and culture, I’ve allowed myself to create work that honestly reflects who I am. An epic fantasy story expressing my struggles in art school through comic influences and the genre fiction tropes I love. The medium of my work presented here is not a comic book or comic strips, but comics informed the decisions made in their creation. In order to help structure these ideas I researched the concept of the Hero’s Journey; that people naturally gravitate towards a single story structure, also called the mono-myth. Christopher Vogler’s work on the subject opened my eyes to the elegance and flexibility of such templates. Within this structure I used a metaphor I’ve had in my mind for a while now of a fantasy world where heroes fight with implements of art. I’ve created a quasi-autobiographical account of my experiences as a young artist through this metaphor.
The autobiographical nature expands beyond the storyline; cartoons & comics have always been important to me, however it was cartoons that I grew up on. When I was younger I rarely had access to comic books. My favourite comic book characters I knew mostly as cartoons. This special relationship with cartoons based on comics has always informed my drawing style. The animation styles I’ve pulled from are too numerous to count but one prominent example is the Avatar: The Last Airbender series, which has such a stunning simplicity to its colour and design. Avatar has a lot of Japanese influences but is an American produced series and as such does have a unique voice. I paid specific homage to Avatar in the design of my antagonist Monk character as it had inspired much of my aesthetic choices for this work.
The range of influences from popular culture in my work is pretty vast. One of the biggest design influences I wanted to explore is pulp stories & their descendants in modern culture. Star Wars & Indiana Jones both have iconic & striking posters that have stuck with me as examples of engaging glimpses into a greater story. This was a major influence in my decision to show my story through posters as opposed to full comics. I found myself with an inherently epic scale to the story I’d envisioned and saw comic book covers as an effective way to capture the grandeur of the entire story.
The choices of moments (McCloud, 13) I made were informed by the structure of the hero’s journey and the idea of the pregnant moment. In narrative theory the pregnant moment is a moment that appears when something has just happened and something else is about to happen. (Knapp) Making sure that all my posters had some sense of this idea insured that I was creating exciting scenes and ultimately the best representations of the respective stage of Vogler’s structure.
Christopher Vogler is a descendent of the work of Joseph Campbell and has refined and re-contextualized Campbell’s ideas into a concise analysis of the Mono-myth structure. (Vogler, xiii) In his book the Writer’s Journey, Vogler details twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey and what each stage entails. He does a great job explaining the story function, and potential options for each stage. Though this form of story structure can be seen as formulaic, the possibilities are very open as to how each stage is interpreted. Vogler makes a point to stress that depending on the type of story being told, these ideas can be pushed and pulled in order to convey whatever the authour requires. (Vogler, xviii)
I’ve allowed myself to dive headlong into the Heroes Journey & build the world of my story. Worrying less about having clever concepts or trying to reference specific artists through parody. I had spent a lot of time working within my fantasy world focused on poking fun or critiquing famous artists. This ended up feeling like a soulless pursuit of cleverness and novelty. I’ve shifted to a place of pure drawing joy, learned by advice given to me during the development of this work by my advisor Jon Scott.
The premise of a world where all heroes fight with pen & paintbrush, while fun and exciting, is not a story. I had a premise but no story to tell. The application of the Hero’s Journey as a tool to extract my own story through that premise was invaluable. This has allowed me to explore my feelings about the art world and truly express my experiences in a more genuine and rewarding way.
As I read through Vogler’s exploration of the stages in the Hero’s Journey, I began applying them to my experience. I saw how obvious each element aligned with my own life. My high school art teacher fit into the role of the Mentor, guiding me forward into the special world of the art school. (Vogler, 12) A place where I’d face challenges again & again, wearing me down until I seized the sword of my salvation; the pen. I spent a large chunk of art school trying to create the “fine art” I thought I was expected of me. It wasn’t until I had gotten to my lowest point of frustration where I finally realized that I needed to change. I focused my energies on studying comics & began learning about producing the best work of my university career. All the archetypes and structural elements of the Hero’s Journey allowed me to best express my frustrations and deal with them through my art.
The metaphor I’ve created of “art as violence” is not very subtle. I have experienced resistance to my ideas about art because of they often fall outside of the high ideals of “fine art”. For me references to popular culture or creating an illustrative narrative work are important & interesting avenues of art. I’ve had to “battle” in critiques and wasted a lot of time creating work for others and not myself. This feeling of being attacked for making the type of work that I enjoy was what caused me to struggle creatively for a long time. Using the new tools I’ve found within Wolk’s theory and Volgler’s method I was able to start truly exploring my feelings and push my metaphor beyond the simple & reactionary statement that “art is war”.
I began to explore other ideas of how an institution of art functions. This invokes a world where everyone is told they are “the one”. In essence every student in an art school is the hero of their own Hero’s Journey. The metaphor has the potential to be grim and pessimistic, but I have tried to use it as a tongue in cheek way to express my frustrations & accept institutions of art as they are.
I’ve used this story as a way to empower myself & in doing so realized that much of my frustration was self-imposed. I still do sometimes fall into the trap of trying to create “Art with meaning” without realizing. My art has grown and become more genuine as I learn that if I want to draw at the table of high culture, I should just pull up a chair.
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