Brain Food – Lucy Bellwood

Double Dipping

Sometimes I’ll jot down a word I think I haven’t heard before, only to locate it in the existing Word Hoard archive on my own website. Apparently I logged bruit (sounds like “brewie”) on this site in August of 2020, possibly in response to learning more about my dad’s many vascular conditions, but it appears again in my notes from reading Excession earlier this year! Leave it to Ian Banks to shove something like that in the description of a spaceship.

[Edit: mentioned this to Zina and I actually learned the word because she was doing her MA in 2020 to become a Physician Associate!]

Brain Food, Comics, Reading

“I draw the path to walk”

A page from Laura Knetzger's comic with lush black and white forests. The text reads "My friends don't come so often when I call anymore. It's my fault. They're children, and I asked them to earn me money instead of just playing."

Still thinking about this short comic on creative practice by Laura Knetzger.

Last night I sat in a cloud of campfire smoke with a friend, talking non-stop about the balancing act of creative practice. He’s a printmaker and a bookbinder, two disciplines that require a great deal of precision and craft. We agreed that we want to encourage everyone to make art, to make music, to dance, to be unrepentantly bad at things, to understand that there is art we make because we are dedicated to a craft and art we make because it’s an expression of our innate human desire to play. How it isn’t contradictory to preach the necessity of both. Sometimes I do feel like a hypocrite, cheerleading people who believe they “can’t draw” while internally upbraiding my own ability to put pictures in boxes. But these things are not exclusive.

Lately I’ve needed the energy of 2010-era Alec Longstreth, delivering this lecture at The Center for Cartoon Studies. Alec—who had, at the time, sworn not to shave or cut his hair until he finished his graphic novel, Basewood—was a human lightning bolt. He embodied that spirit of craft and professionalism, but with a punky, DIY energy that made it all feel both radical and attainable. I was so fired up after hearing him give this talk that I actually pulled all-nighters (something I was loath to do even at the tender age of 19).

A page from Alec Longstreth's zine Your Comics Will Love You Back all about setting reasonable timelines for your work by tracking progress and number of pages finished over time.

This image of his encapsulates everything I’ve come to rely on in the process of drawing Seacritters. I’m not perfect—I still occasionally underestimate the time things will take and fall prey to distraction and despair—but I’m committed to this idea.

That summer at CCS I found myself surrounded by 36 other people who wanted to take making comics seriously. I had never been in a room with people who shared that dream. It’s hard to remember what that was like now, having worked in studios full of creative professionals and lived in cities lousy with cartoonists and traveled all over the world to huge conventions and tiny festivals crammed with passionate people hawking zines and graphic novels and minis. But it felt propulsive at the time, and right now I need the creative equivalent of jet fuel.

I need the reminder that there are other people out there touching the lightning bolt for the first time, and channeling sparks into the page.

Activism, Brain Food

One Thing Several Ways

“Some people think I do ‘a lot of different things’ but I think that I am doing only one thing several different ways: I support folks, in groups, workshops, and individually, as they figure out what is theirs to do, and what is not, and how we can aim our labors and our gifts toward negotiating the peripeteia, the turning point that is upon us. We are living through a transformative and dangerous era. I see my work as trying to marshal courage, compassion and collective resources to alleviate inevitable suffering – and in my most idealistic moments, I can imagine we are seeding a new world.” — Martha Crawford

The first line of this paragraph really hit me in the solar plexus when I read it. I still don’t feel the urge to post things on Bluesky, but when I do stick my head in there every so often after following a link, I tend to see posts by Kate Schapira. Her work with the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth has been inspiring to me since I interviewed her way back in 2016 for my comic on sail cargo. She mentioned having learned some valuable skills in one of Martha’s cohorts, and after clicking through to Martha’s website I can see that they’re clearly singing from the same hymnal. It’s nice when people I admire are connected to other people who clearly get it.

Looking forward to digging through her offerings in the weeks to come (including this workshop called GROUP GROUP!!).

Blog, Brain Food

A String of Letters

My friend Christopher made himself an acronym to live by (PAASH: P.E., Art, Admin, Study, Help) and I liked the idea so much I had to make my own. The general idea, as far as he described it, was to capture the things he does in any given day or week that make him feel like a whole person. If something feels off, he can take a look at the acronym and see what’s missing.

After a lot of messy note taking and backronymification I landed on CLEAR: Create, Learn, Embody, Act Up, Rest.

Create: make something with your hands, has to be tangible, no computer shit

Learn: engage the conspiracy string brain, read a book with a pencil in hand, take a class, listen to a podcast

Embody: move in any capacity, whether concerted exercise or rolling around on the floor like a pill bug

Act Up: engage in some form of activism, ideally connected to community, that pushes you outside your comfort zone

Rest: the hard one, zero input time, staring into space, lying on the ground, generally after lunch

They’re not so different, really, but I think it does add something to have to come up with your own. I’d be very curious to see other people’s down the line. Maybe we all, deep down, want the same five things out of a day. (There’s a thought: should it be limited to five letters? That’s just how these two examples shook out, but I see no reason to limit the parameters.)

Blog, Brain Food

Noodling in the Dark

There’s something undeniably different about finding a community via blogs.

Social media spoiled us for feeling like we were all in the same giant room—liking, replying, reblogging, DMing and so on—but when I go to quote a friend or draw attention to a project on my own site, I find myself applying a higher standard of stewardship. How do I want to introduce other people to this person? What work of theirs really sings to me? I always try to do my due diligence with tags and links and properly formatted images, because we’re making our own internet out here and we owe it to each other to get it right.

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram. There are also fewer people to keep up with overall. I’m more likely to unfollow feeds whose updates I don’t leap at the chance to consume. I’m more aware of nuanced opinions, annual projects, and the inner thoughts of relative strangers.

Because blogs are much quieter than social media, there’s also the ability to switch off that awareness that Someone Is Always Watching. I’m far more likely to write or make things just to please myself on my site. I’m also always genuinely delighted and startled when someone tells me they’ve read a post.

I don’t want to lose that feeling of noodling around in the dark.

Brain Food, Ojai, Watching

“What I’m having is fun.”

A vibrant painting by Christopher Noxon showing a riot of pink and green undulating fields, buildings, mountains, and rivers.

After looking over the Big Weirdies at a recent show, a friend said with a wink-wink laugh, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

He’s welcome to it! What I’m having is fun.

I really like this post from my pal Christopher about his approach to “super-saturation and world-building” in his paintings without the use of psychedelics (despite what many people seem to think upon viewing them).

A vibrant painting by Christopher Noxon showing a riot of pink and green undulating and radiating fields, buildings, mountains, cacti, and lakes.

Brain Food, Reading

Spells

Add cardboard (carbon), gently torn, to some dried leaves (carbon), and the leftover zucchini bits and broccoli floret (nitrogen) from dinner, and you’ll end up with a singularly useful and generative substance (“soil”), from which all other life now stems. Is that not amazing? And it’s available to you. The earth’s deepest and most primal incantation.

I lost track of Cassie for a year or two but I’m now I’m subscribed to her newsletter about compost and it’s great.

Brain Food

Manufactured Longing

Working on the music, for me, it’s kind of important to not fake it in some ways, to not try to force this emotional state out of it, to sort of pay attention to what’s going on in your life, if you’re feeling inspired or motivated just letting it happen. […] Especially after you’ve released a bunch of records for a long time, you don’t want to manufacture longing.
RIP Brian McBride

Brain Food, Experiments

Inventory

I signed up for another one of Jocelyn’s online classes last month, and so far I’ve found it incredibly helpful in finding my way back to bits of myself and my creative practice that have been occluded by caregiving. One of the exercises was a mind map exploring all the tools we use to access and interact with our creative selves. The four stages she suggests are Ritual, Connection, Collection, and Synthesis. Here’s a big mess of ideas around those hubs:

A mind map showing various quadrants of creative connection.

I love letting myself use little doodles to explore concepts like this. I think it started after Shay Mirk shared some More/Less lists they’d made for the year and inspired me to make my own. (Pretty sure I did one for 2022 as well but I can’t find it so here’s an old one.)

A list of Less and More goals, featuring things like equating pain and work, blogging, ocean, trying to go it alone, and other little illustrated concepts.

I see these inventories and remember that I have such a robust series of practices for doing what I do. I also see how the things I’m pursuing in my life right now have roots in this list from two years ago, which I love. It all takes such a long time.

I recorded a Ramble about all this the other night that I still haven’t edited and uploaded to Patreon, but it’s coming. Still circling the question of my job and what I think it is vs. what it actually is.

Brain Food, Reading

Four Reading Rhymes

I’m washing my eyes with words and hoping something turns up that works as I’m moving forward.
Robert Eggers, on writing dialect for The Lighthouse

7. People pretend there are readers and non-readers. But there are just people willing to practice the patience necessary to get hypnotized, and those who quit before their eyes turn into spirals. To read is to welcome this hypnosis, await its arrival, then trust its direction.
Gabi Abrão

Life happened because I turned the pages.
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading