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).
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.