Nadine and I went to the Forest Festival up in Jackey’s Marsh in the North of Tasmania in Feb. Drive West Today (me) played in the forest there – it was beautiful … nothing nicer than a hippie festival. I only made time for a quick sketch that weekend – here it is. The Great Western Tiers are really nice. I’d like to go back and check out the caves up there if I get a chance sometime. Apparently they’re spectacular. 
Tag Archives: Santospirito
Forest Festival 2012
22 MarThe Sleuth Exhibition – process diary #1
13 MarWarning – art-wank!
Please note: To ensure all wank does not go by unmissed – all French words are in italics .
This post is going to be part of a slowly growing process diary where I will talk about some of the strange discoveries I have made whilst working on Sleuth … which is an exhibition of comics where I will be sticking up comics all around a gallery room. It is a big personal experiment in how comics might be able to work. If you’re interested in this post, then you might be interested in other places where people write art-wanky content about comics such as Australian Pat Grant’s website (just google him), international places such as the Inkstuds (radio show and website), and other places.
For the most part I have decided to make comics that are quicker to write and make, which largely means that there will be drawings of characters without much background details, relying more heavily on the words to give context to the characters. This is mostly so that the interplay between the different comics is where the action is felt by the reader / viewer.
Back-story – For the past few years I have been slaving away on the Long Weekend, which is graphic novel (non fiction comic … is that still called “novel”?) which is long slog … and my heart’s desire was to churn out some comics that were far more intuitive and less thought through. I came up with a loose idea for criss-crossing comics on a wall and applied for a spot at an artist run space (Inflight ARI) in Hobart and got a slot for November 2012.
Even though I still had more of the Long Weekend to ink I haven’t had much left to do in the way of decision making, I had pencilled out most of the last chapter and made most of the grand decisions so it was down to the stage which I like to think of as meditation – just inking away over pencils that had been decided upon a while back. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to decide at all … au contraire – inking is still a very malleable process, lots of things get decided then too … just no where NEAR as much decisions need to be made as the earlier layout and pencilling stages (at least not the way I do things).
SO – my grand master plan was to make something super quick and dirty, making lots of mini-comics, but they wouldn’t be designed for the page, they’d be designed to spread across walls!!
“That’s not a big deal is it?”
WELL – it means a whole different bunch of considerations must be made! Which is when my creative interest is piqued! ( I have a fairly restless mind that needs to be engaged, or I get mssively bored … hence the need for a new challenge that is different to last overly ambitious thing I tackled).
The first thing I decided to do was to make a rough plan of the gallery space, and draw what it could look like … this is before I’d done any writing per se. I then decided on some generalised themes that rattle around my obssessive brain – mostly with a slight Jungian bent to them such as psyche and spirituality in modern Australia, Australian history, particularly that of explorers who die in the pursuit of glory (a ridiculous Australian pastime) … I decided to use these characters that I had invented in 2010 that I had in this comic that I called the Department of Conversation – Paul and Mary … and old retired couple, the baby-boomers, the grey nomads. I decided a comic involving a meandering conversation between them might make for a good “spine” for the whole artwork, something simple to get it all started. I’m quite fond of these two, they’re quite warm and funny in an old-couple kind of way.
I decided after that that I should make a lot of my decisions on the fly as it would give the whole piece a much more improvised feel, which would make it a process of discovery for me … I would discover the links between unrelated comics myself, perhaps I won’t even realise them until afterwards when other people point out links that they’ve made.
I recall a conversation I had with Bernard Caleo in 2011 about non sequitar arrangements (that’s Latin, not French), if you place things next to eachother and show it to people, their brains are hard-wired to search for the link themselves, they assume that since you’ve shown it to them then there is a reason, if you haven’t explained it to them then they will make up their own reason. HOW INTRIGUING!! That’s how comics work … or at least in part. You show people two images, they actively create the link between them panel to panel … but what about story to story?? That’s one of the things that I’m exploring myself. If I stick up a whole bunch of comics that intersect at certain points, then people will assume there’s a link, (otherwise why would I have put them all together) and then they will search for the meaning behind it all … provided I’ve kept if vague enough then unforseen meanings can spring into being within the reader / viewer’s mind!!
Pages 61-64
2 Mar
If you’d like to read the first chapter in its entirety go here – Friday
Previous pages in this chapter (Saturday) – 58-60
Or go back to the start of Saturday
Next pages – 65-68.
So far I’ve managed to complete up to page 84: the end of Chapter Two: Saturday.
Today I begin inking the final chapter … I have to rethink the ending.
The first page here is one of the more important ones to my mind, philosophically speaking that is.
Analysing Indigenous peoples is a little beside the point in this and in many things.
Looking at all of us together, the places of our interaction is more the task at hand.
I suspect that one of the reasons that the topic of Indigenous people is such an explosive topic with so many people (i.e. we are so politically correct, so polarised, so angry on their behalf, so angry the opposite way) is because the majority of us in Australia have mixed feelings about our role in the current state that the large amount of Indigenous people live in. Our role as perpetrators is traumatic for us also. In harming others, we harm ourselves also. In denigrating others we debase ourselves. When people point out our awful deeds as Australians, we are quick to become defensive, quick to blame the victim, quick to place the responsibility elsewhere. I suspect we do this because of our collective sense of guilt.
This is a difficult thing to depict, I hope that my slightly imaginative way of doing is effective.
In many ways, drawing this comic has been my way of unpacking this sense of guilt out and finding a way to think about modern Australia.
Pages 58-60
21 FebSynopsis and overview
First chapter – Friday
Previous pages in Saturday
Pages 58-60 (note page 59 is incomplete at this stage)
Next pages – 61-64
This last page is one of my favourites … the fun part about adapting something is that you can pretty much do anything you want with the words because they have no images associated with them. The image of the old man in the backyard singing the Tingari images with Craig’s words about imagination I thought was a great idea … it took me a little by surprise when I’d finished it and stood back to look at the image … as with all things comic based – it’s hard to imagine what it really will look like until you have finished the damn thing. Perhaps the more experienced people have a better sense of whether something won’t work at all … but I still suspect that even experienced people are taken by surprise when their ideas REALLY work.
As I mentioned in the last blog about the long weekend, the image of the map of Iraq is left unfinished at this point until I can get a copy of Craig’s actual map – even though it was only 100 years ago, it’s amazing how many place names look totally different on the modern map versus the old one. I liked the old map sooo much that I wanted to use it in the comic … so I’m waiting on Craig to take a photo and send a copy to me.
The first page here owes a lot to some of the notes in Bardon & Bardon’s amazing Papunya Tula book. It’s a truly monumental book which details so much about the PT movement in the Western Desert that it’s beyond belief – it’s a little like trying to read Strehlow’s works … it sort of saturates the mind and you kind of … implode a little trying to comprehend what it all bloody means … until you put it down to tend the veggie patch.
In other news – Craig San Roque himself is off to America, the land of the free where you shouldn’t forget to tip. He’s going to visit the CG Jung Institute of San Francisco and he’s going to present some of this comic in a presentation that he’s doing over there … how terribly exciting. I did attempt to send him a booklet of the first 60 or so pages of this comic by Express Post … but apparently Hobart to Alice Springs would still take 5 working days to arrive at Craig’s doorstep (this is EXPRESS post we’re talking about people) and he leaves for the states on Sunday … so no dice! So – digital it is!!
Pages 51-57
10 Feb
First Chapter – Friday
For general synopsis and whatnot go to the menu bar at the top and click on The Long Weekend (Graphic Novel)
Previous pages in second chapter – Saturday
These pages were endlessly interesting for me – doing lots of ridiculous research into Iraq and Lebanon … the map of Mesopotamia is incomplete as I haven’t had the time to look at Craig’s old map as of yet … but for the sake of people reading this I have put it up anyways. It’s at this part of the essay / comic that the scope of the ideas start to branch all over the planet. Perhaps those readers more accustomed the the Western application of archetypal behaviour will be more at home with the presence of Adonis and Inanna / Ishtar / Venus (and all the other goddess analogues you can think of). The drawings of Saddam Hussein were also fun to do … I checked on the web for photos of him and was a little shocked to find millions of copies of the video of his hanging available for anyone to have a gander at … well, I assume it’s not propoganda material and it’s real, happy to be corrected of course if anyone knows of the details of that video … anyway – I chose to use it, one of the flashes of cameras as he was swinging served as a good model for the drawing. i haven’t decided whether or not I wish to spell it out to the reader what it is they’re looking at or to just leave it as an image … though I appreciate that not all will get that that’s the same bloke as the picture above it with the poor Kurdish folks in the background. any thoughts, comments people? Please leave below.
Hope you’re all well.
Incidentally – Australian comics just got better with Pat Grant’s beautiful Blue now available!!
A mysterious Tasmanian dog
12 Jan
Here’s a link to the Fox Eradication Program in Tasmania. They have some interesting bits and bobs. Its a controversial topic … given that most people in Tassie don’t believe that there are foxes here at all … and its all a waste of money … here’s the stats from that website
Physical Evidence of Fox Activity Collected in Tasmania (since 1998)
Carcasses – 4
Skull – 1
Blood – 1
Footprints – 2
Fox Positive Scats – 59
Pages 47-50
8 Jan
Here is the beginning of the second chapter of The Long Weekend – It’s called Saturday.
If you’d like to read the first chapter it’s here – Friday
It has been written and designed to be read as a book rather than online so if you’re the patient sort then you can wait for another year or two whilst I finish off the pages and sort out options for publishing … or alternatively, if you’re the impatient kind of person and you have good connections in the publishing world – you could save me a whole heap of time and send me tips about who to approach.
Incidentally, I suggest that some of you who might be interested should check out Palestine by Joe Sacco. It’s from the 90’s, but it suffers from chronic awesomeness. It’s quite related to the LW as Sacco studies the nature of colonisation referencing both Edward Said and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; the latter being directly related to the second chapter of this comic right on this page. I haven’t gotten my dirty hands on Sacco’s new book – Footnotes in Gaza but here’s a good link with an interview with him about it.
Giants walk among us
4 Jan
One of the first in a series of drawings exploring some ideas for a big comics-based project I have in store for 2012 … the working title is “Sleuth”.
I’ll get stuck into it more when I’ve finished the Damned Long Weekend.
Joshua Santospirito Art 