Hello, Dream Painters!
Sometimes we need to shake things up!
preacher dismayed that
apocalypse made people
much less religious
On Sundays, I’m going to start posting different experiments, and some selections from my poetry notebooks. Today’s poetry comic experiment was inspired by a conversation I had with
in the comments to one of her recent posts about Guillermo del Toro’s notebooks in her excellent publication .For today, I first selected four random art panels from my archive and put them in this comic format. Then, using a random number generator, I selected a random poem from my spreadsheet and paired it with the random panels.
I had a lot of fun with this experiment. It has given me a lot to think about in terms of the way we relate words to pictures. This is a poem I had not previously illustrated. It was originally published in my book, Horror Haiku.
At first, I had a tiny existential crisis. Were all of my efforts at visual storytelling a waste? Does it even matter what pictures are paired with what words?
Then I took a deep breath.
I love that this experiment shows that our brains are primed to make everything a story. If I were to illustrate this haiku in my traditional fashion, it would look much different. However, I love the thoughts and stories that this random version introduces. It has a real Eden to Doomsday progression with the green leaves at the open and the stark desert landscape at the end.
The story I see here is different than the story you see. We will each see something that is a complex mix of our unique experiences and studies. My story is also tainted by the fact that I know at a glance what haiku these panels originally were painstakingly paired with.
I describe myself in a number of different ways. At my core, I feel I’m a collage artist. I not only use collage techniques to make my art, but my writing is also a form of collage. I take all of the stuff I read and see and then cut and paste it together into new images in the form of sentences and paragraphs. Everything I do is a kind of guided remix.
I love that every line of a poem, or every piece of art I create can be remixed into something new.
Today’s experiment is a good reflection of the collage principles that drive all of my work. I will definitely be trying this again, and adding some different variations. I will also keep making more of my normal poetry comics.
Sunday Poetry Notebook
I’ve kept a journal off and on my entire life. But, ten years ago, I stopped journaling in the sense of writing daily entries about the events of the day and my feelings and started keeping notebooks. I’ve gone through a lot of different processes. I’ve kept a little bit of each thing as I’ve developed my own notebook system.
My notebooks are ugly. I make my messes in them. A poetry notebook is a place for me to ideate and iterate. It’s my place to fail.
I call my notebooks my poetry notebooks because I write a lot of poetry in them, but also because everything I put into them is collected for future use in poetry comics in one way or another.
I used to start a new notebook every year, no matter how many pages I had left in the book. Now, I fill multiple notebooks each year, and I just put stuff in until it’s full.
My handwriting is atrocious and always has been. I have some funny stories about my chicken scratch going back to kindergarten. The two-page spread above is a haiku sprint from May 16th. Judging from the time and the location, I wrote these while waiting for E to get out of school. I sometimes park at Bush Park, near their school, and write as many haiku as I can. I put a tick mark next to each poem once it has been added to my spreadsheet.
At the top, I wrote myself a note that says, “How does the ocean smell?” I used this as a prompt for the new haiku I was writing for the upcoming Weirdoku zine about the ocean.
This spread is from the 22nd. I was out on the street waiting for E, instead of at the park. On this day, I was taking notes on a podcast. The note tells me it was The Creative Pep Talk podcast, and the guest was illustrator Anoosha Syed. I responded to some prompts from the podcast, and then I started brainstorming stuff for this newsletter and my poetry/writing/comics/illustrating business. I added a weird little guy, and my current creative mantra to the bottom of the first page. I’m not much of a draftsman. My line control is still a work in progress. This is another reason why I mostly collage my stuff. It’s easier for me to get closer to the image in my head by piecing shapes together rather than drawing the right shapes.
Above is the third page of the entry for May 22nd. This one has a single haiku and then one of my labyrinths. I’ve been doodling versions of these since I was in high school. Sometimes I color them, and sometimes I don’t. Here I used up all of the ink in my blue and red Pigma Micron 05mm pens. I love these pens, but I don’t have a lot of experience with them. My standard art pens are my Tombow watercolor brush pens. I’m sure I will show you examples of these from my notebook in future weeks.
Programming Note
I’m working on providing more value to my paying subscribers. Starting in mid-June, I’m going to be putting Sunday posts behind the paywall, allowing everyone to read the comic, but having everything else in the post be exclusively for paying subscribers.
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
P.S. Please feel free to suggest any art or poetry experiments you’d like to see me try!
What a fascinating experiment! I love to see what appears when the artist leaves room for randomness in their creative process. I also love peeking into other people's notebooks-- thanks for sharing yours. Your joy and energy are inspiring!
It’s great to see experiments as well as someone’s creative process.