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PAGE 22

This “bird’s eye” aerial view is a big departure from the framing that has come before.  This is facilitating the zooming in to read the Walt Whitman passage in the lower frame; but it also allows us to see more detailed information about the desk top.  Prominent is the cover of a fictional book, titled “The Confines of Overt Iconography” by F. R. Sidney. Read: “message FoR Sidney: Stop getting so caught up in the use of symbols.”  There is also a manila folder with some writing on it. The writing is not quite legible; but it is a recreation of the file folders in which I used to keep drafts and other support materials I used for drawing.  The phrases across the top of the file are a garbled version of “the mind which creates the man who suffers.” It lists the materials within as “Pages19 - “ and the dates as “June, 1983 - “  In other words the precise file that would pertain to this very drawing (page 22, completed in July, 1983).  Masking tape was a something I used a lot of for drawing.  The not very well delineated roll shown here is a reference to this  And, of course, the cassette case is for the tape in the tape deck (both on the dresser and in the car).

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The most “overt’ symbols are in the open desk drawer. Next to the closed cigar box (the contents of which we see on pages 33-34) are a rather old fashioned looking pocket watch and a rosary.  A not very subtle symbol of time (in its pre-digital cyclical format), the watch is also a symbol for life. Those who are dead are essentially “out of” time.  Yes, one can say, “Their time has run out;” but one can also say that they are now in a “place” where time no longer pertains.  They are “out of” the system where time exists.  Why go to the trouble of dropping something like the watch in here?  I was trying to insinuate that our narrator’s aesthetic inclinations might be compared to the impulse to stop time. This was my way of saying that the narrator is creating “gravestones” rather than living and vibrantly resonating art.  Stopping time, as our narrator is doing, is to render dead rather than to make immortal.



A symbol for someone who was himself resurrected from death, Jesus Christ, is right next to the watch.  The rosary, like the watch is on a chain.  I did not mean to introduce any truly religious content here.  Though I did like the idea of Catholic v. Protestant (crucifix vs. cross, the more pictorial or hieroglyph vs. the abbreviated or cuneiform) Instead, I wanted to show a symbol whose very potency relied on one’s belief in it.  Yes, the rosary (and the crucifix part of it) is a symbol for Catholic Christianity.  But, I was referencing it as a symbol of superstition.  Remember my Emerson quote: “All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it.” 



I was endlessly fascinated by vampire stories as a boy - my junior high encounters with “Dracula” and “Kolchak the Nightstalker,” in particular,  loomed large.  And then there was my experience of “The Exorcist” at age 13! Why did the crucifixes keep the vampires and demons at bay?  Was it because they were suffused with “magic” in the way that Tolkien’s “One Ring” was?  Did God just make this shape inherently repellant, emanating some kind of divine radiation like Kryptonite or Uranium 235?  No.  The crucifix had power precisely because those who wielded it believed that it had power.  Even Darren McGavin’s cynical Kolchak seemed to “believe” somewhere deep down inside.  If this were truly so, why were symbols necessary?  This is just a way of communicating, a language for interacting with vampires and demons, perhaps.  In this model, the communication, not the symbol has power.  If one gets too caught up in symbols alone, one has no power at all. Whatever... I wont put too fine a point on any of this; but this was where I was going with it.



Meanwhile, our narrator is critiquing Walt Whitman in the lower frame.  That is my handwriting - back before I allowed my penmanship to be reduced to printing in ALL CAPS.  While I personally appreciated Whitman on many levels, I have often secretly considered him to be a bit of a windbag.  His enthusiastic proclamations here are celebratory; but they also strike me as boastful.  If this were Hip Hop, MC Walt might be telling us about the power of his rhymes.  “Do you really? Or does the writing make it so?” Is a haughty young person’s cynicism (“Yeah, right?!”); But it is also a statement of what I was getting at in the vampire/crucifix discussion above.  The writing, in fact, does “make it so” in the same way that the crucifix gives belief (or communication of that belief) an effective physical form.  However, our narrator is in a very sparsely populated world here - a world where his own symbols’ physical incarnations seem to not be communicating much of anything to anyone.  Our narrator can critique Walt Whitman; but at least Whitman is being read (i.e., communicating).  Can we say that about our narrator?

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The layout here, the bird’s eye and the text is something that strikes me now as very static. By the way, I did own both that watch and that rosary.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

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(Exodus 20:4-6)

PAGE 21

The car and its environs are now neatly framed in the windows.  We are back in “the room,” and there appear to be many details we did not get to see the last time.

 

First, there is the desk.  And on top of that desk there are an assortment of items: a cassette tape holder, a roll of tape, a manila folder, a filofax day planner, a pen and an open book. There is a bit of an “in medias res” quality to the book’s being left open. Behind this we can see a full array of collegiate books - comic book apologia mixed in with the high pretense of the academic canon.  Again, I didn’t mean for these books to be especially significant as individual volumes; but all of these particular books had been stacked throughout my living space back in 1983.



“The Tunnel” was the one exception.  There is no such book; this was my being whimsical with the title of Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.” Yes, “The Bridge” is probably the epitome of the kind of romantic symbol choosing that has lurked in the aesthetic background of these drawings thus far.  “The Tunnel” is a play on “Bridge and Tunnel” as an epithet for weekend visitors to Manhattan. I was also trying to whimsically suggest that an excess of Hart Crane’s romanticism (his “illogical impingements of words” remains a perennial “go to” poetic style for the young) would take one (via the tunnel) straight to Hell, or at least to death and the “underworld” as the afterlife is envisioned by the Greeks and Romans.  That Crane himself committed suicide made him an appropriate figure to reference here as well.



This desk very much resembles one which my mother bought and refinished for my room in 1968.  The top drawer is slightly open revealing some kind of murky object that appears to a box.  It is very unclear.  And the lack of clarity is supposed to make us curious. 



The chair is another new element.  Its general shape resembles the dining set my parents acquired in the late 1970’s; but an even greater influence on this chair’s shape were the chairs I had seen in the work of a print artist who had participated in the 1982 Wickford Art Festival named Linda Adato (Wickford, RI being the small town where my parents then lived).  I had been fascinated by the interiors in her work that first summer I had been working on the drawing sequence.  I had photographed some of her work and had these chairs around as models in my resulting snapshots. As I look at this now, the overly busy wood grain pattern strikes me as very peculiar; but this had been my way of solving the issue of shading.  The cushion had been an attempt to create a very busy “counterpane” like pattern again.  I owned a rickety chair that I used for drawing that had a patterned cushion somewhat like this.



Probably the most significant detail introduced here are the portfolios that are off to the left.  They are somewhat nondescript items.  I think that the overly busy areas of the drawing, like the car out the window and the book line up, draw so much more of a viewer’s attention that it might be possible to miss them.  The guy in the room (as well as the guy in the car) is apparently some kind artist too.  Or, more likely, these “guys” just might be the same.

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The open book is something that I was very dissatisfied with.  My friend Ron Wiesel, never one to be shy with his opinions, was merciless in his critiques of how this ruined the whole picture.  Yes, the perspective wasn’t properly handled - and there is no erasing in pen and ink! I chose to console myself myself that this “hovering” book symbolically lived in a slightly different world.  OK, whatever, Gill!  Of course, Ron had been right.  And now I can’t look at this drawing and not remember him.

PAGE 23

This and the next page (which are side by side on the same sheet of paper) are a fiesta of exaggerated 2 point perspective.  It should be noted that with the possible exception of the top frame of page 19 this is the first instance of 2 point perspective in the drawing sequence.  The first vanishing point is out in the hallway beyond the door.  The second (the newly introduced one) is way off to the right of the top of the frame.  As I was composing this group of frames I remember having the idea that “the same old room” would be presented in a slightly different and fresh way; but as I look at it now, I get a kind of “elasticity of space” feel to the lay out.  It is as if someone had spun the zoom lens from telephoto to wide angle. Now the distance between the dresser and the desk seems enormous.  There is a whole playing field of rug.  The whole room seems bigger.  This was intentional; but, frankly, I think I exaggerated it too much.



I remember being particularly pleased with the style of the layout of these two pages.  This page is the main focus.  Then what follows on page 24 is this “main” idea presented again in near simultaneous close up and long shot. This three-frame/two-page layout (i.e., main shot juxtaposed with simultaneous close up and pull back) is repeated two more times on pages 35-38.  The pace of my drawing sequence is far too slow and ponderous for this to really apply - but there is a kind of early 1970‘s cinematic quality in this attempted layout.  I hadn’t seen “The Thomas Crown Affair” at the time; nevertheless, I think that film’s famous Polo sequence is a very successful example of the kind of thing I thought I was up to here with these repeated, reformatted and simultaneous views.



The wood grain in the chair and the desk drawer remain excessively attention grabbing.  The repetition of the drawer is an attempt to build some kind of curiosity about what might be in there  (as well as in that box).  There is a bit of a glow out the window in the mirror.  I forget what this was supposed to be (probably just an indication that the outside is still there).  The hall behind the door is now a slightly more convincing realistic space.  The door on the tape deck remains open in this frame; on the following page, it finally closes.  The microphone has a garbled attempt to write SONY.  I think the reason I tried to include this unnecessary detail was that I was trying to slip in a private joke.  I believe that it says SUNY rather than SONY: State University of New York, a franchise of this institution dominates Albany.  My father also taught there for 12 years.

PAGE 25

PAGE 24

I have always regarded certain portions of this drawing sequence as “chapters.”  Pages 1-8 make up a kind of introduction.  Pages 9-18 make up another unit: the “dream sequence,” the cassette journey out and back.  Pages 19-26 are also a unit. When I had my first look at this particular 8 page stretch after more than decade of not really giving it a second thought, my first reaction was to ask myself why had I devoted so much drawing space to such a small amount of new information.  Yes, we get to see the “collegiate library of pretension,” the portfolios, Walt Whitman, a pocket watch and a crucifix before we finally arrive at the odometer/tape counter “side by side” on page 26.  But all this could have been done much more simply. 

Instead, I chose to draw it out.  I included repeated frames (“chutes and ladders”).  I presented the same scene (“the room”) in a more complicated and exaggerated 2 point perspective scheme.  I presented  scenes, e.g.,  page 23, in three different ways nearly simultaneously (main shot, close up, and long shot).  At the time I joked with myself that I wasn’t sure if this technique were a Marxist or Hegelian dialectic - or both. Yes; college students who spend too much time in the library are insufferable!

All this is going on, yes; but, only when I looked at the entire 8 page arc, did I remember what I had been trying to do.  I was trying to connect and interweave two separate visual sequences. I have broken them down for reconsideration in the diagrams below.  The first sequence, or visual shift is a pull back from the car as it is seen from the room.  The second sequence is a series of frames that show motion from the point of view of the car, all looking toward the tape deck.  In a nut shell: one track is the inside looking out; the other track is the outside looking in.  But it is even more complicated that this.  In the middle of these two series of frames is a third and, perhaps, more central experience of the reading and reaction to the Whitman passage.

I was in no way influenced here by the 1971 film “Harold and Maude.”  Nevertheless, the final few minutes of this movie may be a good way of illustrating what I thought I was doing here on pages 19-26.  Maude (Ruth Gordon) has decided to poison herself.  Harold (Bud Cort), her very young lover is naturally devastated.  The final few minutes of the film cut between three different sequences of shots.  The first sequence consists of their arrival by ambulance at the hospital and Harold’s subsequent night long vigil to await word on Maude’s condition. The second sequence is Harold’s picturesque and dramatic high speed drive to the ocean (and later off a cliff). The second sequence takes place after the first (chronologically); but we see the cuts from the first sequence to this new timeline concurrently.  A third sequence - a very brief and simple shot of a doctor walking down a hospital corridor - is also shown in between the driving sequence and the hospital waiting sequence.  This, of course, is the doctor who is coming to give Harold the bad news of Maude’s death.  This brief series of shots of the doctor ties the whole thing together.

In this tortured analogy the Whitman passage is like the doctor coming down the hall - the thing that will try to tie the two strings of frames together.  Our narrator/artist imagines himself “afoot with his vision” in the same way Whitman is.  But is he really?  Can anyone ever really be?  He is really there in that room - ass in chair (the real reason the chair emerges here) - imagining himself “afoot.”  As he looks “out” the window, he “sees” a vision of himself.  As he looks in from that car (from this vision) back at the first self, he is now looking at an imaginary scene. He may be scoffing at Walt Whitman; but the cynical question scribbled in the margins of the book may ironically be asked more reasonably of our narrator, not of Whitman.

The cinematic analogy is somewhat helpful after the fact; but, at the time I did not think of this in terms of film AT ALL.  I thought I was composing a series of varied drawings of a central place - variations on a theme.  Rather than ripping off cinema I was more likely ripping off Jennifer Bartlett’s “In the Garden!” (see the “Influences” page of this site for more)
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The top frame is another instance of how a certain framing can visually break up a realistic object into a collection of abstract patterns.  The very dark side of the tape deck was given an eccentric almost organic texture that I remember particularly liking. The inclusion of “caution” on the tape deck’s side was very intentional.  The door is closed.  The cassette cartridge is in the machine; but the actual unspooled tape is now gone. The “tape counter” is approaching 0-0-0, indicating that the dream sequence is coming to an end - and that what follows will be back to some kind of present tense. The buttons on the component are a bit overly long (again, exaggerated perspective); but I liked that their resulting shadows could then be longer.  One can see that I am starting to get into the stipling here in a way that might predict where I would eventually take this technique.​

PAGE 27

Title. Double click me.

In the Fall of 1983 I took my longest hiatus from the project.  The top frame here was one of handful that I had to re-do for general sloppiness.  This is the second and final version.  I guess I may have lost some skill in the interim.  I had become enmeshed with friend Ron Wiesel in the production of a graphic arts magazine, “Oasis,” that featured work by both of us.  I spent lots of time learning how to do basic offset printing: darkroom work, platemaking, half toning.  My old friend Jim Forni had helpfully convinced his employer, Mohawk Paper to donate the heavy stock the magazine was to be printed on. The result was hardly spectacular; but pages 1-18 were now “published” (or at least mass reproduced) and in front of a now larger audience.  I had also found means of photographically reproducing these pages in ways that made possible my sharing the project with a wider array of people.



During this period what had previously been more of a private project had started to become part of my public persona. Friends and acquaintances started to know me (at least partially) as “the guy who made this stuff”  (whatever “that stuff” was!) On a side note, even my future wife Marsha became aware of me during this period when Ron sent her a copy of “Oasis.”

 

But what did people make of it?  Sure, some people could spot the recurrence of symbols throughout various drawings.  Other people seemed to get something out of the surplus of detail and idiosyncratic drawing style; however, many people simply shrugged their shoulders and had no interest in trying to pay attention to it.  It was odd.  And more than that, it seemed either deliberately obscure or simply arbitrarily meaningless. 



I had spent the academic Fall Break of 1983 with three Reed College friends on a road trip to a rustic mountain cabin overlooking Lake Tahoe.  We spent that week doing research on our respective undergraduate theses, chopping wood, making hearty communal dinners, and chain smoking. I can vividly remember my three companions at one point discussing photos of pages 1-26 that I had brought with me when they thought I was out of earshot.  They had no idea what to think.  Granted, they were Critical Theory, Pol Sci, and English Lit people; but, if these people couldn’t get it, who would?! I am not sure that where the drawing sequence went subsequent to this moment in 1983 was any more clear; but I do know that from this point on I made a greater effort to think about how it might be understood by viewers.



When I started this particular project in 1982, it was simply a spin off of a previous project (that was subsequently abandoned).  I had some very vague ideas of where it would go (the circular story, the major symbols, etc.); but it was not until September, 1982 that I finally sat down to write out the precise blocking page by page and frame by frame.  I stayed on course for the next 14-15 months; but as I sat down to work on what would become page 27 in December, 1983, I had a change of heart.



I decided to make the subsequent pages much more hyper-specific.  I have since forgotten precisely how the earlier drafts of the sequence were to have continued; but I remember its being more meandering and that the identity and quality of the “artist”/narrator was to have been kept very vague.  I decided here to make it much more self reflexively specific.



In the top frame we are seeing page 8 as it might have looked on the drawing table during its creation.  The rapidograph pens, the masking tape, even the sheets of paper - this was precisely how I worked at the time.  (The only difference might have been that in “real life” the sheets of paper would have been riotously covered with smudges black ink).  So - “Ah-Hah!”  The artist/creator of this very sequence has become its subject.  Not only that - In the bottom frame we see that the artist is working on this sequence in the very room we have been seeing so many views of up until now.

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I remember being frustrated that I hadn’t “planned” the drawing table space better.  I had already laid out the dimensions of the room and the layout of the house that it was in, so I was left with only this option of putting it in a little corner which had been “out of frame” so far. If the incomplete drawing of page 8 on the drawing table wasn’t enough to spark recognition in the viewer, the finished drawings for pages 1-4 that are shown hanging on the bulletin boards above the table would more explicitly announce the self reference.  The bed and the bare mattress are back.  Even the strangely lined blanket from the earliest pages is here.  One can see the portfolios on the floor from pages 21-22.  We are definitely in “the room.”



The drawing table shown here is exactly the drawing table I built for myself from raw lumber in September, 1982.  The antique lap desk open on the table is precisely like the one in which I kept my art supplies.  The parallel rulers on the left are just like the set I used for rough drafts (the very ones my Grandfather had used for navigation as a Lt. Commander in WW II). The ink bottles and paint tubes - they are all exactly like what I used to draw.  The stool between the table and the bed is also precisely the one I owned at the time.  All of a sudden this drawing sequence had become even more personal.



The calendar in the wastebasket was another not so subtle commentary on the narrator’s use for time - his discarding of it.  A brief technical note: this, like many frames which follow, is a 2 point perspective drawing.

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I remember really disliking this drawing in the lower frame at the time.  I can’t remember precisely why; but I vaguely recall not liking the necessity of  cramming a lot of stuff into this small visual space.  I think I resented it.  Maybe I regarded it as akin to badly written expository dialogue.  Maybe.  Frankly, this - and a great deal more exposition - had become an utter necessity.

PAGE 28

The top frame here on page 28 (with its aerial view) was meant to invite a comparison with the last aerial view on page 22.  On that page we were looking “over the shoulder” of our narrator as he is reading Whitman.  Here we are looking over his shoulder as he works on a drawing.  The focus of page 22 and the Whitman frame is on taking IN information; here the focus is on its production. There are three solid black “work stations” in this room: the dresser (with the tape deck), the desk (with the books), and the drawing table (with the drawing).  We have visited each of these work stations in turn as a means of encountering those three fanciful facets of our narrator’s solipsistic world: identity, perception, and expression.  Yes, the drawing table that I was basing this on was stained a very dark brown; but I did not have to make it solid black.  I had by this point developed some greater facility with shading; nevertheless, I chose to go with this kind of anvil black (and all the connotations that accompany that color) which I had already used for the dresser and the desk.



The top frame here is really more of a pull back from the close-up of the drawing and pens from the previous page.  I had inserted the view of the drawing table from the bed in between these frames not just as a way to show the placement within the architecture of the room (to show full context) but also as a way of showing multiple views.  We see not only the view that the artist working on the drawing might see; but we also see the view from the bed (the view as seen by the artist “in repose” - for lack of a better term).  The view from the bed is a way of denoting a more passive viewpoint or a kind of interior imagining rather than an actual viewpoint of someone more “actively” involved.



There is very little activity in the conventional sense.  The only action is our constantly moving viewpoint.  We thought we were coming back to “the room” through those double bedroom windows.  Instead we find that we have returned through the framing device of a drawing.  We have come back through the “eyes” of the artist, through the way he has chosen to represent the room, the very room in which he is producing one of these drawings OF the room.  And along long the way, we get to see the flora and fauna of his work space.



The fact that our artist narrator has his own work up on his wall is significant.  Yes, it helpfully identifies who this artist is; but only the truly self absorbed would have a display like this.  I, myself was so paranoid about keeping finished work “safe” that I almost never had it “out” and visible.  All the tools shown are just like mine.  Some of the displayed phone numbers and “notes to self” are approximations of those that I might have had lying around at the time.  The calendar in the wastebasket is open to April (the dates displayed are from April, 1983 - the most recent April).  April follows March (March is a specific date that becomes important some 10 pages later).  The implication is that once one gets to April a calendar will no longer be required.  “April is the cruelest month.” April Fools Day.  April, the first full month of Spring (rebirth - blah, blah, blah).  All these connotations were intended.



From this moment forward I never took much of a break from process of working on this.  I did a little bit of drawing (or in some cases, a lot) each week rather than working only during breaks in the academic year.  And I think one can see that the principle of 10,000 hours of practice (which Malcolm Gladwell has taken credit for popularizing) had started to modestly pay off.  The style of drawing remains idiosyncratic and overly detailed; but the sureness of the drafting has improved.  My ability to put lines and other shapes precisely where I wanted them has started to increase considerably.  The parallel rulers, the calendar, and the lap desk are all good examples.  I remember being particularly focused on the shadows cast by the stool legs.  I wanted them to look menacing, hence the kind of electrified barbed wire quality about them.  There is still some evidence of my continued intense devotion to line.  The outline of the wastebasket, for instance, is incredibly fat.



Almost as soon as we have emerged back into “the room,” we are then suddenly transported into yet another room.  This one appears to some kind of exhibition space.  We can see a major portion of page 28 framed on the wall in the bottom frame. We can also see that the name associated with this framed picture is “Sidney.” The floor is an aggressive checkerboard.  Much of what we can see in this very cropped image falls into the category of controls.  We see walls and doorways.  We have only glimpses into these mostly hidden rooms.  We can’t even see to the end of the hallway. There is another partition in the foreground, a kind of “velvet rope”  for restricting access.  There is some kind of control panel open (Lights? Alarm? Climate control?) Another electronic gadget sticks out of the wall above that; and finally there is an old fashioned institutional type of fire alarm below.  I liked that it might evoke the image of the bad high school student who pulled the alarm as a prank.  I also wanted it to remind us of the Gamewell firebox we saw in the street scene on page 11.



I especially wanted these two pages to be a rapidly disorienting experience.  When we have arrived at the bottom of page 28 we have broken through the 2-D equivalent of the fourth wall not once but twice in rapid succession.  It is as though we have woken up from a dream within a dream.  And what exactly is this place? We will have to wait until the next few pages to get a better idea.

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One significant note about the composition of this bottom frame is that the part of the framed drawing that might create the “Droste effect,” the infinite picture within a picture is deliberately left out of the frame.  More on that later.

PAGE 26

This eight page volley of images comes to a simultaneous climax and conclusion here on page 26.  The tape counter and the odometer are both arriving back at zero. It should be noted that both counters appear to have “reset” buttons immediately to their right; however, here these counters seems to be arriving back at zero on their own.

 

We are back where we started.  We are back in "the room" and seeing the bedside view of the tape deck again.  We have returned to the same space.  But we have also come back to where we had been chronologically.  If the sequence that began with the unspooling of the tape back on page 8 was some kind of interior life (a “dream,” an imagined experience or a memory), what we are resuming is the present tense.   This is an assertion of the here and now.  Things in the lower frame are oddly shaded; but all the components of the original frame are here - with the one notable exception: the unspooled cassette tape is missing (the interior experience).

When we turn to page 27 it will become clearer that this lower frame is actually an unfinished drawing, a work in progress.  The whole question of who the artist is will become more central in the next few pages; but here, the emphasis is on what something unfinished looks like - without the knowledge that it is unfinished.  I had sometimes taken photos of drawings in various stages of completion because I found looking at the empty, unfinished spaces to be interesting in retrospect.  Seeing a view of the unfinished work shows which parts “came first,” what parts were the priorities.  If creating 3-D illusions in 2-D space is a kind of trick, we are getting a peak at how the “magician” does his work.



In this frame the tape deck and the rug are finished.  One can read some kind of symbolism here by extrapolating what I have already said about these items.  The cross hatched textures of the spot light are where work seems to have left off.  I liked the way that the odometer was primarily black and the tape deck was mostly white.  The dial is circular in the car.  It is square on the tape deck.

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As well as being a thematic chapter, pages 19-26 were also a group of drawings that I completed more or less at the same time (over the summer break between my junior and senior years in college in 1983).  I had been actively working on these pages as a unit.  I vividly remember finishing this page at Georgian Bay in mid August. I cleared away everything from the enormous kitchen table (except for the green oilcloth tablecloth) and laid out the four large sheets of paper that had these 8 pages on them.  I remember taking in the resulting 4 x 5’ layout with a feeling of satisfaction, as this was the first moment when I could see the whole sequence.  My mother was watching me as she worked around me (I was standing on a chair and occasionally on top of the table itself; yes, moms love this) But what I really remember was her saying to me, “Why do you do all of this?”  She wasn’t being snotty - she was genuinely asking.  It may have been the first moment when she thought to ask (or, more likely, the first moment when she thought I might answer her without attitude)  My mother was an extremely bright and talented woman; but art was definitely not her wheelhouse.  She would often tell me as much by recounting her college roommate’s failed attempts to teach her painting.  “Marylon, what color do you feel like right now?!” Shrug.  Anyway, my mom answered for me before I could gather my thoughts.  “It must be for the satisfaction of having done it.”  I am not sure I could have summarized it any better at that moment, so I let her answer stand.

​The image from the frame on page 19 reappears here.  Yes, it is slightly different - or at least rendered that way by my slightly inexact way of reproducing it.  (I could have made it almost exactly the same, had I chosen to) It is “different” from page 19 in the Andy Warhol cinema kind of way; but it is also different in that we are seeing it again with “new eyes,” having experienced the intervening 6 pages of images.  The recurrence of this image was meant to be a kind of a nod to the idea of the Hermeneutic Circle of interpretation: one cannot interpret any part of a “text” without interpreting it in relation of the whole.  One has to experience the initial sequence of a “text” (or drawing sequence) and THEN go back and re-examine all the parts again having finally experienced the whole.
 
OK, Gill, whatever.  The last time we were here, the subsequent focus was about the dynamic between two different viewpoints: looking from the car to room and looking from the room to the car. Here the focus is a turn of the driver’s head to look at the instrument panel. This is a set up for the close up on the odometer which follows; but it is also another way to reiterate our narrator’s interior focus. (not looking out)  As in the top frame, I wanted this view to be very realistically from the driver’s perspective. In this I think I was fairly successful.

Some technical observations: All the objects seem to be in the correct place.  There does not seem to be any of that wide angle distortion.  The steering wheel is even quite successful.  I seem to have figured out the uses of directional stipling.  This may be one of the first examples of my willingness to abandon line as the sole way of indicating objects.  Rather than indicating all the individual stitches with a surplus of line (as I might have done just a few months previous) I allowed a stipled line of varying thickness to do the work instead.  The horn button on the left side of the steering wheel is another example of a shape being indicated without this excessive use of line.  This change in drawing style (albeit a very, very subtle one) becomes important in the final chapter of the sequence.  The steering wheel’s shadow on the dashboard is another example of a more adroit approach to shading.  For me now, it makes the depth of field of the frame really pop; nevertheless, there are lots of examples of sloppiness.  The cross hatching of the instrument panel seems rushed.  Despite the perhaps accidental breakthrough on the steering wheel, many of the other objects are still heavily indicated with line.  There is an attempt to denote nearly all the lettering; but there are examples sloppy overfill of black in certain areas, e.g., the unleaded fuel plaque.
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In the early 1980’s having a car diagram on the instrument panel seemed quite novel.  I particularly liked including it here, as it seems almost another form of symbol making. The car has so far been a symbol for a number of things; but here on the dashboard there is a drawing (a pictograph?) that is meant as symbol for the symbol.  Note that the zone beyond the dash is a solid black “Tron Space” again - a bit like the space around the car diagram on the dash.  The oil pressure is fine.  The speed and RPM’s are reasonable; but the temperature is dangerously high and the fuel is dangerously low.  I personally experienced both of these readings (with very poor outcomes) in my own Subaru GL; but I never experienced them both at the same time.  Homeostasis - automotive or otherwise - is apparently about to be interrupted.

Just what is this place? There is an exhibition of some kind going on. It may take a viewer a moment to figure this out; but it seems that this is the view that one would see if one stood in the same vantage point as at the bottom of page 28 and turned to the left.  We just saw page 28 itself framed on the wall on page 28.  Apparently pages 3-23 are arranged along the exhibition space as well.  If one is observant one can even see that much repeated drawing from page 8 on the wall just to left of the left window.  This was the very same drawing that only a few frames back had been shown to be on the drawing table in the midst of being created.  Or was it? Much of what has been depicted has thus far been shown to be whimsical, imagined, or even just downright fanciful.



This is really like no museum or gallery space that I have ever encountered.  Yes, there is an immense interconnected series of gallery spaces - like a museum.  It has one of those benches that are so often stuck in such spaces.  The Georgian style double windows in the far wall seem overwhelmed by the unadorned plain wall space.  The exterior of the building has an intricate brick and marble cornice appearance.  The floor is hyper-aggressively patterned.  And then there is the bluntly coffered concrete ceiling.  This ceiling doesn’t seem to match the floor.  Also, there seem to be no lights.



I had several goals in mind in composing this scene. First there are those windows.  Again, (as in “the room”) they are like two eyes looking out onto the street.  I have long forgotten the name of this cartoon from my childhood; but I remember scenes from it in which characters are running around inside another (giant) character’s head with light coming in through the eyes.  I wanted this interior space to be a bit like this “inside the head” space.  This exhibition, rather than being a real showing of Mr. Sidney’s work, may be more of an internal wallpaper of the mind.  I was also thinking of the famous side by side gothic vault like shapes of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. In the back of my mind I was thinking of Hart Crane’s “The Bridge”- and how for Crane the Brooklyn Bridge became a self-consciously chosen symbol. The arches of the Brooklyn Bridge’s towers had specific religious connotation, so I opted to round them off to resemble certain kinds of latticed windows in Georgian architecture.  The Albany Academy, the place where I received my primary and secondary education, had examples that were perfect for me to appropriate here.



Perhaps a few words about the Albany Academy are in order here.  I arrived there in 1968 and continued until I graduated in 1980.  It was regarded, at the time, as the pinnacle of college preparatory education in that idiosyncratic, egregiously corrupt, and intransigently small minded community of Albany.  Yes, Nelson Rockefeller had stuck the sprawling State University of New York (and it’s staff of liberal professors) on the city’s outskirts in the 1960’s; nevertheless, the city had rather a stagnant quality to it.  Its democratic machine politics were legendary. At 40 plus years in office Erastus Corning had been the longest serving mayor in the history of the United States.  There remained a kind of “small pond,” blue-blood undercurrent that suffused what social organization existed outside the patronage system. Those descended from the Patroon class (Albany had been one of the few US outposts of the once powerful Dutch empire) and their WASPy counterparts maintained the Albany Academy as a kind of barracks for the auxiliary governesses for their small-town, upper class twit offspring, children whose names were often followed by “The Third” or “The Fourth.”  The Albany Academy was a place that was designed to ship this class of adolescents off to suitably august colleges.  If “Junior” could not get into the Ivy League, then hopefully something not too embarrassing could be arranged.



The well to do of the newly assimilated ethnic immigrant classes were also more than happy to spend money to have their offspring jump on this train to supposed “success.” (at least as it might have been defined in Albany) One of the novel approaches to education that the Albany Academy employed was a quasi-military system of student organization called “The Battalion.” The West Point like uniforms inspired in the local working class a certain kind confidence, an assurance that the Albany Academy and its peculiar forms of corporal punishment, ritualized hazing (stolen from the British “Public” school system), and hierarchical modes of enforcing student compliance could be counted on to whip any problem kid into shape.



This was the social ground upon which the new ideas of the 1970’s were trying to take root.  The newly hired ex-hippies teachers who had graduated from places like Kenyon were thwarted at every turn by the old school disciplinarians (usually second generation alumni) who believed in the power of competitive athletics.  There were the vicious PTSD haunted Vietnam veteran gym teachers who would lift the less capable among us by the neck to dangle for public amusement.  There was even one teacher who had repeatedly hit my 5th grade friend Timmy Schramm on his stark naked ass (very British for boys to swim naked, apparently) while demanding that he hop around the pool on all fours pretending to be a frog. “C’mon, Schramm, I can’t hear you say RIBBIT!” We were imprisoned under our strange military hair cuts in an era of “I went from Flat to Fluffy.”  Our experience of the era’s sexual revolution was limited to our periodic 5 minutes per week interaction with the cucumber sandwich, cotillion wannabe set that attended the Albany Academy for Girls directly across the street.  High school is not a particularly socially easy time for anyone; but my experience of the Albany Academy had left me full of a level of vitriol and rage from which I am, even now, recovering.  But I digress...



It is probably not surprising that I still have many rewarding friendships with the people who went through this school with me.  Most have the same “I survived a tour of duty in a war zone” attitude that I do.  (that or residual Stockholm Syndrome) 



At the time I was working on this drawing, what I still associated with my old school was a small minded attention to the format of education (athletics, social cliques, deference to authority, etc. ) and to the status that it might bestow (admission to prestigious Universities) rather than to the actual content of education (I think the name for this is knowledge).  I was a purist (I could afford to be) and I looked down on those who were not.  I thought that those who were caught in this kind of web of prestige and hierarchy were like pawns in some kind of hideous game.  Hence, the floor.  Not only does this aggressive floor present a human chess game appearance (the symbol for the rat race), but it is also a complete recreation of the actual floors from the halls of the Albany Academy.  The idea is that this exhibition, to the extent that it is even a “real” one (as in an actual one within the world(s) of the drawing sequence) is more of an affirmation of status than it is a display of skill or insight.



The exterior brick work visible outside the windows is also that of the Albany Academy - especially the marble corner stones. The Albany Academy is the template for the windows, the floor, and the brick work. In some ways my experience of the Albany Academy was a quite long past and a distant experience for me in 1984.  A few years can seem an eternity when one is young; but what I remembered most from my experiences there was a sense that all my striving had been for all the wrong reasons.  The implication is that the negative associations with my “Alma Mater’s” decor indicated that the artistic “strivings” (read “ambitions”) of Mr. Sidney are also for all the wrong reasons.



The final and perhaps the most strange architectural element is the ceiling. I remember a field trip out into the art gallery world of Portland, Oregon (a very narrow world, indeed) in September, 1983.  I had my camera along as usual; and when gallery assistants weren’t looking I was photographing their furniture, light fixtures, and even their ceilings.  One gallery (as I recall it was Arlene Schnitzer’s Fountain Gallery - located adjacent to a Fred Meier grocery store in Northwest Portland) had an exposed coffered concrete ceiling. It was rough - almost resembling the underside of an overpass. Yes, this was the dawning of the SoHo “downtown” edginess era; but even so, this really got my attention.  I noticed how the pattern almost resembled the grid like pattern that I had dramatically illustrated the cassette tape rolling over on the storm drain.  This pattern of coffered ceiling was out there in and in use in exhibition spaces; but how great that it might also signify that this particular space is at the bottom of a giant drain!  In other words, this exhibition and its inherent quality or worth is something akin to waste.  I also thought that the unlikely juxtaposition of this kind of coffered ceiling with this ornate floor would make the “drain” ceiling seem even more obviously out of place here. In addition, I thought that the more shallow coffering look I chose had a tomb like quality.  The bench seemed almost coffin like under this mausoleum lid. I remember also thinking of the Pantheon as a model at the time. 



There is a bit of a wide angle yaw to the layout here; it is a classic 2 point perspective drawing.  Everything in the room was easily executed for me.  The real challenge was the placement of the street scene glimpsed through the twin windows. Getting measurements of distance and elevation just right took a lot of time for me to draft.  About this area outside - I wanted it to evoke memories of the previous street scenes we saw on pages 11-13.  I also wanted it to seem convincingly like the street scene later depicted on pages 39-40. 



Another detail that took quite some time was laying out the tiny thumbnails of just about every drawing I had done thus far across the gallery wall from left to right.  For some reason starting with page 3 was important to me.  (saving the camera close up for page 42, perhaps? I can’t remember.) Again I was assiduously trying to avoid the “Droste effect.” Page 23 is latest page we can see.  I deliberately wanted the light to fall across the Whitman page - a way of “illuminating” our narrator artist’s central delusion about himself. I remember that the solid band of light on the right being a very important composition element for me.

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I remember being particularly unhappy with the sloppiness of the cross hatching on the ceiling beams; however, I was quite pleased with the parallel lines in the lighted patches of the floor.  But that was only after I took the black squares several steps darker.  This was one of the few times when I realized the valuable lesson that going much, much darker can sometimes  be effective. This is actually quite a large drawing, and it seemed to take forever to finish. Simply looking at the parallel vertical stipling lines on walls makes me tired even today.

PAGES 29-30

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