[Click on the image to see a full-size version]
Here’s a thing that could use some words alongside it.
The story goes: I listen to music like everyone else, and some of that music is from a long time ago. I’m interested in the history of American music, of blues and folk and country, the rural stuff from before the 1950’s, before everything went electric.
Context is everything. In music and art. The context of this music is pretty fascinating stuff, and I try to read what I can on the subject. Over the last few years it’s created this landscape in my head, this semi-fictional place full of imagery, full of scenery and characters and stories.
Drawing can be very interesting if you look at it in a stream-of-consciousness. All imaginative practice is, I suppose, instinctive by nature.
You draw what feels right where it feels right.
I don’t like approaching a composition that’s carved in stone. I like to start with a vague idea and just let it sort of unfold at it’s own pace. It’s the same with collage art. The process is a bit like playing with a Ouija board: you gather all the pieces and just push them around the page until something happens.
I was once lucky enough to hear a lecture by German illustrator Thomas Fuchs (www.thomasfuchs.com) who said a number of things that got under my fingernails, particularly about the suggestive nature of the visual image. He said that most of the time you don’t even need to think of an idea: if you know where to look, and how to look, those ideas suggest themselves to you. They impose upon you.
And I think that’s about right. Some ideas really do give themselves to you. The shape of something, the texture, the colour, the size; in context, they tell you what to think. These things suggest ideas that are guilty by association. And then it’s so obvious you can’t believe you didn’t see it before.
The context of this image is: the music of the rural South, and what I associate with that environment. Not just from the music. But from the culture, and history. Especially prevalent is the religious association – the rural American South of the 1920’s and 30’s lies in the shadow of church steeples and burning crosses.
Gospel music and blues music are brother and sister, one sacred and the other profane.
The Lord’s music versus the Devil’s.
We are Holy, they are Pagan.
In this context, the blues musicians are atavistic mutants from the ancient Greek woodlands, a physical perversion of carnal sin. Their songs were about lust, about genitals and intercourse and adultery. Make no mistake: half of these songs, these songs from the age of our grandfathers, these songs from an age we are always told was more innocent, these songs are about pussy.
So the players become satyrs, and the juke-joint dances they played become Dionysian frat parties in some Hellenistic myth.
From there it becomes a call and response thing. You look at the pagan religions of the ancients and the associations flow freely: the landscape becomes Mesopotamia, the Mississippi River becomes the Jordan, the Euphrates; the biblical inundation becomes the great flood of 1927 that crushed the levees; the death cults and slavery of Pharaonic Egypt become the mortality rate and servitude of post-Reconstruction existence.
Eventually you end up with this semi-mythological place, a surreal landscape where Hieronymus Bosch meets the cotton gin culture.
Here’s some detail…
Posted in Illustration, artist, cartoon, comic, drawing, drawn, freelance, handmade, illustrator, image, ink, inspiration, music, poster, rock music art
Tags: Anubis, art, birds, blues music, comic strip, comics, death, Deep South, drugs, egypt, flood, folk music, guitar, Illustration, inspiration, love, Mississippi, moonshine, phallic, poster, pyramids, religion, satyr, sex
