Design & Execution

My third illustration for Lucy's Dance treats the delicate topic of the missionaries who visited Stebbins in the late 1920's and stopped the Curukaq festival . . . or rather, tamed it into hiatus. A Jesuit missionary, Fr. Martin Lonneaux, overlooking the support-system of the Yup'ik community, perceived that the gift-giving portion of the festival was costly enough that it left several Yup'ik families destitute. Lonneaux concocted a watered-down version of the potlatch that would involve smaller, church-supplied gifts, but in the process amputated the festive spirit of the festival such that his "pretend kassiyuq " never caught on. For further details, see Stebbins Dance Festival (xxiv). The wording in Lucy's Dance focuses neutrally on the cultural misunderstanding. It would have been easy to use powerfully-charged language when summarizing this cultural loss. From what little I can find about him, Fr. Lonneaux, SJ seems to have been a relatively toler...

Draw, erase, draw, erase. Sometimes the illustration process rocks back and forth, boatlike. I use my digital eraser as much as I do my drawing tip for grooming lines. I spend ages zoomed in, which is incredibly handy, though it usurps my sense of scale. Zooming can be especially dangerous when I'm drawing human limbs, which may appear witch-doctored upon zoom-out. Another zoom hazard is the temptation to fill every inch with detail befitting the myopic scale--simply because you can. Some artists (myself included) have trouble saying done when empty areas still gape on the page. Horror vacui is a fear of unfinished patches, like open wounds, indicating negligence, laziness, or worse, surrender of imagination. My introduction to layout and typography has somewhat disabused me of the compulsion to fill, but the rocking motion of drawing can bring it out again. This week's drawing demanded that I pack my two-page spread with complexity, both visual and cultural. As I lifted my ...

This week I publish my first pseudo-complete illustration for Lucy's Dance in the form of a landscape. I used to have a marked aversion to rendering landscapes. I pretended that the subject matter was just too traditional and that I was edgier than the plein air crowd, but the truth is that landscapes, as painting subjects, require a very contemporary stomach for abstraction that I sometimes lack. I am an instinctive illustrator, interested in defining shapes clearly. As such, I once twitched a little at the prospect of painting landscape forms (foliage, distant objects, etc.) that I couldn't honestly identify. I preferred to identify all parts of my subject, then render them to my satisfaction, using a ruler if necessary. I experienced a mix of envy and horror while watching impressionists swab away, working right through the nebula of colors and forms. A blob for a human head, then a similar blob for part of a tablecloth. Was this justice? I eventually learned that the best...