While working on Bet Your Sweet Bottom, I realized that I could save myself a lot of trouble by making backgrounds for certain things and inserting them in. Specifically, I made one for smears of light for the windows, and I made a wall of bottles for behind the bar. It’s a real time saver. The window smear is because I think it’ll ultimately look better than my other option for a visual effect to indicate glass. The bottles are because I could never get a consistent proportion for those bottles between pages as I was doing the pencils. It looked weird and out of place, and I knew I would have to resize and redraw them in digital. Doing that fresh for each panel would have been terrible and difficult for me. So instead, I have a single wall of bottles I can keep in proportion and adjust to fit. For as tedious as it can be to resize and shift around a picture background, it’s a lot easier than hand drawing new bottles over and over, hoping I got the sizes right. There are still a few I’ll have to draw again because of angles.
There’s a stand-up bit I saw on Facebook a while back that I think about sometimes. I forget who it was, so I apologize for not being able to properly credit this. The joke was that when people say metal is bad music since you can’t understand the lyrics, it’s because they don’t have talent. He then specified that the joke was only meant for the musicians in the audience. As I wind my way through all the ways I can think about that joke, I find myself agreeing more and more with what I find.
There’s the outsider perspective. If you’re not into a particular thing, it’s really easy to look at it from the outside and describe it in a way that sounds bad. After all, if you don’t know how the thing works, why things are done like they are, what things represent, or what the appeal is, then all you’re seeing is a bunch of surface level details that confuse and maybe upset you. Music and the arts generally are something that everyone feels the need to understand, or at least claim to, for social status. If you’re not a music person, then you probably gravitate to lyrics a lot more, like I do, because you know words. So when people are presented with music that has no words, it’s boring; when presented with music whose lyrics they can’t understand, it’s bad, because “they’re purposefully withholding something from me.” Your foothold is removed, and you’re upset because you can’t participate or pretend to get it enough to appear to have a refined cultural palette.
There’s the level of appreciation. There are a lot of things we commonly accept that we don’t understand, like math. If you’re not a math person, then you don’t get what’s interesting or fun or meaningful about math. No one will look down on you for not getting math. The reason the math person gets it is because they have, for lack of a better word, a talent for it. They can perform the calculations easily or well enough to go far, and they can see and understand what each part of the calculation means enough to know what they’re doing at all times. Both of these things, and others, allow them to see a larger meaning and idea of math that gives them an appreciation for it that the rest of us don’t have. The same thing is true of every other field. Music people get something about sound and melody that the rest of us don’t; writers understand something about language that the rest of us don’t; artists understand something about color, form, and design that the rest of us don’t. The issue there, of course, is that culturally, we’re expected to get music, writing, and art. We’re not uneducated swine who live for the next plate of slop, after all. So there’s this dichotomy between the surface level appreciation that most people have and believe is the full meaning, and the actual depth of the subject that you can’t really dig into unless you have some talent or expertise in the field.
There’s a level of social inclusion. I’ve touched on it some already. As a society, we all have to agree on what things are cool and important. Once those things are determined, we all need to be able to participate in them. Feeling left out and unincluded is an attack. It’s like how when people say, “We’re all entitled to our opinions,” they mean that disagreeing with them, or pointing out if they’re factually wrong, is a personal insult. Because certain arts, like music, are among the important and cool things in society, people get upset when they can’t find any headway into it. It’s not enough to say metal isn’t for you; metal has attacked you by not even giving you legible lyrics. In my head, all of this circles so many subjects, like celebrity culture and politics: Even if people don’t fully understand what’s going on, they’re so invested in being part of the in-crowd that they force you to accept their uninformed, outsider opinion as equally valid, and refuse to dig deeper into that opinion. I mean, if they examined what they thought, they would either have to confront something they don’t like about themselves or realize that there’s no deeper to dig. Living in an individualist society means you have to constantly fight and guard against all of your natural allies, because you’re convinced they’re enemies ready to ostracize you for any infraction against conformity. Worse, because so many of us don’t understand the things we hold dear, we do ostracize others frequently to reify our own shaky, illusory place in the cultural landscape.
There’s a level of jealousy. Artists, musicians, athletes, these are all kinds of people who are passionate about something and experience it deeply through direct participation. There are also plenty of people on the outskirts who don’t have the same ability to perform, at least not on the level of recognized professionals, but who still get it and appreciate it similarly. Then there’s the majority of people. The majority still like these things, but they only have a surface level appreciation. Underneath the social status considerations I’ve talked about already is a very basic jealousy. If you don’t have musical talent, you’re jealous that musicians have it. The jealousy that matters, though, is that for all the trappings of being a musician that the non-musician assumes they could also have. Since the majority of people only interact with musicians as celebrities and performers, the assumption is that being good at music means having no money worries, all the romantic and sexual fulfillment you want, and constant adulation from the crowds. Basically, if the only way you interact with a field is as an outsider seeing the most extreme cases, you place all your earthly desires on that role and then become very jealous that someone else has everything you want. But most artists and musicians can’t make a living off of what they do; there’s a reason why it’s a common joke for artists to quit and become a lawyer, because in their imagination, that mundane job provides an artist with all the things they lack. We’re all jealous of each other. I think there’s plenty of people who prefer holding onto that jealousy because it promises that the fantasy is attainable in reality. It’s a twisted hope that means you don’t have to risk the comfortable parts of your life. So yeah, it’s a sore subject. People tend to react big when someone points out the divide between their abilities and their desires by, say, telling them that they aren’t talented enough to even appreciate metal.
The hand can only grow as fast as the eye, right? People tend to assume that because they can see farther than they can reach, they’re seeing as far ahead as the big shots. I know firsthand how frustrating it can be to know how much further your sight goes from your reach. The trick in life is to be comfortable with the limits of your own understanding and to only worry about your reach when you know you can get farther.
Weekly Art Blog 3/16-3/23/2025
Life in the Gutters 