I have gotten about two-thirds the way through the thumbnails for the first chapter of my next project. I am getting more in the groove and remembering my lessons to make this easier. But it’s still planning, so it’s the single hardest thing about making art, by far. It’s the work part, through and through. I’ll draw all day – I did recently – because it’s a lot of effort and relatively little work. I’m working in one or, at most, two hour chunks on thumbnails. Honestly, it’s an upswing, and I’m hoping to spend more time on it soon. It’s just such taxing concentration. Most of the decisions are made while you’re looking at your thumbnails and working out a script, and decisions are so hard. I work all day, come home, and I’m so tired, looking forward to something I know is very tiring. It’s hard to make progress sometimes. Here’s a photo of a climbing woman I did the other day. I like how the hand turned out.
This week, I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind lately. More tangential to art, really. We spend so much time with our stories that we forget they aren’t real. The stories we tell ourselves about how the world works and how things should be. Sometimes, in some arenas, something will happen that’s so shocking that we’re brought back to reality on one front. It seems like we never have anyone who can talk us through the rest of the way.
As an example, I think about space travel in these terms. Based on our current understanding of the physics and energy needs and whatnot, there is no technically possible way to travel the stars like in Star Trek. We could go down the list, but suffice it to say, science fiction is allegorical fantasy that uses current trends in technology to discuss problems in society today; when a sci-fi writer says, “They made this technology that does this thing,” it’s magic they’re describing so the story can happen. It’s not a prediction, a roadmap, or an inevitability. I think about this because, while I like space stuff and don’t want to detract from real world space science, the reality of current pushes for space travel from rich weirdos is really dark and horrendous. Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars because he doesn’t think the Earth can survive – you know, since he’s going to keep destroying it with his companies to maintain his wealth – and so wants to make a second home on Mars.
If you listen to accounts from rich people about the apocalypse and things like space travel, you’ll hear it clear as day: They know they’re turning to fantasies to escape responsibility for killing the Earth. You know, the planet we’re on now. The only known planet that contains life, where all humans have ever lived and died, where countless eons have seen the rise and fall of entire classes of organisms we can’t fully define or imagine. This miracle, this Eden. Most of us are struggling to survive, caught in a rat trap created by out-of-touch tyrants for their benefit. We don’t have all the time or know-how to fully grasp it. We’re so far removed from our own lived experiences and dream of escape. We grow up being told that we’re separate and apart from all that stuff outside the window, and it feels true, with all of our Internets and stuff. But like…we’re only alive now, and can only be alive, because we live on this planet, with these other animals and plants and fungi and bacteria. We’re not aliens, popped down on this planet to use as a toilet until it wears out. The idea that we can actually go be aliens in space, treating other worlds that way, is an allegory made by a fantasy writer who wanted to explain why our history of colonization is bad and created the series of dystopias we’re desperately trying to stay afloat in. It’s the mindset the Europeans had when they came to the Americas (and Asia and Africa and Australia). That’s why in sci-fi, they’re called space colonies. It’s not subtle. Don’t get stuck thinking space society is inevitable, or even desirable, just because we’ve written a lot of stories about it.
I could go on and on with examples. The “glory” of war, gender norms, anti-vax conspiracy theories. Suffice to say, most of what we interact with in our lives is a series of stories that we use to make sense of a world we’re barely scraping by in. This isn’t inherently or exclusively a bad thing, but we can forget what they are and follow them as if reality, which is dangerous. I think a lot of this, at least in the modern West, stems from individualism. We value the individual to the point of purposeful isolation from community and assistance, which makes us weaker and easier to control with lies and stories. It’s the opposite of democracy, if you give it any thought.
I bring all this up because it’s why I think education, especially in the arts, is important. The reason it’s so easy for these stories we’re told to take hold in our minds is because we don’t know how things work. God of the gaps. If you’re a poor white person with a bad education and observe the bad conditions some Black communities exist in, it’s easy to be manipulated into thinking that the Black people themselves caused their own suffering. So many of our problems today can be traced back to that sort of dynamic, where people are left with an improper and incomplete understanding how the world got to be the way it is and either buy into an old bigoted myth or make up a new insane belief to explain everything. It’s why education is such an important and central pillar of society, and why those who want to hold onto their power at all costs fight against it. At least from my experience, one of the most underrated tools education gives people is the ability to analyze and understand stories. Arts education is all about picking apart and analyzing the world in front of you. If you can do a critique of a novel, you can do one of a politician; learning to read a painting is learning to see something for what it is instead of what it appears to be.
Here’s an exercise you can do. Imagine you’re standing on a beach. Draw a circle around your feet. Everything inside that circle is you. Your thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories. Everything outside of that circle is the world. You are seeing your perspective projected on that circle around you; you are not seeing the world. I think it’s really important to understand that and remind yourself of it every once in a while. While I can’t say it’s definitely possible to stick your head outside of the circle, you can get glimpses of what the world may actually be like sometimes, if you learn to recognize what’s projection. Forget all the stories, try to see the world, and write your own way forward.
Weekly Art Blog, 4/13-4/20/2025
Life in the Gutters 