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This is a memoir about breast cancer, drawn in simple cartoons by self-taught cartoonist Miriam Engelberg. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 43 and, sadly, died at the age of 48.
The good: I LOVED that she wore a blue wig, and that was the wig that was most “her” despite being nothing like how she looked before she had cancer. I loved her observations about support groups and people’s varied and ridiculous reactions to her diagnosis. I love that she watched a lot of TV, did a lot of crosswords, and read a lot of tabloids. She seemed like a really rad lady.
The not so good: I really wanted to like this more, but so much about it fell flat. I really really support people drawing comics just because, even if you aren’t super good at it. But I also feel like the more you draw the better you get at it, even if it’s just a teeny tiny bit! You don’t even have to try! You draw a lot, you get better at what you’re doing, even if what you’re doing is speech bubbles or repeated patterns or aliens or oncologists. I love atypical drawing/cartooning styles (like Lauren Redniss, Esther Pearl Watson, and sometimes even Maira Kalman falls into that category); drawings that aren’t your typical comic style, nor are they necessarily realistic or strictly representational. I think it’s weird that Engelberg read a lot of comics (she referenced my favorite person, Lynda Barry!) and drew so often, and this is her final product.
There were parts that I liked because she is relatable, but when she tried for jokes it was a lot like watching a multicam sitcom with a laugh track (really asking for the laugh), except it’s a book and there’s no laugh track! I loved when she approached the subject with humor not with comedy. Those observations were poignant and interesting, not gunning for a laugh.
I was just generally disappointed with this book. I wanted to like it so much more, but it just didn’t quite do it for me.
Mornings are a really difficult time for me.
August 09, 2010 8:33:35
There have been quite a few people who have taken a picture of themselves every day of the year and put them together into a time lapse video. Those are interesting to me, but frankly how I look during the day and how that changes over a year isn’t really that interesting to me. What I am really interested in is how people look when they wake up. A few years ago when I was in advanced painting and drawing I did a book project where I drew pictures of my friends waking up in the morning. The assignment was to use some kind of system (maps, playing cards, something like that) and do a project based on that. I chose tally marks and drew images sort of emerging from a field of lines.
August 10, 2010 9:23:44
That project was really fun but it was difficult to get source material. I had to ask my friends to take photos of themselves, and being busy college students, even if they really wanted to participate, it’s something that can pretty easily slip your mind. So when I bought a new computer (shitty though it may be) one of the features I opted for was a built in camera. Every morning (or as many mornings as I can) I take a photo of myself. So far I have almost 150, starting in August 2010 to the present (some days I miss, other days when I look really funny I take more than one photo). The photos are time and date stamped, so I can also track what time I got up (or at least what time I took the photo) throughout the year.
I am posting these drawings as I do them to my tumblr. To see all the drawings in this series posted so far, you can go to allieschwartz.tumblr.com/tagged/morning.
Panel from "Fun Home". Image from salon.com
I have been reading a lot lately. This might not be unusual for most people, but it’s quite rare for me. In addition to my Novel challenge (ha), I read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A family tragicomic. I am most familiar with the Bechdel move test, where in order to pass the movie has to have 1. two named female charcters, 2. who talk to one another, and 3. about something other than men. I am also acquainted with her series Dykes to watch out for. We have a ton of the books in the GSC library.
After I finished it, I talked a little bit with Scott (known for his love of all things comic). He said that he liked it, but thought it didn’t quite succeed as a graphic novel. That you could have taken out all the pictures and it would have been just as successful. I can’t say I disagree, though I think the subject matter is far more compelling than any other graphic novels I have read. I found the book so affecting. I love reading about how she finally put a name to her sexuality in her college library, and the insatiable desire to read all things queer after that. She reads Collette, Rubyfruit Jungle, The Well of Loneliness, all books I read in the past four years, and all books in the GSC library that I worked so hard to wrangle and organize. I think I’ll donate my copy to the library, because we don’t as yet have one but I definitely think we should.
Father-daughter relationships are always interesting to me. Bechdel’s experience with her father was so unlike my own, but there were aspects of that relationship that I identified with. It is odd to think of our parents as people unto themselves, and she seems to have had some extreme revelations about who her father really was. It is heartbreaking both that she only started to know who her father was so close to his death and that he had lived so much of his life in secret.
In the last days of the term late at night in the depths of Boliou, I collaborated on a cup with Myla. I threw and glazed the cup, Myla did the drawings. Some of the majolica on the other cups crawled a little, but thankfully this one came out of the kiln perfectly. I think one photo doesn’t really do the drawings justice, so I put a few together.
I also got a new computer recently, and the Windows photo gallery has the option to combine photos into a panorama. I thought it would be funny to put photos of this cup in there and see what it came up with. The result is definitely odd:
I was recently looking at A Plate A Day, which directed me to Musing about Mud, which in turn led me to discover an incredible exhibition at the Philadelphia Clay studio by Molly Hatch. The exhibit, called Mimesis, is an exquisite show of cups and vases. Hatch grew up in a family of artists and crafts people, so she is used to entertaining herself with creative endeavors.
One aspect of Hatch’s aesthetic that I really relate to is her affinity for decoration of hidden surfaces.
“A cup or a bowl is almost universally accessible and navigable as most people use them in their daily lives. For me, the blank cup is anonymous in a manner similar to a blank piece of paper. The three-dimensional surface tableware provides is rich with conceptual potential as a place for drawings and paintings. Interaction is encouraged through the decoration of hidden surfaces—the underside of a cup, beneath a lid or on a handle.”
Ceramic surfaces have so much potential for exploration and decoration. I love artists use decorative traditions to explore ideas of craft and surface. There is the meta aspect of drawing cups on cups, but I think looking at the work through that lens is really limiting (and not just because there are also vases, plates, drawings, and wallpaper painting in the show). The cups on which she draws are not anything entirely remarkable; they are a series of simple, identical, white cups. But the illustrated cups are very intriguing. They allude to ceramic history, especially functional ceramic objects that have been in china cabinets for centuries. They are ordinary cups depicting ordinary cups, but pairing the two makes for a graceful and stunning object. I generally thing most things look better when presented en masse, and in the show the cups are presented as a large set on pegs like you might see in someone’s kitchen (albeit within a frame).
I also really love her drawing style. Her aesthetic is one I really relate to: beautifully decorative, but still subtle and simple. She takes normally pristine decorative motifs and applies them in a way that shows great evidence that it was done by hand. Applying imperfect marks to a pristine surface gives the pieces a lot of character and movement, characteristics I think are often lacking from a lot of glazed surfaces. I am obviously showing my bias here, being that I am a ceramics person who also loves to draw. I am tempted to gush all day about how much I love her work, but really you should have a look for yourself.
You can visit the exhibition website for more information and the gallery where all the images in this post came from:
http://theclaystudio.org/exhibitions/hatch.php
And for more information about Molly Hatch, visit her website here: mollyhatch.com
This post is about neither paper nor clay. Ha!
It’s about drawing and film. For my Film Noir class (which was not as great as it might purport to be) we had to take noir photos around Northfield. Other students in my class posed their friends and traipsed around town/campus looking for good places to shoot. That sounds miserable to me. I hate working with people, so I took the assignment to mean take photos around the town but of noir drawings. So I drew on pavement, a hazardous waste barrel, an brick wall, a sewer grate, and an electrical box. It was pretty fun. I used a box of chalk that I found in the drawing studio and had a bunch of fun drawing on stuff around town. Miraculously, I only got yelled at once.
And, yes, I know the captions are awful, but keep in mind this was a school project, and my very last Carleton project at that, so I was sort of phoning it in.
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- “The first thing she saw when she walked into the room was his silhouette and a cloud of smoke.”
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- “He stood waiting but she never showed.”
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- “She knew just what to say to have him eating out of the palm of her hand.”
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- “The worst of it was over.”
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- “He paid off the dirty rat, but there’s no telling if the conviction would stick.”
