In Print!: Maxine Says

While I'm in a bit of a slowdown on comics-making (mostly due to my organizing the upcoming conference on Creativity, Play, and the Imagination at Teachers College), there's an upsurge of my work appearing in print of late. I thought I'd share a few links to the publications and to the work.

First up my piece "Maxine Says" from the Fall of 2008 (it originally appeared on this site here) appears in the Bob Lake edited "Dear Maxine: Letters from the Unfinished Conversation." As the title indicates, "Dear Maxine" consists of letters to Maxine from her former students, colleagues, reflected on her influence. My piece was made while I was taking Professor Greene's class, sitting in her living room with 30 other students (and not conceived for the purposes of the book, that came about much later). In retrospect, it seems a little daunting, making a piece about the legendary philosopher and then turning it in for an assignment - but her initial reception has led to an ongoing conversation between us, and I'm grateful that my initial audacity or more likely, naivete, made that possible. - Nick

of consequence

Continuing my attempt at a weekly comics piece for Robbie McClintock's course... Not sure i'm going to make the weekly part. But still going to work through some ideas conceptually and visually as I go. - Nick

of consequence

Continuing my attempt at a weekly comics piece for Robbie McClintock's course... Not sure i'm going to make the weekly part. But still going to work through some ideas conceptually and visually as I go. - Nick

learning pathways (untitled)

This term, I'm sitting in on my advisor Robbie McClintock's final  course - a look back at his formative educational experiences. I set myself a small goal of making a short piece inspired by something that occurred in the class or the reading. I include the quote from Robbie to start it off, and then other ideas from the class and my own work (related to my dissertation) constitute this one. The first page references the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts and also connect to my 2004 billboard project - which you can read about here. This imagery came up again in my dissertation proposal, and likely will make it in some form into the actual piece. The second page offers a vastly different approach, one that is in line with a new piece done for publication a few weeks back, that i've yet to post, allowing it to appear elsewhere first. Been pushing a lot lately, since the Shape of Our Thoughts piece, on allowing the text to shape the imagery and the image to shape the text - seeing my role as one of mediator in the creative process. That leads to things like the second page, but the first page was fun in getting back to just drawing stuff for a (long!) while... - Nick 

The Shape of Our Thoughts

Subtitled, "a meditation on and in comics," "The Shape of Our Thoughts," is an exploration of how comics work, what their potential for conveying and exploring meaning is, and a tiny bit on implications for art/and comics education. It's intended as a journal article and culled from material from my dissertation proposal. As this visual-verbal essay embraces the visual as being integral to our thinking, the work proceeds in form as it does in content. The very compositions of each page function to develop the theorizing that is the piece. I sought to create something that addressed the ideas in its very shape throughout, and in doing so i was led to some places i hadn't expected to go in the least. Anyhow, enough words... - Nick

(After the pages themselves, i offer some behind the scenes commentary at some of the details inside.)

Notes:
P1:
So the story my grandmother "tells" here, is fictional. That is, i can't remember specifics of her stories but this tries to replicate them in spirit by drawing on elements from her life that are all true, and it could be a day that happened. Some specifics - she walked to catch the bus (my grandmother never drove), and no doubt was greeted by neighbor dogs. My mom and siblings all had beagles, so this is a nod to those, i'm guessing at least one neighbor had a friendly one over the years. Onward, she took me to the Fisher Building in Detroit on occasion, and i know she liked it quite a bit. The "detour" relates to the fact that i'm the biographer of Detroit artist Charles McGee - who ran a gallery there at some point, and i'm speculating on a possible meeting between them. Near Second and Forest Avenues, my grandmother's father, later her brother, had a shoe supply store - Kanners & Patrize Co (eventually). It's now the Green Garage in Detroit. I know from my mom, they used to watch the parade from there. Ok, getting to the Detroit Public Library where my grandmother volunteered - helping with wayfinding, shelving, etc. The encounters, including with the red tailed hawk are made up - but possible.

P2: The "comic" pictured on the bottom is a nod to Molly Bang's "Picture This: How Pictures Work" in which she tells Little Red Riding Hood through geometric shapes and color. I used this as an example to a class of 9th graders in how to tell superhero stories even if you don't think you can draw - imagine Superman and Batman as loose geometric shapes. Here's such a story of a world's finest team-up...

P3: I couldn't figure out a structure on how to hold a page intentionally fragmented together. In a conversation with my friend Jon, he mentioned an aversion to things Calder (mostly joking). I said, i'd make use of that somewhere. And the next day, it occurred to me this page could be a mobile - static pieces made kinetic.

P4: The resonance between word and image - the tornado is composed of text from the Wizard of Oz when the Cyclone arrives and from a wikipedia entry on the butterfly effect. (I also included the Tempest, but that disappeared by the final version).

P5: Thinking on "lateral thinking" here - i originally had this as 3 or 4 lateral/horizontal strips, but they had so much commonality - i wanted to connect them more directly. I tried this once, thought better of it, woke up the next morning and tried it again, and said why not? (Having spent days trying to figure out how to do it, i can answer the why not much better...) It is intended to be read vaguely upper left to lower right, hitting pieces along the way as one does. The far right column does connect quite directly - but i very purposefully wanted this to be readable in many different ways - to emphasize the point of sketching, of making connections laterally. Also, the math sketches are my dad's, would've liked to show a bit more of that alongside my own sketches figuring out how to make this piece. Another time...

P6: I told my dad about my idea for the final page, and he grabbed the latest issue of Scientific American which had an image of the brain as nodes for the cover. Tied in neatly where i was already going... - That's it, N

Dissertation Preface to Unflattening

(Note - I have moved this site over to www.spinweaveandcut.com. All new material, information about Unflattening, as well as past archives will be over there. Please join me over there! Thanks - N)

My dissertation proposal was handed in this week and defense is around the corner. I prepared this preface for it - which gives a hint at where i'm heading with the dissertation itself, "a visual-verbal inquiry into curiosity" - that is a comics narrative as academic dissertation. In starting this with a nearly all verbal approach, i set up the final definition on page 4 - pointing to the inadequacy of this approach. The page following, when it comes, will thus launch forth in full comics fashion. (And likely i'll reference Alice, saying, "what is the use of a book ... without pictures or conversations?") Look for excerpts from the dissertation in progress in the year ahead (and other comics as well of course!). - Nick 

(Note: this piece didn't actually appear in the dissertation - only in my proposal. To see excerpts, go here. - N)

Five Critical Senses with professor Tim Eatman

This piece was produced for and with Professor Timothy K. Eatman, of Syracuse University and the director of research for Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. In the midst of a conversation in which Tim was taking me through his presentation on the five critical sense of engagement, i was struck by his use of his fingers to convey his ideas along with his words. Given my interest in working with visual metaphor in my work, I saw a lot of visual material in this and it also resonated with one of my first (and still favorite) "mature" works - "Show of Hands." And so one thing led to another, and I created this piece out of text versions of his talk, and he presented it in conjunction with his acceptance of the early career award from the IARSLCE. Ok, all that said, let's get to the work itself. - Nick