The Weirder the Better

One of the best things that came out of Bread and Puppet for me was inspiration. It was excellent to get away from home and meet so many other creative people. I noticed that a lot of other artists among the apprentices worked in a particular way, which is planning out their end result a whole lot less than I do. When I'm drawing (with pen) I usually make a sketch first and then ink it. So many people who worked with pen at Bread and Puppet just went for it. I really, really liked that idea so I gave it a shot and it completely rocks. It is a lot more spontaneous and whatever comes out of your brain just comes out. I've noticed that when I work with pen, a lot of what I do is cute. And I am tired of cute. Drawing in ink without sketching first is pushing my drawings to a much more interesting place, I believe.

Something else I noticed about a lot of the work that other apprentices were making is that the imagery was often totally creepy. That's a good thing. There was a lot of distorted bodies, oozy shapes, people eating things, penises, darkness, dismemberment, jars full of eyeballs, hair, things that blurred the line between beautiful and grotesque... It was AWESOME. I love weird. I want more of that in my world. It's gonna happen. Especially since I began collaborating with Leda, who is a really amazing artist and Bread and Puppet apprentice from New Zealand and who comes up with a lot of ideas I would never have thought of, but that's what collaborating is all about, eh?

Leda and I wrote stories and swapped them, then illustrated each other's stories. We fully intend to continue this exchange through international post. I wrote her a really long story about a woman named Elsa who has no legs (Leda's edit) and doesn't wear clothes. She goes on many adventures and then meets Bart, a flautist with a hat. They fall in love and live happily for several years until he pressures her into wearing a shirt so she leaves him. The story Leda wrote is about an old woman who shows up on the narrator's front porch in a very mysterious and surreal way. These are the illustrations I did for it. Guess at which point I stopped doing pencil sketches beforehand:

I sadly do not have photos of the artwork Leda did for the story I wrote, but I do have a picture of some earrings she made me that I now wear constantly:

Sometime in the final two weeks of the apprenticeship, she told me to draw a man eating a man eating a man eating a man and this is what came out:

This was really fun to draw. Really, really fun to draw.

Yup, I dig drawings that are creepy and weird and spontaneous. 

Weird is good for you.