Eye Infection

'Rub it, pick it, itch it, scratch it- and it will get infected!" That's what parents tell their children. But children never listen. It is not in their nature to leave things alone, because they 'should know better.' So they persist. For the pleasure of it. And the more they worry a sore spot, the more interest they take in it, the more they appreciate its peculiar, changing characteristics, the more thoroughly it beomes their own creation. Freud maintained that the origins of artistic creativity can be witnessed in a child playing with its feces. Chipping away at a scab or peeling it off is much the same sort of primal activity. The first is sculpture, the second is painting.

This regressive impulse does not disappear with adulthood, it is merely repressed. Anyway that is true for many of us. In some, though, it is sublimated and survives as a form of perverse curiosity, the negative or destrtuctive complement of a positive, productive drive.

Anway this is from a book I started reading today called "eye infection". It's about underground comic artists from around the 70's and 80's, mainly Robert Crumb, Mike Kelley, Jim Nutt, Peter Saul, and H.C. Westermann. They were the big ones. Crumb was a leading pioneer for comics depicting race, sex, and drugs but also holding strong in the one of a kind marksmenship one puts towards creating comic literature. The best way I've found to get into this kid is to 1.) watch the movie American Splendor, 2.) research his literature for about 30 minutes online at amazon.com. He's got all of his sketchbooks published all the way back to the 60's.

I ordered this book by him today called "Your Vigor for Life Appals Me". I mean....just look at the title....it's got to be good!

Crumb is the kind of character that for some reason always brings home to the idea of just "drawing" in a sketchbook. I mean, tha's pretty much all he ever did. Even if his style was crazy as hell, he'd revisit page after page and pile and pile sketches all interacting with each other until eventually, it produced some kind of hidden dialouge. The idea of a sketchbook is merely that. A way for igures and ideas to interact with each other. But as simple as that is, how many times have you looked at a newly sketched drawing and said to yourself "I hope nothing ever spoils this drawing, because it's perfectly centered by itself". Crumb has this one drawing of a really nice portrait of some lady done in almost a classical manner, yet at the bottom of the page, you can tell he used this page previously for dozens of other sketches, in which one of the characters from the bottom (a little bird) is perched up on the portrait of the lady's shoulder saying "you're so cute". NOW THAT'S WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT

i'm so lame.