Groping after an explanation

I've come to be pretty confident in my artistic voice, but when I was recently asked to go past my favorite joke ("I paint sad flowy ladies.") and the usual followup ("I paint the quiet things: internal drama and subtle emotions of the figures in the stories I love."), I found myself going in rambling, vague circles which boiled down to "????"

So, having put some thought to the question, it is time to think aloud (aka write it down), because wow it is hard to pin down.

How do I put my art into words?

There is a definite theme and direction, I know that much. There's something about pain and beauty and  humanity and femininity, and there it is: but how do I actually verbalize it? It's not a 'something', it's a definite thing, but I dance around locking onto it constantly.

There is beauty to be found in pain, in sorrow and grief, and there's beauty in quiet moments, too. My art is about these intersections, and especially in those things in the context of overlooked narratives within known stories, but it's more than that. So many times, women are subjects told about and acted upon but not explored, even when the stories are technically about them. I keep looking at these isolated, simplified figures through the context of their humanity, the emotion I read in their actions and choices, and celebrate their beauty and strength and tragedy (or attempt to).

There really is something arresting about all the things not said, but implied, by these narratives I find myself drawn to. We know Persephone ate the pomegranate seeds, but why, after all those months? We know Guinevere was unfaithful, but what did she feel for the husband she betrayed? We know the girl without hands forged her path from the great unknown, but from where did the strength come to take herself from those places of danger with such self-possession?

I want to ask these questions, strip from them the gloss of storytelling disassociation, but still make sure that these women are celebrated no less for being reassessed as mere mortals - their untouchable nature is not what holds my interest, but their beauty in the midst of their human struggles and weaknesses.

(I think I'm getting close to finding the right words for my art, but it's still quite rambly. I need to be able to speak both succinctly and in-depth about this, and right now I have neither. I feel like I'm circling the point from a height - I'm no longer doing a haphazard fly-by, but I still need to close the gap.)

Evenstar

This is my comic for MoCCA, minus the cover which is, haha, still being painted. I am hoping that there are enough Lord of the Rings nerds that weekend to justify fourteen pages of I Have Too Many Emotions About a Minor Character, Please Hold.

Evenstar Pages 12-13

I started working on this comic with the easiest image for me - the big dark double-page spread one page from the end. It was the easiest way to get myself into the hatching in a context that would be far more forgiving than, say, anything with figures.

The end result needed a lot of Photoshoppery, but I expected that, since pencil really only goes so dark without going past hatching and into full coverage... and the end result is something I'm pretty damn pleased with!

The raw scan

After Photoshop

I need to go back into the original and take out that weird half-panel around the Evenstar the way I did digitally, so I can present it for sale, but other than that I'm letting them stand as two very separate entities.

Next up to bat: not another Evenstar page, but instead, my Month of Love drawing! Stay tuned.

And now for something completely different

Stand back, everyone - Jenna is doing a comic.

That's an out of character statement if ever I made one, and it deserves some context. It's simple: one of the best small venues in New York City for selling stuff as an illustrator is MoCCA, but since that stands for 'Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art', this year it's required that every artist tabling have at least one comic to show.

After some (haha, some) initial panic and abortive attempts at writing A Comic, I realized that I was already above and beyond my comfort zone and needed to approach it more intelligently. Instead of a story of my own, which I don't have, or an adaptation of something else, which I would have had to write and design from the ground up, it occurred to me that I already had something I could use: The Lord of the Rings.

[warning for extreme nerdiness and emotions]

On the read-through I did my senior year of college, a small exchange I'd never really paid much attention to jumped out at me:

And Aragon said to Halbarad: 'What is that you bear, kinsman?' For he saw that instead of a spear he bore a tall staff, as it were a standard, but it was close-furled in a black cloth bound about with many thongs. 

'It is a gift that I bring you from the Lady of Rivendell,' answered Halbarad. 'She wrought it in secret, and was long in the making. But she also sends word to you: The days now are short. Either our hope cometh, or all hope's end. Therefore I send thee what I have made for thee. Fare well, Elfstone!' 

- Return of the King, Capter Two: The Passing of the Grey Company

It is one of only two direct references to Arwen I can recall between actual her appearances in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King, and it hit me like a punch to the gut. This scene takes place around two months after the Frodo and his companions set out from Rivendell; the implication is that Arwen has spent that entire time since Aragorn's departure working on his standard, alone, knowing that she will never see him again unless the impossible is achieved. And then she sends it to him. That's the part that gets me, really.

So, here's the comic, in final-thumb form; the text follows, though it's not broken up by page here. As we get closer to April, expect to see some progress shots.

You fell in love once, when the sun was brighter. 

That sun has long since set. But you are the Evenstar: a piercing light in the growing darkness. As the shadows gather and pool, dangerous as deep water, your radiance becomes a beacon. But no matter how bright you shine, it is for nothing if he fails. 

So you take the cold, clear light of the star you are named for; you take the delicate, shining threads of hope that bind you to him. The black of the banner beneath your hands is nothing compared to what rages at your doorstep, but you pierce it with diamonds and truesilver until you have given all you have. 

And then you let it go. 

It goes to him, as you cannot, takes a place of honor beside him, and now you watch the shadows deepen with nothing left to keep them at bay but your own lonely faith. 

But you are the Evenstar, and you shine bright as light fails. You are a beacon. And far away, a banner of blackest night is pierced by stars.

Shifting gears

I haven't really posted much here in a while, though I've finished two paintings and made huge strides on a third. There's a reason: for the last six or seven months, I've been, very quietly, absolutely panicking about my art.

It was a background noise for a long time, something I didn't even really notice except occasionally, in small ways: in my slow withdrawing from the community, in the the mixed way I reacted to inspiring illustrations, in my flat inability to even make a move in promoting myself, in my difficulty articulating anything about my last two paintings. My art was getting better and better, and garnering reactions that left me speechless, but there was a growing anxiety sitting in the pit of my stomach that made making art hard.

The problem was that I wasn't a fantasy illustrator, and I couldn't reconcile that.

For a while now, a part of me has known that my art wasn't actually the kind of fantasy that would interest the markets I thought I wanted to work in; more recently, that part also figured out that I wasn't even really making the kind of paintings that fit in an illustration portfolio. There's a grey area in where illustration ends and gallery work begins, and many, many artists work on both sides of that blurry line - but every time I read an advice post saying things like 'look at the book covers in your local book store!', or flipped through Spectrum, my anxiety spiked through the roof because my art didn't look like that.

It should be understood that I 'knew' I was a fantasy illustrator since mid-college, and I put a lot of effort into educating myself about and making myself a part of the fantasy illustration community. There's a lot of comfort to be had in an identity - and the unknown is terrifying.

It was hard being rational about shifting gears toward gallery work when I didn't even know where to start, and froze every time I thought about researching.

Through this, I kept painting. It wasn't the mechanical, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of painting that I did when I crashed last spring - this was me closing my eyes on the panic and just... trusting my art. Something had clicked inside when I finished The Long Path, and letting myself sink into Devotional was an experience worthy of the painting's title. Even as I despaired over the endless mosaic tiles of my current painting, it felt right, and the panic fell away.

It wasn't any sort of a long-term solution. But it did allow me to move forward where in all else I was freezing to a halt - and it did mean that I was posting progress.

Travis Louie, who I'd met this summer at the IMC, noticed those posts; he's the one who's given me something other than a blank page to start on. Whereas I was previously working with nothing but the thought, 'galleries????!?', he has given me advice and people and places to look at, and a goal for my portfolio rebuild, and I'm more grateful than I can say.

So that's where I am right now: still painting, but now with a goal. And, you know, that trust in my art hasn't gone away. My life is currently a balancing act, with work and maintaining any sort of a social life weighed against making art - but my art is always there, waiting, and I have faith in that. Transitions are so, so difficult, but between Travis giving me something to go on and that faith I've found, I no longer feel frozen every time I'm not concentrating specifically on painting.

And we'll see how things work out.

Devotional

Devotional, 20"x30"

I'm going to write a thing about this.

Studio time!

The last time I took a good photo of my studio, it was senior year of college - a year and a half ago. I really like seeing artists' working spaces, and in the spirit of sharing, here's mine (and Steen's!)

Here's the whole thing. We get really lovely northern light through those windows!

Steen's side! (look at her birds!!)

My side! (look at the mess!)

Crossed blades, art, and encouragement. Steen wrote  NEJ beneath it but she is wrong.

Eleven, Aragorn, Nine, and Faramir - my studio mascots.

And Van Gogh, my studio guardian. His ear comes off!! <3