Do Not Trust Artists

Evan Dorkin once wrote something in the front of one his comics:

Do not trust this comic book! I was angry when I wrote this, but not when I pencilled this. When I inked this I couldn't remember what had upset me.

What pisses you off right now?

Don't take any time to think about it, don't rationalise it, don't analyse it - Write it down.

Go on. I'll wait.

Done that? Good. Anyway...

What's pissing you off RIGHT NOW?

A couple of years ago, I was really pissed off at the church. An easy target to be sure, but I had a full clip of meme-bullets in my brain that I wanted to fuck those barreled fish up with good and proper.

Wrote a fair amount of them down, too.

Not enough of them, though. And they're lost now.

I came across the beautiful beginnings of some stories just recently. They moved me - tugging at my mind, saying "You know how things used to be, you know how pure your righteous rage was, you know how idealistic you were, you know what sort of a person you were back then. You may think you've forgotten, but you know...."

I wanted more than anything to finish those stories, put some hard, driving muscles on those unearthed skeletons of memory.

But I couldn't.

I've only gone to one church service in the last two years, and I was tired and kept imagining gothic performance artists invading and slaughtering the band. And the only Christians I've hung out with in as long are the fallen ones, who swear, drink and fuck like the damned souls they in all likelihood are.

I'm not angry at them any more.

My anger towards the church, such a defining part of me for so long, has gone. You move away from the fire, the heat inside you goes cold.

I always used to think to the future, you see - I'd think "I'll write these stories in a little while, and by all holy damn won't they be good?" And I never quite got around to it. Oh, I did something - I have a few dozen pages scattered here and there, but nothing finished, nothing focussed.

So while I did a little bit, I have very little to show for the years of angst between 19 and 23. (Yeah yeah, the world is probably better off without such whining, but at least I'm not suggesting that I should have been burdening the world with any of my pre 19 whinging)

The first comic strip I drew, I had had siting in a notebook for about 18 months or two years, something like that.

By the time I drew it, I knew every panel, every expression, every piece and every part. It had all been in my mind for so long it seemed almost... well, stale is the wrong word - maybe some vaguely pejorative connotation of the word Familiar, if there's one lurking about anywhere.

When I did my last comic strip, I still laughed at some of the shite jokes after the ink had dried. Because I hacked the thing out in it's entirety in slightly over two days. My first cartoon was four pages, and took over two years to get done - my last was three pages, and it was written and drawn at less than a day a page.

The most deadly and dangerous and stifling and stupid thing we can do as people who think of ourselves as creative (no matter how self-delusional that may or may not be) is to think to ourselves "I'll get onto that one day." Because how many times do we get around to it? And how many times, while we're watching tv, with the sincere intention of action in the back of our sitcom-smoothed brains, does the passion leave us? The anger, the fury, the rage, fading away?

You can recapture the intensity of a moment, but less so as the moment recedes into the mists of time. Just as pain fades with time, so does anger. You create from intensity - Something strikes you as wrong, so you rage against it, something strikes you as right, so you celebrate it. Something or someone pushes you, and you need to express yourself.

Well, what I'm saying here is that when something pushes you into the need for expression - push back. Act on it immediately; create, write, paint, sing, express. Of course it isn't particularly practical for you to sit down in the middle of the office and start spontaneously composing haiku, but write it down, the feeling, the idea, and put it somewhere safe.

Only this time, don't leave it at the bottom of your draw, or the back of your mind - Come back to it after work, or in the weekend (this weekend, not the next), and build on it. Put layers of muscle, tissue, nerves, on this skeleton before you forget.

Act on something within a week. I spent a couple of years meaning to get around to some stories, and lost them, the scattered fragments of which read with a lot more idealism and rage filled purity than anything I've hacked out recently

Seize the intensity that you have THIS VERY MOMENT and channel it - tomorrow you may have forgotten what got you so angry in the first place, and art will be lost.

I want to see things that people won't understand in five years, that people will give funny looks to by this time next year, because that means that people are creating from things that affect them NOW, showing the culture that we're feeding and feeding off right now, this very minute.

We can set the fucking world ablaze, but only if we grab the fire before it grows cold and dies...

"Now that I think of it, I wish I had been a hell-raiser when I was thirty years old. I tried it when I was 50 but I always got sleepy." - Groucho Marx

--Apathy Jack

13/4/02