Cartoons and Visual Art 2

Those not skinning, can hold a leg.

This sketchbook is called Those not skinning, can hold a leg. It is still in progress with thirty-eight spreads left to be filled. I’m fairly sure work on this sketchbook began in 2016. It has continued on and off since with breaks of sometimes up to a year or more between panel installations.

My mother gave me this grey sketchbook full of pages patterned with faint dots spaced a quarter-inch apart. I wasn’t sure how to approach use of this format until I noticed that the dotless inside front page for some reason had a stern, blank rectangle of 2.375 by 2.875 inches printed in dark red ink. So I determined to pencil on every subsequent page a rectangle of the same size, which came out to twelve dots wide by fifteen dots high, and to fill in these rectangular areas in the middle of each page with whatever kind of psychedoolia flowed out.

Sometime earlier that year I had been reading the Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman and, among other peculiarities in that text, had been captivated by an endnote with a laceratingly odd turn of phrase:

In his Personal Memoirs (1885-86) Grant wrote that when he explained to Lincoln his reasons for ordering several simultaneous Union advances in the spring campaign, the President replied: “Oh, yes! I see that. As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he must hold a leg while somebody else does.” Lincoln’s personal secretary, John Hay, recorded the remark (as retold to him by the President) in his diary on April 30, 1864 as: “Those not skinning, can hold a leg.”

After filling the first several penciled panels with drawings, I photocopied the relevant bit of text from the Sherman book, went back and pasted it into the printed rectangle on the un-dotted paged and cartooned that panel in as a sort of title page.

Herewith I shall review all one hundred and eighteen extant drawings in the book in the order in which they appear (and with the exception of that title page, the order in which they were composed).

By the standards of which I’m capable today, the work in this book appears technically crude and largely ill-considered from a design standpoint. C’est la guerre.

In this drawing appears a motif that shows up a lot in my cartooning: characters “saying” other characters (one character generates a speech balloon which instead of text has another character inside of it). I don’t really know what it means and I like it.

The first double-page spread:

Ugh. Yeah, looking at these old drawings up close and seeing all of the exercises in poor penmanship that I’ve ironed out of my doodling process is some bitter medicine. Lots of thoughtlessness and carelessness in these cartoons.

The verso drawing in this next spread has a triceratops poking its head out of the patterning miasma. I’ve been drawing dinosaurs since I could hold a pencil.

On the next drawing, feeling experimental and wanting to risk something that might not work out, for the outer area I did some checkered patterning in a solid layout with no unfilled space. I recall at least one friend at the time saying she liked it.

This next spread seems from verso to recto to find me oscillating between trying to use less black-and-red and more black-and-red.

In this drawing I experimented with broad swaths of bright colors in a way that was theretofore not part of my cartooning practice. It made for an interesting result, though I don’t think the drawing is one of the stronger in the book overall.

More quadrupedal critters and dinosaurs, naturally:

Curious multidimensional anatomy and characters growing into one another:

I can observe pencil and pen technique getting incrementally sharper in both of these next two drawings. My feel for color theory was getting less bad too.

Something weird is growing or emanating off the central figure into the center of this drawing:

This drawing has an accidental ink smudge that I incorporated as trails of patterning that violate the panel borders:

For some reason I vividly remember working on this next one while sitting in a warehouse where I was working at the time. It’s probably the strongest piece in the book up to this point. Something intuitive and unforced in the pen strokes that comes through in the lines.

Pretty sure this next spread was the first one I completed after I relocated from San Francisco to Seattle for a while.

A smudge again transcends borders:

This is a pretty strong pair of drawings by the standards of my skill level at that time:

This next spread is something of a mess. Some good color combinations though.

The verso drawing on this spread was produced during a time of great emotional difficulty and is one of the few pieces in the book with a direct representation of feelings I was experiencing when I made it. The dinosaur in the middle is me being besieged from all sides.

Some kinda cool swizzly patterning on this one:

I quite like this drawing; might be one of the strongest in the book:

The character in the middle of this next one is the same character from the previous drawing on the same spread.

Got a little smudged outside the lines on this one again (lower right corner).

This next spread is pretty good on both pages.

At this point for a while I started getting into filling characters in with solid colors and doing elaborate crisscrossing experiments with super-extended limbs and antlers and wings. Characters can also be observed holding swords and daggers for some reason.

I have no idea what’s up with that conspicuous swath of black in this one:

I dislike this busy and unfocused drawing:

This next spread is radical across both drawings. Interesting things happening.

The next five spreads seem to me to comprise a run of strong work. Flawed but striking.

This drawing is good:

These next two drawings not so good.

Gettin’ weird on this next spread.

This spread is strong.

I was trying to revisit what I liked about that earlier orange-and-black warehouse drawing.

Challenging the panel borders again in the upper left and lower right corners:

I think this drawing is one of the better ones in Those not skinning, can hold a leg.

This one has an ugly ink stain in one of the green blocks. A slip of a pen? Hazards of going straight to ink. Mistakes can be difficult or impossible to correct for.

This drawing was adapted from the Codex Aureus of Canterbury, an illuminated Gospel Book of the mid-eighth century. Illuminated manuscripts have been an ongoing source of fascination and inspiration for years and I have studied them closely as research for my work, but a cartoon in which I reconstituted the style so closely is an outlier not only in this book but in all my oeuvre. This drawing is an anomaly.

And here, for reasons not clear to me, I reintroduced cut-and-paste text into this book for the first time since the title page.

More experimentation in radical patterning and more cut-and-paste text on this next spread:

This one’s good.

This one not as good.

I remember this one started out full of confidence. Didn’t stick a landing.

This one’s cool; I dig the paws:

Across this next spread on the recto page I began to grow frustrated with my lack of progress on this project over the years and threw whatever rule book I was operating out of into the fire. I started using bigger gel pens in sloppier strokes and smearing the colors into one another with my fingers. Trying to bottle some inspiration from the likes of Gerhard Richter, John Cage and Philip Guston.

Burning:

Eviscerating:

I like the randomized background colors playing haphazardly against the cartoony forms:

Bottoming out with the most aggressively crude and simplistic offerings from this book so far.

Closing this entry with this golden fellow who seems to be looking back over the course of what has transpired, perhaps pondering where it goes from here for Those not skinning, can hold a leg.

When this book might be finished depends in part on whether I get back to filling the panels in more refined drawing styles or if I stick with cultivating the brutish finger-paints aesthetic. In any case it feels good to share all extant work from this book in one place, which I have never before done except for those who have held the book itself in their hands. Perhaps one day you will be one of them, whether in a finished, unfinished or published version of Those not skinning, can hold a leg.