Dear Stranger

Me: Of course it fits like puzzle pieces when they finally come together.

Her:That doesn’t mean anything, just because the puzzle pieces fit together doesn’t mean the picture makes sense.

Me: What? What the hell do you mean by that?

Her: You know. Didn’t you ever do that?

Me: Hmm, “didn’t I ever do that?” Yeah, no, I think you’re going to have to elaborate on this one.

Her: You know! When you get pissed off at the puzzle and cut off all the edges so you just have a bunch of rectangle and squares. Come on, you’re the artist! You never did that?

Me: No, no, I never got pissed off at the puzzle. I put it together the way it fit.

Her: It fit this way too. And the pictures were more interesting by far. My point being, just because they fit and they were interesting doesn’t mean they made sense.

Something of mine was posted on drawger.com as part of an online showcase of women illustrators work. The comment that the host made when posting it is rather interesting to me.

I’ve posted this image because it is beautiful and emotional and it serves as an example of the kind of work I’ve been getting and not knowing what to do about adding it to the show.

To my mind, this isn’t conceptual work. This show is meant to strengthen our confidence in thinking in an op-ed kind of way…

…Or is it that we are wired another way and that emotional work is our forte and shouldn’t be messed with? [I hope not*]

[*editted from: I really don't know.]

- Nancy Stahl

http://www.drawger.com/show.php?show_id=36&image_id=1294&view_comments=1#comments

I kind of wish I could respond, but I’m not a drawger member.

I’m not sure about other women, but I know myself. Emotional work is my forte, and I’m not ashamed of that, or scared of it… I stood up for it in art school, and I intend to stand up for it throughout my career. I think it’s sad that there isn’t much of a place for it in mainstream illustration, and that the work that I truly enjoy doing doesn’t seem to translate well into the realm of “conceptual” editorial illustration.

I work with concepts just as well as the best political illustrators. It’s just a different kind of concept. Emotional concepts are under represented in the world of illustration. I don’t know if that’s a gender issue, but it might be.

By the way, I just printed up a couple of hundred promotional post cards with that image on it. Leave me a note if you’d like me to put your address into the mix when I start mailing them out.

My interpretation of what i heard from amy’s room last night
Or, Amy looks for jobs and is met with nothing but unpaid internships:

Words are enough, when words are all you’ve got. 

A man on the subway begging for change says,
“I’m not greedy, I’ll take a penny if a penny’s all
you can afford to give. It may not seem like much to you,
but nothing’s too small when you ain’t got nothing.”

Every little word gets tucked away.
Cause no word is too small, when words are all you’ve got.

Here’s a thing I’m working on for a boy.
This is an early stage, I’ll post it again when it’s
closer to the finish line.
I wonder how it’ll change.

Sometimes I find myself wishing I knew just a bit more about righteous anger, and a bit less about resignation.

But, to act on anger requires you to earnestly believe that your actions can and will change something, whether it be the world, a situation, another person…

Do you ever lay your hands on a solid surface and, brief though it may be, find yourself convinced you’ll just fall through it if you push? Like a ghost, or a figment of the imagination.

I don’t push outward, the world and it’s people don’t seem to change much except in size and shape, and when you push they only seem to pull.

I push inward. At least I can feel myself changing.

A song for the moment:

I’m poor at keeping on topic, I meant to write an introduction, but I have nothing to say about what I’m doing here.

Let’s talk about empathy, and walls.

When I was younger the metaphor of the wall was one that I identified with strongly. I busied myself at the task of building emotional, psychic, walls to keep myself from getting hurt- all the while hoping some one would come along and take the time to break them down, that someone would come find me. The princess in the tower fantasy.

What I’ve learned is something that most people know, whether they accept it or not: walls come with their own brand of hurt. They hold pain in just as much as they keep it out. They close you in with yourself and allow you to remain cold to the world. There are times in our lives when this seems like all we really can do, for the sake of self preservation.

But, when you close yourself off from the world, you shield yourself from a very important truth: your hurts are not the only ones that exist in the world, and more importantly, they are not so unique. You are neither the first nor the last to experience all of the things that you are trying to hide from the world. It seems like the safe, and even the strong thing to do to close ourselves in with our pain, but in doing so we deny ourselves something that to my mind is far more valuable than the safety you feel shut in on yourself. And that is the empathetic experience that comes from knowing your own pain well enough to see it in others and allowing yourself to share the burden, rather than carrying it all on your own.

The process of breaking down my own walls has taught me a great deal about empathy… Or maybe it’s the other way around, and empathy has taught me a great deal about breaking down walls. I’m not sure which, but no matter. Empathy, emotional mirroring, the ability to feel along side another person, requires a level of emotional vulnerability and exposure that not many are comfortable with. It requires a willingness to live life with fewer walls. To allow your emotional skin to exist in its natural state of permeability takes a great deal of courage. But to allow oneself to experience strong emotions in unison with another human being, whether it be pain and sadness, or joy and elation, to allow oneself to resonate with the world- to truly see, and accept, that both your burdens and your joys are understandable, mirror images of burdens and joys experienced the world over- is worth the vulnerability that comes with letting your guard down.

“When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.” -Tennessee Williams

So, dear stranger, I’m asking you to let your guard down.