The Diving Bell
by Frank Santoro
Saturday, January 12, 2008
I’ve heard a lot of cartoonists talking about this dilemma: in order to find all the strength within one to summon up the images needed for the comic, to maintain all the focus and attention to detail necessary, to have an editor’s eye + guiding hand, to be the objective reader who keeps the narrative whole, the artist then suffers the atrophying of other “occular” abilities.
I only draw the landscapes + figures I need for the story. The demands of the story are what engulfs me, so that my waking moments are spent shape-shifting into a camera, a projector. I’m an editing machine that plays my comic on an endless loop for months.
Yet when I’m walking along the Braddock trail with Gretchen and I spy those stacked mills + houses above, I furiously look at EVERYTHING and it inevitably leads me to draw other things, new things that have no place in the narrative other than it is my life, my story — and if I don’t record it here, her, now, it’ll be left on the cutting room floor.
Labels: Frank Santoro, Landscapes
You’ve guessed what movie I saw last night? Yeah, a no-prize for you. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Everyone’s welcome to rib me for this post, and my Schleprock tone, but I don’t have my own personal blog and I just felt the need to take this page out of my scribbled on journal, and put it out there in the world.
Now for another cup of coffee and, where’s that issue of Cap’n Quick?
I thought it was a great post, Frank. No ribbing from me!
Wim Wenders has a great story about how when he was shooting his version of the Scarlet Letter (on the Spanish coast, with Spanish locals as pilgrims, no less) They would shoot essentially still shots of particularly poetic isolated scenes that struck them during the shoot. The one that made the final cut that I remember was one of a single apple hanging on a tree for like half a minute. An early venture into a realization of the spiritual for Wim, I guess, but these poetic moments, even with no discernible motive or meaning at the time can be so important to a piece and should not be rejected. It all goes in the pot…