LINEFEEL: Home (Private Notes, High Res, and Process)

Hello, Patrons.

Now that September is behind us, I can finally share this image outside of the Gender Unbound artist festival that was kind enough to commission me for it. If you want to purchase a canvas print with proceeds going to GU, please do so through their website. The festival is run by friends who are very much deserving of lovingkindness. The artist statement is available at the previous link, or in my Patreon post here.

Now, let's talk about how this image exists in its current iteration.


Suburbia

The first art professor I ever had was like a brother to me. I was in the first art class he ever taught. I went out of my way to attend his classes throughout my college career, even though I was often terrible at completing tasks. I still loved learning, and he was one of the few professors I felt I could deeply invest in. I don't know exactly how he feels about me, but a heated argument with him over the phone is the reason the LINEFEEL series started.

His paintings included oil paintings suburban buildings with large vertical compositions. The few times these unsettling pieces included figures, they were normally turned away, preoccupied with their own white suburban goings-on. What I found most compelling about these pieces was the concept--they were often titled after Bible verses. In the vast negative space there was an implication of fear, of being watched, of an impending rapture that would only save the most penitent of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Later in his career, my professor would continue his theme of covertly spiritual paintings of buildings, except with a greater extend of distortion.

Maybe it was my low standards for Christian art, but I found my professor's work compelling. It takes the heartwarming sentimentality of Conservative Christianity and flips it on its head. Distortions of the calm and polite spaces in his paintings gave way  to something weirder. Something more real. As a rule, I've learned that things that feel curious and visceral are probably closer to a real God than something saccharine, and so I purse those visceral things in earnest.

Somewhere along the way, the professor and I grew apart. It was a slow burn, likely starting with my coming out and my divorce. When visiting campus for my professor's dissertation, he invited me to stay with he and his family. I got to bond with his wife over our both having relationships in Switzerland, answering any questions about my polyamorous relationship, and other goings-on. His wife seemed to listen in earnest, and didn't make any judgement calls on what I was sharing. After I drove back home, however, he said over the phone that he couldn't have me in his home again, around his family. He viewed me as a sexual deviant. He wasn't being self-aggrandizing. He said he lost sleep over having to make this call, and he definitely sounded like he was going to cry. I told him I understand, since we can't simply choose whatever we want to believe. But I did ask him to accept that he may be mistaken about his beliefs and the world at large.

At the time, I didn't know how it made me feel. He and I still think of each other all the time. I certainly think of him whenever I do images of suburbia. Any time I draw a hellish overlap of buildings, like in the final image of I AM ANIMA, it is a callback to a society that let me down over and over again. This professor is one of several examples of people who didn't believe me when I was sharing the new things I've learned about myself. They certainly aren't the last time a fixture of my life no longer fit me. I realized mid-painting Home that those experiences are imprinted on me. My relationship to my professor and his family are part of the home I lost. And so, that spirit is probably the biggest component of this art.   


Ideation

Sterling Hundley is, in my opinion, the smartest thinker in illustration. I've admired his lateral approach to image-crafting for some time now, a process he's packaged and sold as the Ideation Lab. Image ideation has multiple steps, but one of the most enjoyable and pivotal experiences during my participation, was thinking in dichotomies:

With an established dichotomy, one has many little pairings of conflict that cover an incredible amount of ground in a deceptively simple frame. It's genius. Sterling, I love you. (I got about halfway through the class before deciding to drop the rest of the assignments to focus on my own things, but it was well worth the money all the same.) The dichotomies, when paired with little symbolic doodles, may give way to interesting pairings worthy of their own illustrations. And so, here's a look at all the notes taken before I could start work on Home:

In the top-right one can see the thumbnails, including what I settled on as the final composition. These thumbnails, however, could never have existed until I knew how to summarize all the feelings that well up when someone asks, "What does home feel like, to you?" It's all these words, all these doodles.

Something I love about abstract art, is that it feels like it has a better shot of being true to our experiences. Our memories, our feelings, our identities, all of that is a giant and abstract spaghetti. One can reduce any of our components to smaller pieces, but it will never do justice to our complexities. If you ask me, abstract art requires less summarizing. You can hit someone with a blast of feeling that they may not even be able to articulate at first. Good! That's closer to what a complicated feeling is, what a person is, what a cumulation of life experiences is.

For the figures in the center of the image, I knew I had to shift to a medium that matched the subject matter better. I opted for crayon. In my memory, I held the crayon in my fist, but I can't be certain that's what actually happened.

I hope you enjoyed these extra insights into one of my weirdest but favourite commissions yet. For the artists and the other curious folks, I have attached the high-res image. I hope you find it rewarding to your curiosities.

Love,

-Jonathan