aaaand this is a drawing i started in australia and finished in canada. It was inspired by a library book about magic and alchemy in art. I was amazed at how certain mythologies and attributes of our natural world persist and change through time. But for me, it's not so much about consistant symbolism as the underlying human/nature relations.

Somehow I came up with the idea of people going a little bit against the natural order. This is a woman peeing upwards at the moon. She's gigantic like some kind of superhuman, and her urine actually reaches the personified moon. It's playful, and I thought it made sense that the moon is often a symbol of feminity. And I think it's like a myth... "and she grew so large, and peed so strongly, that her piss totally soaked the moon in the face, and dripped down to earth, creating the lake of Moon Piss."

For me, the concepts that inspire a drawing should stay at the beginning stage of the art-creation. My ideas about this work's "meaning" only serve as the motivation to create an image that is, in itself, interesting to look at. So I know that people are going to interpret the spraying fluid as a gigantic orgasm, or lemon juice, or whatever. I don't like to make art that is like a cryptic code, which you can decipher using your artworld knowledge to come up with the meaning and say "oh, I see what you did there."

And that's okay, because when I look at old medieval, renaissance, or surrealist imagery, I don't always need to know what the symbols mean in order to be interested. I just want it to look cool and provoke a bit of thought.

Failure of Text in images

I haven't been posting while I was in Australia. While I was there, I made these two drawings:

There was text in the speech balloons, but when I scanned these images, I photoshopped them out, because they just didn't work in context.

The words were based on a conversation I overheard, from the party in the yard next door while I was drawing. A European visitor had had too much beer, and was talking loudly about all sorts of things, mostly comparing Australia to his home. He sounded homesick. Eventually he started saying, "I don't feel like I should BE in Australia, as a white person. White people don't belong here, they aren't welcome because they are foreign invaders. Everywhere else i've travelled, I've met someone from that local culture who made me feel like I was accepted as a visitor, but not here in Australia." He sounded pretty distressed.

I paraphrased his words and made the topless woman say them. She was a picture from an "Australia is Beautiful" naked postcard, and I just added the rest of the decor randomly.

The second image had text based on the reply to this issue made by a housemate's friend when I told him the overheard conversation. He basically said, "Well the British weren't the worst colonizers in the world. Sure, they did terrible things, but not as bad as some other nations. And at least they did things to improve the countries they took over, like building railroads, instead of just pillaging."

I'm fairly interested in discussions of colonialism, so I used these two points of view, in a collage spirit. I figured that just as I was taking figures from postcards and re-drawing them, I might as well do the same with text.

But in the end I didn't find that I could show these pictures to anybody, without adding a big disclaimer of, "This is not really my opinion, this is a conversation I overheard." I guess words are just that strong, more loaded than images in this case. I mean a topless chick with pointy boobs is a topless chick with pointy boobs - whatever - but the words seem more likely to be interpreted as the artist's personal viewpoint.

I think in the end, the problem is that I feel so ambivalent about judging these viewpoints. I'm using the words without putting forward my own viewpoint. It ends up being really wishy-washy and confusing.

So, I used the clone stamp tool to just make it blank.