The creative-drawing companion to the acclaimed and bestselling What It Is
Lynda Barry single-handedly created a literary genre all her own, the graphic memoir/how-to, otherwise known as the bestselling, the acclaimed, but most important, the adored and the inspirational What It Is. The R. R. Donnelley and Eisner Award–winning book posed, explored, and answered the question: “Do you wish you could write?” Now with Picture This, Barry asks: “Do you wish you could draw?” It features the return of Barry’s most beloved character, Marlys, and introduces a new one, the Near-sighted Monkey. LikeWhat It Is, Picture This is an inspirational, take-home extension of Barry’s traveling, continually sold-out, and sought-after workshop, “Writing the Unthinkable.”
Excerpted from an essay, by Douglas Wolk, entitled "Comics Raw and Cooked" on The Barnes & Noble Review.
One way of thinking about drawing style in comics is to reduce it to a single axis: the continuum of styles between "raw" drawing and "cooked" drawing. Those terms are borrowed from Robert Lowell, who, in turn, borrowed them from anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and used them in 1960 to describe two competing schools of American poetry. In comics, it's not a competition -- art-comics are a little too collegial for that. But it's easy to reframe Lowell's ideas to describe what cartoonists do. Raw drawing is (or presents itself as) the barely mediated expression of the artist's impulses: it eschews rules and straight-edges, it flows directly out of the brush, it bubbles over with life. Cooked drawing originates in the conscious mind: it's precise and rigorous, with a firm distinction between "correct" and "incorrect" execution, and it's best suited to carefully planned narratives. Raw vs. cooked isn't a useful way to classify most cartoonists; most of them work somewhere between those two poles, and a lot of them change their position on the line from moment to moment. But the Canadian art-comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly has just published a pair of remarkable books that perch near opposite ends of that spectrum.
Lynda Barry, the creator of the weekly strip "Ernie Pook's Comeek," is about as invested in raw drawing -- as a practitioner and advocate -- as it's possible to be. Her new book Picture This is a companion piece to her earlier What It Is, which was a sort of illustrated version of her famous "Writing the Unthinkable" workshops; that one was a bunch of images and doodles and personal stories surrounding a set of writing exercises, and this one is a similar framework for drawing exercises. For Barry, though, they're very similar processes; they're all about putting a pen or brush down on paper and moving it until something comes out. Drawing, she claims, is "not something that you are good or bad at. It's something else. You move your hand and you scribble all you want and it feels very good."
As you might guess from that description, Picture This isn't particularly structured, and it's very scribbly. Its interior is in the form of four quarterly issues of an imaginary magazine, and its focus is whatever Lynda Barry feels like drawing that day. (Which means, of course, that it's gorgeous; part of why drawing feels so good to her has to be that funny pictures and wonderful shapes appear where her brush meets the paper.) There are questions meant to spur readers into making marks of their own ("Why do we stop drawing? Why do we start?"); there are panels and strips about Marlys, the pigtailed protagonist of "Ernie Pook's Comeek"; there are pasted-in words and phrases from old magazines and school papers; there are a bunch of images of a character that Barry calls the Near-Sighted Monkey. (Barry's pleasure in drawing it, a kind of ultra-stylized self-portrait, is palpable.) Most of all, there are decorations: hand-scalloped borders, circles and blocks and leaf shapes, flowers and curlicues.
Barry jokes that "if you use coloring books past the age of ten, you will wreck your imagination forever"; then she provides a bunch of shapes to trace and color and cut out, as well as a diagram to make "a chicken in winter." Is it possible to make the leap from thinking about tracing and cutting out a chicken shape to actually doing it? Not easily: Barry notes over and over that children are willing to take the risk of making pictures in a way that most adults aren't, but maybe the reason for that is that some adults -- like her -- have a gift for it, and others don't. And the suggestion that raw self-expression is not just a universal right but a universal delight is a little disingenuous coming from someone who's so good at it.
--Douglas Wolk
Anonymous
Posted January 18, 2011
This book is simply delightful!
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Overview
The creative-drawing companion to the acclaimed and bestselling What It Is
Lynda Barry single-handedly created a literary genre all her own, the graphic memoir/how-to, otherwise known as the bestselling, the acclaimed, but most important, the adored and the inspirational What It Is. The R. R. Donnelley and Eisner Award–winning book posed, explored, and answered the question: “Do you wish you could write?” Now with Picture This, Barry asks: “Do you wish you could draw?” It ...