Heroes of the art
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Homegirl meditates
I was speaking to the Lord, lamenting my laziness in regards to painting and drawing. I have lost so many years that could have been used for serious improvement. He showed me that it was not laziness per say, but more a problem solving issue that had taken up a lot of my time. He also showed me that He directed me all those years carefully and ordered my steps out of certain art skills woods. One of these woods was the "it's perfectly ok, edgy and feminist to draw women naked from the waist up"-woods.
What can I say? As a child I read a lot of French and Belgian comics and after a while you get numb to the nudes, semi-nudes and the frequent sex scenes. So when I had bought the Deleter manga set, screen tones and all, I set out to draw my fantasy comic with the female main character introduced as naked waist up. But something made me pause. I remember vividly how I had convinced myself that the way I was going to draw things was non-sexual. Nothing to see here, move on. But a voice inside of me still asked, —Why topless women though? Soon after that I was incredible lucky to stumble over an article discussing the topic de-sexualizing the naked female body in relation to webcomics. The author put forth the argument that only a few comics did it well, with their depictions of hanging, wringed, gravity influenced sagging boobs. He pointed out that most artists who insisted on drawing womens breasts exposed, male and female artists, always drew young, perky women, with bouncing balloon boobs straight out of the popular porn mags. These artists shied away from drawing the big range of female upper body nudity such as the sagging, post breastfeeding, aged boobs.
I was floored because I had been on the internet for some years at that point. Knew a thing or two about racism 101 and feminism 101. I knew about micro-agressions and ingrained, normalized and unspoken attitudes. The undercurrent of opinions that stream through a society which determine that even though we all abhor the eugenics of say, Nazi Germany, most of us fully support abortion on the basis of a screening showing signs of Aspergers. So in the end society’s undercurrent of attitudes towards abortion which favor the freedom of the to be parents to take the life of another human being over the unborn child’s right to live, and towards the disabled superseds the public morale opinions which says that eugenics is monstrous.
I did not know that having been raised with some severely distorted attitudes toward the female body made me perpetuate the exact same Madonna or Whore attitudes in my art. Simply I thought the whore was the liberation of womanhood. I never grasped that liberty is the personal freedom and choice to cover up and undress without shame and guilt, however with consideration for the customs of the land and the people around you.
Problem solving can take many shapes, for me it was like this. As I child I was acutely aware that I was a stranger in a strange land. So I faced some unique challenges before I genuinely felt comfortable with picking up a pen to draw. My dad was an artist and drew animals for children at parties. Over time that amassed to many crocodiles and parrots. His oil paintings hung in a few places our house, some a bit hidden away. His father's paintings of the sea and elaborate sketches of cities where all over our house, and my grandmother's apartment. They were on par with the marine paintings I saw in the national art museums and so I was a bit spoilt visually because I thought acquiring such a level of skills in depicting reality, the sea, war ships and skies was to be expected of all painters. After all, grandpa's paintings were not showcased or sold from what I know. He had a humble job manual labor job, painted privately and gave the paintings to his children and grandchildren.
In after school daycare, I, like every other girl, followed the beehive. You know the beehive. It’s the same hive mindset wherever you go when it comes to groups of girls. Follow the queen. The most popular girl does one thing and every girl around her mimics her. To validate their own position against the queen and to solidify their own position in the group. At my daycare the most popular girl drew chains, those easy "s" like ones that children across cultures seem to draw every generation. So I copied her. She also colored some line drawings, I tried to copy that but failed. I also watched at guy draw a crowd to himself because of the drawings of people that he did. He would become my best friends for a period of time some years down the road. He drew effortlessly and I coverted his popularity. At home my mom took me to the library and let me pick up comics that visually appealed to me. Lucky Luke, Thorgal, Garfield, Splint and Co., Yoko Tsuno, Yakari, Peter Madsen's Valhalla, Tintin, Marsupilami, Johan and Peewit, AKIRA, Carl Barks Donald duck collection, Don Rosa Donald Duck collection and many others.
All this, and nothing compelled me to draw, I could not solve this conundrum: in all these comics African and black people looked ugly or were non-existent. Simple as that.
I watched cartoons, a tons of them, it was the 90s and there were a lot of good shows on TV and I enjoyed them. But for all the watching I did not feel compelled to draw, because I could not solve this conundrum: in all those cartoon shows, African and black people were either non-existent or naked, banana skirt wearing cannibals with balloon red lips. They looked ugly. Simple as that.
In the museums, castles, churches and art galleries my parents and the education system took me to, I saw paintings, but by then I had gotten used to caricatures of African and black people. Even when I saw a moderate, upright depiction of a moor in the background of a painting my eyes were blind to see them and draw the connection that here was a depiction that did resemble me.
And in the way of a child I was puzzled by what I saw anyways. The muted colors of classical paintings faded in appeal compared to the over-saturated, popping colors of modern comics and cartoon shows. To make matters worse, the glossiness of oil paints made it hard for me see the whole painting at once. That and indoors lightening made me have to shift position here and there in order to catch sight of every figure in the painting. No one told me to stand at a distance to take in the wole painting, so as a child of small stature I was puzzled at standing a few meters away from a humongous painting and not able to see the whole of it.
And since no one taught me how to view a painting, how to immerse myself, what to look for, or why I should care for certain motifs, I came to my own conclusion of the matter of paintings very quick.
I liked forms and shapes and representative art. Nature and landscapes were easier on my eyes because I could judge for myself by looking out of the window, if the painting matched reality. Everything involving people felt irrelevant to me. It was never people who looked like me who stared back from the canvases. I found the nakedness and voluptuousness of the men and women to be tolerable, because it looked like what I observed at the beach and at swimming pools.
I liked the strong colors of Michelangelo. In fact fresco paints were easier for me because of their bold colors and lack of glossiness.
I did not like the different modern art movement that made a break with romantic or realistic art. I did not like abstract art, surreal art, post-modern art, cubism, or other movement that favored non-realistic and simplified landscape paintings.
In short, I deeply despised the old and refused to take any liking for the new.
In Matthew 13:52 Jesus says:
“He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”
Here the point is, we need the new and the old to be true disciples in the kingdom of heaven. We need to both the Old testament and the New testament. We need to know of the Old covenant and the promises already made by our steadfast and eternal God, to understand what He is offering us in the New covenant. Renewed covenant it is for the Jewish people, New covenant for the rest of us gentiles who are branches from wild olive trees who in Jesus Christ get grafted into God's cultivated Olive tree that is the Israel of God.
If we do not have both old and new, what is the foundation on which we stand and walk on?
I was problem solving in the first decade of my life and it was taking time.
The thing is drawing and painting is an emotional response coming out from within me after I have taken in visually things, ideas and concepts from the outside. In the first decade my emotional response was “rejection of a normal and pleasant depiction of African and black people, people who look like me, is to be expected”, and “white people, white people everywhere”. The point was constantly being put in my face, “not your heritage, not your land, not your culture”. So I got by that sentence inside of me, “not my heritage, not my land, not my culture”, I have no part in this. It was like being a person without a shadow. Just like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible man I existed and breathed and interacted with the word around me, but somehow I left no fingerprints, left no records, left no impressions.
I think were African descended, black people in the Americas tend to emphasize the whole "we. were. slaves" when you ask them to take pride in the progress of their nations, continental Africans keep strangely quiet about the whole "we. were. colonial. subjects".
But it is true we were colonial subject, subordinate to Europe, and a continent and peoples to be extracted from. Labor to be extracted from, military body count to be extracted from, resources to be extracted from. Deeply tied up to European politics and the European mother empires. Like the rest of the world, for hundreds of years we were yearning for London, Paris, Amsterdam and other hearts of empires.
So I was problem solving on the visual front throughout my childhood. But God had blessed me, because I was a gifted writer. I had a unique hunger to put words together, and was prompted to write my own texts in response to the texts I read. So I got my creative hunger satisfied and plenty of applause from the adults around me.
Then one day I saw Pokemon on the TV. It was as if lightening struck me. I still remember the scene that urged me to pick up a pencil and capture what I saw. I was sick with hunger for the lush, over-saturated colors of the show. I was in love with the foreign names. It was clearly a show set in a world that was based on Asian people and Asian cultures. I didn't feel stifled by whiteness in stylized format, the way I normal did when I saw Batman forever. It was in a fantasy world and I preferred that genre, because with fantasy I could imagine I existed as a nuanced human being. If winged, fire breathing, overgrown lizards existed and had dramatic over the top stories, why not me? An African tomboy hooked on adventure.
And something about the big expressive eyes, the shiny, shiny effects and over the top emotional displays of the characters resonated within me. Me an expressive, sensitive and sentimental child raised in a culture of reserved people. So I picked up a pencil and desperately tried to draw. I was in love and love made me crave to recreate what I had seen. I put in the repetitive work of copying in real time as the 30 min. episodes wound up each week. Later on I would try to continue to draw from my memory.
Then at my library they had a small booklet from a soon to be translated Japanese comic called Dragonball. I don't know why but something about the spiky haired boy's very confused expression caught my attention. The girl also. She looked...cool, like a teenager. Not like a the hyper-sexualized women or the realistic but still half naked women I was used to from the Franco-Belgian comics I usually read. In those you couldn’t tell a teenage girl from a woman because whether they were sixteen or forty, they were drawn with big busts, wasps waists and hips that few Nordic women have. I made the librarian order the comic for me and I was hooked.
It is not just the whole Japanese thing about the booklet that caught my eyes. Every summer they ran Studio Ghibli's "My neighbor Totoro" and I always caught fifteen minutes here and there from it every year. Whenever we visited German I could watch RTL and see Ranma½ and Wedding peach. And sometimes our TV could catch that Swedish channel where you could watch Sailor moon.
All these piqued my interest, but no more than say Disney, Looney's tunes or Tom and Jerry.
So Pokemon and Dragonball is what got me started with drawing. And when I had started drawing I started to notice the paintings I did like, namely the book covers of the fantasy novels I read.
Dragonlance: Larry Elmore
Forgotten realms: ??
The English covers of Tamora Pierce's books.
Harry potter: Per Jørgensen
The Dark angel trilogy: Tord Nygren
Then I befriended that guy who was to become my best friend for a period of time down the road, and he played Magic Cards. The images on the cards were cool, so we drew those.
But Japanese comics in general gave me the better option for a visual language. Me, a stranger in a strange land, stuck in the idyll of the far, far, far countryside. I desperately needed a visual language to create a reality where somebody like me existed and left a mark. So I decided I wanted to draw manga and started learning that visual language through my second decade of life. But now a new problem appeared.
I did not understand it fully but at a basic cognitive level I could perceive the relative dissonance. Japanese comics where steeped in Japanese culture, language, society and more. Even the very shape of the text balloons fitted a language that can be read in several directions easily. Not like the roman alphabet. Yes you can read words vertical, but whole sentence in that directions, nah that is not what the roman letters were made for.
But the school uniforms, the bentos, the senseis, the onis, the panties. I did not know the linguistic theory of a word and it's anchor. That a symbol has an anchor, and that you cannot just transfer a symbol out of it's context without risk losing the anchor that gave it meaning. One example in linguistics is the woman with an issue of blood who touched the hem of Jesus robes. Now I always thought, He probably wore a normal tunic, maybe a long one because it's the Middle east. But it is certainly strange for a woman to bow down so deep in the middle of a crowd, anonymously and touch the hem of His garment without everybody noticing. Until somebody told me it's a talith that He wore. A kind of scarf that rabbis and religious preachers would wear over their shoulders, on top of their normal clothes. And suddenly it made sense to me that hem is the symbol pointing to a reality, and talith is the anchor of the symbol which explains to me what the hem of His garment in this context refers to. It refers to a certain point and practice in Jewish culture of the biblical time and it is still an anchor because rabbis today still wear it.
But all the symbols I was getting from the Japanese visual style were of no meaning when I transferred them to my own cultural upbringing. Bentos were lunch boxes, but my lunch box was some rye bread with topping, and not something visual appealing, just down to earth humble and filling. School uniforms, well they sort of exist here in the few private schools that exist. But even at those schools people don't wear uniforms most of the time. Sensei and other titles of respect, well here is a society of assumed familiarity and a flat power hierarchy. Calling someone by title or their last name is generally considered rude and sounds overly familiar in a loop-sided logic kind of way. Maybe you will call sports stars by their last names, but these are the only ones where it is an endearment. For your teacher, the politician, the police officer, your in-laws it is first name basis that more accepted, your surname is more intimate in a sense.
Onis are the whole demonic lore connected to Buddhism and traditional Japanese folklore and Shintoism. We do have demons here but they are according to Nordic folklore and mythology and they are not called demons apart from a Christian worldview sense, as pointing out the paganism of their existense. In Nordic tradition the equivalence to onis are forest people, underground people and so on. People like we are people but a different kind of people, not lower, not higer but different, like a different ethnic group.
The panties were the lost peculiar thing. European art is steeped in perverse and lewd art, but this fan service, looking up skirts here, exposing panties there in a fun and finger-wagging way was peculiar for me. And I did not know it was tied to how sexuality and lewdness is expressed in Japan. I did not know that a society that prides itself with rigidity and emotional supression, that hasn't had substantial women's liberation breakthroughs, which like every other culture has a voracious appetite for sex, has a very different way to express perversion than say the sexual liberated North where I have grown up.
I was problem solving in the second decade of my life and it was taking time.
Then came tumblr. And my world exploded like nothing before. I saw blogs devoted to show the presence of native strangers in Europe, Maroccans, Egyptians, Moors, Koreans, Turks, and so many more in European paintings, manuscripts, murals and more. As I now went around in museums, galleries and castles I finally spotted the brown and black faces that my eyes had been blind to prior to tumblr. I was floored at Rembrandt’s paintings of Africans (moors), I was floored that Reuben’s rivers of paradise had Africans in it. In fact I was floored that there existed normal pleasant beautiful paintings of people like me from 600 years ago and longer, and now I finally noticed them here and there in castles, in museums and in galleries.
I had to pause, because suddenly the old did look useful to me, the old had a visual language I could learn from and take with me as I embarked on the new.
It was good that tumblr happened to me. Because I was reaching the same problem with Japanese comics and art as I had previously experienced in European art: limited useful portrayals of African and black people like me, which I could use to build a visual language.
But all was good because now European paintings held high regard for me. But unlearning decades of ingrained attitudes don't happen overnight. Building a visual language without contemporary masters to look at is difficult. But instagram happended to me and exposed me to some truly amazing contemporary master with nuanced portrayals of African and black people. Not all of them were Kehinde Wiley, but I needed the diverse showcase of how people like me could be drawn and painted in a variety of styles and skill levels, so every different approach helped.
And now in my third decade God has set me free. He has given me ample visuals so I know that there is an abundance of paintings with beautiful, pleasant, funny and peculiar depictions of African and black people that I can lean on or just enjoy. And having set me free from that problem solving has set me free to draw wider in my choice of motifs. I now feel freer in what I like to study artistically and what I enjoy looking at as an audience. I can draw people in general, and I can draw nature, animals, mountains, everything. But of course I have a favorite subject, you can tell just by looking at what I produce. But I am free to veer of that favorite subject, to fall in love with other subjects without feeling chained to one motif only, because I have to create into being what is not properly represented.
No I can enjoy the old that exists, rest in it and bring it out with the new.
I stopped despising the old masters. In fact I now have much greater respect for them knowing that they were truly masters of their craft. Able to depict all subjects true to their vision of beauty, true to their skills, true to their artistic ambition. I want to be like them. If I draw a Dutch man, I want to draw him to the utmost perfection and joy of my skills. If I draw an Egyptian woman I want to draw her with the careful observation and perception of the world that I have honed and practiced over the years. If I draw a donkey, a gull, the sky, a hillside, and so on and so forth... Everything motif, I want to draw with exellency of skill showing myself to be a true craftsman, diligent and eager to show myself approved to God.
Paul says in 2 Timothy 2: 15-16
"Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. But shun profane and idle babblings, for they will increase to more ungodliness."
And as it is true about the word of God it is also true about the things of God. By faith I died with Christ Jesus on the cross, was buried with Him in baptism and rose with Him from the grave of water submersion. Now my life is hidden with Jesus Christ, in God. So also with my skills should I show myself diligent and faithful to God. After all God our father asks of us in proverbs give Him our eyes (our perception and intelligence) and our hearts (our whole being to the inmost part) and to commit our ways to Him and our works to Him.
And really to do so is only gain. I have gained much. Now let me bring out of my storeroom new treasures as well as old.
