This is an interesting one for me, I think I drew from a different place than I usually do. Often I just have a funny or a naughty idea which inspires me to sit down and doodle; then I’ll enter some kind of fugue state and come around a few hours later with something wildly more ambitious than I intended. Put simply, most of the time I’m not a conscious contributor to the things I draw.

This time though I was present and I got a bit personal with it. There’s this idea called the “Death of the Author”, that an artist’s intentions with a creation are irrelevant the moment it is shared and viewed by others. It makes sense to me, everyone has different lived experiences which contextualise every future experience; when someone looks at a piece of art of any kind, the parts that speak to them and what those parts say will be unique to that person. A message which seems ridiculously clear and obvious to one person may be as legible as blotted ink on used toilet paper to another and It would be impossibly arrogant of a creator to expect anything they make to convey the message they had in mind to every person who ever consumed it. The best you can reasonably hope for is that it can speak clearly to people who have similar experiences to you, you’d have to make a true masterpiece for even a few other kinda of people to look at it and feel what you felt while making it.

I could tell you what I was thinking when I made this, which memories and the feelings those memories invoked influenced my decisions, what I wanted this drawing to communicate to those who looked at it… but that would be pointless; I’d even go so far as to say that it would undermine the work I did. In the end it’s just a drawing like millions of other drawings, meaningless to everyone who won’t see it and most of those who will.  I think most drawings end up saying nothing at all, which may be the true Death of the Artist. Some things are best left unheard anyway.

Love you XOXO