Do I ever mention that?
I guess I'm generally too busy cursing him. So. Yes. He designed and built, with the aid of his family & friends as unpaid labor, a Buckminister Fuller-style geodesic dome atop the hill halfway up to the highest point on our property, in the midst of the piney woods. It had a rather large greenhouse, and a spiral staircase, and cast iron stoves and granite floors that we had chunked out of the cedar thicket, elsewhere on our land, and laid the stones ourselves. It took us a couple years of effort all told but we had running water, power, and were working on drilling our own well when things... went sideways and my mother decided she didn't want to be living halfway up a hill in the deep woods with a man who was capable of strangling and beating members of his own family. Y'know. Reasons.
Still. I helped my father build a house. I helped buttress a 3/4 century old barn. I helped mine limestone and install stoves and run plumbing and wire an entire bloody house. In the late 70s, I guess it was 78 or 79, I watched my father build a model of the dome out of pipe cleaners and cut up pieces of straw, and draft the blueprints by hand, working out all the math on all the lumber. I watched this idea, made on paper, become a physical thing. Nevermind I had no idea who Buckminister Fuller was, or why my redneck renaissance man of a dad was so into trying to be self sufficient and build a shelter from the 1980s and Ronald Reagan. All I was aware of, at the time, was we were building a house. I watched the whole thing happen and got blisters digging the septic tank, and uncovered a clutch of baby turtles (buried in red clay, half a mile from the nearest source of water!!!) and wound up raising all 5 of 'em, before Eastman & Laird were even a thing, so no, they didn't get names. I mean, they were map turtles, all from the same clutch. You can't tell those guys apart.
Where was I going, again?
Oh, architecture. I'm really obsessed with it, in re: making it work with the confines of a comic page. I have whole scenes in AZURE PANTRY where I'm making myself insane because-- this isn't in the script, it's my o.c.d. acting up --I need to do a cutaway of the building and draw a staircase in a two-point vanishing perspective shot, and I'm not using fucking CAD to cheat. I can do this on my own, I'm relatively certain. But yeah. I love architecture. I love contemplating it. I'm not an architect. But I love space. And I love the idea of capturing & creating sub-spaces within art: capturing angles & observations that would be impossible, in a practically realized 3-dimensional space. But you can do ANYTHING with lines and paper, so.
Yes. And. I dunno. I have drawn many imaginary beach houses and impractical impossible spaces in my comix, just because I can. I love harmony & geometry even though it's far from my strongest suit as a visual artist. It just compels me.
I'd like to think I don't get that from my dad. Because I don't really want to give the near-murdering bastard much credit. I think that's understandable. People are complicated. My feelings about complicated people aren't always complicated. So I tend to frame my upbringing in the negative. It was hard to figure out what was happening around me, on any given day, because there was clearly Good and Wholesome Hippy Shit in our household, our diets weren't insane, my parents were trying in their Southern, aging young radical way to encourage me to be less racist and fucked up about sex than they were. But then, as it so often was with that generation, there's that hidden violence that kinda fucking poisons everything.
So I look at my abilities, my toolkit, and I dunno. There's no point to this essay. Do essays need points? I use my art to process all this shit and make sense of the world through it. I think about violence and structure a lot, and that all gets expressed via the content & form(s) I'm working with. Can an imagined architecture become a spirit trap for the potential negative forces in the world? Like, do you think I could take a little of the evil that would otherwise find itself expressed in audiences, and they project their complexes, their untidy constellations, into "real" spaces in my art? Could my work draw that bad shit out of them, and lock it away in an imaginary space?
I wonder. I wonder if my art could actually do that. At any rate that's why I keep re-drawing this fucking stairwell, and making my poor doomed characters descend it.
Abstractedly I have to imagine my dad saw us living in that pipe cleaner and drinking straw dome. Ascending a spiral staircase at its center. My mother had a motorcycle accident the year he was building that; lost a great deal of cushioning cartilage in the back of her knee, and could sometimes hyperflex her knee out of joint. So a spiral staircase seems like a dubious prospect, particularly when it doesn't have a bannister. Dad could have changed those specifications at any point in the construction. But mom didn't seem to voice any objections. Then we slept one night in the completed house, and I'm thinking she was as put off by having to descend that staircase to use the toilet in the AM as she was by the idea that her and her son would be living in the middle of fucking nowhere with a guy who could strangle a kid in a filled tub. So we never stayed in it again. It became a construction project that eventually was allowed to rot & collapse and become the ruin of a forgotten future.
I'ma try not to let that happen with my art. So I wonder if making a horror story with architectural preoccupations embedded in it is a healthy thing? Do I want to make little spirit traps for bad thoughts people have? Would that help people? Like, I believe horror is therapeutic. Exposing myself to horror has helped me unfuck my head rather a lot, I think. And making art that is based in / around horror can be of great aid, I also believe. But I do have misgivings about making it myself, now & again, just what with all the baggage. But whatever. Not here to talk myself out of AZURE PANTRY, or DENIZEN, or PAINLESS, much less KILL HOUSE or PROMISELAND. There's a little horror in all of 'em. Not least because I have to draw all those houses & attics & basements & backstage spaces.
[ends there]
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