Nateomedia: Illustration, Comics, Prints

From The Vault: As I Lay Dying

I’m going to try to keep these weekly postings up and, while I work on new material, I thought it might be fun to show some of my older work.

When I was an undergrad at CSULB in the 90s, I was a big fan of pen and ink. The work I admired most always emphasized markmaking — whether it was ink or paint, you could see the artist’s process as he worked through an illustration. Although my style is evolving, I still am drawn to this sort of work.

Anyway, for the Advanced Illustration classes I took in 1999, I did a series of brush and ink illustrations about William Faulkner’s 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying. I had read it in one of the many literature classes I had taken, and I had fallen in love with it. In the book, Addie Bundren dies an unhappy woman and, to exact her revenge on her family, requests burial in Jefferson City — a brutally long journey made worse when one has a rotting corpse in one’s wagon. Hilarity ensues.

This first piece above shows poor Addie Bundren in her coffin. She would only fit in upside down because she insisted on being buried in her wedding dress.

In a famously short chapter from the novel (it’s only one sentence long), Vardaman Bundren, Addie’s youngest child, confuses his dead mother for a fish. I wish I could take credit for the coffin-shaped plate, but it was my instructor, Robin Richesson, that came up with the idea while we were discussing my thumbnails for the project.

The Bundren’s journey to Jefferson City. I’ve never been one to shirk away from difficult perspective challenges in an illustration and I was quite proud of the way I handled the horse in this piece. One might argue that the people in this piece look somewhat crude, but that was intentional. Was the effect successful? I’m not sure. I do think that they work okay in the piece, but I can’t say whether it was the best solution.

One of Addie’s older children, Darl, burns down the barn where Addie’s body is being housed for the night in order to stop the family from having to continue on their journey to Jefferson. It almost goes without saying that the farmer who owns the barn is not very happy. Oh, and they managed to save Addie’s corpse from the fire too!

Looking back on these illustrations, I’m still pretty happy with them. They’re a bit rough here and there — I think Addie’s dress was my biggest failing – but they still have a certain charm. I remember that I worked really hard on these pieces — each one probably took about eighty hours to complete. Drawing all those teeny-tiny lines with a #1 round brush adds up. Hardly efficient, but it can’t be said that I didn’t work hard. Three of these pieces were matted and framed as a triptych and displayed in the annual end-of-the-year student show in the CSULB University Art Museum.

Tags: art, csulb, Illustration