Six Word, Illustrated Story

Any reader of the very first post on this blog will know that this place is inherently a scholastic endeavor, as well as a personal expression. So this following post is mostly under the scholastic commission, but I find that it is still rather personal. As an introduction, this is a six word illustrated story, as the title suggests. Now, this story is done in such a manner that challenged me artistically because I wanted to avoid use of video or pictures, since I have work with those on a regular basis. Instead I chose to use water color on paper, then scanned those images onto a computer. Now, these illustrations are somewhat in the manner of a Stan Brakhage film, i.e. Mothlight,Black Ice, etc., but I tried my best not to just copy another’s stylistic expression and call it done. Rather, I did several of these illustrations and then chose the ones that I felt best expressed the six word descriptions.

Now, this story is of a very personal nature to someone very dear to me, so I won’t reveal the nature of my relationship to the story’s subject. However, the story essentially is about a young man who went away to college. One day he returned home on a break by hitchhiking the couple hundred miles between the university and his home; it was bitterly cold. He wanted to borrow one of the family’s two cars from his older brother. His brother, somewhat angry that he had gone away in the first place, refused bitterly. They argued and the young man said very hateful things and left to return to university. Roughly a week or two later his older brother and a younger brother were killed in an accident in the very car they had quarreled about. What ate at the man was that he had never gotten the chance to apologize and make amends with his brothers, and that his last words to them weren’t of love, but bitterness and vitriol. He has carried this regret his whole life and even carries it to this day.

 

 

Now, of course there are some inherent difficulties associated with this format. For one, abstraction is a hefty, and thorny, obstacle to overcome here. For instance, these images aren't of any coherent object; in fact, they cannot even be presented as Impressionistic renditions of tangible objects. But that is the very support for the form these images have taken on. There are complex and deep emotions at play, not just for the subject but by my relationship to the subject. So, these are my personal feelings about the story in part, but mostly it is how I feel about the subject's feelings about the story. But this is helpful because it is a way to show how avante garde-ism and abstraction aren't excluded from a documentarian angle on a story. The images and words tell a story that actually happened, it is simply the form of the images that has been subject to the creator's ideas and desires.