Keywords: Hero’s journey, Jungian archetypes, Dongbei/Mongolian shamanism, comic and painting, folders.
On December 20, 2024, I interviewed R. R is an artist who primarily creates through comic books and painting. I met R in summer 2023 at the home of my former traditional Chinese painting teacher. My takeaway is that you can consider a past-present-future generative engine instead of each as a distinct reality, and that I can concretely think about my pursuit of the hands and the sacred in my service!
She explained to me that “comics” can more broadly refer to any work combining text and images. It doesn’t necessarily require multiple panels on a page, each containing text and images. She has a serious yet special way of speaking. Over the past year, I’ve seen mind maps she made for a story she’s working on through her social media updates. I was curious about how she organizes and records notes and intermediate products during her creative process. I’ve always enjoyed thinking and memorizing by writing and drawing in notebooks. And since 2019, I’ve been exposed to various electronic tools in the tech community that assist with this recording process. I’m interested in how she developed her own methods for her comics and learning without having contact with this community. I’m also interested in what her “work” format and vocabulary look like, as I want to create a comic or image-text collection about cells from a non-scientific perspective.
We talked for an hour and forty minutes. First, she showed me her current work and living space. She lives in an artist’s studio. The floor is dark concrete, looking cool and comfortable. She draws drafts in her bedroom and completes paintings using canvas and a scraper in the living room/studio. Her latest paintings, mostly red, hang on the walls in various sizes. Her partner has a similar studio with a bedroom section inside. They also have a dog that sits very straight. She says the dog’s personality is quiet and easily frightened. The dog is learning human language and rules.
Then she showed me her computer folder structure. The parent collection includes folders for each work, as well as a series of files that transcend any specific work. The higher-dimensional files include “What to use words for, what to use pictures for” - with about 10 single-sentence lines recording her decision-making methods for how a part in comics should function. The notes read like prose poetry, which struck me as special because I’m used to seeing complete sentences and paragraphs or bullet lists in notes. The higher-dimensional files also include a “Vocabulary Explanation” folder, where each file is a definition and usage of a term. For example, there’s “解物” (I’ve forgotten if this is the exact term - a word referring to humans from an ancient Buddhist-like book), and another word (also forgotten) that describes what to do with “解物” (forgotten too). There’s also “Technique and Style Summary,” which contains many reference works. Finally, there’s “Learning Notes,” containing many book PDFs and mind map files that meticulously re-explain and connect chapters using the book’s original structure. I expressed how impressive this was, and she said that in unfamiliar fields, she needs to begin understanding from others’ frameworks and definitions. In the folder for the work she’s currently creating, she has folders for each chapter. She said sometimes she would think of a sentence and then place it in a chapter folder. I mentioned other categorization methods I know of, such as backlinks and tagging. I also shared that while I was initially excited to play with these tools, I realized I still need to improve my convergence methods. She said she’s very interested in high technology. I shared several introductory links with her.
I also asked about her creative process. Actually, we discussed this topic two or three times. She said that during the process of experiencing life, reading, and theory, she develops a “want to draw” desire, and then she does just that. Sometimes she wonders if she might run out of ideas to draw, but in reality, as soon as she finishes one painting, she immediately has something else she wants to draw. [To Be Continued] This led our conversation to spirituality. She feels that the work of “making art” is transforming secular experiences into divine works. What is divine? “This question is a bit big,” she said several times. Then she said it’s goodness or what’s beneficial for life. But simultaneously, there’s also a part larger than spacetime that doesn’t care about life. The two combined, the process of “something changing from this to that,” is sacred. For example: an embryo becoming a child, a human becoming an old person, becoming ashes. A seed becoming a tree, becoming carbon, becoming smoke.
We spent the most time discussing the possibility that “we are all originally one.” This part actually caused me quite deep emotional fluctuations. When she first mentioned anxiety about death, I hadn’t made much of a connection yet, but when she talked about separation from loved ones, or not being able to be with them forever, having barriers - that’s something I’ve experienced. “If we were originally always together, then there’s no such thing as separation or non-separation, gaining or not gaining.” She said in alchemy, the world began with the cosmic soul, and then the soul broke into many fragments - us. Another version is the Tower of Babel, where people originally could communicate but were separated and couldn’t understand each other. Hearing this made me somewhat sad, as if I was finally saved or wondering “why didn’t I know this earlier.”
On a more conceptual level, I realized that my interest in group behavior and my contradictions in interpersonal relationships are both related to this worldview. She recommended Jung’s “Psychology and Literature” to me. It mentions the collective unconscious and the soul, which are what we try to contact or release through creation. I read the first chapter, on the shortcomings of analytical psychology. It states that some psychological issues cannot be addressed through “material” means.
I have a negative bias toward the word “channel.” [To Be Continued]