Eschew Narrative - Thesis Year

THESIS YEAR Gabriella Santiago-Vancak

2. gallery talk 3. process of discovery 4. the game of it a. you, the player b. the pathways 5. snakes and hands 6. future imperfect

contents

1. doorways

sketches for my original comic “St. Sebastian’s”

I.

doorways

This is not my first thesis project.

I wrote an entire proposal for a 60 page comic. My original projeft was called “St. Sebastian’s School,” though it should have been called something like “St. Sebastian’s School for Wayward Children.” It was a comic about a student at the school, a girl, who slowly discovers that she is a robot. Another character is possessed by a demon. The narrative was long and involved.

The comic was inspired by the drama of teenage life and TV shows like the X-Files and Lifetime morality tales like Death of the Cheerleader.

Each week I would meet with Whitney Sherman and have nothing to show for myself.

The project stalled and I found that the only way I could continue working towards a complete thesis was to change the project entirely. At the time, I was drawing from my anxieties; I was creating large scale pencil drawings of architecture and environments in pencil and charcoal. The spaces were interesting to me because they told a story of their own without using words and therefore without guiding the viewer.

I began to think about nontraditional narratives and what a story could be and mean without words. Then, as I brought these large black and white drawings to Illustration

Week in NYC, I would consistently get asked why they were only black and white. I was encouraged to do the work in color. When I finally managed to do this, it was as if all the pieces finally fell into place.

It was shorter and more manageable and didn’t require exhausting character design and a script. I was able to just draw which is what I really wanted to do, after all. I drew many arched doors and windows. I had found a doorway.

Because that’s what I did. I threw narrative out, the title of this idea book is:

“ESCHEW NARRATIVE”

Castles

These castle drawings were from my Image Harvent Project that I showed in the first semester of my second year at the Image Harvest show. We were asked to go back into our past work and borrow themes and ideas from there. It was these anxiety drawings of confusing, impossible spaces that critics continually asked me to do in color. These were the inspirations for the environment and color studies that I did in Ruins.

II.

gallery talk

Ruins is not the project that I expected to end up with when I came to MICA almost two years ago. I really thought that I would do a pretty traditionally narrative comic and it was with that plan that I went into my second year. And then I couldn’t make anything work.

So I decided to throw all my narrative aspirations out and began to question what exactly a story could be and what characters were. I began drawing buildings and paths through them. At the time I was imaging these buildings and environments as a kind of side-scrolling adventure game where the reader was a kind of active player, the main character in a way, who could travel through the world in a non-narrative way, just exploring.

I began thinking about the sorts of people or things that could exist within the world I was creating and eventually I had these windows where these snake forms were twisting through and that became the thread for a kind of narrative. I wanted only to guide the reader through space and color with pathways rather than tell them how to

feel or think about the creatures and places they were encountering.

The process after I had made these few decisions became incredibly easy, actually. I methodically worked through the book almost entirely in order. In a way, I was myself discovering the book in the same way the reader would. I did a storyboard, naturally, and then I did at least three newsprint sketches per page and then did a final color pencil page. What was most important to me about the way these images looked was that they were colorful, emotional, and created depth without employing much real perspective because I really enjoyed the flattening the bright, solid colors were creating.

I also liked the idea that it wasn’t up to me to answer any of the reader’s questions: what is this place? What are the snakes? What are the hands? It was, in a way, an exercise in letting go of meaning and traditional narrative. These things could be applied afterwards by myself and by the reader.

Prior to this I had been thinking very intensely about the meanings behind my

gallery talk

work and what my particular way of symbolmaking and arranging had to say. It isn’t that Ruins says nothing but that it became free of the burden of explaining itself.

For the exhibition it was important to me that it followed the rules of the book in that it was a little inexact and had my hand in it and that it was immersive.

Notes

My gallery talk was attended and critiqued by Whitney Sherman, Gizem Vural, and Marcellus Hall.

take a look at these hands

III.

process

So... I finally had a project to work on but it had to start somewhere. So who was I looking at?

I remembered a book that I loved as a child. Everytime I thought of the perfect children’s book, the kind that could be thoroughly enjoyed by adults as well, I thought about Peter Sis and his book The Three Golden Keys. The book itself was a kind of maze exploring a Sis’s home of Prague.

The city in the book was painted in black, white, and red ink, each brick part of a dizzying pattern. The character was guided at times by a black cat from his childhood. At a library, there was a Quay brothers-esque librarian with a book for a head. The jounrey of the book was driven by memory and nostalgia. It was confusing and magical at the same time.

Being a book for children, it had a narrative and it had words but I wanted to give an affect similar to Sis’s world one that could be both bewildering and awe-inspiring.

At the same time, I began working with colors, which I had little experience with. I was, in a way, out of my depth and

feeling somewhat like I wanted my reader to feel, just discovering where the path led without knowing why or where it was going.

I felt lost and eager at the same time, wanting to continue and liking the work I was making.

process

After I finished my storyboard of the book the process moved along pretty smoothly.

I was working with unfamiliar materials and colors but I was making progress.

I would start by looking at my storyboard, which altered over time, of course. Then I would select the page I wanted to do and would make at least three sketches of the page, changing things slightly each time to see how the image would develop and also have a record of where the image had come from. After three sketches were finished satisfactorily then I would move onto the bigger paper and flesh out the sketch into a final piece. It was easy!

A large part of this being easier was getting to the studio every day and working for at least 6 hours and usually 8. A steady workday helped build a good work ethic that allowed me to make a lot of progress in a short amount of time. By the end of Winter break I had managed to finish most of my pages. It was smooth sailing after that.

IV.

ask of a new space in a game. The environment didn’t need to be interactive but it needed to be explored and the hands and snakes begged questions that would cause the player.reader to continue on their journey.

a) You, the player I have always loved video games.

Many of the games I played as a child were side-scrolling adventures, which had the same effect as turning the page each time you walked out off the screen. The player clicks or uses the WASD keys of their computer to move a character around on a screen. I mirrored this side-view throughout my book except at the end when I chose a top-down approach (an image of two snakes in a pool of water with four exits to the pool) that mirrored much older games where the player moved in simple landscapes in four directions and each screen looked exactly the same.

Engagement of the player/reader was important to me because I wanted my book to be viewed as a process of discovery, the reader/player moving through the environments, asking questions one would

b) The pathways I, of course, removed the character or player but created pathways for the reader to move around the environments, such as a pink road or the curves of a snake disappearing into a window or simply a waterfall that appeared again on the next page, the next area. The player would be guided but without words, gently.

the game of it

The reader was, in my mind, a kind of player guided by a pathway throughout the book. Both by the urge to understand the meanings and origins of the hands and snakes but always frustrated in this pursuit.

storyboard

snakes and hands

V.

The imagery of my thesis book is sort of mysterious and strange. I liked it that way. I wanted the reader/viewer to have questions that are unanswered. I wanted the world to have its own unusual logic. The reading of the book, like it’s creation, was a process of discovery. I wanted the reader to be guided but not explained to or forced into understanding. For the purpose of this book about the book I will explain some of my thoughts pertaining to the imagery. a) Hands The hands in Ruins are a kind of stand in for human behavior or human actions. They reference the way that humans alter the world.

They’re the vestiges of whatever lived there before the environments fell into ruin. The hands are the personification and rememberance of human actions that led to ruin and destruction.

b) Snakes The snakes are a more primordial force or being. They exist as spirits in the world, and, at the same time, as throughways for the reader to follow. They are silent guides, silent Virgils, taking the reader into the bowels of the ruins, the place that they inhabit. I think of this book as a kind of descent into an abandoned world.

a selection of pages from Ruins

VI.

future imperfect

Well, I don’t know, actually, what the future holds. I have been looking for a job for a while now and it seems that everyone wants an illustrator/graphic designer and those jobs, while intersecting in some important ways, are actually very different. This book is about the limit of my graphic design experience but I am looking forward to learning .

Most of my interests lie in making art and writing for video games. I’m also planning to work on more traditionally narrative comics.

So far my plan for after graduation concerns my interest in self-publishing.

a) Maps and Apparitions Maps and Apparitions Press is a collaborative press that my partner, Helen, and I have founded to self-publish our work and the work of others. We primarily are focused on illustrated poetry zines and collage.

Our first publication will be Wound Woman, a poetry zine written by Helen Hofling with illustrations by me. Wound Woman explores the concept of the wound man from a personal, queer, feminist perspective. The wound man was an illustrated index for medieval surgical texts; a man stands with a variety of wounds with knives sticking out of him. The wound woman is his counterpart

and the poetry and imagary explores physical and psychic wounds. b) Video Games I am very interested in learning to code, write, and draw for video games.

Hopefully, after I graduate I will attend a coding bootcamp or perhaps apply for the NYU Game Center. I currently make Twine games, a game application that’s mostly writing based and I hope to work with smaller indie game studies on concept art. c) Comics and Zines After I finished Ruins, I was able to begin writing my original comic project, “St. Sebastian’s” and hopeuflly will be able to publish that on the web and in zines soon.

So I’ve returned to narratives! I am also very intersted in creating my own artists books and zines, the first two of which I’ve envisioned are: Girls Setting Things on Fire and Formless.

Girls Setting Things on Fire is a zine depicting exactly what the title says, exploring magic and female power, and Formless is a comic about a creature that appears from a darkness and then begins to alter its body, giving itself a face and genitals along with various other alterations.

Images from Wound Woman.

This book is dedicated to my partner Helen Hofling, without whom going to grad school would not have been possible.

Special thanks to my professors/mentors Kimberly Hall and Whitney Sherman for all their help and support. And to my cohort, who rule! To my parents, also, who always said I should go to art school and stay out of oďŹƒce jobs.

Gabriella Santiago-Vancak is an illustrator and writer based in Baltimore, MD. I am originally from Brooklyn, NY and moved to Baltimore to get her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in the Illustration Practice Program. gsantiagovancak.com // @gabriellasanvan