Fresh Ink

I start with three quotes:

“Drawing reduced me to essentials: Hand. Eyeball. Pencil.”

“Fused with my subject, I was alone in the clean work of creation.”

“This is the story of a girl and her sketchbook.”

With the recent passing of Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novels “Persepolis” and “Embroderies”, I begin to wonder, once again, about the power of art. Marjane’s set of books was a wonderful window into a world that we did not really understand or acknowledge in the West. That was a real gift to someone who knew that there must be more than the stories in the nightly news and gossip passing for information in the media. Artists have that power and should use it to lift us and inspire us.

Molly Crabapple’s “Drawing Blood” is one of the texts that I hope you take some time to read and enjoy. Her memoir takes in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, Suicide Girls, SWOP-NY (Sex Workers Outreach Program of New York), travel in warzones and online, go-go dancing, burlesque, Stoya, Las Vegas, love and loss, and all of the drama a young woman could face in the late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century as an artist and activist.

Born Jennifer Caban to a family with a tradition of the artist as instigator, she survived the rough streets of Queens, New York through the pen and the page. It was with her art that she managed, like many artists, to find herself:

“Art gave me a way to see, to record, to fight and interrogate, to preserve love and demand reckoning – to find joy where once I could see only ash. I’d take on the world, armed only with a sketch book.

I’d make it mine.”

These lines struck me as I read her memoir and noted how I also picked up a pen, found something to leave a mark on, and keep myself together through my work. And I am not writing these lines to make any sort of comparison between my scribbling and the artwork of Miss Crabapple. I was quite impressed with the sketches, posters, paintings and other art work displayed between the lines and wished that I had found the book and the artist at a much earlier time in my life.

But isn’t that always the way? Don’t we all survive things and move on, despite all of the obstacles and insanity of our lives?

Well, not all of us.

Crabapple notes just how imbalanced things are in a society when dealing with money, race, poverty, homelessness, drug use, and power. I was very struck by the sections on the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and how it transferred to different countries and cities…before it all fell apart. She was arrested and spent enough time in jail to have an epiphany:

“Occupy Wall Street taught some middle-class white people what poor people and people of color already know: the law is a hostile and arbitrary thing. Speak too loudly, stand in the wrong place3, and you can end up on the wrong side of it.”

And she also discovered something else:

“On September 18, 2012, the day after I was arrested, I started writing for real…”

I was very impressed when I saw that line. Normally, if an artist excels in one medium, I wonder why they bother to move on to another one (eg. Picasso did work in sculpture and ceramics that cannot hold a candle to his paintings…and yet he did it). The written word still managed to retain a power that could be added to her art. And it would pay off...

Read this response of one activist who can see the media as a monster that eats what it can without giving anything back:

“That Occupier was right to hate a system that can commodify even its opponents. But the media fixates on individuals. Even a movement that fought the idea of having spokespeople would have them imposed upon it in retrospect.”

I was also struck at how she manages to keep moving on despite the setbacks and betrayals in her life and in the lives around her (I will never look at Suicide Girls the same way again). The purpose of her work has never escaped her, and she continues to go on. Molly Crabapple, an award-winning artist, has never forgotten the lessons that led her to her art and continues to inspire her today.

That should be a lesson for all of us.

“My work has taken me past the edge of burnout. It’s burned in.”

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You can find more poems, stories, and articles by Kendall Defoe on my Vocal profile. I complain, argue, provoke and create...just like everybody else.

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