Grief Comics

georgiacapra: if you had known

Wed, 01 May 2013 23:34:37 -0400

if you had known

georgiacapra: sodawound: georgiacapra: monumental desire i...

Wed, 01 May 2013 17:22:47 -0400

sodawound:

georgiacapra:

monumental desire

i hope you don’t mind me writing some thoughts triggered in response to the words and illustration here but, i was reminded through its elicitation of memories - the context is quite different from the intention (i believe) of the image itself but y’know, words, meaning, interpretation..:

something that stays with me still of my mum’s pain through grief and growing of losing my father when he died is that she repeated often in the early days of mourning “he’s made a monument of me, i am relic of his memory”… we leave each other behind, don’t we? and yet, we make and give each other too - her words have stuck with me and up until recently when a shift has occurred in my mind and i’m no longer scared of being left or leaving behind the people that have had meaning to me, but rather more acknowledging and appreciating of the impact and residue of others onto my life and incorporating that into my world as we grow with and for each other.

we are monuments in each others memories and that is the most significant we leave behind emotionally and psychologically, beyond the environmental and karmic destitute we may synthesise onto the planet and universe - if we think ourselves as individual monuments alone or left behind then that is a sad and honest thought i cannot deny its truth, but ‘monuments’ grow moss and inspire change, don’t they? they are the gifts of what we have seen or received and their meanings change as we do too.. we do not become relics of each other or even ruins of the people who have gone before us or suddenly past, but if we are monuments, we are something to behold and remember from, and to perhaps inspire ourselves. we were not left behind as relics, but built up and kept for others.

no one gets left behind.

hey no this is lovely! my favorite notes are reblogs with comments on them, I wish I got to read more people’s responses. also - most of my more worked pieces and prints have to do with grief and memorial and collective affect so this seems like a good read and companion to that train of thought.

witchsistah: 10knotes: tigursblood: my heart just broke in 9...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:51:24 -0400

witchsistah:

10knotes:

tigursblood:

my heart just broke in 9 seconds..

This post has been featured on a 1000notes.com blog.

Damn.

Photo

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 19:11:55 -0400

“Rosalie Lightning,” by Tom Hart.

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:10:21 -0500

“Rosalie Lightning,” by Tom Hart.

Photo

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:40:29 -0500

Photo

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 22:29:54 -0500

Tom Hart's Book 1 in progress MUST READ

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:51:47 -0400

Tom Hart's Book 1 in progress MUST READ:

I had the incredible opportunity to meet Tom Hart at SPX last month. I had read about his daughters’ death sometime this year and, shortly after, I bought Daddy Lightning. I didn’t know he ran the Sequential Artists Workshop in Gainesville until I went to the workshop he ran at SPX. Being a Florida native, I was curious as to why he would move to Gainesville and start an comic artists workshop. I always really liked Gainesville, it being the first north FL town I visited in my adult years. But if I had known about SAW before I moved to New Orleans, I would’ve moved to Gainesville to attend the school instead.

It’s a funny thing though. In the workshop I drew a lightning bolt as a character. It was a misogynist lightning bolt VS a hug monster shaped like a cloud. I wasn’t really thinking about it, it’s just an easy thing to draw. I also have a lightning bolt tattoo on my leg. I also live with two other people that have lightning bolts tattooed on them. I have a connection with lightning bolts obv. Also, my closest aunt’s name is Rosalie.

I should go to this school. Tom Hart writes and draws the kind of honest art that I can hear and feel inside me trying to explode out of my hands. I would be more than honored to learn from him. Question is, WHEN?

quickhand: One of the most bittersweet things about being a...

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:09:27 -0400

quickhand:

One of the most bittersweet things about being a photographer is that when you lose a friend, you are left holding onto the evidence. Images that you made over the years and your time together become your proof. They go from being outtakes to being the most important images you’ve ever taken. I wish I had better words to explain the process of grief that includes going into your negative boxes and old computer folders and just searching. Searching for happier times, searching for images to give to your other friends to hold onto, to remind themselves that yes, this person was here, this person was important, I laughed with this person, I loved this person. This is not something that you ever want to do. It becomes something that you feel like you have to do.

I guess I thought about this because a few days ago, it was the 3rd anniversary of my friend John passing. A friend of mine on facebook linked to an album that I made three years ago, a few days after John’s death. These are just photographs that I took, not thinking that one day they would be as important as they are to me and my friends.

John was the first friend that I ever lost to an untimely death. This year, I lost three. I was going through my phone the other day, and found a photograph of someone who I lost this year that I had forgotten I took. I had to stop for a second, because I was simultaneously overwhelmed with happiness and grief. There she was, on our couch, playing with the cat. Instantly, this cell phone photograph transformed into something that was much more than it’s original intention. It became a piece of this person who I would never get to laugh with, disastrously cook with, or watch stupid youtube videos with again.

Ultimately these photographs become reminders of why I photograph at all, which is to make permanent those that I love. Rarely are the images are ideal ‘photographs’, perfectly exposed or intended to be art at all, but each is as important as the next.

Photograph: Jess Dugan

This is also why, recently, I’ve made a conscious effort to allow people to take photographs of me more and more. I’ve had a long standing hate-hate relationship with my body that has resulted in me having very few images of myself. My mother had to con me using my best friend to get a senior portrait. But as I flip through these photographs of my late friends, I wonder, what will others do when I am gone?

Photograph: Genesis Crespo

No one really knows when they’re going to kick it. Right? My Dad has said over and over “You know where you wake up in the morning, but you can never know where you will lay your head.”

Photograph: Diane Russo

But hating your body/self and allowing others to have images of you is not easy. Before she committed suicide, another friend of mine de-activated her facebook, obviously not wanting anyone to mourn her presence online. While I completely respect her decision, it created this void for those who were in shock. All I (and others) wanted to do was flip through photographs of her, easily collected for me by this weird online structure that so many of us are entrenched in, and I couldn’t do that. Real, tangible photographs existed, but they were scattered throughout the city and the country, in shoeboxes and scrapbooks. Ultimately those photographs were collected and put on boards at her memorial service, ultimately gifted to her family.

Which brings me back to my own family, with images shoved in closets forgotten. “Why do you want those?” My Father asked, when I told him I was looking for images of him when he was in his twenties, the same age as I am now. When i found them, I realized that we look a lot a like, both, here, at 23.

I think we forget, a lot of times, that these images of ourselves are not just for us, or for facebook, but ultimately for others. I recently found this image of my great, great, great grandfather, Isaac Martinez of Puerto Rico, smooshed and upside down in one of my grandmother’s photo albums.

Here is this photo, barely wallet sized, that represents someone I never could have known, who died way before i was born, but who is a reason I am here today. How can I not find this image important? How can I not compare his facial features to my own, see my weird ass cowlick on his head, and not feel something for this photograph?

So, I guess the point of this monologue is ultimately a plea. Let yourself be documented and photographed, let others hold onto images of you, allow those who love you to have something from you. Because you never know when your last day is. And ultimately, having photographs of the ones we love who have died helps us to move on, to remember, to mourn, and to allow future generations to have a connection to the past.

By Kate Beaton This is beautiful. I find it interesting how we...

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:05:00 -0400

By Kate Beaton

This is beautiful. I find it interesting how we can feel the loss of someone in one of our communities even though we may not be close with them. We might not have spoken more than 2 words to them but we can still feel a weight of that loss.

retrofitcomics: Tom Hart is posting pages from his follow up to...

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 22:59:49 -0400

retrofitcomics:

Tom Hart is posting pages from his follow up to Daddy Lightning. Heavy and masterful work.

Photo

Mon, 28 May 2012 07:56:04 -0400

georgiacapra: I just need to finally post this I guess. The...

Mon, 28 May 2012 02:27:00 -0400

georgiacapra:

I just need to finally post this I guess.

The works above are the culmination of my work during the semester. The two pieces are a 50x100cm installed drawing titled Grief is a Recent Home and Remember Death, a suspended sculpture made from stiffened fabric.

They are intended to explore grief and grieving processes. Grief is something I am not sure I understand but I often feel engaged with. I have been trying to write about grief for so long now that I do not know what to say. There were a lot of peripheral deaths for me this spring and residual actions of remembrance. The question of how to grieve someone you don’t know, of what gets lost and found in the process of remembrance feels relevant in the wake of Mark Aguhar and Trayvon Martin, but also in deaths that appear tangential: the brother of a girl I went to high school with, the kid who lived a block from where I grew up. If you follow me here, you know I was in a foreign hospital last week and I wrote about the freshman girl at my university who died in a St. Louis hospital while I was in the ICU, which in Italian is called Rianimazione, literally “Reanimation.” The gaps in language make themselves so intimately known.

In the wake of a recent death, grief feels like an obstructed landscape, a temporary home. I am thinking about death and the martyr and the refuge we take in our construction of grief, what we build out of need and desire and sadness, and our ability to take shelter in the curation of our grief. Remembrance is a game of obscuring and revealing. Death means being categorized by the living. Grieving starts with the casting of something that was there but isn’t any longer.

In the drawing I return to categories, to lists of people I have known to die, of dangerous symbols, of places forbidden to go to. I black things out and highlight information with the cutouts of draped forms, appropriated from the martyrs of Italian sculpture surrounding me, layered to conceal some, reveal others. The sculpture is a ghostly mimic of the robe of Bernini’s St. Theresa, who was pierced through the heart with a golden arrow, becoming a martyr for her ecstasy in death. Her robe is a shroud. My Austrian art history professor told me the pieces were heavy-light, weighted with sadness but buoyed by ascendance. Grief is a kind of elevation, I guess.

————note: This should have a picture of the two installed together but for some reason the tumblr uploader won’t let me use that one.————————-

yoursecretary: j.bee posted a comic about mark aguhar that...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:55:59 -0400

yoursecretary:

j.bee posted a comic about mark aguhar that touched on many of the conversations i have heard discussed since mark’s death - how to mourn someone you didn’t “know” (“know” being a very nebulous word when dealing with an internet culture that has frequently been called and characterized as “oversharing” - whatever that means), public discourse concerning suicide (v murder), how to remember people, how to commemorate people, how art created by/for/about can be sensationalist, how to talk about how death (in general, and specifically mark’s) make us feel (the question about how that matters, does it matter)

j.bee told me that my post that said “lets keep reblogging mark” inspired her comic and we discussed how we see less of mark’s work reblogged and what that means, if it means anything.

as usual, more questions than answers becuase there is no answer. i am just reminded that there is no answer and at least a million questions.

Photo

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:39:04 -0400

retrofitcomics: I always thought that a book about James’...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:03:19 -0400

retrofitcomics:

I always thought that a book about James’ Father plucked just from the comics about him throughout the years would be beautiful.

Copies of Fungus are still available.

kochalka:

Breathing & Beautiful.

beatonna: A recent death for my home town, it made an impact. I...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:34:00 -0500

beatonna:

A recent death for my home town, it made an impact. I made this comic, because I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

(via Liz Prince Power » Comics » dad dream #1) “Today...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:50:58 -0500

(via Liz Prince Power » Comics » dad dream #1)

“Today would have been my Dad’s 66th birthday, so in honor of that, here is a comic about how we try to assign meaning to things in order to cope with grief.”

Alisha Rae 2011

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:52:32 -0500

Alisha Rae 2011

fuckyeahlizprince: (via Liz Prince Power » Comics » I...

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:10:00 -0500

fuckyeahlizprince:

(via Liz Prince Power » Comics » I don’t know how to say goodbye)