Words and pictures about Daisi & JANE
Also, holy confidence and pasta making machines
Words and pictures about Daisi & JANE
Here is a rough picture of the cast of Daisi & JANE. There is one mystery figure (see below) who will enter later. It’s going to take a while to get this project to the place where I can begin to share it on a regular basis. The central challenge, which I’m still grappling with, is commitment. Just plain old commitment. I’m getting there.
Writing posts, like this one, about the project and the process, helps me to believe that I am really doing this. It’s part of the doing…
Between thinking and doing lies an abyss. It is the doing itself that constructs a bridge. Doing is messy and scary and transformative. Doing creates reality.
There is a fine line between capitalist woo-woo magical thinking that posits the idea that you can get anything you want (e.g. money) by believing (insisting?) that you deserve it, and what I call holy confidence. Holy confidence is not insisting on anything; it is a willingness to enter new territory and see what happens.
Holy confidence creates art. I call it holy because it is a faith… a faith in self as a transformative conduit. Not a hollow tube, but an amazingly intricate and unique conduit that brings forth its inherent nature in all that it makes. Like nature does.
Noodle is as noodle becomes
Here’s a silly-but-I-like-it way to think about ourselves as transformative conduits: there is an infinite well of pasta dough, which feeds into the pasta-making machine and comes out with as much variety of pasta expression as there are attachments (aka each one of us).
Made-up character, know thyself, and clue me in!
Creating a story with characters, using words and pictures, is not like being God. It is more like being an explorer, or miner, or pioneer. I already know a certain amount about who these characters are (some more than others) and I learn more about them every time I draw them or put words in their mouths. And the more I know, the more I want to know.
I shared the following cast list on a different platform, so you may have read it already. If so, read it again! Like everything I repost or repurpose, I change it to suit my present self.
The cast of Daisi & JANE
Daisi and Jane are half-sisters who share a father. They are 10 years apart in age. The younger one, Daisi, has come to the big city to live, for the first time, with her older half-sister, Jane, who is as unlike her as two people can be who share the same gender and 50% of their DNA.
Daisi grew up in the Midwest surrounded by a white picket fence, in more ways than one. Her cultural associations are about 20 years behind her sister’s. She believes in, and uses, her white hot bod as a tool, if not a weapon, in the service of what she thinks she wants, which is a fairy-tale Prince Charming and a white picket fence. If she can become a movie star first, so much the better. Daisi is very young.
Jane never had a white picket fence, and she’s been around the block more than once. She is so sensitive that she can’t bear to step on an ant, and cynical enough that she sometimes loses track of her own beating heart. She does not suffer fools gladly, though in the case of her younger sister she makes an exception. Jane’s great love is her son, Buster. Buster’s great love (aside from his mother), is his dog, Mr. Woofus. Jane is a single parent. Buster's dad left the picture before Buster was born.
Jane and Buster
Ed n' Art
Once upon a time, that was the name of this comic. It's had a handful of names. Evolution happens. Ed and Art have opposing, complementary personalities. They represent (semi-consciously) parts of me that I often find difficult to integrate.
Ed and Art are neighbors to Daisi and Jane in the same Brooklyn apartment. They are in their late thirties. They are gay but their gayness is not a topic; it’s a context. They are not the main characters anymore, but they are still very important. They function as the comic/cosmic relief.
Willy
Another inhabitant of this apartment building is a man in his late twenties. (At work he calls himself Will). He wears a suit every weekday, works in an office, and dreams of fast cars, women, and being a superhero. He is as busy leading an unexamined life as Daisi is. But I promise you, he has the potential to evolve. He is mesmerized by Daisi from the moment he meets her, and the feeling is not mutual.
Mystery Man
There is one more central character about whom I know little. He keeps to himself, so he’s hard to know. I’m not even sure I know his name. He is a quiet, highly intelligent, vibrant man, who lives in the basement of the building as its resident manager. When he is not fixing a dripping faucet or some other problem for the tenants, he paints in his basement studio, or tends to the small garden where he grows vegetables and herbs. He uses a flip phone and does not own a computer. His past is a mystery. This character is a bow to the female concierge in The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.
It amazes me that I can know so much and so little about this project at the same time. It amazes me that this is how it is, all the time, with everything, whether I can see it or not.
The sweet spot that I desire, as an artist and a human, is holy confidence, faith in the process.
It's funny, I'll wake up sometimes and idly think: "I might get up in time to make the bus and ride to town and then walk the three miles home and feel good about myself." I feel that urge slowly beginning to rise in me, but all the same, I get up and act like it's a normal day. Except until about 10 minutes before the bus is due. And then, ALL AT ONCE, I KNOW IT'S GONNA HAPPEN! And I zoom out the door and make the bus and then somehow, the deed is done and I do feel good about what was brought forth in the moment. And what I saw on the walk, whom I met, whatever other things colored that part of the day.
So I'm just responding to your notes about "the urge" that is trying to surface. That's how your words touched me this morning!
Oh, then there's this: "A resolute imagination is the beginning of all magical operations" -- Paracelsus
The "resolute part" -- harder to muster as I get older? Still, it's pasted to the ceiling of my little cupboard bed.
XO