Drawing Mythology

I have been drawing in this form for over 15 years and over that time a certain consistency has formed. To support and explain this consistency a Mythology has been founded on the three major groups found in my sketchbooks. Here are those three myths;

People

There are the men and there are the women. Men are characterized as having ties including the bow, bolo, and straight. They will also wear button-up shirts, have parted or balding heads of hair, wear different types of pants, more than likely old-timey shoes, and most likely a mustaches. The button is the man’s rivet and the necktie his neck fastening device. All of these things make up what he is, just as much as the robot’s parts make up a robot. Men are interested in the moving parts and tickers made of metal. They try to fuse electronic and mechanical parts to their own biological makeup whenever they get a chance. Their main interest and occupation of choice is the fix-it man. But once they start tinkering, the mechanical envelops them, inside and out. Their creations become so exaggerated that the use is forgotten, and so a use is never the goal. What is important is how many of the lovely springed movements and rusted out levers one can put between themselves and the supposed find purpose of the creation. Women wear dresses trimmed with eyelet lace while the dress material usually carries a pattern, most commonly is polka dot. Women usually have a circular application of rouge on their cheeks, along with full lips. They can pull their hair into pigtails meant for lassoing birds and hypnotizing the male brain into spontaneous combustion. Their blood is thick and as dark as the blackest squid ink, with a composition of 40% granulated molasses, 40% ground clove, and 20% eye-ball lubrication. This sweet solution pumps in their exposed hearts and bleeds like robot grease. People in general, both men and women, can be dismembered and partitioned in the drawing without the consequence of death. In most cases they must be bent and reformed to fit on their page. It is natural to be peeled across a page. Death is never a possibility, unlike robots, these people will not die.

Robots

Robots consume birds and are overall suspicious of the animal. Humans create them and you can see their crude manufacturing as proof of that. Once they are built, their role in the drawing can be similar or no different than their human counterparts. They can be disassembled with parts exposed, just like the humans. Though they may have special add ons like music makers or meat grinders. If humans had these same add-ons within their anatomy, they would be closer to machine than to human. The robots are proud of their inefficient and poorly designed bodies, and they go to great length to emphasize this, as it gives character and character is deemed human. There are rivets, gears, pulleys, and mechanical joints that secrete grease. Inside their chest cavities there is a process, both chemical and physical, that breaks down the birds they consume into their elemental properties for the operation of the robots systems. Nothing is wasted in this process of bird digestion. The only reason for this is because robots were not given a solid secretion system to evacuate waste, and if they do not use up every last drop of bird juice, it can clog up their general systems. If left untreated it could lead to robot death. Robots can be made stronger than humans, but they are not invincible. They can be harmed and killed by means found within the drawings, including pitchforks, gunfire, regular fire, and over consumption of birds. Robot intelligence varies from robot to robot, and they can sometimes carry the brain of humans or any other living animal in their metal craniums. This does not change however the basic instincts of the robot, for instance, their suspicion of birds.

Birds

Birds can be found inside and outside of people, and sometimes people can be found inside of birds. They could be thoughts, some type of stand in for those sheets with eyeholes we call spirits, or just animals with hollow bones and feathers. If they are one of the first two mentioned, one could see why they possibly originate from internal organs, and why robots need to consume them to be fit and vital. Their closest relatives are the fish. Each has been known to have bodily exteriors consisting of an overlapping shingled material that gives them their eye-catching pattern, which may or may not inspire the viewer. Each could be one in the same and when transferred from one form to the next may be recycled into either form; bird or fish. If they are more specifically ideas, and as ideas go are actually complicated life forms that not only need a biological or mechanical vessel to exist, but a whole community of them in which to converse and evolve. The birds’ death is not also a death for the idea they carry, but a transition point into a new stage of life and change for this idea. So even though robots may massacre birds at will, they are only accelerating the birds’ ability to transfer ideas across the boundaries between people and robots. Robots don’t do all the killing either. People also must succumb to the act of bird sacrifice, in order to grease their machines and robot companions. Therefore, the mechanical and human populations are tied together in this mangled coexistence, with the bird and its close relative the fish, as its tightly strung bow. Without these birds and the entities they carry, people and machines would suffer greatly from loneliness and the longing for one another.