I went through this same process with all seven brothers, and their sister. Here is the final picture.
PS. AAh! I’m confused! Why does her blog make no sense? Of course you are confused! But it’s not your fault. This blog entry has 3 parts. The best way is to look at the right hand margin. See where it says Blog Archive? Okay now see where it says Looking for Sasha, Part 1? Yep. Start with that one and read them in order, it will make more sense.
I took away the flowy pants. I gave Sasha teddy-boy pencil pants and here’s how he came out.
My mom says he is her favorite of all the brothers because he looks like Project Runway. (Sasha would probably be too snobby to watch Project Runway, but better that than bell-bottoms.)
I’m illustrating the novel. My story has at its center seven brothers and their sister.
Sometimes the concept of illustrating is kind of hard for me. I went to an art school in New York called the New York Studio School, where pretty much the worst thing you could do was paint something narrative. That was like a dirty word. So was illustrative.
Well, they did have their point. They were trying to teach something very profound. I think they were trying to teach me, in particular, that you can’t get all carried away by your subject’s facial expression before you’ve worked out the formal structure and composition of the work itself. My teachers came from a background of Hans Hoffman, Rothko, Matisse, awesome guys like that. I’m glad I learned that formal lesson and went to that school because that’s how I learned that the language of painting goes much deeper than the surface.
But now I am long out of school and on my own and enjoy getting reacquainted with my narrative streak. The art most dear to my heart is both formally strong but also very narrative. The two can and do co-exist. The Genii scrolls, Henry Darger, Masaccio, Charlotte Salomon, The Bayeux Tapestry Miyazaki’s cartoons, silent films, to name only a few…
Well, so I wanted to do some storytelling with this picture of the seven brothers. I wanted the painting to be about both their essence but also their surface personalities. The ways I would express these things would be: the clothes they wear, their faces and expressions, the way they are standing, and the way their feet relate to the horizon (that means, if one of the guys is floating, you can bet he’s not a very grounded person).
I went through a process new to me in finding all these things out about all these brothers. Writing (and reading) about all seven would take all day, so I will just write about looking for Sasha.
So Sasha, he is a brother somewhere in the middle of the family. He’s about 21 or 22 years old. He has magical eyes that can see anywhere, anything, if he concentrates. He is vivid and theatrical, he dresses very well. He’s witty. He’s beautiful and small, pretty as a girl. He’s also nervous, he has too much energy but, being a fairytale prince, nothing to do. He drinks too much and doesn’t know it. He’s beginning to get cynical. He’s never alone, but he’s lonely.
I don’t know anyone from my actual life who is like Sasha except the younger brother of a high school friend who’s not around so he can’t model for me. But I used my memory of him, a distrustful, intelligent ten year old child with large green eyes by a swimming pool in the summer of 1996. Then I put in the” Sense and Sensibility” movie and sketched Hugh Grant because a big part of imagining boys was imaging their hairstyles, I never appreciate before how many ways boys style their hair and how hard some of them work at it. And then, how would Sasha stand? Sasha stands almost walking forwards, because he is nervous and restless. His ankles are turning a little bit. He’s not the most stable of the seven brothers. He’s walking towards us, away from the horizon, because he wants to interact with you, he goes head on into life.
I always knew the hardest part would be the clothes. I never paid much attention to men’s clothes. I mean, when I played Barbies as a child Ken usually came in a wedding tux or swimming trunks. He didn’t have many options. And most of the actual real-life men in my life have worn T-shirts and jeans.
I thought Sasha would wear something really classy and yet eccentric and so went shopping for him by googling “Comme des Garcons mens.” I mean, if I were a man I would wear nothing but Comme des Garcons! (Well, maybe not, since even as a woman I rarely manage anything but T-shirts and jeans, but you know. In theory.)
The picture above is the picture I found.
I did a test drawing of Sasha in one of these outfits. I was proud. I showed it to my parents and the word “bell-bottoms” was heard. Oh dear. I showed it to my sister Melissa, the co-author of our story who is currently writing Sasha and who knows him very well. “I don’t know,” she said dubiously. “Sasha’s really vain. I don’t think he’d wear loose pants. He’d want to show off his butt.”
I love cicadas so much. I think there should be some sort of spiritual festival in August of September called the Festival of the Cicadas. They make the dog days beautiful and mysterious. The days are so tired in this drought. The cicadas sound like a slow sad tambourine or like the long sigh of evening and long hours.
Not always though. Sometimes there are a lot and they sound like urgency. If I didn’t know they were tree-dwelling insects what would I think of that sound? I’d think the trees I pass under were filled with rattlesnakes, or ravens, with a voice like walnut shells, or spirits who speak in tongues. When I walk under a tree with ten thousand cicadas making their gypsy shaking music, I want to belly dance if I knew how.
Here’s a cicada poem.
***
Tree Voices in the morning-
white light spotting
a falling of a waterfall
a foamy gurgle
a silver cat purr.
Tree Voices in the evening-
yellow tambourines round as the sun
tiger growls in my time of great sorrow
rattlesnakes who rattle trees
shamans who Shake, and Stop danger.
(above: Melissa and I long ago circa 1998 when we first started writing this story)
Not long ago my sister sent me six new chapters of the Fehran story and I was reading them more avidly than I read the last Harry Potter book (which is really saying something as Harry Potter allowed for neither eating nor sleeping). When she finishes this section, we will be almost finished.
Fehran will be a (probably really long) illustrated novel. Missy (actually as she is now a grownup she goes by Melissa calling her that feels weird for me) offers this description of the book:
“Fehran is a dark fairytale about how a broken heart can consume the whole world. It is set in two kingdoms. In one, a tyrant king searches for something to feed his ambitions. In the other, seven magical princes and their sister grow up and nourish the seeds of tensions that will destroy them. The story follows how the two kingdoms crumble the closer they are intertwined, as a great betrayal brings love, escape, revenge, and finally losses that cannot be repaired.”
The story began actually years ago. I was nineteen pretending to work in a temp job in Houston, but as they had actually nothing for me to do, I just stared at the computer screen and imagined a story in my head that played itself out before my eyes without effort, like a secret tv. Missy was sixteen, in high school and a big fan of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” It turned out she too was imagining and dreaming a story. By combining our two stories, we found an excellent form of entertainment.
This was nothing new; we had been inventing stories together our whole lives, the notes of which filled many manila folders and which we called Sagas. Most of the earlier Sagas were about hot tempered brave ladies in Victorian times who fought pirates or something. But this new one was different. We called it Fehran after the world in which it took place. We even started writing it down. After all, the Brontes had written down their Gondal story, the one the children had all imagined long before Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. We wanted ours to last also. I had to draw pictures of all the characters because I like to know how people look. Soon we were writing a book.
We never finished. I went to New York to study art; Missy went to Rice in Houston to study anthropology, and Fehran went the way of the other childhood sagas. Ten years went by. I don’t really remember why I started writing Fehran again. I was unemployed, always a blessing for artistic endeavors. Soon Missy was writing it again as well. It has changed a lot from its original version, but the characters, like the two wayward princesses, the seven magic brothers, the waifs Eani and Henri, and the tyrant King, have all remained.
But now it’s August. There’s not much rain. It’s dusty all around Montrose and smells like car exhaust and dried cat poo. It’s okay. It’s also the time of nothing to break the light of the sun. If you go to the rose garden it’s copper needles drying in the heat, little flames of roses, cicada’s sad tambourines, blonde grass, and sunsets so heavy with color they are pressing honey and melted butter through the black trees at dusk.
At this time one year ago I was in such a different place and as they days get hotter, drier, and longer and longer and longer, I like to remember that time. I stayed two weeks at Plum Village, the monastery of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, in the countryside outside Bordeaux, France. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, there was “nowhere to go and nothing to do,” so I spent a lot of time wandering through tall grasses, watching sheep bleat to each other, watching a nun throw back her head and sing the moon up. I wrote so many moon poems there and I wasn’t the only one! Lots of people were into the moon… it’s so different when you can really see it. I so miss the moon and I miss the insect sounds in the field and I miss Plum Village, so I will share some of my journal from that time.
Plum Village Moon Poem
Half moon:
parts itself
pushing out
like the breasts on a young girl growing
giving birth
or the sky is giving birth to her pale form.
You are growing, like me
you’re giving birth to yourself,
like me.
The moon was a sharp half piece
like the chip off a diamond.
Yellow was soaked all around it.
Fresh as a shot of sun
inside the water, this moon.
If you see a stone under flowing water flashing
It seems to be waving.
That’s the way the stars tremble.
Waxing moon:
a rose kiss
a rose eye
an opening eye.
pink moon playing
bobbing in a rainbow
rolling in the trees.
Full moon:
now you turn towards us your full face.
Now you show up, you open your eyes wide.
You are awake.
I and the corn and the flute insects wait for your voice.
A mother is come home.
Full Moon Festival
Down by the lotus pond the children
are holding rushing sparklers.
What’s that immense silent firework
showering sparks behind the trees?
Plum Village Insect Poem
The insects are earth’s singers.
I hear tambourines. The night is full of a thousand tiny bells.
And reedy flutes, rattling grass.
But a bird’s song is sweet as a baby laughing,
a brook in the forest,
a surprise of bright flower.
If I find you, smaller creature,
in the shower or the hallway,
you are green and glazed with gold.
Your legs are blue. Your eyes are soft.
Your legs catch at my finger like the bow catches a violin string.
I have to carry you out into the soft blue night
And lay you on the first leaf I can reach
A leaf in a darkening linden tree
So you won’t die.
Spiders in the shower
you ride so high
you weigh nothing on your eight airy stilts.
Even a drop of water
will crush you high world
but I’m careful
***
The point of Plum Village Buddhist teachings though, is to live in the present moment, which right now means H-town. So I will try to have some nice poems about shiny, trembling, plenteous roaches and fluffy feral cats as soon as possible.
Learn more about Plum Village here:
http://www.plumvillage.org/
