Sreya Derew’s Counting Song

This was made with a little help from my friends Tom Magee and Phil Openshaw. It was part of the creative progress engendered by this GLP comic:

“Sreya Derew Counts Backwards from Ted to Dina”

I am very grateful to Phil and Tom for giving me permission to use pieces of their work.

This photograph was posted on Facebook by Phil Openshaw. The interface between positve and negative spaces grabbed my attention. I immediately began to see graphic possibilities for those shapes, even though the photo is not a particular favorite of mine. The image does not really do justice to the breadth of Phil’s wonderful talent. You should check out his site for his photography, and his fantastic asemic art.

The drawing below was made by Tom Magee and posted on his blog at Ello.

When I was making this comic, I reached a point where I had dynamic spaces divided between black and white and red, yet there was no story. When I make abstract comics and asemic writing there is always a story. It can be a fragment of a story, like a scrap of a lost manuscript, or a quotation from an imaginary book. Maybe it is barely a glimpse, like something seen through a window, or like one frozen frame of film. I try not to worry that I have only a small piece of the story, because I have always known that the viewer, the reader, brings the larger narrative to the work. Asemic writing has helped me fully understand that truth. But I did not have even a piece of a story until I saw Tom Magee’s drawing on Ello. The two floating entities in his drawing almost yelled at me, like little bratty monsters. They knew they were the catalysts for a GLP narrative, and they demanded their space in it.