THIS SIDE DOWN

PEN AND INK, SPRING '78

 

More experimentation with the expressionist set design influence. Having been an apartment dweller most of my life, I was often influenced by those images as well, and there is the idea here of massive numbers of people crammed into a small space. Each one of these windows might look out onto one world, but looking in from out here you can see a bunch of worlds thrown together, a world and a long chain of stories in each, walled off from each other, isolated.

The title comes from the fact that, as with "This Side Up" every angle is basically correct for the picture because of warped perspective. This picture probably came before "This Side Up", actually, but in keeping with my sense of humor it got its current name. Many of these pieces were named arbitrarily many years after they were drawn, and if the titles played off each other, it had to do with the order they were drawn out of the box- which was not necessarily the order in which they were created. The writing you see bleeding through some of the windows is actually "This Side Down" written all over the back. Shouldn't have done it but as always hindsight is 20/20.

A cropped version of this was used for the front cover of Jugalbandi's "The Cram and Stuff Method". It was a toss up between this and "Sargasso", which ended up on the back. This one was easier to put a logo and title over. I felt that both conveyed the feeling that a lot has been packed into a small space.

 

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