DAVID SMALL DRAWS IMAGINARY WORLDS

September 27, 2021

I visited David Small at his studio outside Mendon, Michigan, to talk about the original drawings from his graphic novels, Stitches and Home After Dark, which are currently on display at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center. 

JA: I was thinking about the image in the show from Stitches of the little boy, lying on the living room floor making a drawing, who then crawls into the drawing. It made me think how drawing becomes a way to go inside and explore the imaginary worlds within yourself. 

DS: That drawing is a literal transcription of that idea. You’ll recall the way the sequence resolves: after the kid dives into his drawing, there’s a shot of him going down an esophagus into a stomach where all these cartoon characters live, and they’re all happy to see him. 

JA: So, this place he goes, filled with cartoon characters, is it a happy place?

DS: Yes, it’s a happy place, but also, not. It’s creepy. It had all of my cartoon “friends” in it, but in a stomach. 

That visceral interior scene also presaged the poisoning of my body by my father’s X-rays. He was a radiologist who--when I was an infant—repeatedly gave me massive, high-dose radiation with the idea it would cure my sinus problems. He wasn’t a mad scientist experimenting on his child. In those days that was treatment. Later on I developed a cancer from those X-rays that nearly killed me. 

There’s no correlation between cartoon characters and my cancer, of course.  I don’t want to get too analytical about it, but the fact is, I grew up in a radiologist’s house looking at X-rays. When, as a kid, I asked what I was looking at—esophagus, stomach, ribcage and so on—my dad would say, “That’s what you look like on the inside.” OK. Right. I knew where drawings came from, too: from my inside. Put them together and you get that image of a strange interior playground, darkly glowing. 

JA: The last time we spoke you described to me how you reconstructed the living room of your childhood home, because you didn’t really remember it until you started drawing parts of it. You began with a lamp or something, and when you drew that it caused you to remember the next thing and the next thing. There seems to be a relationship to me between this process of discovering something through drawing it, and the image of the boy crawling into the drawing. 

DS: That was a memory prompt I invented for myself. I was trying to truthfully reconstruct my childhood home, to make it real for me again. It started with a lampshade, which was all I could recall at the time. Once I had that, I could see the base of the lamp, then the table it sat on, and so on. When the whole room was complete, like a stage set, the ghosts came in speaking their lines, and that whole time of my life flooded back on me. I thought this was a very original way of stimulating memory, but I’ve since learned that some therapists use it to help their clients recall things that seem to be out of memory’s reach. Anyway, it works! I recommend it!

JA: Isn’t it interesting that instead of arriving at the story and the setting and the people through language or words, you arrived at it through marks by a pen on a piece of paper? It started with one thing and that led to more visual information that fleshed everything out, and then the story came in. 

DS: I’m very visual. I was always the kid in class who “could draw good.” For years I was very proud of that. It seemed like I had a superpower nobody else had. Now it really worries me that the entire culture is going my way. I mean, that they get all their information visually, and that reading books seems to be on its way out. It’s worrisome because the visual needs more; it needs language, it needs a structure of ideas to validate it. And the visual can be deceptive, just like anything else, possibly in an even worse way because it’s so seductive.

Anyway, the image of the child going into the drawing represents my life. I do this every day. I create worlds on the page, replete with characters, sets, costumes, dialogue, and so on. It sounds like a power trip, yes?

JA: No, it sounds like fun.

Later we toured the grounds and house where he lives with his wife Sarah Stewart, with whom he has collaborated on many award-winning illustrated children’s books. They live in an historic 1833 farmhouse on the banks of the Saint Joseph River, surrounded by beautiful gardens cultivated by Stewart. There are carefully laid out fruit, vegetable, and berry gardens, a native prairie grass field, and a meticulously designed labyrinth. 

Sketches and journal pages by Small and Stewart that focus on gardening and the natural world are on display at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts, part of the city-wide celebration of the recent acquisition of their complete archives by WMU Libraries, that also includes exhibitions at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Kalamazoo Public Library, and WMU Waldo Library. Be sure to visit all the venues, but especially don’t miss the graphic novels at the KBAC through October 29. They will draw you into David Small’s imaginary world!

For more information about the city-wide events visit: It’s a David Small World.

 —Jeff

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