As my own private game, or perhaps as a writing exercise, I often try to capture the essence of something in one word. (For example, my word for Madonna is "energy".) It's gotten to the point where it's unconscious: the word that springs to mind when I look at Theo Ellsworth's cartooning is "rich" — it's rich in texture, rich in symbolism, rich in meaning. For this reason, I've been circling the fat Secret Acres collection of his work,
Capacity (available at
http://www.secretacres.com/theo.html) as if it were one of those chocolate mousses that make your mouth itch if you take more than a few bites at a time.
It seemed more manageable to properly introduce myself to his work via the three Ellsworth minis with silkscreened covers I picked up at the 2009 Stumptown Comics Fest —
Always Something Nearby: A Narrative Sketchbook,
Thought Cloud Shrines (available at
http://www.hobocomics.com/) and
Imaginary Homework (apparently he only printed a limited number, but some may still be available if you contact Ellsworth
directly via his website).
Ellsworth comics can't just be read; they must be interpreted.
Thought Cloud Shrines, in black ink printed on tan paper, is a series of single-page, wordless images, representational but fantastic. The Aztec-art influence, as manifested by his flat figure-work and patterns suggestive of organic geometry, that
Ellsworth mentioned in his Broken Frontier interview is particularly evident here. Humans, beasts and plants fuse: they are often encased in body armor made of natural substances, and all sport elaborate headgear.[1]
Though it sounds like the stuff of horror,[2] Ellsworth warmly (his warm tone is reinforced by the palette he uses for cover and paper stock) recontextualizes this imagery: the armor appears more like an attempt to harness fancy than a defense or a weapon. It also serves a decorative purpose. The towering hats are dream-hats, or conduits to the imagination. The mechanical is defamiliarizing rather than dehumanizing — a quirky take on becoming one with nature — and signifies creative industriousness.
One page depicts a cartoonist working by candlelight: balanced on his vertiginous cap is a man standing on a little chair, who is in turn conversing with a wild-faced, but not exactly threatening, figure coming down through the ceiling. According to the Broken Frontier interview, Ellsworth's labor-intensive designs are a deliberate attempt to connect the physicality of cartooning to accessing the unconscious.
Not all artist exercises are worthy of a reader's attention, but in
Always Somewhere Nearby: A Narrative Sketchbook, Ellsworth embellished a not particularly original exercise — while traveling, he would make a scribble, turn it into a drawing, and add some words — and transformed it into a mini well worth consideration. As aforementioned, Ellsworth's work requires varying degrees of interpretation, and in
Always Somewhere Nearby, the interpretation becomes more subjective, in that certain pages (there's one drawing per page) will resonate more deeply with the reader than others.
"It's nice to go home after a long day at work" is a true, if not profound, statement,
but the tiny figure progressing up a long, winding walkway to a large, beehive-shaped home, personified with its arms waving in welcoming excitement, seemed to capture the sentiment perfectly, as did the person in the tower calling down to another not terribly far distant but still well out of reach, "Should I wait to be rescued, or should I try to get down myself?" Somewhat jarring, however, is
the crudeness of Ellworth's lettering, which looks like anyone's regular (irregular) printing: it took a few minutes to reconcile the style of his art with his scrawl.
Imaginary Homework, a zine Ellsworth created for his drawing-workshop students, is his answer to Lynda Barry's
What It Is: it's a series of exercises that can be used to encourage the creative process. The net result is that Ellsworth will make you tell yourself a story about you, whether you're imagining yourself bouncing on clouds or the spokesperson for humans to a creature unfamiliar with the species. The art here is less polished, but this is also the wordiest of the three minis, so there's more of a balance between the art and the text. It's the kind of mini you could spend a week thoughtfully absorbing, or pick up every once in a while and play around with.
Notes:
[1] It reminds me a little bit of the work of Kim Jones, but in my imagination, it smells nicer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jones_(artist)[2] … Especially when Ellsworth writes that he silkscreens in his "creepy basement."
All art ©2009 Theo Ellsworth
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
As my own private game, or perhaps as a writing exercise, I often try to capture the essence of something in one word. (For example, my word for Madonna is "energy".) It's gotten to the point where it's unconscious: the word that springs to mind when I look at Theo Ellsworth's cartooning is "rich" — it's rich in texture, rich in symbolism, rich in meaning. For this reason, I've been circling the fat Secret Acres collection of his work, Capacity (available at http://www.secretacres.com/theo.html) as if it were one of those chocolate mousses that make your mouth itch if you take more than a few bites at a time. 
Ellsworth comics can't just be read; they must be interpreted. Thought Cloud Shrines, in black ink printed on tan paper, is a series of single-page, wordless images, representational but fantastic. The Aztec-art influence, as manifested by his flat figure-work and patterns suggestive of organic geometry, that Ellsworth mentioned in his Broken Frontier interview is particularly evident here. Humans, beasts and plants fuse: they are often encased in body armor made of natural substances, and all sport elaborate headgear.[1] 
Not all artist exercises are worthy of a reader's attention, but in Always Somewhere Nearby: A Narrative Sketchbook, Ellsworth embellished a not particularly original exercise — while traveling, he would make a scribble, turn it into a drawing, and add some words — and transformed it into a mini well worth consideration. As aforementioned, Ellsworth's work requires varying degrees of interpretation, and in Always Somewhere Nearby, the interpretation becomes more subjective, in that certain pages (there's one drawing per page) will resonate more deeply with the reader than others. 
