Poems to the Sea

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This abstract comic book is an unofficial sequel to Cy Twombly’s Poems to the Sea. This is the sounding and imprecise mapping of what lies between us, the surface, and the void.

24 pages, Federal Blue ink, Risographed, Saddle-stitched - Published by Ley Lines. Copies available Here.

The offing,

a sounding,

and mapping.

[1] For Agnes Martin, grids represented innocence. She once proclaimed, "Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” 

[10] Rosalind Krauss wrote “the grid announces, among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” Any cartoonist who hears this must protest; the grid makes our stories possible. She continues, “the grid serves not only as emblem but also as myth. For like all myths, it deals with paradox or contradiction not by dissolving the paradox or resolving the contradiction, but by covering them over so that they seem (but only seem) to go away. The grid's mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).” 

[11] Cy Twombly immersed himself in myth. The first Twombly comic I read was Fifty Days at Iliam—a ten panel retelling of Homer’s epic the size of a large room. However, my favorite comic is his Poems to the Sea which takes form as 24 little drawing/painting hybrids in his signature scrawly style. The panels of his poems are scribbly lists and metered meditations on the ever distant future in thick white paint and ruts of graphite. The only stability in the work is a clear line near the top of each panel, the horizon. 

This book is an unofficial sequel to Twombly's Poems to the Sea. This is the sounding and imprecise mapping of what lies between us, the surface, and the void.

[100] Erin Curry is usually a sculptor. Her comics are sculptures too. Her artwork sometimes responds to the re-emergence of the Sublime through digital exploration. Her grids represent longing. 

Awarded an Honorable Mention in 2017 Best of American Comics

Pleased to be mentioned by Kimball Anderson in an essay here as well as Robert Boyd’s favorite comics of 2015 here. Thanks you two.

For the curious, my admittedly expansive definition of comics derives some of its intrigue from 73 NOTES ON COMICS Essay by Barthélémy Schwartz. Translated from the French by Andrew White with help from Barthélémy Schwartz published by Comics Workbook Magazine 4.

It is not the specific content of juxtaposed images that defines comics, but the juxtaposition of the images itself. The text/image dialectic is only secondary in comics; a global image composed of juxtaposed local images without text would still be comics.

White mentioned this essay to me at a conference and it has provided me some permission to keep poking at comics from a sculptural, installation, and painterly perspective and even when I’m not making “comics” it’s still serves as an oblique strategy to moving forward.

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