Something Borrowed.

Swimming in the pool of the infinite feedback loop.

How are you doing? Had any good ideas recently? Or more importantly, had any new ones?

I’ve been lining up a few projects and thoughts recently, working out what to go forward with, and it got me musing on influence and coincidence. ‘There are no new ideas’, someone once said. But even that had probably been said before, so let’s jump in.

I feel that I work in a cycle of absorption and expulsion. Influence goes in and hopefully new work comes out. What happens in between is your ‘voice’, I guess. Or at least it should be. If nothing happens between seeing and creating, that’s called ‘copying’, but every other interpretation is called ‘influence’.

Sometimes it’s very conscious but infuriatingly impossible, ‘I wish I could draw like that, but turns out, I draw like this’ and sometimes it’s completely unconscious, like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve just ripped that off wholesale and didn’t even realise’ (quietly screws up paper into a ball before anyone else notices).

Everything else is overlap. An infinite feedback loop of plugging in different ingredients and occasionally a new variant emerges. It’s almost like we didn’t need AI art at all, isn’t it?

My favourite AI theory is that it will consume itself. Flooding the pool with so many bad attempts as it learns, that those images become the majority of its data source, and therefore it poisons its own waterhole. A copy of a copy, a spiral down, with the circles getting smaller and smaller. I do hope this happens, because in the opposite version, the human version, the spiral goes up and the circles get wider. We’ve hardly started…so vast is art, so narrow human wit…which someone else said too. Alexander Pope? I forget.

André Juillard.

André Juillard died in the summer. He was French comics master, and his illustration style had a big influence on me. I remember finding his book The Blue Notebook in a library in Montreal and although I couldn’t read it (becasue of my poor French), the art nudged me off down a slightly new path. His (and others) work found its way into the stuff I was making and thoughts I was having until it hopefully emerged as its own thing.

A little while ago I came across the work of Pierre Brissaud and was struck by the similarity it had with Victory Point, except about a hundred years before.

I had never consciously seen this work, but André Juillard I assume would have done. And I imagine it would have influenced him just as I was being influenced by Julliard, clear line artists, and the modernism/sensibility of people like Charlotte Perriand.

Completely separate to this and unaware of the connection I’d made, a contemporary artist who I very much admire, Ilya Milstein, messaged me to see if I’d heard of Pierre Brissaud, because he too had seen the similarity. It was nice to share that thought with someone working today, who’s work also influences mine.

Julliard died while working on his next book, which was set in Cornwall, the home of one half of my family and where I spent many a holiday in my youth, naturally informing the landscapes in Victory Point. He died in Brittany, not far from Île-de-Bréhat where Perriand had designed a house and lived for a time, influencing her design work. He died while I was cycling though Brittany in the summer, unknown to me, but probably the closest we had ever physically been. At the same time, my partner Lizzy was standing in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, at a comic art exhibition, sending me a photo of Julliard’s work and a saying, ‘I don’t know who this is, but it looks like something would like’.

What to make of all this? Nothing. Everything.

Yes, it has all been done before, but as I discussed with Ilya, there’s something validating in that endurance, that maybe for a second you’ve tapped into something that is universally enjoyed and part of a greater lineage. By its very nature, any work that is created by anyone it is never exactly the same as anything else, so it’s always an addition, not subtraction. In a world where AI is running roughshod over everything, it almost feels like even the most blatant plagiarists are now artisanal, cottage industry creators by comparison. Almost.

So, yeah. I see it all as inhaling and exhaling. And we all breathe the same air.

Oh, and fuck AI ‘art’. Seriously.

Origins.

I think that’s about it for today, just that thought really. Although, in a vaguely related thing, I frequently get asked what the name of the art style I draw these kind images in is.

I’m not sure why to be honest, I guess to know what to enter as search to find more I suppose? But I never know what to say, because it isn’t a style itself, it’s just a combination of styles that I have put together in a way I find pleasing. I guess the three main ones being ‘isometric’, ‘cutaway’ and ‘clear line’.

As a little historic addendum, I recently came across this sketch note in a diary from 2018. It was the precursor to drawing the image above, which started it all.

Not quite the back of napkin, but you get the idea. Grid square napkins would actually be rather lovely, maybe I’ll order some in for the KIOSK…

Enjoy your coffee and I’ll see you next time. Actually, if you’d like to see me before then, I will be attending the Thought Bubble comics festival in Harrogate (UK) this weekend (16th/17th Nov), where I’ll be helping out on the Avery Hill Publishing table. I’ve not been for almost ten years now, but it was one of the first shows I ever attended, so I’m excited to see what’s new. Do drop by if you’re coming, and I’m sure I can sign a book or two.

Owen D. Pomery.

ps. I still keep that image as a print in my shop (perhaps because it was the first) and it is available HERE.