These things we chase…
These things we chase... These things we learn to need, they come for us with ties, with weights and snares and traps.
We want them anyway. We take them so they'll plug that black hole in our heads, the void in our hearts, the hunger in our loins.
We take them, and they drink us. They bind us to the ground. And once they have us bound, they kill us with our wants.
These things we chase are us. That "us" we think we want.
Until the want eats all.
And we no longer hunt.
Nor get. Nor fly. Nor live.
The what and the why
This piece is a warning.
All day, every day, we're bombarded with ideas, notions, and plans. And all of them have something in common: More. More is the word of the day, the flavour of life. Search for more, go get more, squirrel away all you can, and you'll be satisfied. Get your lot, chase the cheese, find the love, buy the house. "Do you know who I am? I could buy and sell you ten times!" It's the frenzy of fancy.
And it doesn't stop with money or things. Intangibles are also in the mix. Grow your following, get the promotion, grab that fame. Be loved, always and forever. Get the girl, get the boy, go get both. That school? For your kids? are you sure?
So we search and we hunt. We hustle, we yearn. We run all day, every day, in our soul-powered hamster wheel, never getting enough, always looking for more, all the time feeling the lack, the prize not for us, the prey that flew away.
This one speaks to that—to the false shimmer of desire and how sometimes the only thing behind it is a heavy chunk of dull metal.
Now, does that mean we should not want? Should not hunt? Should not care? Of course not. What it does mean is: that "want"? That "want" is a trap. The prize is not real. Its ties are too strong. Even if you get it, it won't help you fly.
So we'd better remember the prize is in the action and the gold in the steps. That bird will only taste great if the hunt is sacred. If we make it about something more than its end. Otherwise, we're the hunter who never realizes they're instead the prey.
The how
To be fair, this one came to me pretty much in its final state. The image of a tiger, helplessly seeing its prey fly away, whacked me in the head in the middle of a thought. The only paper I had was an old envelope; the only thing I had to write with was a ballpoint pen. With that and my boundless talent, I drew this tiny masterpiece:
The first time I met the Yearning Tiger. Tap/Click/Poke to see it bigger.
As you can see, at this point the bird was not an Ibis yet, and the Tiger... well, the sack of potatoes with hip dysplasia that's supposed to be a tiger can barely convey the idea.
But I knew. I had captured the idea in an ugly net of shaky lines. It was enough. The wheels were turning, and my five artistic neurons, usually tangled in mortal combat over that line over there (it's squiggly-er than it should be, and you know it!), got together and behind the idea pretty quickly. Let me show you how it went:
Mental interlude
"We need a cooler bird. That looks like a pigeon, and nobody likes pigeons."
"Hey, I like pigeons."
"Shut up, Larry. We let you pick the bird that one time, and we only sold like two prints."
"Shut up, both of you! No pigeons, Larry. Sorry. But what about an ibis? We like ibises. It all started with one, too."
"Yeah, that sounds good. But we need something else..."
"Hey, what about this: the tiger's chasing the bird.."
"Ibis"
"What?"
"Ibis. It's an ibis, not just a bird. We all decided"
"... OK. Ibis. The Tiger's chasing the Ibis, and..."
"Thank you"
"You're welcome. Now shut up. The Tiger's chasing the Ibis, but they're tied forever, even if it gets away. The Tiger by desire, the Ibis by fear, both by this chasing game. Neither feels there's value to living if they're not chasing or being chased."
"Oh, oh, I like that! But listen! What if they're tied not just to one another but to the ground, a rock or something? Even if the Ibis escapes, it can't go away. Even if the Tiger gets the Ibis, it can't use its wings to fly."
"That might be cool. Good idea, Larry! I knew there was a reason we kept you around."
"Hey!"
"... Sorry? Anyway... I like it, but let's not use a rock. This thing that keeps them from freedom should be human and human-made. It's our mind that keeps us down. It's our craft that makes us weak."
"An anvil! Let's use an anvil!"
"Hell yeah, that might work! And it's silly, too. Like the old Roadrunner cartoons! The coyote is always hunting, but he never gets the roadrunner. He's always crushed by the anvil or dragged to the bottom of the ravine or something. It's all silly, and avoidable, and stupid and relatable. It's perfect."
"But... what do we tie them with?"
"Well, The Red Thread, of course! The Thing that ties, the Thing that bounds, the Thing that keeps us together, the Thing that doesn't let us go. The GoodBad Thing."
"Oh fuck, The Red Thread. Of course!"
"... now, who's gonna be in charge of drawing all that? It's easy to talk, but now we need to paint the damn thing. Any volunteers?
... Anyone?
... Any...
GUYS!"
Noodling and sketching
Having the basic idea ready on that envelope, it was now just a matter of refining the sketch. This is probably when I have the most fun: deciding on a pose for the Tiger, changing the pigeon into an ibis, sketching where The Red Thread is gonna go, twisting and turning in a way that feels oppressive but fluid so the Tiger won't realize while they're choking to death and tied down forever...
A VERY rough first approach. Tap/Click/Poke to enlarge.
It's not perfect, and the Tiger is still not 100% tiger-ish, but hey! That's what reference is for! As it's probably evident by now, I have no fucking clue how to draw a tiger from imagination, so even if my sketch could fool an astigmatic septuagenarian from 10 feet away, it was not gonna cut it for a finished piece. To the interwebs!
After several detours and unexpected rabbit holes (you'd be surprised about the reproductive habits of Echidna. It is fascinating how such a weird-looking animal can be so kinky!) I amassed enough photos to be able to draw a tiger doing his taxes while hanging from a trapeze if I ever needed to do it. Then it was time to Frankenstein them together into a drawing that looked more like a tiger and less like a project gone wrong at the Taxidermy Academy for the Blind. I also added the Ibis and the Red Thread.
Now, this is better. Except for the anvil… 😬. Tap/Click/Poke to see it bigger.
Now the shapes and composition were ready, so it was time for...
Colour!
(yeah, with a "U." the Commonwealth FTW!)
I knew I wanted to stay away from "Tiger Colours" for this. It shouldn't feel natural. It should be realistic but alien in a way. After all, you had to buy the idea of a tiger chasing an ibis made of light while ensnared by a weird, physics-defying thread tied to an anvil. 🤷♂️
So I went green. Mainly. I needed a bit of a sickly yellow to make it uneasy, and for contrast, trusty purple was called into action. After some fiddling, I got it to where it worked. Wait. No. The background is too muted. Let's make it pop. Theeeere you go!
Colour! Tap/Click/Poke to make it grow.
And a video, just for kicks:
If you Tap/Click/Poke it, it looks better.
And so, the idea felt solid, the sketch solved a lot of the questions I had up to that point, and I was ready to sit down on my ass for hours on end to scratch and squiggle, to paint and erase, to decide and backtrack, to second guess every line and to curse the fact that I can't put on pixels exactly what I see in my brain. For that, I blame Larry.
"Hey!"
Sorry, Larry. I love you, you know that. But we all know you're a "Big Idea" kind of neuron. Detailed work is not your forte.
But we do it anyway. Which brings us to...
Three million lines later…
AKA. The boring part.
Believe it or not, that's true. The most exciting part is coming up with an idea, sketching it, solving the problems I invariably fail to realize will crop up, choosing a colour palette that looks awesome, and then building a scene that's meaningful and moving and fluid and cool.
Of course I didn't manage to do all that, but hey, I tried. I said it was exciting, not that I was successful at it!
The rest of the process is just refining and refining and refining, and putting small lines and dots and patterns in place, and drawing and redrawing that freaking Red Thread so it looks cool and goes around the Tiger in a fluid way and, what does an anvil look like in real, non-animated life? I could only remember the ones Wile E. Coyote ordered from ACME...
And then it was time for the Black Hole. You see, I came up with this line in the little text I wrote for the piece: "We take them so they'll plug that black hole in our heads." and I liked the idea of an actual black hole driving the Tiger to the hunt. So, late in the game, I decided to put something to represent that void. I tried several things, but in the end, I decided to go Stephen Hawking on the thing and use a "realistic" depiction of a black hole, or at least what we think they look like. Come to think of it, it isn't as much Stephen Hawking as it is "Interstellar." But I think it looks cool. 😉 Here, take a look at some closeups and details:
So, noodling and noodling away, I spent I'm not sure how many hours painting the thing, and at some point I decided it was time to declare it done. I'm not sure who said it, but that thing "Art is never finished, just abandoned" is surprisingly accurate. And a test for my engineer brain. I want definitive reasons to decide a thing is finished, not just the vague notion that abandoning it is the right thing to do at that moment... I guess I'm not an "artist," whatever that means.
But a point came where it felt right to stop. The piece says what I want it to say, as I understand it. The yearning is there. The powerlessness is there. The hunger, the void, the weight of the anvil. A prey made of... light? Or is it just a prey-shaped void?
And my loved, loving, living, and killer Red Thread, guiding and choking, tying, beguiling.
It's pretty. And that's all that matters, sometimes.
It looks pretty once framed, see? Wink, wink…
And for those of you who enjoy seeing things come to life with all the twists, turns and second guessing involved, here’s a video that shows it all, from beginning to end.
I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you learned something about the piece, me, or maybe about yourself while reading it. If anything, I tried to make it fun. And hey, there's always the piece itself.
If you like it, and if you liked the story behind it, there are a couple things you can do to support me and help me keep drawing animal avatars for our inner dreams and terrors:
You can get a print (or seven.😉)
If you're not yet part of the gang, you can join my mailing list. I always show my work first in my emails. And at gang-only prices, too.
You can buy me the proverbial cup of coffee. That way, Larry will have that bit of manic energy that helps him come up with brilliant ideas. (We love you, Larry, you magnificent, undercaffeinated bastard.)
Above all, thank you for reading my rants and trying to make sense of them. It means a lot having you here. And as always, let me know how I'm doing. Shoot me an email or a DM, follow me on social media, or just think really hard in my general direction. All of it helps, and who knows? Maybe I'll discover I'm a telepath!
See you next time!
-Julián
