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Birth is the point when we enter our lives and start to develop our personal characteristics.

Where we are born; Where we live; Who our family is.

Everything that comes with life 'does it affect who we are? or who we become?
By the time we are old enough to talk we have already started to define our characters.

Our accents, our words, what we like to see and do, how much we talk, or how active we are, essentially comes from our surroundings. How does your family treat other races?

Which other races live around you that people judge? Are there any people who don't get judged. Our views of good and bad, our goals, our achievements, our entire lives are affected by the circumstances surrounding our birth, but we are born to be whoever we become.

I was born to be an artist, I have always known that.
Many people aren't that lucky.

Everything that happens affects at least one life. How we see people starts with who we are around when we are little, mainly our families. We begin to judge people by their images.

What they look like. What they wear. What they smell like, or even what they sound like.

When we get older and we see strangers, we judge them, often without even knowing we are doing it. We are just relating people to other people we have seen, and how that experience affected us. Who do they look like? If they look like your brother then you will probably become friends with them, unless you don't like your brother. I am twenty two now. I am still meeting different people every day, usually there is something about people that I can relate to.

If you get around a lot, you will keep seeing "different" types of people, I have been paying more attention to which people are the most alike? Which people have thought the same and done the same type of things their whole lives? A lot of people are like other people.
Are any of the people all alike?

I started my thesis research by documenting the different character types around me, my family, my friends, and people I met. My initial idea was to sketch the people and record some information about them to see if I could place the people into different categories. What did they have in common? What was different? And what did other people think of them? My goal was to find a group of people which would remind everybody of somebody else they know.

My friend Shawn is one of those comic junkies, he has thousands of graphic novels, which helped me out a lot with the research into the comic world. I was only allowed to borrow three books at a time. He was pretty worried about his comics.
One of the books I borrowed from Shawn was Stray Toasters by Bill Sienkiewics.
That is one cool, intriguing, insightful book. I would recommend it to all. I was paying attention to what I liked, what I thought was different, even what I might be able to do different, I liked how some of its pages look like a page out of my sketch book, or a scrap book. Some pages have hand written type, and some don't. I liked the way some of the pages have type that guides you through an image, then it changes to having everything in a grid. The grid is mostly divided, except for a couple of places where an overlapping text box makes two parts of the grid flow together. Then they throw in the random black and white page to add contrast.
Another of the books I liked was Someplace Strange by Ann Nocenti and John Bolton.
I liked how the back cover had illustrations of the illustrator and the writer. There are a lot of pages that show excellent creativity, and similar use of contrast between styles on each page to that of Stray Toasters. I think they use one of the more common forms of the comic/graphic novel layout.

My next step was going through a bunch of my old stuff, school work, poetry, scrapbook stuff, etc. and gathered whatever I thought might help me figure out what I was trying to say.

Mainly I was trying to figure out what stands out the most out of all the stories in my life and which ones I would be able to reproduce. I started to get a vision of a page with me sitting there looking at a map, or globe, thinking about the world, then I sketched a couple of concepts out for the idea in my journal, but later went back to follow that same idea. I was thinking about how whenever you ask somebody where they would like to be, everybody, everywhere always wants to be somewhere else. You know that game we all play as kids, where we spin the globe and stop it with our finger? "That's where I'm gonna live..." Or if you just listen to people talk, they are always saying where they would rather be. I wondered why? Why does everybody want to be somewhere else? Now that I am thinking about it, most of the people would rather be someone else, or themselves, just in someone else's shoes. Moving back and forth between two countries as a kid made me see that no matter where I am at in the world, I am always going to miss the other place. Like a little kid that has hundreds of Hot Wheels, but he doesn't have the 69 Chevy with flames on it, and that is the one that he wants. You know, I think that is one of the levels of understanding that I was looking for. We won't miss it if we have never had it, or seen it, but if we have had it or seen it, then we will miss it or want it. It all fits together, we want what we don't have, or can't have, and what we have had, or had done and we can't have it again, but we want to. It is part of the urge to rebel that we, most people, have tucked into our shells.

People relate with people who they have something to relate with.
You can observe this best at parties, or anywhere there are groups of people.
If people work together, they talk about work. If they have the same hobbies,
then that is the conversation, and so on, whatever the common interest is.

If I knew who my characters were, then what were my stories going to be?
Was I the narrator? Could I come up with more than one way to read the comic?
What was going on in my world? What were people wearing?
Are we a material culture? Who is "We"? Is that Americans, or everybody?
Or is America everybody, it isn't like we are all of the same blood or anything.

I was talking to my Art & Ideas instructor Peter Richey when he told me his philosophy on writing a story...

"If I want to make people laugh, then first make them cry.
If you want to make them cry, then first make them laugh."

I thought... hmm... that makes a lot of sense, but how could I make that happen? Or even more, which stories could I use? He also told me to think about backgrounds, like what artists come from a rural background? What are the relationships between the people and the land? And then, what will people accept from me?
Peter and I also talked about the Narrative shape of a story. A story has to have a climax, so what would mine be? After I figured out my climax then I could work backwards, climax then beginning, then the end. If that is not interesting, then how would I make it interesting? Of all the stories I have ever told, what lights people up the most?
The idea of a story having a high, a low, a climax, and whereever it goes from the climax can easily be related to life. All of our lives have their own high points,
or good times, the low, or bad times. There is always some sort of climax in life.
Some of us don't know what our climax is. I don't really know, I mean is it getting hit by a truck, or is it making a national sport team, or even being born? I do know that there is a climax so far, but it might change, and it probably will.

I was continuously recording conversations, events, everything I saw or did went into my journal.

If I am studying life, then I must look at life. Life is everything around us, so what was I looking for?
I did a small survey type of thing where I was asking everybody what they thought of life. You should try asking some people, sometime, it isn't something that most people are willing to talk about, or maybe it is just that they cannot be bothered coming up with a clever sentence. Most of the people told me in one way or another that they don't think about it. Not thinking about life is impossible for me! A lot of other people said that they don't know. I was asking what they thought about it, if they don't know what they think about it, then do they think about it? The rest of the people I asked were either loving life, or hating it, and they had something to say about it. My friend Graeme who had just lost his three best mates was happy to be alive, but didn't want to say how he felt about being alive. His thoughts about life will change a lot in time I would imagine. Another common type of answer was that life is too deep of a subject, that most of us are not supposed to understand it. Our mental capacity might be limited, so that we can only comprehend a fraction, so we don't need to worry about it.

 

The best quote about life that I think I got is from my Uncle Mick who said :
"It's what you make it... It can be crappy or it can be good."
I think this is good because I haven't chosen all of the bad times in my life,
but I have chosen to be where I am now, I am choosing where I am headed.
However, I may never get any closer to my my intended destination, but my life is good.

 

Another quote I liked is from my cousin Craig Jr. who said :
"Life is a lot to think about, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose...
The first thing you need to know is that you don't know much. Everything is a test. What you see. What you hear. What you do... Nothing is what it seems. Our failures are known, our successes are not."
Craig has an interesting view on life, it makes sense to me. We will never know most of the information available to us, let alone will we ever figure out the answers that are not available already. We learn from the things that we do, we could never do everything. We can only see so much, can only hear so much, can only do so much.

I decided to make my own quote on life:
"Life can be hard and short, any moment you could be dead.
Life it is a sport, so maybe your friends will go instead.
Whenever trouble starts to smother, we have all got to support each other."

A lot of people think that we are coming to a point where there will be no new art styles.

That is not true. Just by seeing the difference between different countries,
I know that in the world of art, we have only just begun to uncover artistic styles.
There is such a difference in national identities, or even in each generation.

Art is created through personal experience, and exploration. Our lives are different from all others, so the art could never be the same, it could never be predicted either.
History takes its toll on peoples opinions, beliefs, and the way people do things today.

It isn't just an art thing, take a look at sport where New Zealanders grow up playing Rugby, calling the game Footy, or Football. The English people and many others call Soccer Football or footy, while in the States we have grown up to NLF Football. It is called Grid Iron or American Football in other countries. Football has almost became a new word for sport. I haven't even mentioned all the variations that I know of. The Australians have a couple versions of footy of their own. Some people argue about which sport is football, but no one is wrong.

In my life, I have a lot of 'Lucky it wasn't worse situations. I do the things that I do because that is how my life is, my styles vary between moods. Sometimes I am better at drawing, other times I am better at writing poetry. The images that I create are reflected on what is going on in my head, and how I feel about it.

During my thesis investigation I traveled to New Zealand to study the difference between the two cultures which I grew up in. What stood out the most? What are the funny stories? What are the sad ones? I started off having a lot of fun catching up with old friends and family, so my stories started to be more of a comic style than I was looking for. None of my stories would really make you happy, although they might make you laugh, but I wasn't sure if they were quite what I was looking for. Then one morning I had woken up early when the phone rang. I answered the phone, it was one of my Mom's friends Carol. Carol has a son named Graeme who my brother and I grew up with. Carol sounded like she was freaking out about something. She asked me if I had seen the paper yet. I said Nope! Then she told me that Graeme had been in a car accident the night before, and that three of the people involved were already dead. I couldn't believe it, I just kept thinking... no way! I had just seen him. Then she told me that he was the only survivor in his vehicle, he was in critical condition, on the morphine drip. I know exactly what that's like, but I had never watched it. I tried to comfort Carol, even though I knew that there was no way I could calm her down while her son was fighting for his life. She told me that Graeme felt like he should be dead, because, why shouldn't he be, when his friends were all dead? I could not relate to losing my three best friends at the same time, but felt so bad for Graeme, since he was like a little brother to me. Carol asked me if I would let my Mom know because she had to get back down to the hospital.

I don't need to tell the story word for word, but I spent a lot of the rest of my time in New Zealand at the hospital. It felt good to be there for him, to be able to give him support. I was able to take the bad stories of my life to brighten his day, to show him that bad things do happen.

We all know this, but when do we begin to realize, or to accept it. One thing he was worried about was whether or not girls like scars? Yes, a lot of them love them, but no, a lot of them think they are gross, and you don't want to be with those girls any ways because they are all about image. Do you judge by personality, or size of scar, or how ugly it is? I also knew how to make the hospital more comfortable for him, the way the bed was positioned, or the bandages, even how to deal with the nurses. Nurses can be a pain in the ass! I started thinking maybe that this was the reason I got hit by a truck. I could help him through his suffering, then hopefully one day he will do the same for another person. Is it a coincidence the one mans suffering can aid a fellow man, being able to guide the weak into the light.
This story repeated over and over in my head, in Graeme's words :
"They were just young cunts, fuckin good cunts man! It was just the driver's 17th birthday, just a young cunt..."

I needed to get some work done on my thesis, but I couldn't think about anything else. I knew that this was my thesis, because I was starting to understand my life, gaining an understanding of life from death and near death experiences. I knew that I had figured out two good stories for my thesis, but they were both sad. How could I justify trying to make them happy? I couldn't.

I could try to show a typical life cycle, or major points of realization.

Would people understand what I had done?

I didn't want to make life look sad. Life isn't sad, it just seems like it sometimes.
I think that the best way to show how good life is, is to show how much worse it could be.

Bad shit happens!!! I don't know if it is all for a reason or not. We need to live life to have fun, do something we want to do, at least that is what I do and my life is good.
After I had figured out which stories I would use to make people sad, I decided to move my thesis towards a better understanding or realization of life after death. I have been gaining a better appreciation for life, after having been hit by a truck and seeing how the good and the bad, I wouldn't say balance each other, but they both come and go.

Every life has its own good and bad points.

Death is the best way to appreciate life, to gain a better understanding.
Death is where we begin to appreciate all forms of life, where we learn to appreciate our own, for everything is our own life. Being alive made me want to get baptized, I wanted to have more fun and live my life as fully as I could. I will never forget how thankful I am to be alive, to have been given another chance.

Pete McCracken my Advanced Design teacher hooked me up with a contact at
Dark Horse Comics, Adam Gallardo. That was great. We met so that he could see my work and give me some professional direction towards my graphic novel.

I wanted to come up with a series of stages in life. At first I was thinking about using emotions like happy, sad, love, hate, etc. but when I proposed my idea to my committee they suggested that I look into some other series, like stages of life. I was thinking about the stages of life, and the research that I had been doing on character types when I had this idea to look into what different stages had been done by artists in the past. Lots of different stages had been done for various things, but one of them stood out. The old Catholic art with its different religious series gave me an idea. Which series can I relate to one of my stories, I asked myself. Jesus has a couple. I'm not saying I am the new born Jesus or anything, I just think we have a lot in common.
If I was going to do Jesus, then what part? The stations of the cross, his life, which? Well I did both of them. At first I started with a poster series which has posters titled Life, Taking up the Cross, Death, Resurrection, and Salvation. After the posters I moved on to the 14 Stations of the Cross, which were to go with the posters. Now I wasn't remaking the old Christian art in any way, just taking the titles, I want to be like the artists back in the day. If they all did the same scenes, why can't I? I was transferring a major point in my life into a set of pictures with titles about Jesus, like we both had to suffer before we were reborn.

The Posters
The posters are 5 of the major points in my life. I incorporated styles from different eras in the posters. Each poster uses the same grid. Each poster has my figure with his arms spread (resembling the cross) in some different activity, some different level of intensity. My figure is also used to connect the four corners of the poster. They have all got a side panel which represents what happens before the title of the poster, for example, before every "life" is a mother, a female, so I have the female representing before life. Another continuous element of each poster is God. God is going through some different emotions. Each one has its own color scheme as well, a full color/2 color scheme.

The first poster "Life", has me with my head and palms up, looking at the sky. I was thinking about how everything is an experiment. We are learning as we go. My character is like: Life is good, I do whatever, nothing will happen, what's next? The God is looking away and shrugging his shoulders. God knew I was going to learn my lesson. I drew the grass spiraling in the wind to show that other forms of life can be beautiful, especially nature. Before any life is always a female, so I have drawn a female in the side column. I chose to draw a female nude because I felt that it would better portray motherhood, and sexuality. The style I chose for this poster is my style, the style I have been concentrating most of my studies on. I figured it would be the best to show my life.

The second poster is "Taking up the Cross" it has me with my back facing you, and I am just about to get hit by the truck. I have accepted it and have risen my arms in the form of the cross. I was thinking about how Jesus just accepted his death, he carried his own cross. Many people use the cross as a symbol for hope, so my character is like, "Looks like I am headed towards that light". The God is looking down with his arms crossed. Teaching me a lesson.
I drew the lights glaring past me in the night, nearly turning me into a silhouette. The column on the right shows my hand gripping my crucifix necklace. I am asking for help.

The third poster "Death" shows me just like I am crucified on the cross, only with out the cross. My body is stretched out as I am soaring through the air. I was thinking about how death
was the major turning point, always is the major turning point, whether it is you or someone close to you. The God is looking down at me angrily, he wished I could have learned without the suffering. I drew the hospital sheets in a style similar to past robes, and drapery. In the past column (right) I have put a tire track because it is a pattern that can be related to being hit.

The fourth poster "Resurrection" has me being lifted into the sky. God is looking down with his eyes closed bringing me to life, or to heaven, he knew I had learnt my lesson. I drew the hospital sheets falling away from my body as I am being lifted into the air. Before resurrection is always religion, so I drew a cross to represent religion in the side column. I chose to draw a Celtic cross because I like that style of design, and it is part of my family history.

The fifth poster is "Salvation", Salvation has me with a pen, pencil, and scalpel in one hand, and an arrow in the other. The arrows represent the reborn energy that flows through your body when you are given a chance to live. I was thinking about how I was going to help people? Why was I still alive? I am an artist, that is what I do, so my character is thinking: I will draw life, show life, show love for life. It is a beautiful day, God is happy for once, he knows I have changed. I drew the world spiraling around in type, because type represents my art, creating a new world with my art. The right column shows that before salvation is death, or when you see the bad side of something, when there is a place or a need for help. I chose to draw my eye, with the reflection of Death himself, coming to take me away.

Before the accident my life was going down by the sound of it, e

verybody around was drunk or stoned and I was lovin it.

Every week I was getting into trouble.
It was all good, living my life like I thought I should.

Free! I thought the idea of life was to live life like me.

The 14 Stations of the Cross

1.   Condemned to death
2,   Takes up the cross
3.   Falls the first time
4.   Talks to Mary
5.   Helped by Simon
6.   Veronica wipes his face
7.   Falls the second time
8.   Speaks to the Women of his town
9.   Falls the third time
10. Stripped of his garments
11. Nailed to the cross
12. Dies on the cross
13. Taken down from the cross
14. Buried in a tomb

The fourteen stations is a series which I found in Catholic Artwork and I translated it into my life. The Catholic version tells the story of Jesus, from when he was condemned to death, up till when he was buried in the tomb. I have taken stages of my life, my struggles and created the series of how I fought with life. I hope these images will relate with other people like me.

It is death that shows us a brighter light, a higher love for life.

The first station is "Condemned to death" where Jesus was condemned to death by the Romans. I was condemned to death by the life that I had been living, the way I thought, the choices I chose. This piece shows my face when I was really drunk, my hand is flipping off the viewer, in a sense flipping off the World. I wasn't mad at the World, I just didn't care about it. I had been having fun and partying. No different than any other teenagers, except I was the one your Mom might call the bad influence. I was always drinking alcohol and smoking weed, or else figuring out how I could.

The second station is "Taking up the cross" where Jesus was forced to carry his own cross up to where he would be crucified. I feel the cross symbolizes the burden on his shoulders, or on my shoulders. For me, taking up the cross is opening my beer or rolling a joint. So I can get more wasted! I have drawn my hand opening a can of beer. Symbolizing my contribution to my own death. Jesus had to carry his cross, I had to open my beer.

The third station is "He falls the first time", Jesus was carrying a lot of wood, it would have been heavy, so he fell in the struggle to carry his cross up the hill. I was thinking about all of the times that I have fallen down because I was too drunk to walk, or even to stand up. In Falling the first time I have drawn myself falling down drunk and spilling my beer, because drinking was the cause of most of my trouble.

The fourth station is "Jesus meets Mary", it would have been the last time that Mary would be able to speak to her son. She would have been so sad, yet also so angry at the same time. I can't even imagine how she would have felt. While I was working on my piece I was thinking about my relationship with my own mother. How she always tries to push me away from drugs and alcohol. She was worried, yet she would always give me money to support me. My station shows my mother handing me money with her right hand, while her left hand is motioning in sign language the "don't" symbol. Waving her finger back and forth trying to represent her warning me against the alcohol and drugs.

The fifth station is "Helped by Simon". Simon helped Jesus in his struggle to carry the cross. I was thinking that if my cross is my struggles, troubles, the life that I had been living. Then being helped by Simon is when other people would contribute to the errors of my ways. I have a buddy named Simon who I bought weed from all of the time. I have drawn Simon's hand passing a joint to my hand to symbolize him giving me weed. Helping my burden. Helping me carry my cross.

The sixth station is "Veronica wipes his face". Veronica shows the sympathy of a woman, wiping the blood and sweat from Jesus's face. I have shown Veronica wiping away the blood from a cut on my eyebrow. I had my eyebrow split open one night when I had been out drinking. I got into a fight against three other men, who knocked me out. Later I was woken up by a van full of Moaris who then gave me a ride back to my place. My flatmate wiped the blood from my face before she took me to the hospital. I ended up with five stitches in my eyebrow.

The seventh station "He falls the second time", Jesus falls for the second time in his struggle to carry his cross. I chose to show the second fall as being knocked out in the drunken fight. The image shows two guys swinging at me, while I am falling toward the viewers. The first fall was just due to alcohol, then the second is due to alcohol and violence. But I struggled to carry the cross in a different way than Jesus.

The eighth station is "He speaks to the women of Bethlehem" Jesus speaking his last words to the women. I dropped the name of Bethlehem, because if I used a town it would have to be Jerod speaks to the women of Palmerston North. I have drawn myself getting different phone numbers from girls. Alcohol makes me want most all women, and I have the courage to go for them all when I drink it.

The ninth station is "He falls the third time". For this I have shown myself when I was getting ripped to pieces by the truck. I had been partying all night long for my flat mate's 20th birthday. I had drunk way too much alcohol and smoked way too much weed that night. At 2am the morning of the 19th day of the 9th month, 1999 I was hit by a truck 8 kilometers outside of Palmerston North, New Zealand. I had been walking drunk, the driver had been driving drunk, bad mixture.

The tenth station is "Stripped of his garments". The Roman's stripped Jesus down to die with his body bare to all. To strip somebody is like a way to take away a person's respect, his dignity, his pride. I was stripped of my garments by the doctors and nurses who were trying to save me. I have shown hands cutting and tearing my clothes off of me, while I am being restrained. The first thing I said when I woke up was that they owe me new pants.

The eleventh station is "He is nailed to the cross" where they hammered nails through Jesus's hands and feet into the cross. In my series I have this to be when the surgeons were entering all of the foreign objects into my body. The first of five bolts is being screwed through my shin bone, and they are cutting my guts open. I chose this because the cross is where Jesus was sent to die, and he died on the cross. I was still alive when I got to the hospital, I got stapled.

The twelfth station "He dies on the cross". Jesus was finally free of his suffering, and on his way to heaven. The way that I chose to portray this is the viewer takes the place of my soul. Looking at my eye from the inside. I am dead, but still in my body.There is an angel waiting with her hand out for me to follow her into the light. The light is shining through my eye in the center of the piece.

The thirteenth station is "Taken down from the cross". Jesus was taken down from the cross to be buried in his tomb, where he would later be resurrected. I have shown two doctors pushing a bed, with the patients head covered by a sheet. My lifeless hand dangles out towards the viewer. I figure the trip from where I got hit to the hospital is the most like I am being taken down from the cross.

The fourteenth and final station is "Buried in his tomb", where Jesus was buried in his tomb, before he was resurrected. I was never buried in a tomb of course, but I have so many crazy visions from the whole experience. I can't tell the different memories between life, death, and morphine trips. I have drawn my hands covered in darkness. I am trying to get out. Trying to find the light. Trying to free myself.

I am really happy with the final outcome of my thesis. The final resolution is something that could never have come to mind, without having done all of the research and deep thinking involved in my thesis study. The work that I have done for my thesis is definitely the best that I have ever done, which means to me that it is successful. The best thing is it was fun.

I have a lot of ideas of how I can continue the work that I have done. How I can continue to re-interpret the great compositions of the past. Think about all of the classic images that you can relate to something in your life. If they can be translated, then why haven't they? I have plans to redo The Last Supper next; it will be my mates and I partying at my house. I might even make a final supper series, different scenes of the final supper or something. There are so many options, so many other possibilities. I am also going to carry on with my research into the Comic of my life, turning my life into a graphic novel. It is a project that I will get published when it is finished, but it is not finished yet.

My understanding for life is hard to explain. Life is unexplainable, yet I do have an understanding for it. Life is irreplaceable, and never-ending, yet lives come and go all of the time. Life is so beautiful and good, yet most of the people are suffering.
My understanding for life tells me that I love life, I think I have a better idea of what people are looking for, a better idea of what people want to see.

My ideas started with studying the relationships between different lives and different people, and I figured out a lot of interesting things. There are still a lot of studies that I would like to do involving life, and people. I studied how to create a comic book, or graphic novel. I met with Adam Gallardo from Dark Horse Comics, where he looked at my work, and gave me advice. My book is still in the process of being made, but I will finish it. I studied the history of Art, looking at how I could adapt older styles of art into my work. Catholic art was the last of my studies, it is where I found the door that I was looking for. My thesis is just the beginning. Now it is time to open the door to a new world, my world.

 

Bibliography/Credits

1- Stray Toasters, Matt Sienkiewics,
Model 3, Epic Comics, U.S.A.

2- Someplace Strange, Ann Nocenti & John Bolton,
Epic Graphic Novel, U.S.A.

2- The History of Graphic Design, Philip B. Meggs
John Wiley & Sons Inc., U.S.A., Copyright 1998

3- Understanding Comics, Scott McCleod,
HarperPerennial Publishers, U.S.A. Copyright 1993

4- Holy Bible-King James Version,
Barbour Books, U.S.A., Copyright 2002

5- http://users.net1plus.com/artcatholic/

6- The Stations of the Cross, Life, Death, Resurrection, and Salvation

7- My Life, All of it, and everything in it.

8- Thanks to Paul Platosh (P.N.C.A.), Kurt D. hollomon (P.N.C.A.),
Margaret Richardson (P.N.C.A.), Adam Gallardo (Darkhorse Comics),
Pete McCracken (P.N.C.A.), Peter Richey (P.N.C.A.), Mary Slowick (P.N.C.A.),
Eric Wilkinson (P.N.C.A.), My family, My friends, My enemies,
I'm sorry about all the names who I have forgot to mention.