krazy

I'm 57 pages into Michael Tisserand's Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White (2016). The central premise of the book, I gather from reading reviews, is that Herriman lived his life (1880-1944, not a really long one by our standards but not insubstantial and very successful artistically and I imagine financially) always a minute away from being discovered as 'passing' - he was, by the measure of the times, African-American. Tisserand is able without too much trouble to pull together Herriman's ancestry going back to New Orleans in the early 19th century, and since we know Herriman did 'get away with it' there's not too much tension but it is intriguing to note that, in becoming successful and famous under his actual real name, he was arguably endangering himself and his family. If people back in New Orleans recognised him as one of those Herrimans, they would have known he was 'black'.

So as I said I'm 57 pages in so I'll reserve judgment on the actual book until I've finished it. But I just wanted to ruminate for a moment on what appealed to me, as a child, about Krazy Kat. I was first exposed to it, I would imagine, at the age of 6 or 7 (we lived in Parkhill Road Kew until the beginning of 1973, and I am fairly sure I owned the Penguin Book of Comics, which my father bought for me in a big hardback edition, at Kew). If I remember rightly - I should have a look at it again sometime - this volume had three, page-sized examples of Krazy Kat. I am sure that I loved the idea of it, and the look of it, more than I loved the actual strips, which I either didn't understand or didn't know enough about the world to know whether I understood them or not. It certainly had an otherworldliness implied in it that gathered me up, more than anything, particularly the shifting backgrounds (I see even in the entirely random two frames I grabbed above the background completely changes, though obviously the action is unfolding in the same place). I liked the language too, which undoubtedly meant a whole range of completely different things to Herriman and his audience than it did to me, still learning English I guess, in Australia in the early 70s.

But just look at how beautifully Herriman renders a landscape in this sequence, also from 1911 (20 November, actually):

Particularly the first frame, which is to die for. 

I wonder what stopped me from becoming one of those great visual artists inspired by all the great visual art I was exposed to (by dint of the Penguin Book of Comics alone!). I guess I have a vague sense of feeling not so much that everything had been done, but that there was a daunting array of options and to choose one was to limit oneself. It's not like I didn't get praise for my limited drawing skills as a child so I could hardly claim to have been inhibited from without. 

So after writing the above I sat here for a couple of minutes thinking of a world where I might have made a big impact by developing my capacity to draw and then I thought yeah well whatever that would be in some respects cutting myself off and being limited to one narrow track, in terms of personal awareness/knowledge and that's really how it is isn't it. I'd rather be interested in a big range of things than focused on my own capacity to create. Possibly that indicates a limited faith in my own ability to convert whatever art I might produce into a wider commentary/ agent of change. I can live with that.