Artist Statement: The Endless Scroll
A closer look at the drawings.
I got to thinking that some Fashionably Late Takes subscribers might be curious about the decisions I make for the pencil drawings in each essay. So in this “Artist Statement” series, I share what influenced the artwork.
You’re getting two artist statements in a row this month, because I’m working on pushing through some big projects — including illustrating a novel! It’s written by
, who is serializing it on Substack. I’ll cross-post the first chapter in a couple weeks once it drops on July 1st. You should check out his Substack and consider subscribing.
Because computers resurrected the scroll, I have an infinite vertical composition when I publish visual essays online. In some, I’ve played with the experience of scrolling through drawings. The most vertical drawing that I’ve made so far comes from the essay “To Err is Human” about scientific hubris. This is the only one that begins without a drawing — you don’t encounter it until you’re eight paragraphs in, where it creates a bridge between stories about two fateful events that took place on the same day but across the world from each other. In between, I drew a long stretch of clouds to try to give readers a sense of being transported from one event to the next.
To Err Is Human
“Black Saturday” was the most precarious day of the Cold War, and it emerged out of a series of mishaps. Where malice could theoretically be contained by Mutually Assured Destruction, malfunctions went rogue. Airplanes and a submarine nearly fired nuclear missiles. If they had, then Black Saturday would have become the first day of WWIII. This history t…
For another piece (which also touched on the topic of scientific hubris), I drew a progression of five daisies that become increasingly mutated. They appear as five separate drawings in the visual essay, although in real life, they are composed in a single drawing that is shaped like a large, horizontal scroll, as you can see displayed here:
