The Small Press Expo

Nice vid on Ivan Brunetit’s new book on cartooning…

As part of Lynda Barry’s term as Artist in Residence this spring semester at the University of Wisconsin -Madison, she’s inviting some of her favorite artists to join her in presentations that are free open to the public.
The first one takes place on Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 4:30 PM.
Visiting Artist Talk:
Ivan Brunetti: Seeing, Drawing, Writing and Cooking Through a Cartoonist’s Eye:
Room L160 Chazen Museum of Art (Elvehjem Building)
800 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
4:30 p.m. - 5:45 p.m.
All events are free and open to the public.
Seeing, Drawing, Writing, and Cooking through a Cartoonist’s Eye
Ivan Brunetti has been reading comics and drawing comics for over twenty years. He’s taught at Columbia College and University of Chicago, put together two award winning comics anthologies for Yale University Press, and his cartoons and illustrations have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Spin.
He is also the author of “Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice.” According to Art Department and Arts Institute Artist-in-Residence and fellow cartoonist Lynda Barry, “it’s the best book on how to make comics I have ever seen. When someone tells me they want to make comics,” says Barry, “I tell them about Ivan Brunetti’s book.”
Born in rural Italy in the late 1960’s, Brunetti moved with his family to Chicago’s industrialized South Side and where he learned to speak English at the age of 8. On his relationship to writing and drawing he says,
“Drawing is like Italian for me. It is the first language I learned…It’s almost like a geometric phonetics that happens in a split second…Writing is more like English, my adopted tongue …. As a child I had to develop an ‘immigrant’s ear’, experiencing language not just as words and phonetics, but also as music…
“Because I suffer from severe myopia and thus a complete lack of depth perception (feel free to use those mocking metaphors against me) with my right eye practically blind, I have gone through life squinting at a very flat world…. It’s no surprise, then, that I see cartooning as primarily verbal, and through a prism of language, a translation of how we experience, structure, and remember the world.
It would obviously be insane of me to saddle any student with these sorts of convolutions so I tend to use a much simpler metaphor….. food. …Perhaps all the lessons I am trying to teach in this book can be understood by making a quick, simple, unassuming dish, spaghetti aglieo e oglio”
Brunetti’s students have ranged from “the deeply perceptive and analytical (who taught me a few things)” to the people who took his class simply to “keep out of trouble on Wednesday nights.” He says teaching has reminded him that making comics “is still a relatively young, quite open art form, with a lot of unexplored territory. This is true both in terms of the language itself as well as the subject matter.”
His way of teaching comics does not focus on technical aspects such as perspective, figure-drawing and lettering. Instead he emphasize the daily practice of drawing which is how “the deepest realizations come to us. It is the pencil that teaches best…. The trees of theory can obscure the forest of practice. I would go so far as to say that practice is philosophy, for practice itself encompasses philosophy and philosophy without practice is shallow indeed”
Lynda Barry will be talking with Ivan Brunetti about myopia, the power of drawing by hand, how to teach cartooning to people who badly want to make comics but feel they can’t draw, and what it has to do with making of a perfect dish of spaghetti aglio e olio. They will be joined by special guest and fellow cartoonist Chris Ware.