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<\/a>In the meantime, allow me to introduce you to an amazing artist and writer, Katherine Wirick<\/a>. A few weeks ago, I attended S.P.A.C.E. con, an Indie Comic-Con convention. Katherine\u2019s work drew me in because she published a whole graphic novel in an impressive, painting size piece of art. When I took time to read her work, No One is Safe<\/a>, I cried. The story is about Katherine telling about her father\u2019s role as an eye witness to the Kent State massacre<\/a>. As she wrote the story, her father got sick with cancer, given to him by his experience in working with military chemicals. She tells that story as well.<\/p>\nAll that in one graphic novel\/painting? Yeah, and it\u2019s pretty amazing. When I get some cash, I\u2019m buying a full on print<\/a>. \u00a0Normally, I try to keep these interviews short, but our conversation turned up a bit more things I want to discuss on this blog. So, enjoy the conversation\u2026..<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n GGR: Describe your journey from wanting to be a painter to Graphic novels and comics. How did that come about?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n K:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t have any serious art education until I went to the Columbus College of Art and Design. The main reason I wound up there was that I didn\u2019t really want to do anything except draw, but there was the added side benefit that they didn\u2019t care what was on anyone\u2019s high school transcript, and there was nothing on my transcript because I had dropped out halfway through ninth grade. That made it functionally impossible to get into most universities but CCAD just wanted to know if I had my GED or not. I knew, when I went there, what I wanted to do, which was comics, so I majored in illustration, but although I got to know some really great professors and students, it wasn\u2019t a perfect fit for me, because I\u2019m not really an illustrator in the usual sense. I don\u2019t have any interest in producing pictures to accompany someone else\u2019s text.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I wound up at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts primarily because I wanted to draw better. I probably would never have even heard of it except that my husband had gone through their undergrad program, and he came out with a set of drawing and painting skills that I fiercely envied. I wanted was the kind of education that artists got during the golden age of illustration. A lot of great illustrators were associated with PAFA. High modernism, the rigid doctrine of modernism, dealt a hard blow to that kind of art program (literally\u2013during the \u201960s people were smashing the statues in PAFA\u2019s cast hall) and there really aren\u2019t many places outside of PAFA where you can get that education anymore.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n So I went to PAFA and for the first year I was painting sort of by default. I love painting, but it wasn\u2019t enough. I spent a whole year on one painting and it was only marginally successful and by the time it was done I had realized: this is ridiculous, I want to tell stories, I want to do it with words and pictures, I want to make comics.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n GGR: Did that result in some struggles and clashes with your professors?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n K<\/strong>: It did. Students on the whole were receptive\u2013undergrads in particular thought it was awesome, so the future is safe for comics and we should all feel good about that. And among the faculty, Ren\u00e9e Foulks and Dr. Kevin Richards were incredibly supportive from the very beginning and the piece was far better for their contributions than it would\u2019ve been otherwise\u2013without them it probably wouldn\u2019t even have happened. It was during one of Kevin\u2019s lectures that I first got the idea for\u00a0No One Is Safe<\/em>. And the curators of contemporary art at the PAFA museum, which has a loose association with the school, bought it from me, and it\u2019s in the permanent collection now.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n My final critique turned into an argument between faculty who thought it was no good\u2013I had one guy say to me, \u201cIf I were you, I would walk away from this\u201d\u2013and faculty who liked it (at least in theory; a lot of them hadn\u2019t read it). And a visiting artist who saw\u00a0No One Is Safe<\/em>\u00a0half-finished got really excited about it, and described it to some of his colleagues, and later reported back to me, in innocent shock and confusion, that they had sneered at the very idea.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s an antipathy in the traditional fine arts (painting and sculpture) to work that is infinitely reproducible, and it\u2019s well-established and dates back to the Industrial Revolution, and if you want to know more about that you can read Walter Benjamin, who was much smarter than me and explains it better. At PAFA I was occasionally made aware of that; once I brought up Mike Diana in a class and somebody said, \u201cIf he didn\u2019t want to go to jail he shouldn\u2019t have made copies of his work.\u201d So the fine arts find comics problematic in the first place. But that wasn\u2019t what was at issue withNo One Is Safe,<\/em>\u00a0I don\u2019t think; I didn\u2019t even start thinking about reproducibility until I was halfway done. It was a one-of-a-kind thing destined for a gallery wall, just like a painting.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It might have had to do with communication, specifically how much communication I was attempting. A faculty member told me, \u201cWhen people go into an art gallery, they don\u2019t expect to have to read.\u201d Jenny Holzer suggests otherwise, but there\u2019s resistance to the idea that written words can be visual art. More than that, some people in the fine arts really disdain the idea of\u00a0direct<\/em>\u00a0communication. Your work is supposed to mean something but you\u2019re supposed to keep the meaning coded, you have to express yourself elliptically. There\u2019s some snobbery at the base of it, the refusal to allow\u00a0just anyone<\/em>\u00a0to understand your art and the rejection of work that has broad public appeal. That doesn\u2019t mean that artists are snobs, it means that fine art as a form suffers from a status anxiety which dates back to the French Revolution. \u201cArt for art\u2019s sake\u201d came about in response to an existential crisis which was never really solved.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Greil Marcus once wrote that in Heartfield\u2019s work Hitler, Goering et al. \u201cwere not art subjects\u2026 this was real speech about real things that happened to real people.\u201d That was what I wanted: I didn\u2019t want to make art, I wanted to speak. The Ohio National Guard killed Bill Schroeder and the U.S. Army gave my father cancer and I had no interest in putting veils over anything.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n
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<\/a>K:<\/strong> Dad was very interested in the project from the beginning. He liked to tell that story, not because it felt good to relive that weekend but probably because he liked to educate people, and a lot of people, even from my parents\u2019 generation, are uninformed or misinformed about what exactly happened at Kent. I asked him to go up to Kent with me and give me the historical tour because he\u2019d already done that for me once before, when I was an undergrad. I don\u2019t think there was any specific occasion that prompted it, we just went up and visited the campus, and for years after I thought, \u201cGosh, I wish I had a recording of that,\u201d so, later, working on this art piece kind of gave me an excuse to do something that I\u2019d been wanting to do for ages. We all went up, Mom and Dad and my husband and me. It was May 29, 2010. The tour lasted for about two and a half hours, and that was mostly him talking and me interjecting with questions.<\/p>\n