Agony

Cody Vanwinkle

Interview by L. Valena

August 1, 2022

Can you start by please describing the prompt that you responded to?

I can. It was a ceramic piece. I don't know whether it was a bowl or a plate, a platter or an ashtray because the picture was looking down. I didn't really understand the depth of it, but it was some sort of ceramic dish and it had this nice ombre effect of brown and tan and some blue in there. At the bottom, there was a little shape of an eye that had three delicate raindrops falling from it. This very pretty crying eye at the bottom. I had never responded to a ceramics piece -- maybe even anything 3D before, so that was really interesting as a new twist.

What was your first thought?

Well, I've done this a couple of times, so I know what I'm supposed to be looking for. I need to figure out what this makes me think of and draw conclusions. I noticed that this round dish had a sort of scalloped edge, and that shape vaguely reminded me of a flower that you might see in an illuminated manuscript or some architectural detail in a medieval church or something. It gave me that kind of vibe. It reminded me of this flower shape that you might see in really old art or architecture.

That got me thinking about old art. My first thought was that I could draw an impression of some really old illustration like an illumination, but I already did that once for the Adventure Calendar, and I wanted to do something I haven't done before. That's what brought me to the idea of a stained glass window. It's something I don't know much about. I've never tried to design one. Let's give it a shot.

Because of that crying eye in there, I was thinking about how anguish or crying is depicted in religious art. It often represents the agony of saints. “The Agony of St. So-and-So.” I looked at a few pictures of that. From my Google search, it seemed that art from that era was from before we invented expressing human emotions visually. I wanted to do something more emotional than that, so that's why my piece looks much more modern. It's a person showing a real human feeling.

I was searching for pictures of people crying, looking for the right kind of angle or the right kind of expression on their face, and I saw one of a woman whose makeup was running. And I thought it was a really cool image that I'd like to include so that's where I went with it.

This is such a cool departure for you.

I don't know anything about stained glass. And so I hope the person who receives this as their prompt doesn't either, because if they do, they would probably see little details and say, "That's not how stained glass works."

What is this piece made of?

Well, I'll tell you, it's not stained glass. I hemmed and hawed for a long time about what medium to use, because I had been drawing mostly digitally for a good while there. I had just learned to do it and I was excited to learn new tricks. But then, over the last few months, I’ve missed getting my hands dirty and so I’ve gotten back into traditional media.

I figured I could do this stained glass window in chalk pastels, and then charcoal for the black. It might look cool, but it also might look a little sloppy and I want this black to be opaque. I wanted it to be black black black. I couldn't really do that with that material. Doing it all digitally would be an option. But I didn't really want to do that. So, I used my Crayola crayons and colored the drawing. And then all of the black you see is digital. I took a picture of that and then I made a layer of black to do the frame and all the little lines between the panes. I wasn't exactly sure I was getting away with it. I was afraid it might look really elementary school coloring booky. But I texted a picture to my partner, and he said "What is that made out of? It looks like real glass." And that was shocking to me, but I guess the white paper showing through the crayon can kind of read like light coming through glass. In a few of the panes, I also tried to even out the color somewhat and that made it a little less crayony and a little more stained glassy. I don't have a lot of experience mixing traditional and digital media, but I liked it. So I may do more stuff like this in the future.

That's really exciting. Hell yeah!

I always go through this, especially in art classes: I keep discovering that I'm following rules that don't matter or that are bullshit. It's always so nice to realize that I can do whatever the hell I want.

Isn't it interesting to discover the rules that we make for ourselves without even realizing it?

Yep. We don't even know we're doing it until we notice and then make a change.

I seem to remember that you used to have a tradition of putting on mascara before watching a sad movie. Am I remembering that correctly?

You are. I don't know, “tradition” would suggest I did it a lot more than I did. I wish I had made it a tradition. I should. But it was something that happened a couple of times. I just did it for the selfies. I'm not good at makeup. I would just sloppily put on turquoise eyeshadow and mascara, and then watch something that made me cry. I'd cry it all down my face and take pictures. I was probably watching “Call the Midwife.”

That sounds great.

I used to not be able to cry. Growing up a boy, you learn how to not do that. But then as an adult, I realized that's very unhealthy and stupid and I want to have access to my emotional expression. So it was sort of like cross-training. I practiced. I would find things that made me choke up a bit, and pursue things like that more. And now I cry at everything.

Crying feels really good.

It does! It is so refreshing. That's probably why we do it, because it lets go of this tension. It’s so much healthier than just swallowing it and then not knowing why we’re miserable later in life. It feels exactly the same as when it finally starts to rain after all this atmospheric pressure. Oh, and that ties into me describing the tears in that ceramic piece as raindrops. So, it's all connected.

If you were interviewing yourself right now, what question would you ask next?

I might ask if I've traveled and seen a lot of stained glass.

Have you traveled and seen a lot of stained glass?

My partner works in a church that has lots of small and large pieces, and I have visited a few cathedrals in my day. Oh, and also I grew up Catholic. So that's a pretty easy way to encounter stained glass. I like the modern stuff, but generally speaking the older it looks, the more impressed I am. Even if it's not actually old.

One thing that's really cool about this piece is the way I think that stained glass sort of lends itself to this sort of segmentation. I feel like you're really getting into the different planes of this face by constructing it from smaller shapes, and I'm wondering if that's something that you have explored in other works.

You know, I don't do it enough. In this case, I drew the silhouette first, and then from looking at colors and light, I figured out what the big panes would be. Then the last thing I did was divide all those into little panes.

There is a piece that I made a couple of months ago. I had a photo of myself where I was kind of hugging my knee, and I wanted to draw something like that. So I drew all the body parts individually, and then colored them, cut them out and assembled them. I didn't think it was going to look that different. I assumed it would just look like a drawing and it's only if you get really, really, really close that you would notice the difference. But instead there was that little bit of shadow that showed that these are different pieces of paper overlapping each other, so the finished product came out more interesting than I expected.

That's a lesson that I was learning from an art class I recently took. The less of a plan you go in with, the more interesting the result has a chance to become. I'm definitely an overplanner, so it's good for me to practice leaving things to chance and improvisation. This piece was rather planned in the conceptual stage, but the execution was pretty improvisational, and I'm quite happy with it. Had I just done a digital drawing with no physical materials, I think it would be lacking.

Yeah, I agree. I think that the texture just really adds a lot to this piece. It's really, really exciting.

Thank you. It's fun to play.

Do you have any new advice for another artist approaching this project for the first time?

Well, I guess what I alluded to earlier: don't plan. See how little of a plan you can get away with. It's easy to think, "Well, I didn't plan what shade of pink the rose petals would be," but you can do better than that. I put a challenge out to the art world to learn the lesson I'm working on, which is see how little of a plan you can possibly get away with. Even none at all.

Call Number: Y87VA | Y88VA.vaAgo

Cody VanWinkle spent five years illustrating children's books at the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute. In 2017, he was published in And Lester Swam On, written by 21 rambunctious second graders. Someday, he would like to combine his passions for making ice cream and knitting.