Surfacing

Cody VanWinkle

Interview by L. Valena

Can you please tell me, first of all, what you responded to?

Yes, I can. I received a triptych of photo collages. It was three pieces that each had three or four Polaroids in them— all different pictures of a man, presumably the artist. He had a cage on his head that appeared to be made of rose stems and some blooms, and in all of these pictures he looked like he was not enjoying himself. He was despondent or outraged, and each of these pieces was on a bed of rose petals that I later realized were probably just flattened, but to my eye read as wet. And they were accompanied by words like “trapped” or “no way out”, things like that. It was pretty clear that this is someone who is trapped in a cage and not enjoying it.

What happened next?

I received this prompt the day after I got the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. I don’t know where the artist was coming from when he created this thing, but my reaction was feeling very free. I suddenly had some hope for the future, and I felt like soon I will not have to wear a mask all the time and have the freedom to live without so much dread or paranoia anymore. I won’t have to feel so vulnerable. To see his cagedness made me really focus on my freedom.

That was the theme I wanted to go with. I had a few ideas. I didn’t want to do anything too obvious, like a bird taking flight. I wanted to think more about how this affected me instead of making a greeting card. I thought about it and realized that this moment in my life was about finally breathing freely, about finally taking a breath and not having to be afraid of what I am inhaling. I was looking for images of people who were coming up from drowning or taking off a mask and breathing, but it was really hard for me to find the kind of imagery I was looking for from internet searches.

I took some selfies to try to emulate it and discovered it was really hard for me to depict this sensation without making it look like an O face. Because it looked like some tremendous relief with an open mouth, but it wasn’t necessarily inhaling, it looked like it might have been exhaling, like a scream or an exclamation of some kind. And I thought That’s not what I’m aiming for here. I also didn’t want to use myself as the model at first, but I couldn’t find a better one, and I just decided to use what I had. So I drew a picture of a person (who happens to resemble me perhaps) who is experiencing this. I did initially consider having the figure pulling off a mask, or have a mask hanging around their neck or whatever, but that felt too dated for me. I don’t want this to be a picture of what it was like in May 2021, I want this to be a more universal life experience. So I kept it less COVID-specific and more about a relatable human experience.

I did include some rose petals. The thing that made it click for me, to make it look more like an inhale, was setting it in water. I thought if it looked like the figure is coming out of the water, then it would make more sense to be inhaling. So I did that. I found some images of people in the water and figured out what that looks like. Then I remembered those rose petals, and not only did I want to integrate that image from the initial thing, but I remembered that they looked wet. I thought it can feel akin to the source material if I have some rose petals floating on the surface of the water or being wet and stuck to the person in the picture. So that’s what I went with. They aren’t red, they are purple, but to me, they are still roses.

Yeah, they look like roses. When the figure is opening his mouth, there’s space and some sort of celestial body in it or something. What is going on here? Can you speak more about this?

That is a supernova, which is an idea I got from my old pal Melynda a long time ago. She drew a series of pictures of birds, and they all had different visible energy sources. It was a sort of semi-biological cross-section illustration, and you could see that for one of these birds, the power source was a tiny supernova. When I was drawing this picture, I wanted to give it a detail that shows it is not just a corpse floating in the water with its mouth open. I wanted to give a sense of urgency, a sense of desperation, a sense of something powerful and immediate happening. It needed to look alive and active, so that was what crossed my mind to do that.

I thought if I could show something in the mouth that shows that there is some power within this being, then that will help sell the message or sell the mood. So I tried it out, and I thought it worked out pretty well. To prepare for this interview, I was trying to think about what I would say about that part. I thought, “I know they’re gonna say ‘What’s up with that part?’ and I’m gonna have to have something other than ‘Idk it’s cool’.” That’s what I’ve got.

I think it’s really cool, because the way you drew the supernova, it certainly seems like it is rapidly expanding, and it is about to come out of this person’s mouth. Is the viewer about to be engulfed in a supernova by way of this person’s mouth?

I guess my assumption was the viewer isn’t actually there, so you are in no danger. I think you’re right that something is going to emerge; this is not something that is only enclosed in this person’s body. I think now that they can breathe, and they’ve reached this moment of release, there’s some sort of eruption happening and we are seeing the moment just before.

Really cool. I also really love the idea that you’d open your mouth and there’s outer space inside your body. I don’t know -- that definitely took me on a little ride when I was thinking about it.

We think of ourselves (or at least, many of us do) as really small in the universe. We are just these funny little mammals on this funny little planet in this universe that’s always expanding, and it’s been too big for us to comprehend for millennia and it’s still getting bigger. So it is kind of a trip to think that even little old me, which is something like a guinea pig on the forest floor, could have a gateway to the cosmos inside.

Yeah.

I’ve always been fascinated by that idea of something so vast being contained inside something so small. That the relationship between ourselves and the universe can be interpreted in a billion different ways, and some of them are impossible but that doesn’t stop us.

What is your relationship with water?

Well, in this image, one might assume that I’m afraid of water, or that I find it confining or claustrophobic, but I really don’t. I love water. I grew up in Phoenix, where if you don’t have access to a swimming pool you die. So I grew up spending every day from Easter through Halloween swimming. I’m not afraid of oceans and lakes and rivers and pools. I really enjoy being in the water. In this piece, I was trying to think of any situation where breathing becomes urgent, so that’s what’s happening in the image. I find water to be soothing. I’m one of those people who tries to float and relax and look at the sky.

I wanted to do a digital drawing because I feel like there hasn’t already been too much of that these days [in Bait/Switch]. I thought, just for the sake of variety, I’ll do something different from whatever we seem to have a lot of. That was to my benefit, because I can draw digitally much faster than I can draw on paper. I was able to pull this piece together in a few days, whereas if I was trying to do it on paper with pastels or something, I would probably still be working on it. It also gave me the opportunity to play with effects. There’s this ripply water effect that I think that works pretty well. I think it helps sell the idea that this is water and not just a person dreaming with echo lines. As a cartoonist, I have to think about these things.

That’s awesome. Okay, what haven’t we talked about that you want to talk about?

I didn’t want to give you something untitled. I have some kind of glitch about untitled pieces. I don’t mind if someone else does it, but part of the birthing process for me is naming the baby. I struggled with that because I didn’t want it to be anything too ham-handed or obvious. I thought that what this is really about is reaching a surface, and the freedom you get when you break through or arrive. Surfacing is the title of a Sarah McLachlan album, so I was hesitant to use it, but that’s what I settled on and I feel pretty good about it. And I think it’s pretty.

It’s very pretty.

I don’t always think that the things I create are pretty, and I did have some discomfort… not discomfort… some doubts about the color scheme I chose, but I think it’s pretty!

Do you have any new advice for other artists?

Whenever I give you advice about a piece I’ve made, it’s always something related to the experience of making that piece. When we talked about the thing with the sock puppet and the children, my advice was “Hey, remember you might have a bag of sock puppets in your closet.” In this case, I have this piece that I drew, but I also remembered this little Easter egg in the back of my brain about the supernova. I suppose my advice is to mull it over long enough to realize that you might have some old ideas you can reincorporate. If you’re not sure where to go, you can think about where you’ve been and perhaps it will jog something. In this case, it did.

Call Number: Y48VA | Y55VA.vaSu

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.