Make Me Alive!

On Lynda Barry, cultivating “aliveness” in art and life, and abandoning technical perfection

This summer, a little boy asked me to help him draw a duck. He was taking a writing and art class themed around birds, and he and his fellow students were seated in a circle, sitting criss-cross applesauce on the carpet. As my boss drew each new step on her big whiteboard, the boy turned to me, trying to follow along, his eyes frantic. “Can you help me?” he asked. I stared at my boss, my own eyes wide. I couldn’t draw. I hadn’t picked up my paint in a year, and my art expertise stopped with my fourth grade animé-inspired self-portraits. “I can’t do it,” he was whining. He was struggling to copy the tail feathers, and, as I quickly learned, he wanted me to take his pen and draw them for him. The duck he desired was a static, dead thing. I talked him into doing it himself, encouraging him to find his own feathers. And he did. His finished duck was far from a perfect reproduction of the whiteboard – the proportions were all off, and the neck didn’t fully attach to the body, but its feathers seemed to flutter with the boy’s anxious squiggles.  I could see the duck in him and him in the duck. I could also see myself looking back at it. It seemed more alive. 

As a recovering perfectionist who is currently trying and failing to learn to paint, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of “aliveness” in art. I first encountered the term through comic artist Lynda Barry, who uses it throughout her work to capture what we might refer to as relational art – art that makes us aware of our entanglement (or relationship with) the world around us. Near the opening of Making Comics, just as lightly captioned images give way to paragraph-covered sticky notes, she writes: