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: 

“There is a certain kind of drawing that I adore. It shows up in the very first drawings we do as a class. It's here in this drawing. The line is unpracticed, even a little timid. It's the line of someone who quit drawing a while ago. It's impossible to fake and difficult to copy. My copy on the right is missing something. To me it’s just a little less alive than the original.” 

It’s a subtle difference, to be sure – one that I wouldn’t have known how to pinpoint on my own – but it’s there. Do you see it? Do you get it yet? 

For Barry, most children have a natural sense of aliveness. She notes that:

We can see faces in stains, and whole beings too. This was especially so when we were kids – not because we were better at it, but because we believed in an unexpected aliveness in things. It was there because we saw it and we saw it because of the way we looked at things. We looked at them like they could look back. 

These acts of “believing in an unexpected aliveness in things” and looking at things “like they could look back” are central to the artistic philosophy Barry articulates throughout her work, and it feels so necessary right now. At a time when a) arguments for moral purity and degeneracy in art are more visible, b) AI bros keep infiltrating creative spaces, and c) so much current discourse-oriented criticism feels incredibly detached and analytical, I feel a dire need for engagement with messy, emphatically alive art that gets under your skin, changes you, and reminds you of your entanglement with the world. 

Though I abandoned visual art as a child, I grew up singing classical music competitively. Now, whenever I watch live performances, I hear every mistake: dropped soft palates, airy notes, wavering vowels, and extra breaths all immediately jump out at me. It’s even worse when I’m the one performing – the only way I get out of my own vicious head is by seeing each solo performance as a duet, an ensemble number between me, the pianist, and even the audience, if I can bear it. Over time, I’ve come to accept that when singers perform with zero emotion on their faces, their words tend to blend together; even if their sound is technically perfect, it can be impossible to parse each phrase. It’s when they visually connect to the words they’re singing – or the audience they’re singing to – that we tend to feel or really absorb each phrase for the first time, regardless of the occasional technical error. This is how aliveness enters a song. Dance is the same. These forms just don’t move if they don’t feel alive.

The back cover of Making Comics features one of Barry’s most iconic images, which depicts an encounter with a piece of art that seems to come to life. In the first panel, the adult’s confession – that she is “not sure how to look at art” – implies a set of internalized rules, a “right way” to observe and interpret an object as a subject. She has been taught to expect a straightforward one-way interaction. The child’s suggestion – “how about lift me up so I can see better?” – prompts the woman to hold them close so they can both look and experience the art together. The painting seems to shift between panels, but it is only until parent and child combine their bodies and gaze that they can recognize that the painting is mirroring them, looking back. Here, no one is alone. This intra-action allows for a collective experience resulting in the mutual constitution of each body, revealing the entangled relations between each one. The comic as a whole seems to suggest that our sense of aliveness is hindered when our gaze is driven primarily by intellectual categorization or academic conventions. Indeed, it is a quality existing in relation to – or perhaps in opposition to – forms of classical artistic technique, such as those demanded by realism. Aliveness is not likeness. It does not demand perfect representation. It demands connection and an affirmation of shared existence. 

One of my favourite moments in the book is not about images at all. Here, Barry identifies “the same sort of aliveness” in a four-year-old’s handwriting. She shares that she “noticed spacing happening in unexpected ways,” where “[t]he letters are in real relation to both each other and to the page.” With the randomized capitalization and spacing, the names are not technically perfect, but the child seems to grant each letter movement and agency. These letters are not static, dead things we use purely to communicate objective meaning; instead, they seem to bounce around the page, communicating with each other. I could not replicate this image. I don’t know if it’s something you can teach someone to replicate; it’s something that comes from holding your own pen, seeing the fundamental relations between things, and letting yourself play.

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Thank you so much for reading this collection of thoughts. I read Making Comics for a seminar and did not expect it to hit me the way it did, but it certainly got under my skin and changed me. Despite my best efforts, I could not edit this to be any less dramatic, playful, or sincere – I think those are the most fitting ways to approach Barry, anyway.

P.S. I would love to know what pieces of art make you feel alive or strike you as capturing a sense of aliveness.