A while ago I reviewed Virtual Candle, a collection of short comics, drawings, and photographs by Grant Gronewold, better known to the internet as HTMLFlowers. His most recent effort is titled Sonogram. Subtitled “hospital diaries 2017,” the book offers drawings, notes, and documentation from his frequent stays in the hospital for cystic fibrosis treatment.
Sonogram is filled with worries and plastered with documentation from Gronewold’s treatment. Everything from overdue medical bills to medicine lists to pamphlets on cystic fibrosis -- They are photocopied in, then infused with Grant’s meditative line drawings. These drawings range from bizarre to mystical but always retain that silence inherent in the clear lines and unshaded forms. This style is a big departure from the artist’s usual psychedelic-stoner color pencils. You wouldn’t expect Ronald McDonald to make an appearance, but yeah he’s there, either as a reference to the children’s healthcare charity run by the clown's eponymous fast food company, or as proof that Grant’s still got a sense of humor (maybe both).
This zine is almost a work of ritual significance. It is art under pressure, art under the assumption that the artist is, at any given moment, a couple months or less away from death. During those long nights in the hospital he draws his heart out not just for the sake of memorializing his experience, but to maintain his selfhood. In his own words:
“When I die I wanna still be the person I always was, not perverted by my bitterness, distorted by the unhappy chore of living. For all the emo shit I tweet I still love life & im going to fight for that small piece of life that I love, no matter what a doctor says.”
Grant goes on to talk about feeling a kind of all encompassing fascination in life’s most mundane moments, like being ecstatic about “watching the afternoon light bargain for space with the shadows” even while taking a shit or laying a shallow bath. He goes into a few other moments like that in the cellphone notes that have been photocopied into the book, simple things like a bus driver stopping to let a crow walk past or hearing a story about the life of his favorite nurse.
Hospitals can be miserable places -- but to those who rely on them to stay alive it’s necessarily more than that. The paperwork, the neighboring patients, the doctors and nurses with their small kindnesses and transgressive ambivalence -- all that swirling machinery we know as “hospital” is where your life (and the love, loss, joys, and memories that make up your life) is sustained. If there is no permanent “getting better” for you, then hospital is, for better or worse, part of where your soul resides.
So those recognizable icons that haunt Grant’s hospital, from the Nike swooshes to Ronald McDonald, to the spiders and moons and giant scalpels, are manifestation of his internal world intruding on the world around him. Like a magician, Gronewold conjures them out of himself and sets them to the task of giving shape to the unspoken and unseen emotions that live in his world. It’s only our world, at the bottom of it, but specifically, to him, it’s a world where our bureaucracies endanger his physical and mental health, where a prescription slip is a ticket to not feeling terrible for a while.
Sonogram is low on narrative. It’s best taken as a series of impressions. I don’t think it was meant to tell a story, and maybe even wasn’t made to be published. The drawings and words in Sonogram are documentation of a coping process that leaves strange and beautiful byproducts. The mysticism and silence of these drawings is that same mysticism and silence that strikes all of us when we’re faced with our own mortality. They are sadness and bodily anxiety, but also immense internal strength.
Sonogram is available via Grant's Big Cartel page.
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