Sonogram by Grant Gronewold

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. 

Review: Virtual Candle by Grant Gronewold (aka HTMLflowers)

Fort Thunder ended more than a decade ago, can you believe that? For those who don't know about it, Fort Thunder could loosely be described as an art-hive / music and event venue started by Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale, located in an old textile factory in Providence, Rhode Island, which fed off the creative juices and dollars of the legendary(?) school of design. Fort Thunder put on concerts, wrestling matches, noise dance parties, all that, but a huge part of their scene was the visual art and sensibilities of Brinkman and Chippendale (of Lightning Bolt fame), which drenched each event in iridescent neo-fauvism and expressionism. Eventually other artists started living and working there, and a community blossomed that had a lasting impact on contemporary visual design probably, can't say I'm an authority on these things. Let's look at the names: Brinkman, Chippendale, Paper Rad, CF (via Paper Rad), Ben Jones. Go look up more, I can't do all your homework for you.

Add Grant Gronewold (a.k.a. HTML Flowers) to the list by proxy. Though coming along well after that scene was done, Gronewold obviously ingested large doses of those artists as a child and now speaks that language natively, and he uses it to make irridescent visual poetry. His first official collection is called Virtual Candle, and is out and ready for purchase from Spaceface Books

Mr. Gronewold has this way of making art and comics that is both deliberately unpolished and highly refined. Lines, colors, characters, nearly everything is held together by unfinished or deformed yet recognizable shapes, and the rest is carefully placed in the wrong places. These deliberate fuckups and incompletes are actually the most sophisticated aspect of his style, because through them you feel like Gronewold is not only admitting to his imperfections, he's making triumphs of his mistakes.

Both the art and the writing can seem like nonsense, but I assure you it speaks to personal emotional and psychological truths. The combination of deformation and imperfection makes it at once unabashedly sincere, poetic, and moderately to severely ridiculous. The first few sections of the book, for instance, are comics about "The Twins", a pair of unidentifiably fuzzy humanoid creatures who go on crude and childish adventures through nature and society. They piss on trees and in rivers of sorrow, poke the moon with sticks, etc. They say "dude" a whole lot. According to an interview with It's Nice That, The Twins is one of the the artist's favorite parts: "They're avatars for me and my closest friends and adventures we've had or ones we should have had".

The Twins section feels like filler, but it provides a decent introduction to the artists overall outlook on life. These Twins comics are classic stoner nonsense: poop jokes and joyful stupidity. It's great if you're into that kind of thing.

When Grant puts his emotions on the page and combines it with that radiant Fort Thunder energy the effect is powerful and intimate. Grant has cystic fibrosis, and like the more than 30,000 other people in the States with this condition his life came with a rather short expiration date. Imagine a doctor telling you they know when you're probably going to die, telling you and your family to prepare for the worst if treatment doesn't work out. Today, with regular (but often brutal) treatment, CFers often break through several life expectancies, each time being told their clock has a little more time. Speaking specifically about his stick and poke tattoos, Gronewold says that doing them for friends and fans allowed him to "regain some kind of control over my body" while coming close to his third life expectancy. 

With intense emotions and something to actually say, the Fort Thunder / Paper Rad / Whatever aesthetic of color and simplicity and childishness can be devastatingly intimate. The most important thing about Grant Gronewold is that his style and his emotions are completely entwined and you can feel it on the page and on his Tumblr. There is no pretension. What may seem to some as affectation is really just Grant speaking how he learned to speak. 

And yes, I said stick and pokes. Grant apparently let a few brave individuals live out their wildest dreams of letting a Tumblr-famous weirdo repeatedly stab them with a sharp ink-laden object, and included a bunch of pictures of the results in this book. This is as intimate as it gets short of someone getting pregnant. Grant, speaking on his tattoo work, had this to say: "I can’t believe people let me mark them forever. Crazy ding dongs!" He's being modest. His stick and poke drawings have the same intelligent naivete as his comics and traditional drawings. 

I'll leave off with some random images from Grant's Tumblr, because that's how I first found him and also because I can't bear to break the spine of this book to scan  more of the awesome drawings in it. Hopefully you'll enjoy them as much as I have over the years. I also highly recommend reading that interview with Grant by It's Nice That, so you can get to know the artist more in his own words. 

The Gronewold himself