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