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. 

Some words with Zsófia Döme, Hungarian Treehugger and Illustrator

Zsófia Döme (http://zsofiadome.tumblr.com/) likes to get lost in the woods and draw the things she didn’t see, those things that imagination can’t help but see while surrounded by wild greenery teeming with hidden creatures. She is a Hungarian illustrator and a current student at the Hungarian School of Fine Arts. Rooted in a kind of grotesque and spooky fantasy aesthetic, her work exudes moodiness and mythology. She works in everything from playful creature studies to scenes lush with atmospheric tension, while incorporating just enough surreal quietness to make each image more than your average fantasy art.

I sent her a message on DeviantArt, because I had to find out more about her and what was behind the pictures. I began with the thing that stood out most for me: Zsófia’s use of surrealism, fantasy, and good old fashioned creepiness to make a visual statement about nature and what we call civilization. For the sake of completeness I’ll let you know that Zsófia’s English is in it’s “intermediate” phase, and I have taken the liberty of editing her answers to a point for clarity’s sake, hopefully not so much that you forget she’s Hungarian.

MR: The way you portray nature is kind of magical and foreboding at the same time. Where did your love of nature come from, and what goes through your mind drawing such lush scenes?

ZD: I had grown up in a small town in Hungary, and the love for nature comes from there. In my childhood we played in the tall grass, discovered the forest and sometimes we got lost, but we didn’t mind.

Nature can have a thousand faces. It could be the Garden of Eden where you can retire and meditate, but it could also be a place full of darkness, decadence and sickening things. For me it’s a mystical hideout where you can find interesting creatures in every corner. [….] It’s a kind of shelter for me. In my artworks every component has its own meaning on a deep, personal level.

Zsófia, who describes herself as a “tree-hugger,” on her DeviantArt, has a special connection with that natural world she liked getting lost in as a child. Whether she depicts nature as massive or miniscule, it’s always the uncontrollable and invasive, and at times violent and grotesque aspects of nature that shine through and give her work a little edge.

Most recently, Zsófia created a series of studies that pair drawings of (mostly) real life flowers and roots with those same plants sprouting eyes and little mouths and horrible little mutant limbs. It’s a study in giving a face to the plant world, a world that most forget is filled with living, breathing things— with life that grows, eats, moves and feels in its own way, but generally doesn’t have the facial structures necessary to show us how pissed off or ecstatic it might be about it all.

Birds I & II, Silent Lake, and No Way Out all seem to be done in the same style, and I was wondering if they were connected somehow, or were part of the same story, and if so what the project was. Am I just imagining it?

To be honest, the other half of my Birds series is still waiting in a forgotten corner of my laptop to be colored (Birds III, IV). Months have been passed after I finished the line art, but the coloring progress is stopped. I also wanted to upload some new works, but school deadlines kept me away. Maybe I can share some stuff later. The illustrations you mentioned all are separate pieces, except ‘Birds’. The style is the same of course, but I can’t explain why. I just felt this style fit to this kind of dark world, and I also found that is close to myself, as well. One of my friends said some time ago, once she discovers an interesting subject she draws until she exhausts the whole theme. In my case it’s almost similar, but it’s not about interests, rather about style. It’s very meditative and calming, when you are making dotwork or just draw leaves for hours.

These illustrations are begging to tell a story, but as of yet Döme is letting them stand alone. Her experiments in storytelling thus far are few, but promising. My favorites are her illustrations for a violently satisfying story called Anyagyilkossag (“Matricide”), by little known Hungarian author, psychiatrist, and certified murderous psychopath Géza Csáth. Döme was inspired after watching the movie The Whitman Boys, based on the Csáth story, to illustrate scenes from the story. After learning the story of Mr. Csáth life I had trouble reconciling the terms “tree-hugger” and “psychopath,” but Döme does a great job in her illustrations of capturing the story’s pathologically sardonic tone. (If you want, give the story a read here.)

I saw on your tumblr that you were working on a series of illustrations for a story by Geza Csath — “Anyagyilkossag” after you saw The Whitman Boys, which was based on the story. Is that project finished?

My illustrations represent a mood rather than events, as you can see in my works about Csáth’s stories. Yes, this project is finished and I still have others in progress. I really like Csáth’s works and I also regret that he didn’t write more stories during his short lifetime. As for the illustrations it was a short-lived project which was made for my own pleasure. It wasn’t published, but it would be a real honor to illustrate a whole volume.

Do you have any other illustrative projects in the works. What have you been working on lately?

My current project is called “My Wardrobe”. Nowadays I live in an old student hostel and the idea came there. The base of the project is a wardrobe which is used by my roommate and me. Imagine an ugly, old, dusty wardrobe with unclosable doors and a big mess inside. [It’s an interactive illustration where] you can click on the doors and have a look inside, but the small places hide more than only clothes, boxes, or shoes. There are tiny surreal words in every part of it. 

These days I’m more and more interested about connection of body and soul. With this current project I speculate about where is the soul within our body or how it can manifest through our environment and our personal things?

So you’re still a student?

I’ll get my degree next year, and I hope everything will go smoothly.

Could you name some artists or writers who’ve inspired you?

In my teenage years I was obsessed with anime and manga, cartoons and my early dream was to be a comic artist or an animator. After the high school I got into a fine arts university which was a huge twist for me. I got new perspectives about how to approach art, how to enjoy even the abstract pieces, which are the least understandable for the most people. [In school] my taste turned another way. I don’t mean that I completely gave up my early interests, just got new perspectives, new doors opened before me. In the future I’d like to find a balance between popular art and fine art. To be honest, it’s a bit hard, and I’m still growing and developing.

I’m inspired in many ways, with almost everything melancholic, lyric images mixed with a little bit of grotesque horror. As for art, I love pre-raphaelites, art nouveau, and surrealist works. Just a few names from my favorite artists: Max Ernst, George Grosz, Harry Clarke, John Bauer, Alan Lee, Arthur Rackham, Eyvind Earle, Theodor Kittelsen, Csaba Rékassy.

I often listen neofolk while drawing, sometimes a little bit of darkwave, but mainly folk metal, death metal, movie and game soundtracks. Medieval and Nordic sounds are the closest to my heart.

Here’s hoping to hear more from the Hungarian tree-hugger, the talented young Zsófia Döme. If you’d like a print, I encourage all money-havers to click to her Society6 page and buy one.

Nameless, or, "Grant Morrison Just Wants to Watch Them Bleed"

What we all love about Grant Morrison is how resolved he is to make the traditionaly trashy or silly into something profound. Nothing new. Everyone wants to, and only a few are successful, and only one does it, effectively, with the calculated use of gigantic weaponized sperm cells.

Thus far, Nameless isn't that. From the three issues I've read there's not yet any attempt at philosophizing the esoteric references to current events, modernist architects, and ancient religions he slaps on every other page. Yeah, it's all there, that encyclopedic emesis Morrison loves to spew at you, and it's not unenticing to look into every bit of triviality, but it's so obviously not what's on display here. It's a vehicle for what ultimately feels like a gory sci-fi body-horror B-movie with culture. In short, it's pretty fun.

I honestly don't think Grant knows anymore.

The world, unlike a lot of Grant Morrison's settings, isn't a future filled with the noise of abruptly changing information structures, and no one is falling into their own mindhole and discovering glowing discs of knowledge that forever alters their world view. It may as well be set in the present, albeit a present where, for reasons not yet explained, lizard people and naga stalk the land and suburbs, making families happily massacre themselves, and hunting after our square jawed and stubbled protagonist, named Nameless (because names have power, he says) after he nabs a mystical key on behalf of his client.

Brave and handsome

Nameless is an occultist for hire. He's like a John Constantine in need of a long relaxing bath and some benzedrine. When we meet him he's recalling December, a "cunt of a month", when things started to get markedly Lovecraftian. None of Constantine's reflectiveness here; No philosophy. He needs money so he's doing this thing and now there's fish people trying to rip out his throat, then there's a fucking lady in a veil with a bulbous fleshy parasite on her face, and he knows her pretty well and he's so over her shit already, and it feels like just another fucked up day in his happy life. Nameless, through all three issues, retains this air of haggard wisdom, always knowing at least a bit about what's happeing, though not enough to save his or his company's asses.

The people who want the key, and who eventually get the key after some intense effort on the part of Nameless, turns out to be a secretive and privately funded corporation run by a billionaire named Darius. Darius, appearing only mildly Asian and generally smiling, wants to save the planet from a hulking fuck of a space boulder named Xibalba, after the Mayan underworld. He's at once an altruist and a capitalist and someone who uses his money to advance human knowledge. A mildly asian Elon Musk, in other words. Darius even floats around remotely from a base located on the dark side of the moon using a video-conferencing hele-drone, as we all know Elon Musk would love to do.

Xibalba's not just an asteroid. This thing is marked on a long flat side with a rune the size of a mountain. It's apparent that the asteroid does not simply intend to smash into the Earth like any amateur space rock: It has a payload, and Darius employs Nameless to find out exactly what the world is getting into, and how to stop it.

That's issue one. It's not much, to be honest. Issue two and three, however, is when the series begins hitting it's stride. Nameless and a team composed by Darius go to space to meet Xibalba headon and deploy drones with sensory equipment to explore what turns out to be an asteroid full of alien structures, "brutalist" in design and obviously not meant for children. Shit goes down, eyeballs with giant talons attack, and Grant Morrison smashes and reassembles the narrative in that special, and in this instance creepy, Grant Morrison way.

In a nutshell

Sometimes the art, done by Chris Burnham, feels like Quitely. Not to knock the artist, he's fantastic. There are some clever panel sequences, and the panels depicting the journey of the drones through that brutal alien architecture are done with a real sense for how massive and lonely celestial objects really must be. Xibalba seems not to be of exclusively extraterrestrial or supernatural origin, but a mixture of both, in a way that implies that maybe the two were one and the same all along (shades of The Invisibles here). Chris Burnham gets both across, with covers and splash panels alluding to creatures that reside in lonely H.R. Geiger space fortresses, but look like amorphous demons made of shapeshifting muscle tissue, and that do things to human bodies straight out of medieval Hell.

Whether the book will reach for some big-deal psychological or philosophical conclusion has yet to be seen, but I have a feeling Grant Morrison just wants to rip people apart and destroy civilization for a bit. Looks like Morrison's taking all his occult and science fiction training, and using it to make an irreverent, gory, AND clever monster movie. In Nameless #3 we get a glimpse of Xibalba floating on the horizon, it's ominous rune staring down at us all, and we just know it's getting ready to make life interesting in painful and horrifying ways. Honestly, can't wait.