IFOA 2010: Lynda Barry

Reading/interview: Lynda Barry

International Festival of Authors (Studio Theatre). Saturday, October 30, 2010.

Dag.

I saw Lynda Barry a couple years ago at IFOA, and it rocked so hard — calling it the "DIY gig of the year" captured my feelings well — that there was no way that I was going to skip a chance for a repeat visit. Barry, a mile-a-minute speaker, is an artist, novelist and teacher, but probably remains best-known for her long-running alt-comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek. She was here discussing and reading from her new book Picture This — a collage-based work that serves as a practical education on how to draw while acting as a meditation on why creating art is so fundamental, and something we all do as kids, but something that we almost all tend to stop doing.

The book is a companion to, and extension of, her previous work in What It Is, which asked the same questions about writing stories. "The things we call the arts have an absolute biological function," is her constant assertion — creating or reliving artistic experiences makes you feel better. All of this is tightly wound up with Barry's central preoccupation with "image" and the "image-world". In her conception, in everything we call the arts, the image is fundamental.

To get closer to the heart of this perhaps it's worth quoting at length something that Barry, who is fascinated with the brain, returns to time and again in her talks, describing the value of the image-world with this metaphor about phantom limb pain.

A scientist named V.S. Ramachandran has done some astonishing work with neurological problems he's actually solved with a mirror. He had a patient who had lost his hand, but the patient's experience was that the hand was still there, and not only there, but it was in a really tight fist — you know, painfully tight. This guy was miserable; he couldn't get away from that feeling. Ramachandran made a box, tilted the mirror in there, and then he put a hole in the other side. He asked the guy to stick his hand in the hole, the fist that was still there, and look down. So what the guy saw was his fist and then the reflection of it, which was like his other hand. Then, he told him to open his hand, and what he saw was the reflection of his other hand opening, and it solved the problem.

That's a perfect example of what images do. My feeling is that in the course of life there are certain things for us that are like phantom limb pain, like a horrible, horrible parent who dies before you ever work things out with them. And I think the only way that those things can be worked out is through something that's akin to that mirror box — except it may be a fairy tale, or it may be a painting, or it may be a song you can remember from when you were 14 and you had to play the same song over and over and over again, like 400 times in a row. Yeah, what are you doing there? You're opening your fist. You're looking at a reflection.

The image-world is "an immune system and a transit system". Barry proceeds from the notion that everyone is interested in images and interested in making images — or just wordlessly interested in making images but blocked somehow. Once you understand what the image is, the form that it can take is up to the artist — there's no difference between making a piece of music, or writing a story, or creating a dance, or having a very good conversation.

With regard to drawing, this is what she is offering in her book — which she read from in a lively start to the session, asking questions both in the guise of the near-sighted monkey (her stand-in in the book) as well as beloved long-running characters Arna and Marlys.

Just as with What It Is, the book starts from looking back to childhood — "there was a time when drawing came easily" — before something happened to make us stop. So she proposes simple exercises like scribbling or doodling — physically creating at even the simplest level and finding the links between the mental activity of creation and the physical acts that correspond. The physical act of drawing provides the rhythm and creates the inspiration. Beyond drawing, Barry's art-making is supremely approachable to all: a bottle of school glue, toothpicks and paper scraps are all that's needed to get started.

That reading, plus an interview with Peter Birkemoe (owner of local comic-book heaven The Beguiling), were the formal pillars of the event, but the real magic came from the tangents and notions that Barry veered off into. An unpretentious and supremely engaging personality, Barry has the gift of imbuing her ideas with a spark of enchantment, a sense that even in a world full of cruddiness — especially in a world full of cruddiness — we all have the gifts to share in the fundamentally human and biologically indispensable worlds of images and stories.

Along the way, she talked about the beautiful art that could bring a person to tears — and that the artist that happened to bring her to tears was Jeff Keane, of the Family Circus. And about the mysteries of doodling and how even the simplest drawing connects us to the part of the brain that less aware of time — essential for getting through dull classes or meetings.

Birkemoe left more room than usual for questions for the audience, leading to a wide-ranging series of digressions, including hula ("hula saved my life," Barry said, completely seriously), the joy of ruining paper and what it was like to write a play. She even ended with her favourite party trick, which I shan't ruin for you if you haven't seen it, but was guaranteed by Barry to take a year off the life of everyone in the crowd.

In short, a totally delightful time, and I left feeling unusually buoyant. I headed out from the York Quay centre and walked down to the water's edge, the evening sky in its last moments of a brilliant orangeness turning to a stirring fuchsia melting into darkness. As I watched the surface of the water reflecting the sky back in jangling shards, I thought about how much I feel disengaged from the image-world, and I thought about that clenched fist, and I wondered to myself, given all the frustration and self-imposed limitations that I feel about [deleted], what is that mirror that would allow me to unclench?

And I walked past the wave deck, and I walked past the park with the muskoka chairs and I walked past the Music Garden. I watched the water under a now-dark sky and listened to the streetcars behind me. And I felt pretty happy about things, regardless.