A Series of Clowns

On writing the “now” and drawing moody, unapologetic clowns

"So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing." T.S. Eliot

Happy Sunday! 

How did I not know that T.S. Eliot wore green face paint?

Last week, I sat down one night to decide if I could really iron out the clowns or needed to push them under the rug for another week. Before I dove in, I went to grab a snippet from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," scraps of which I have been tucking into the opening letter, little bits of dandelion dust. Clowns hovering in the periphery, I did an idle search.... and there it was: Eliot was known to wear green face paint.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

—T.S. Eliot

In the years of doing the podcast, I was always very temporal. I talked about things as they happened. When things got pushed aside, or when I held things because they seemed too vulnerable, I found it hard to go back later. I had moved on. Time had moved on. I might have changed my mind. The situation might have evolved. There might have been a pivot. I might have made discoveries, answered my own questions, solved a mystery, or listened back and just felt...naive.

Written or told from within or on the cusp of a moment, stories not shared mellow and fade.

A lot of writers have overflowing draft files. A lot of writers have deep memory.

I tend to write what probably should be scrawled on a sticky note pad before I forget it happened or that I care.

In the moment, we give in to the details, the contours, the unfolding. We trace the shimmering line, follow its wobbly progress. There are no absolutes. Whatever is right then is true.

I write here the same way…a dialogue on the wind rather than words etched in stone. This is a letter. This is often a record of single moments strung together, sticky notes of today and yesterday lined up, arranged and rearranged. Hear the rustle?

This is a message in the bottle.

I mention this because I have wanted to talk about the "clowns" project for many months.

It’s maybe one of the oddest portrait series I’ve ever done. It’s certainly the one that got the least comments. When juxtaposed with the series from the year before when I did portrait and bird companion mashups, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

A lot of people are really not fans of clowns.

I'm not a fan of clowns either.

But apparently, I've got a soft spot the size of the ocean for a particular type of clown, or at least for a particular type of moodiness. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my comic me not needing to really look like me. I can be anything in a comic. That's the motto.

This is a post about hiding and not hiding, about what we present and how we interpret, about looking beyond, about masking, about passing, and about making our own normal, quietly living beyond labels and stares and pointed fingers.

Should we correspond?

Amy

(There are a number of images. If this is cut off in email, you can click through to read in the app or a browser.)

A Precursor

This portrait in my journal last year had a very strong comic book vibe. It made me think about doing a face paint series

Portrait in illustrated journal for Comic Book Day (week 18). A. Cowen 2023

I love that one. But it isn’t a clown.

A Sad Clown

Last year, National Clown Week and Harry Potter’s birthday were both mixed in with prompts for Week 31 of Illustrate Your Week (my weekly illustrated journal project). I try to make prompts open-ended enough to give everyone a way in, which often means there are prompts I won’t necessarily use in my own pages.

Harry Potter is my go-to when life is overwhelming. Given the choice of “wizard or clown wisdom,” I expected to draw something wizardly, but somehow, I got sidetracked. I took an off-ramp and drove away from platform 9 3/4 and….to the circus? I fell off a clown deep end, something like diving from the high platform into a tiny bucket below. (That’s a clown thing, right?)

What happened?

Why clowns?

I’m not a circus person. I’m not a gags person. I don’t like slapstick. I don’t do costumes or Halloween. I don’t do makeup. I am unapologetically what you see is what you get.

What caught me off-guard was one and then two and then three photos of people with diamonds on their faces, diamonds around the eyes. No curly red wigs or giant red noses.

These were ordinary people, not clowns.

Something in the portraits that week stopped me in my tracks. There was something moody. Something innately sad. Something somber. There was a malaise, an attitude in the unwavering stares. There was something really quiet in those images, something at odds with the bold face paint.

Something about these portraits was melancholy, dystopian, end-of-the-world.

I thought about zombies. I thought about characters in The Walking Dead (which has been on my mind to rewatch, at least the early seasons, ever since I drew the first of those portraits) and The Last of Us (which I will totally watch again). I thought of post-apocalyptic books like Bird Box, Dog Stars, The Road, and Station Eleven.

Something about these portraits was incredibly matter-of-fact.

What I found most surprising was that these portraits seemed totally everyday to me. They challenged me to just accept the face paint as part of who they are.

I kept looking at the first one I drew and trying to figure out what she should “say” on the page. I kept getting tripped up because her whole attitude was simply, “Yeah, right. What’s the big deal? This is normal. This is my normal. This is what the world is like to me.” 

It was a surface and a layer of protection. It was a way of hiding and simultaneously projecting.

The Joker

After drawing the first one, I poked around for similar muses. I saw some traditional clowns, and those didn’t speak to me at all. But I found two more with the same blue diamonds around the eyes, the same red eyebrows, red lips, and red nose.

The same stare.

If you’ve already jumped ahead because you would have known the face paint immediately, you are leaps and bounds from where I was. I didn’t know the movie context for the face paint I was seeing. I just knew that I was captivated by the challenge to “ordinary” and “normal” and “acceptable” and “mainstream” that these faces issued.

I did a lot of digging into clown history, clown makeup, and sad clowns (like Emmett Kelly) before stumbling over the comic book connection.

The face paint, of course, is from The Joker. The diamonds are specifically the Joaquin Phoenix version of The Joker (2019).

Inktoportraits

In October, I do Inktoportraits, my own set of portrait prompts during the larger Inktober month. Still compelled by the clowns that had worked their way into my journal, I decided to do a series of “everyday clowns” using the Inktoportraits prompts. I was interested in the subtle clowns, the sad clowns, the melancholy clowns.

A few portraits from the 31-day “Everyday Clowns” Inktoportraits series, October 2023. © A. Cowen

The series didn't turn out quite the way I planned. I didn’t have quite the fodder pool I wanted. We were at the beginning of what turned into a challenging span of months at home. That isn't an excuse so much as a context. I wish I had had 31 perfect muse photos to draw that matched the series in my head. I ended up resorting to many “regular face paint” drawings (to fit the prompts).

I completed the series, but when I look at the images now, there are some definite misses (including one actual curly-haired clown).

I know that I didn't find and sustain the type of gaze that had so compelled me with the early Joker look-alikes, but the guiding thread was there beneath every drawing.

These are not “creepy” clowns. These are people looking out from behind a mask, an everyday mask. They pull at my heart.

All in all, it was a good series.

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Illustrated Journal Week 9 for 2024

This is a glimpse of part of my pages for Week 9 for Illustrate Your Week 2024. I draw casually with a few people via Zoom most Sundays. Last week, someone other than me selected the prompt photos, and I laughed to see the face paint show up…perfectly timed for this week.

This one fits.

Illustrated journal page with portrait. ©️ A. Cowen 2024

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The Weekly Bits and Pieces

💭 100 Day Project / Comic Affirmations 8-14

🎯🖋️ Week 10 prompts for your illustrated journal

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Writers to Read

Here are some posts from other writers that I enjoyed in the last week or so:

• The Spy Who Loves Me (

  Nan Tepper
  )

• The Drawing Book goes north (

  Sam Hester
  )

• The Blackbird (

  Candace Rose Rardon
  )

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Made It?

Thank you for reading.

I always invite your comments on the post. What did you like? You are also welcome to share any of the following:

• Do you have a favorite dystopian novel?

• A clown memory?

• An affirmation you need this month.

Thank you to those who continue to read and support this space. It means the world.

Life is slow in the slow lane, but I feel fortunate to have a few people interested in what I am doing. Thank you.

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In looking back to confirm the timeline, I ran into a rare (because I am always out of space) reel:

oamyoamy

A post shared by @oamyoamy

(P.S. - Here is a quick look at the 2023 portrait and bird mashup series.)