[Art21 "Extended Play"]
I'm obviously a nervous guy and I was writing a female character,
through her memory and through her stories.
It was sort of an experiment
to write from the standpoint of somebody who I'm not,
which is certainly fraught with peril. [LAUGHS]
["Chris Ware: Someone I'm Not"]
When I was in art school,
I was told that I couldn't draw women.
That kind of cuts out a whole half of humanity right there.
I distinctly remember being told by one of my teachers,
"If you draw women, you're colonizing them with your eyes."
Do you not draw women and then
maintain an allegiance to some sort of experience that only you have had?
Or do you try to expand your understanding and your empathy for other human beings?
As a white writer, how dare I begin to think
that I could write from the standpoint of even another person.
What I'm trying to do here is draw a gesture of a woman
slightly brushing hair away from her eye,
but now it just looks more like she's got a headache.
Joanne Cole acts strangely towards the younger woman,
and that's because she thinks it's possible
that she might be related to the younger woman
because she's lost in her own memories and thoughts--
but that's not clear to the reader yet.
So I'm trying to balance a couple of emotions here.
I'm trying to make it feel that it's authentic
and not just a bunch of nonsense-- or poorly acted.
This particular character is an African-American elementary school teacher
who is teaching in a private school in the 1960s and 70s.
Hopefully I'm attending to some of the complexities
that a kind of slightly unusual situation might have brought up.
I feel very self-conscious about writing a story like this.
Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the wrong thing?
Is it about empathy?
Am I introducing things I don't understand?
Et cetera.
It's a complicated question as a writer.
[WARE] --Thank you for serving dinner.
[MARNIE WARE] --You're welcome.
[LAUGHS]
[CLARA WARE] --Plop!
[CHRIS WARE] --Plop!
Many of my teachers were trying to get myself and my fellow students
to find the one thing that we were interested in
and then write about that.
I never wanted to do that.
I wanted to be able write about everything--
and anything-- because that's what life is.
[LAUGHING]
--I have no idea what I look like chewing
--but I bet I don't want to know.
It's up to me as an artist to try to decide
how much can I try to feel through another person
and still have it not be
a sentimentalization or a falseness.
I have to try to somehow push my limits and my understanding of
how I feel through other people in what I'm doing.
And you risk falling on your face doing so,
but that's a risk you have to take.
What art is all about is trying to figure out
if the feelings that you're having are the same as the feelings that I'm having.