Smoke and Other Indications...: Drawings

Drawings by Jason M. Marak

Constraint/Restriction/Limitation/Creation:

An artist statement in 100 words

We usually (with good reason) feel negatively about constraints. However, regarding creativity, I find restrictive conditions profoundly useful. Working within self-prescribed parameters pushes me to solutions I wouldn't arrive at working unfettered. In these drawings, I limited myself to one primary shape in various iterations. Repeated consideration of the shape changed how I interacted with it. Shapes became "figures." Figures became characters. Narratives developed. A mark might inspire a line of text or vice versa. The process wasn't linear. The drawings incorporate this process as part of the final product. The corresponding 100-word stories afford alternative experiences of the visual.
--Fictional Space, 2019

Delta Edits Her Landscape

Delta takes the chainsaw from the trunk, sets the choke, and gives it a rip. A small plume of blue smoke. Combustion. She's been calculating for years. The trick: which operation? For the longest time, Delta figured addition. But last night, listening to the Goldberg Variations, she realized subtraction was key. The cypress copse near the junction has always drawn her eye, but also her ire. Something isn't right. Symmetry is an oversimplification. She wants to enact a deeper balance. It isn't her field. They aren't her trees. But as sawdust gathers around her boots, she knows she is right.

Delta Deals

It was Sunday morning when Delta decided to dump the clocks. Fuck that feeble tick tick tick. It’s a construct. Nope. Not this girl. Give me tides. Give me celestial.

On her afternoon walk, she watched the sea. Delta felt an affinity—a churning, crashing, sorority of two. She considered Jimmy:

A good man brought low by the lie.

She regarded him as one might a favorite shirt that fades and becomes something worn only for yard work.

That night, Delta dreamt her body in waves: lifted and dropped, crest to trough, held under then rising out to open water.

Thicket Resents His Lot, Until He Doesn't

Thicket is sick of seasonal change—tired of the process: greening, blooming, browning, loss. He's also had it with birds. A fat robin hops and scratches at the forest floor. Self-centered, Thicket thinks. (To be fair, everyone is.) When danger stalks, night falls, thunder rolls, they huddle within me. They puff, flit, and sing. Then, red weather passes and they fly. Just once, it'd be lovely if the little fuckers dropped by out of courtesy. Thicket doesn't have a celestial view. But he knows clouds are gathering. He senses the barometric drop. Rain falls. Rivulets run. Suddenly, Thicket is full.

Delta Despised Dinner Parties

Things got complicated after appetizers. Her friends, a high-end plumber and her marine biologist husband, had invited a new couple, a big-game hunter and his art dealer wife. "Tigers are, pound for pound, the laziest creatures on the planet. Hand to God." Delta, who had experience with big cats, called bullshit and the subject changed. She was happy when sex started. Whale songs, talk of tiger tails, sweating pipe joints, and the Rothko Chapel had put Delta deep in the mood. With the plumber's richly calloused hands at her hips, Delta became the sea, powerless against the moon's invisible pull.

Delta Comes Alongside Down at the Blarney Stone Bar

Delta is drawn to broken-down men. Men bent like wind-battered coastal trees from the constant barrage of hard luck. Men who know every five-card hand holds some flavor of disappointment. A limp, a scar, any knight displaying the crest of cigarette butts and match-bones, black and twisted from some long extinguished, beautiful flame, holds potential. Delta's particular weakness is for the emotional equivalent of engine trouble—a knock or ping that eventually leaves them adrift, at the mercy of riptides, listing, dangerous against the banks. Delta: rudder to the rudderless, a fresh, resurrecting breeze to the dead in the water.

Delta Takes a Wrong Turn and Hears the Voice of God

Night falls. Temperatures drop. Stars appear and twinkle their useless light. Delta listens. She eases her Maverick onto the shoulder of State Route 36 and kills the engine. As a rule, Delta peels away from her past, vowing to remain untethered. But when Willie Nelson comes on the radio and sings "Can I sleep in your arms tonight," suddenly she longs to be bound. His voice the sound of simultaneity: past, present, future all balled into one. Memory seasoning, heightening, enhancing the here and beyond. Delta squints into the impenetrable dark and for the first time sees purple and blue.

Delta Gives Way

Red sky in morning, thinks Delta as she fires up the engine. She'd had a restless night, disquieting dreams: Jimmy. Children. Can contortion ever become comfort? Amidst a chorus of horns, Delta veers from the far left lane onto Liberty Drive, her favorite route out past the power lines. She is not fond of lanes. She enjoys crossing lines. Delta undoes the top button of her jeans and lets her hand travel past her waistline. The Rolling Stones give way to static. Pavement gives way to gravel, gravel to dirt, until road gives way to wilderness and Delta finally arrives.

Tree Navigates Her Distance

Tree knows her nature. She finds the forest unbearable. She doesn’t dislike her tree-ness. She casts an impressive shadow. She's happy with her foliage. But immobility gets her down. She knows she isn't static. Her slick roots have been pushing across acres for centuries, and she stretches steadily skyward year after year. Perhaps, she thinks, it's the oversimplification of my archetype. What really troubles Tree is her fixed position. She is where she is and, barring lightning strike or chainsaw, that's that. Only with Night does Tree feel herself, when space between trees becomes trees, when everywhere and nowhere overlap.

Delta Crashes League Night and Becomes One with the Universe

Harbor Lanes is full of thunder. Delta doesn't roll, but she likes to work the flippers. For Delta, pinball is a psychological pursuit. Standing in front of Star Gazer, eyes glued to the flashing field, hips thrusting and shifting, it isn't about bonus lights or free game knocks. Targets rise and fall. It's how it's always been. There's the certainty of incidence and reflection. But there's dumb luck, too. Delta does her level best to influence and accept. Outside, cars go by. Signals change. Broadway traffic brakes and guns. Far above, randomness or alignment? Chaos or constellations? Delta knows. Both.

Delta and Jimmy and Nightfall

Delta is spitting mad or perfectly at peace. Nearly naked or bundled. Delta dances fast. Jimmy prefers slow. Delta and Jimmy have never danced slow. Not once. Seriously. You see, Delta is an attractive force. Moths, flames. Sharks, blood. Attraction. Delta can draw Jimmy into anything she pleases. This pleases Delta to no end. Jimmy isn't helpless. Actually, he is. Here's the thing: it's celestial. Delta and Jimmy, binary stars orbiting an untouchable force. It's what makes them stay. It's the moment nautical dusk gives way to astronomical: when sheep become field, ship becomes sea, and darkness levels the universe.

Fictional Space Exhibition Video:

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Artist Statement, 2017:

This statement is one hundred words. Exactly. I like limits: word, speed, spending — fixed points to operate between or consider zooming past. I also like repetition: A sound or shape or image or movement that, while retaining its original attributes, becomes something new through doubling, tripling, quadrupling. Elements are emphasized/de-emphasized by recurrence. These drawings are built from the repetition of interlocking five-stroke units: their shared genetic code. One unit leads to the next until a figure suggests itself. This process provides me the perfect trinity: the pleasure of mark making, the spontaneity of abstraction, and the descriptive possibilities of form.