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"But there's no river at the hospice."

"No, there's no river there."

River People, page 10, panel 2

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"Each day is a stone tossed down a well."

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River People, page 17, panel 3, in which Stephen decides to keep his great-aunt's secrets.

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A river jewelwing in an establishing panel in River People. #Anisoptera #entomology #dragonfly #comicbooks #graphicnovel

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Two Sisters

River People is a story about two sisters who don’t understand each other. These two pages describe each sister and how their worldviews diverge - one sister organizes every detail of her life, the other collects ghosts in a house full of nick-nacks.

Neither of these pages is complete.

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Drawing is about forgetting.

When you look at a face, your mind takes all the faces you’ve ever seen before and turns them into something you expect to see. It builds a symbol of a nostril, a symbol of a cheek.

Instead of the face in front of you, you get a symbol of a face.

And that’s because if you tried to go around noticing the face of every person you pass in what’s probably already a pretty stressful life, that’s a recipe for blithely walking out into traffic. So our minds just show us symbols built from faces that we’ve seen before. It's biological. It’s why police lineups are notoriously inaccurate. We literally don’t see each other.

So when you’re drawing you have to stop and ask, "does it really look the way I think it looks?"

Does my loved-one’s face look the way I think it looks? How does my memory of them compare to the real person? Or is that just how I think they are, or should be? 

In the past you noticed little details like the curving line where their gums wrap their teeth. But over time, as you've become more familiar with their face, you only see what you expect to see. You have to forget all that in order to draw.

You know what I’m talking about because there are moments when something catches you off-guard and you see someone's face for the first time in possibly days, weeks... it stops you in your tracks. You start to see their wrinkles and blemishes as remarkable, beautiful things that make them who they are, because if you changed them, they would change into another person. 

And then you have to ask yourself, "Have I built a symbol of their personality, their life as well?”

When you start to really look, a face just goes on and on forever. You start to forget the way you thought things were. Drawing is about forgetting.

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River People

(aka The Ghost Collector)

Eleanor has spent her retirement in her house on the ragged edge of the river. When Eleanor becomes very ill, her sister Sally comes to take care of her, bringing her grandson Stephen with her.

Eleanor gives Stephen two secrets to keep:

There is a town full of people at the bottom of the river, and

she is dying of a brain tumor that she doesn’t want treatment for.

As Eleanor's mind drifts into dementia, Sally and Stephen must find out why the strange objects that clutter her home are coming to life around them with seemingly malevolent intentions.

timothy.spencer.art

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Introduction page to River People